The DoD is huge and cumbersome. Rules ment to decrease fraud and waste are actually increasing that. Professionals at procurement are rare and often are undermined by political concerns. Officers should be held to account but they rarely are. Contractors understand the two parts - a winning proposal and actually doing the work. Most times the two don’t match.
And we have far too many general officers. They are uniformly politically astute and typically bright smart people. They will find something to do but often something that may not need to be done. They do know how to access funding but projects may not have utility.
Audits need to be routine and constant but those often impede work. Better reporting and management oversight remains a need. Improvements are always needed.
Mind-boggling abuse and amount of fraud in just these examples, knowing there’s much more and has always been a problem. I’m sure under Biden administration is was far worse with the Afghanistan debacle and of course the wild spending done in the last few days of the budget. I’m hoping Hegseth gets a better grip on this huge I overflated budget and finds more wasteful spending cuts to slash.
I was in the industry for decades. So much waste, special interests and regulation.
The sourcing is full of waste and is illogical in regulation. For example, larger-sized small businesses are required to submit subcontracting plans showing certain percentages of subcontracting to small minority-owned businesses. As "minority" is defined, this includes new residents that are of the right color but have never experienced any discrimination in the US or elsewhere. It's no longer good enough that the prime contract with the DoD agency has been made to a small business--that small business now has to find a minority to parcel out more business to. Sometimes the only minority who can be found is basically a distributor of stuff bought from large or foreign businesses. The whole thing is a scam.
I was a contractor at Wright Patterson AFB for almost 10 years I recommended a project being shut down that was going to fail. The integrator blamed the Air Force and they blamed them! $1billion dollars wasted! And nothing ever happened to anyone! Scandalous and criminal the corruption was evident!
The DoD is huge and cumbersome. Rules ment to decrease fraud and waste are actually increasing that. Professionals at procurement are rare and often are undermined by political concerns. Officers should be held to account but they rarely are. Contractors understand the two parts - a winning proposal and actually doing the work. Most times the two don’t match.
And we have far too many general officers. They are uniformly politically astute and typically bright smart people. They will find something to do but often something that may not need to be done. They do know how to access funding but projects may not have utility.
Audits need to be routine and constant but those often impede work. Better reporting and management oversight remains a need. Improvements are always needed.
Mind-boggling abuse and amount of fraud in just these examples, knowing there’s much more and has always been a problem. I’m sure under Biden administration is was far worse with the Afghanistan debacle and of course the wild spending done in the last few days of the budget. I’m hoping Hegseth gets a better grip on this huge I overflated budget and finds more wasteful spending cuts to slash.
I was in the industry for decades. So much waste, special interests and regulation.
The sourcing is full of waste and is illogical in regulation. For example, larger-sized small businesses are required to submit subcontracting plans showing certain percentages of subcontracting to small minority-owned businesses. As "minority" is defined, this includes new residents that are of the right color but have never experienced any discrimination in the US or elsewhere. It's no longer good enough that the prime contract with the DoD agency has been made to a small business--that small business now has to find a minority to parcel out more business to. Sometimes the only minority who can be found is basically a distributor of stuff bought from large or foreign businesses. The whole thing is a scam.
Thank you for making this knowledge available.
Send this to Pete!
I was a contractor at Wright Patterson AFB for almost 10 years I recommended a project being shut down that was going to fail. The integrator blamed the Air Force and they blamed them! $1billion dollars wasted! And nothing ever happened to anyone! Scandalous and criminal the corruption was evident!