Uh Oh! Even Conservative News Orgs are turning against big Pentagon budgets!

via National Interest.

August 13, President Trump traveled to Fort Drum, a U.S. military base in upstate New York to sign the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This legislation authorizes $717 billion in defense spending, an increase of more than $20 billion from the 2018 NDAA passed in December of last year. In fiscal year 2017 , defense spending totaled just north of $600 billion, a nearly 20 percent increase in funding in the past few years.

Despite the massive increase in funding it is receiving, the Pentagon has simply ignored various policy proposals that would make the agency more efficient and save taxpayers billions. For instance, over $2 billion could be saved by implementing roughly thirty reforms proposed by the Department of Defense inspector general (DoD OIG), outlined in a March 2018 report.

In total, there are over fifteen hundred open cost-saving recommendations that haven’t been addressed by the Department of Defense (DoD), which would save billions if implemented. In 2017, the DoD successfully implemented just under one-third of the 1,298 recommendations, but every year the recommendations continue to pile up. Furthermore, there are more than fifty of these recommendations that have not been addressed in over five years.

While the Pentagon gets increased funding every year, it merely ignores requests to make changes that would improve its efficiency and fiscal stability. Defense hawks push these massive increases in spending year over year, but it’s hard to defend them when thousands of cost-saving measures are available and waiting for DoD implementation.

Story here. 

I've been yelling about this but it seems to be gaining traction at the VERY WORST TIME for the Pentagon.

With the deficit that is gonna top a trillion dollars and with sequestration about to hit...along with Trump's desire to get us out of everlasting wars in weird, God forsaken locales around the world its gonna be tough as hell to push for bigger defense budgets.

Why?

Because the Defense Hawks are gonna be caught between Fiscal Conservatives and Democrats that value social spending over defense.

We really should be getting more for our defense dollar.  Reform is necessary. It will hurt but it must be done.