Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/22/pentagon-used-taxpayer-money-meant-for-masks-and-swabs-to-make-jet-engine-parts-and-body-armor.html
…
3 Likes
Seems fair. After all, the DoD has been paying for The Great Wall of Trump. At least a dozen miles or so of it anyway.
4 Likes
So Trump wants to turn America into Belarus but with fancier guns? Not surprising.
5 Likes
I’m sure the Pentagon will get a sternly worded letter from the House. 200,252 Americans are dead in part due to malfeasance of this sort.
10 Likes
They should probably just go ahead and change their name to ‘Department of Offense’ at this point.
5 Likes
4 Likes
You have to admit jet-powered body armor does sound pretty awesome though.
4 Likes
The accounting at the Defense Dept is so screwed there may be no way to ever find out what was spent on what. Bernie Sanders and Chuck Grassley spent years trying to get to the bottom of it. Got nowhere.
4 Likes
“Department of War” was pretty honest.
6 Likes
William Proxmire was awesome at it! Sadly, he passed away in 2005.
1 Like
Umm, except that he was also horrible at it. Highlighting easy targets, like science research that was easy to ridicule.
Even the expensive hammers and toilet seats were perfectly reasonable if you really looked into it, and the cost to the supplier to provide all the sourcing/tracking paperwork that the DoD required.
4 Likes
Exactly. Proxmire never looked at the details.
And note that it’s not just the paperwork that causes the high costs. Take those “toilet seats”–first, they weren’t seats, but entire toilet enclosures. On a plane expected to go into combat–while the Air Force isn’t going to care how well it functions with battle damage they most certainly do care what happens when it takes battle damage. They don’t want toxic smoke, they don’t want dangerous splinters flying all over the airplane. And IIRC the order quantity was 10–at that point you’re paying for the R&D, not the seats.
5 Likes
Lukashenko would use the money to prop up the tractor industry.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
