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"TEE-ING OFF THE TAXPAYER" features comments
from:
NARRATOR: What do brown tree snakes, volcanos, two rusty
ships,
and a golf course have in common? Here's a hint: The U.S.
military and your tax dollars.
DE GENNARO: "Military waste is out of control. Congress is incapable of addressing the issue, the American people have to get mad or their money is still going to keep going down the drain."
NARRATOR: This week America's Defense Monitor will look at examples of wasteful military spending and pork barrel projects that are sure to tee-you off.
AUDIO: Whack!!!(sound of golf ball being slugged)
["AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR" program introduction.]
ADMIRAL SHANAHAN: The Congress is about to approve a $256.6 Billion 1997 military spending budget. That's $11.3Billion more than the President requested. Our program today deals not with the many unnneeded big ticket items in this budget, but instead looks at several examples of Pentagon spending that have little to do with national security.
FADE TO BLACK
SAPIENZA: "We're here at the National Zoo in Washington, DC to learn more about the brown tree snake. With us today is Zoo representative Bob Hoage, who's going to give us a little more information about the snake. Bob, how are you doing?"
DR. HOAGE: "Just fine."
SAPIENZA: "What can you tell us about the brown tree snake?"
DR. HOAGE: "Well it's a big snake and it comes originally
from
New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Northern Australia. It gets up
to ten feet long, it's also hungry regularly. The snake has been
a disaster for the island of Guam, it has gotten on Guam and
destroyed 2/3 of the native species of bird. There are over a
million of these snakes on Guam which is only 30 miles long and
4-8 miles wide. And it gets into the power sources,
transformers, electrical equipment, causes major power outages in
various places in Guam, and occasionally hospitals lose power,
banks lose power, and it also bites so it is slightly venomous,
so its not a pleasant little animal."
SAPIENZA: "Do you think this snake is in any way a national security threat to the United States?"
DR. HOAGE: "I can't speak to that, I can speak to the conservation issues, it's certainly been a disaster for conservation on the island of Guam."
SAPIENZA: "Even though the snake problem on Guam is a scientific and conservation issue, Congress recently made pest control a national security issue when they added a million dollars to the military budget for brown tree snake control."
NARRATOR: $1 million dollars for brown tree snake control is only the tip of the iceberg.... Arizona Senator John McCain, a critic of pork barrel military projects, recently attempted to highlight the enormity of the problem.
SEN. McCAIN: "a $2 million dollar add on for natural gas boiler demonstrations; $2.5 million add on for carbon reinforced recycled thermoplastic lumber; $7 million earmarked for the evaluation of a multi thread architecture experimental computer; a $26.8 million dollar add on to initiate a program using DOD satellite capabilities in support of civil needs, such as detecting forest fires and volcanic activity; a $20 million dollar add on for Electric and Hybrid Electric Vehicle Consortia program.."
NARRATOR: Senator McCain went on to list some $2 Billion worth of unnecessary projects that were added to the 1997 military budget.
Wasteful pork barrel spending is largely obscured by the sheer size of the total military budget -- $254 billion for 1997...but it is never far from the minds of the taxpayers.
DE GENNARO: "an independent study at the University of Maryland found that 3/4 of Americans think that defense spending is wasteful due to Congressional pork barrel politics, duplication amongst the services, and corrupting campaign contributions by defense corporations. The American people are upset, 93% of the American people think that too much of their tax money is wasted."
NARRATOR: Ralph De Gennaro is the executive director for Taxpayers for Common Sense.
DE GENARRO: "Military waste betrays our fighting soldiers who lay their lives on the line and may not get the equipment and support they need. It also betrays taxpayers by burdening them by debt and making it impossible to balance the budget."
SAPIENZA: "In order to balance the budget, Congress has cut the budgets of most federal agencies. However, not every federal agency has been left cash strapped. The Pentagon requested $254 billion dollars for its 1997 military budget and Congress responded generously by giving the Pentagon $10 billion dollars more than it requested."
NARRATOR: Many Americans are unaware that the Pentagon's
$254
billion military budget dwarfs the budgets of all the other
federal agencies.
The immense size of the military budget provides irresistible cover for politicians pushing pork barrel projects and it masks bureaucratic blunders at the Pentagon.
A recent report by Taxpayers for Common $ense detailed numerous examples of waste within the Pentagon.
DE GENNARO: "Our report found $29 Billion dollars had been wasted on all kinds of things from small spare parts that should have cost thirty taxpayer dollars and cost two thousand dollars, to atrocious accounting systems where fifteen Billion dollars simply disappeared. In addition the Pentagon has spent billions of dollars on weapons that didn't work or that we didn't need, and on perks for the brass and the contractors."
NARRATOR: Wasting $29 billion is not insignificant. That's $29 Billion that won't be used to reduce the national debt, or for domestic needs such as transportation and education.
AUDIO: Whack!!!(sound of golf ball being slugged)
NARRATOR: Just outside of Washington, DC, at Andrews Air Force Base, earthmovers busily sculpt the landscape into what will be a new eighteen hole golf course. The cost $7 million.
Golf courses on military installations are not uncommon, in fact there are over 234 golf courses maintained by the U.S. armed forces worldwide.
However, the construction of a new golf course at Andrews Air Force Base has received particular attention, [PAUSE]...Andrews already has two eighteen hole golf courses.
The Air Force asserts that the new course is needed to accommodate an increase in the number of golfers playing at Andrews, opponents charge the third golf course is symbolic of the culture of wasteful spending by the Pentagon.
DE GENNARO: "Pentagon elites and high government officials are tee-ing off at taxpayer expense."
NARRATOR: When we visited the existing Andrews golf
facility it
looked on a par with many of the Washington area's lavish country
clubs. There's a pro shop, a club house with a dining room and
cocktail lounge, a driving range, and practice greens.
Golfers on the links, at least while we were there, seemed to be enjoying their play on the uncrowded courses.
The two beautifully maintained eighteen hole golf courses are used primarily by active and retired military personnel, and their dependents.
But due to its close proximity to the nation's Capital, club swinging members of Congress, Defense Department officials, and other government V.I.P.'s also enjoy access to the courses. Meanwhile, the general public is prohibited from playing at Andrews.
DE GENNARO: "What this is about is that the Pentagon said no taxpayer money was used for this golf course. In reality thousands of dollars of taxpayer money was used for this golf course."
NARRATOR: The Air Force denies that taxpayer money is being used to fund the third golf course, claiming instead that financing comes from what is called the Morale, Welfare, & Recreation fund.
This fund is supposed to be a self-sustaining pot of money comprised of profits from military grocery stores, snack bars, and on base entertainment.
But critics point out that the Morale, Welfare, & Recreation fund also receives a considerable amount of money from taxpayers.
DE GENNARO: "In order to look out for the taxpayer money in this, you have to watch it go from account to account. The truth is that the golf course and a lot of other things like it are funded out of the Morale, Welfare, and Recreation account, which receives $1 billion dollars of taxpayer money each year."
AUDIO: Whack!!!(sound of golf ball being slugged)
DE GENNARO: "We don't have anything against golf, all we think is that if the Pentagon says that the people who are playing are paying for it, then they ought to pay for it. We ought to be up front with the American taxpayer about who is paying for the golf."
AUDIO: Whack!!!(sound of golf ball being slugged)
NARRATOR: We took our cameras to Virginia to investigate
claims
that the Navy spent millions on two ships that never went to sea.
We found them rusting away in the James River near Norfolk,
Virginia. The $450 million dollar pair of ships are the products
of nine years of blundering between the Navy and two cash
strapped shipyards.
DE GENNARO: "The story of the rusting ships shows how the system strikes out. Two simple tankers that should have cost two hundred and twenty million dollars cost twice that. Strike one the first contractor who was supposed to build the ships went bankrupt. Strike two, the second contractor couldn't do the job and left them half finished. Strike three, even after that Congress appropriated forty five million dollars more. The result the big loser is the taxpayer, who spent four hundred and fifty million dollars over nine years for two ships that will never do anybody any good."
NARRATOR: In order to waste $450 million, you would have to spend $1,000 dollars every day for 1233 years!
AUDIO: Whack!!!(sound of golf ball being slugged)
NARRATOR: An investigation by the General Accounting Office discovered that McDonnell Douglas, the manufacturer of the Air Force's new C-17 cargo planes, overcharged the Pentagon for 33 types of spare parts.
The costs of the spare parts were 4 to 56 times higher
because the Pentagon bought the items from the prime contractor
McDonnell Douglas, instead of subcontractors.
In this case it appears that using subcontractors for spare parts would have saved the taxpayer a significant amount of money.
DE GENNARO: "A smart consumer shops around to get the right price. Instead, in building the C-17 cargo plane the Air Force rushed out and paid McDonnell Douglas up to fifty-six times more for certain spare parts than it should have. For example a hinge that should have cost $31 dollars actually cost over two thousand. A door handle that should have cost $60 bucks actually cost $1200. This is not smart shopping."
NARRATOR: The Air Force's own review found an additional $94 million in savings for taxpayers, if McDonnell Douglas had used subcontractors.
DE GENNARO: "McDonnell Douglas did re-imburse the sum of the extra money to the Air Force, but an independent investigation found that more money should have been reimbursed."
AUDIO: Whack!!!(sound of golf ball being slugged)
NARRATOR: Imagine a federal agency so blanketed by secrecy, that even its budget becomes invisible.
Although taxpayers may not be aware of the National
Reconnaissance Office or the size of its secret budget, our TV
crew was able to locate the enormous $310 million dollar NRO
compound near Chantilly, Virginia.
DE GENNARO: "This is a super secret spy agency, the most expensive spy agency in the U.S. government. It has been so poorly managed that four billion dollars was collected in a slush fund, and the agency went out and built itself a lavish headquarters with imported marble in the lobby just out of the extra money that's sloshed around."
NARRATOR: When the new NRO headquarters was exposed by the media, Congress was publicly embarrassed for its lack of oversight over the spy agency.
DE GENNARO: "In September of (19)95 it was reported in the Washington Post that the NRO had accumulated 1 billion dollars in a slush fund. At the end of the year that amount had risen to $4 billion dollars and even this Spring the problem had not been solved."
NARRATOR: The ability of the NRO secretly to accumulate billions of taxpayer dollars undetected in a "black budget", emphasizes another major cause of wasteful military spending.
DE GENNARO: "Black budgets are a black hole, the taxpayers worst nightmare. We give billions of dollars to bureaucrats who don't have to account for the money to Congress, the media, or the taxpayers who are the real losers here."
AUDIO: Whack!!!(sound of golf ball being slugged)
NARRATION: Taxpayers might be surprised to learn that billions of tax dollars, originally allotted for national defense, are actually being funneled by the Pentagon to military contractors, simply to encourage corporate mergers and takeovers.
CORBIN: "This program is paying millions of dollars to corporate CEOs and paying their corporations billions of dollars in subsidies for something they would do anyway. And in the process, laying off tens of thousands of workers."
NARRATOR: Marcus Corbin is a research analyst at the private Project on Government Oversight. For years, he has closely monitored the flow of taxpayer dollars from the Pentagon to major military contractors.
CORBIN: "The Pentagon says that we need to subsidize these mergers in order to promote mergers in the first place since the industry they say needs to be downsized further. And in order to cover the costs of helping corporations merge. And they say when you cover those costs the corporations will be encouraged to merge and that they need this subsidy."
NARRATOR: However, the unfortunate result of the Pentagon's "money for mergers" policy has been to heap taxpayer money onto corporate executives and subsidize huge worker layoffs during post-merger downsizing.
CORBIN: "Lockheed Corporation and Martin-Marietta Corporation merged last year and formed a new corporation called Lockheed Martin that has sales of about in the order of $30 Billion a year. This isn't just a corporation, this is a mega-corporation."
NARRATOR: The Pentagon used taxpayer money from the military budget to encourage the corporate merger.
CORBIN: "A few months after the merger they announced that they were going to layoff 19,000 people and uh at the same time the CEOs of the new corporation did very well. Um, Norman Augustine, one of the top CEOs, received about $10 million in cash, and $10 million in various other benefits and stocks for the year, which was a pretty good deal, um. And in connection with the Lockheed-Martin merger, he was to receive payments on the order of $8 million."
NARRATOR: Aside from the practice of giving millions of taxpayer dollars in the form of bonuses to the CEOs of military contractors, Marcus Corbin questions whether the Pentagon should even be involved in determining corporate mergers.
CORBIN: "Corporations have been merging left, right, and center for the past few years in the defense industry and uh there's no reason to have government assistance for a process that's happening naturally."
NARRATOR: Although government subsidies for merging companies in the private sector are unheard of, the Pentagon remains determined to use taxpayer dollars to induce mergers between military contractors.
CORBIN: "So far Lockheed-Martin Corporation has billed the government for about a billion dollars and it is the biggest corporate merger we've had so far, um, in defense, but there are many other corporations who are billing the government also, so the final tally could run to billions of taxpayer dollars."
AUDIO: Whack!!!(sound of golf ball being slugged)
NARRATOR: According to a recent report by the Federation of American Scientists, the Pentagon has so many weapons that it is actually giving them away to foreign countries.
The study found that in the past six years $7 billion worth of modern military hardware has literally been given away or sold at rock bottom prices.
LUMPE: "some of it as mundane as combat boots or uniforms
and
some of it as modern and exotic as F-15 fighter aircraft, F-16's,
FA-18 aircraft, uh...M-60 tanks etc..."
NARRATOR: Lora Lumpe is the author of the report and director of the Arms Sales Monitoring Project at the Federation of American Scientists.
LUMPE: "we've given away thousands of main battle tanks in the last five years, uh nearly two thousand combat aircraft in the last several years, hundreds of attack helicopters, tens of thousands of small arms -- M-16 assault rifles, grenade launchers and so on."
In one case, the Pentagon gave Egypt 700 M-60 main battle tanks for free. These tanks originally cost the U.S. taxpayer $1.3 million dollars per copy, but they cost the Egyptian taxpayers nothing.
Recently, Turkey received 72 howitzers and 28 Cobra helicopters, Morocco acquired 20 modern F-16s, and Bahrain was given 60 guided missiles.
Evidently more and more countries are beginning to take advantage of the Pentagon freebies since the program began.
LUMPE: "In 1990 we were giving away weapons to only about ten countries and by 1995 that number had shot up to about 65 different countries."
NARRATOR: The Pentagon has a variety of incentives to unload their vast inventory of surplus weapons.
LUMPE: "One they're charged for storage and maintenance of weapons that they aren't using. They don't want to pay those fees. Secondly they're charged to destroy the weapons..they don't want to pay those fees."
NARRATOR: Although the Pentagon claims it is saving money on storage and destruction fees, Lora Lumpe believes there is another reason for the weapons giveaways.
LUMPE: "Industry and the services both have an interest in unloading older equipment to make way and in fact to justify new equipment. One case where this is most obvious is with the development of the F-22 stealth fighter. Lockheed has been lobbying for the seventy billion dollar ---and the cost is expected to go even higher---seventy billion dollar development program on the basis of advanced fighter aircraft already proliferating around the world."
NARRATOR: Lockheed Martin's promotional material, obtained by America's Defense Monitor, uses a map to identify countries with advanced fighter aircraft. Oddly, most of the countries identified on the map possess modern U.S. fighters.
LUMPE: "in their promotional literature to persuade Congress to spend the public treasury this way, they list F15 aircraft, F16 aircraft, FA18 aircraft...all American aircraft that we're giving away now or that the armed forces are trying to give away as part of the advanced fighters that are out there which justify the F-22."
NARRATOR: Critics of weapons giveaways argue that
providing
weapons to foreign countries actually creates new threats to
regional stability. These new threats put a greater burden on
the U.S. taxpayer to increase the military budget in preparation
for potential conflicts.
LUMPE: "there is a real upward pressure on the defense budget that's created by giving away these weapons, we are helping exacerbate the threat that is the engine now for driving the U.S. defense budget and in some cases its clearly used as a justification for next generation weapons systems.."
AUDIO: Whack!!!(sound of golf ball being slugged)
DE GENNARO: "The Pentagon does not get the same kind of oversight that most other federal agencies get, the Pentagon is not held to the same standard as far as taking care of taxpayer money."
NARRATOR: Whether taxpayer dollars are squandered on pork barrel military add-ons like brown tree snake control, or by wasteful spending practices at the Pentagon, the result is the same....scarce taxpayer dollars are being drained from other urgent needs.
Americans may have differing opinions on how our limited resources should be spent -- for example, tax breaks, reducing the national debt, or on domestic programs -- but all Americans agree that wasteful military spending harms the nation as a whole.
DE GENNARO: "the people have to demand that everybody start doing their job. The Congress has to exercise real oversight over the Pentagon and stop pork barrel weapons construction. The media has to do a better job of really scrutinizing where the moneys going and exposing the corruption and the waste. The executive branch and military have to do a better job of managing the money and building the confidence in the American people."
FADE TO BLACK
ADM JOHN SHANAHAN (USN, Ret.): "Many of you watching this program could justifiably ask the question, why are these non-defense items, like brown tree snake control, in the defense budget? The straight answer is that its easy for Congress to hide their multi-million dollar pet projects in the multi-billion dollar military spending bill. I guess they figure no one will notice or care.
But we should care. Wasteful spending and pet projects within the military budget hurt our national security by cheating our troops out of the tax dollars provided them to defend our nation. Mismanagement of tax payer dollars also hurts our nation's efforts to control government spending and reduce our national debt.
For "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR," I am Jack Shanahan."