Coburn: Cut Wasteful Spending at the “Department of Everything”
By BEN FREEMAN
As fears of the impending “fiscal cliff” continue to mount, at least one Member of Congress is laying out proposals for cutting wasteful spending at the Pentagon, or, as Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) refers to it, the “Department of Everything.”
A new report released today by Coburn finds that the DoD could save $67.9 billion over ten years by making specific cuts to what he describes as “non-defense” defense spending.
The report targets “five areas of the Pentagon budget that have little to do with national security where taxpayer dollars could be saved and deficits reduced without impacting our national security.”
Not everyone may agree with everything Coburn recommends should be cut, but there are certainly some doozies in the report, including:
- An app that lets you know when it’s time for a coffee break.
- Research which found that “Fish could show the nation how to overcome political polarization and promote democracy.”
- $1.5 million for a Pentagon project “to develop its own brand of jerky treats that are the bomb!”
Another Coburn proposal would right-size the bloated top ranks at the Pentagon. Just last fall, a Project On Government Oversight analysis revealed that today’s military is the most top-heavy in U.S. history. As Coburn said at the press briefing held to announce the release of his report, “We almost have an Admiral for every ship in the Navy.” Thus, there’s ample room for cuts here, and Coburn’s proposal to reduce the number of top brass by 20%—which would still leave the military with roughly the same general-to-troop ratio it had during the Cold War—would save an estimated $800 million over ten years.
The report also looks to cut spending on wasteful programs that don’t appear to help soldiers, but instead only seem to benefit the friends and family of top Pentagon officials. The epitome of this for Coburn is a bomb detector developed by RedXDefense, cronyism that POGO asked the DoD to investigate. According to Coburn’s report, “The bomb detector developed by the family business of the DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] director was less effective than ‘a coin flip’ in spotting homemade explosives.”
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