The Pentagon Shell Game

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 18, 1999 | by Timothy W. Maier

What Congress doesn't know won't hurt it. That may be the thinking of the Pentagon, but don't tell that to Rep. Jerry Lewis, a California Republican who chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee on Defense. His subcommittee discovered the Department of Defense likes secretly to shuffle money around without telling Congress about what's going on. The subcommittee's findings come on the heels of an Associated Press story detailing how the military lost $2.7 billion in military property, including several engines for fighter aircraft. The Pentagon insists nothing ever really was lost. They blame their problems on faulty accounting and bad record-keeping.

But even that nifty excuse isn't likely to help Defense explain what Lewis charges is nothing more than a shell game being played with taxpayers' money. He claims the Pentagon secretly hid money in false projects and redirected it to unpopular or canceled programs.

For example, the Army signed a multiyear production contract for new tactical vehicles and negotiated a multiyear production contract for a targeting acquisition system. All of this was against Congress' wishes, says Keith Ashdown, a writer with Washington-based Taxpayers for Common Sense.

The Army wasn't the only military branch to be playing the game. After requesting funds for further development of the MILSTAR satellite, the Air Force used the cash to purchase the satellite instead, the subcommittee reports.

"Can such misappropriations really be in the national interest?" asks Ashdown. "Wasting taxpayer dollars on military pork distorts the budget process and undermines real defense priorities."

Yet the biggest shell game may have been played when the Air Force diverted $270,000 from an account used primarily for daily military operations to help pay for kitchen renovations to the home of the superintendent of the Air Force Academy.