The Pentagon’s Bottomless Money Pit
After last year’s debacle, the services are now spending even more on outside advice to prepare for the next expected flop. The Air Force alone just awarded Deloitte up to $800 million to help the service with future “audit preparation.” The Navy countered with a $980 million audit-readiness contract spread across four companies (Deloitte, Booz Allen Hamilton, Accenture and KPMG).
Taxpayers, in other words, are paying gargantuan sums to private accounting firms to write reports about how previous recommendations were ignored.
It’s all a Catch-22 story about a country trapped in an endless cycle of avoidable financial disaster. Each time we try to fix leaks, we end up back where we started, staring at even bigger numerical representations of failure.