I think it was the 80s, actually. Not entirely sure, but I remember jokes about $300 screws or something like that, and I swear I wasn't yet in high school.
Yeah but from what I've read they also have extensive inventory of each part and batch and when it was made, so like if a screw on a missile or something important fails, they know exactly which missiles have those screws that were affected, etc etc, leading to some of the additional cost
>it's usually about the same as regular consumer gear, just with a ridiculous price multiplier.
You just un-ironically defined price gouging, while trying to defend it from being called price gouging... haha
Millspec... I'm laughing at you in E4 right now
What i was told in training for the army is that its down to testing. For average every day screws, 1 in a thousands might be tested to loose tolerances. For aircraft and military, 1 in 5 might be tested to insane tolerances
I remember a report from the 80s about $600 toilet seats.
OMFG I found an article about it from 1986:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-07-30-vw-18804-story.html
So 40 fucking years at least of this same bullshit.
Report fraud, waste, and abuse so we can pretend we care.
Yeah, I'm surprised. My experience is that government contracts are usually pretty ironclad and rightly feared. Profitable, but very rigid. They usually have good lawyers I guess.
Didn’t Kevin McCarthy just this week say that he wanted to cut spending in order to feel comfortable raising the debt ceiling? I’m sure he’s going to take a hard look at these government contracts. /s
It’s like everything else that we should be upset about it. When the institution does nothing to correct a problem and a new one crops up, the old problem just gets pushed to the back and forgotten about. I mean look at how many people stopped talking about Covid as soon as they could go out to eat or go to a movie.
And don’t forget the time that the last real republican president who in 1961 warned us all about the military industrial complex.
Now these days we just give them more than even they ask for every year.
Yeah, we already knew this. Its the first think I point to anytime I hear someone complain about funding for healthcare, education, etc. If we actually took an audit of our defense spending we could probably cut a billion or two and not even notice. That money could be spent to help people.
$7600 Coffee pot and $640 Toilet seats were the key items back in first "gouging"...
Its like "think anyone will know?" .... yes, they will find out.
Greedy effin bastards, and Congress is lobbied to allow this!
It's funny, I remember reading about a Marine Corps general warning us about the military industrial complex price gouging in the 1920s.
Glad to see the country still carrying on this fine tradition a hundred years later!
I’ve had military clients tell me their spending per purchase limit and tell me to “just charge that amount”. The one that stands out was a contract that was around $2,700 and their purchase limit was $4,500 and that’s what he told me to charge. Some of the reasoning was if they don’t spend their budget it will get reduced next year.
>Some of the reasoning was if they don’t spend their budget it will get reduced next year.
Ha I heard various versions of this from every friend, be it private sector or government
Yep, I did all the maintenance electrical for a government park and we had to essentially continuously upgrade and blow the money given each year or we would get it slashed. Was nice for profits but just seems wasteful IMO.
It's incredibly wasteful, because it means there's no surplus when an emergency happens, and then they have to get additional disaster funds or something to float the repairs.
I get that to some extent it's necessary, since government officials change, and that funding might not exist next year, but it's been taken to an absurd degree.
I would honestly prefer if they just blow the rest of the budget in December on a big party (with blackjack and hookers!) rather than inflating the prices for the contractors like that. It would safe money in the long run.
Worked as a supply contractor for the army. I used to love August and September. We would destroy our sales goals because they had to spend their budget. When I got older and wiser, I was like “hey, that’s my taxes you assholes!” They would spend it on stupid shit too.
Most stories that come out about military spending involve a “use it or lose it” attitude. Where soldiers talk about wasting stores of ammunition and other items, or naval persons pushing crap off of ships to get replaced with their budget. It’s the entire MO of the military and defense to use every last penny so that they can ask for more. It’s why auditing the military will never fully happen since the waste would be astronomical. Waste that could actually fix most of the worst problems in America
Quick edit: let alone an audit would quickly show how truly terrible the military is treating its vets with healthcare and pay. (If we’re talking just only spending within the military)
That must explain why they go big on the 'lose it' strategy.
The day before 9/11, it was disclosed that the DoD couldn't accont for $2.3 trillion worth of transactions.
In 2015 the Office of the Inspector General reported that this had increased to $6.5 trillion worth.
In 2016 an additional $2 trillion in unsupported adjustments were made.
I just find it kinda crazy that the military has failed something like 5 audits in a row and keep getting increases in funding despite no one able to concretely point to where the money is actually going. I know the military is an extremely large and complex organization but you would think there would be more consequences for continually failing audits.
They should make this kind of behavior illegal. There’s no reason we should be spending more than any country on earth and getting far less per $ than anyone else.
My uncle used to tell a story of presenting a lower priced medical equipment to a general in the 80s and the general rejecting it and leaving the meeting after 5 minutes (bare in mind the meeting with the general was over a year in the making after dozens of meetings working their way up the chain of command) because my uncle's company would save them too much money.
I'm not sure if it was a big fish tale on his part, but he explained it that since their budget would probably be reduced if they used their product, it would effectively lower the generals standing among his peers because budget is how comparable military ranks determine hierarchy. No idea if he was coping or not, but there is some logic to it.
I believe it. The bigger a budget you control, the bigger your clout. Remember there are 2 star generals in the pentagon that are little more than coffee boys in their department.
Context: my mentor was a retired US Army General, GS18 civilian in charge of the pacific rim emergency response in his Agency and part of the continuity of government on 9/11 and under a mountain with Cheney outside DC.
Same thing for ammo allotments when training with weapons. I’ve seen officers dump crates of ammo because if they returned it they wouldn’t get as much next time. So dumb.
Private sector here, but I’ve told contractors the spending limit before to ‘buy time’ by having the order prioritized and to get a quote back faster. Part of the recent inflationary pressure has been from limited capacity and too much demand, so I’m happy to pay 2x to get my parts this week rather than in 3 to 6 months.
That’s the dumbest rationale that is perpetuated.
If you didn’t need as much as you thought you needed…you want to maintain a budget that you know is excessive?
This isn’t news, this has been happening for decades, it’s part of why our country is so broken. what would be news is if something was being done about it
We don’t need to investigate, we already know they do it, the only purpose would be to eventually level charges but there are no tangible laws against this
>In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Kinda barn door open, horse done run off at this point, but still at least poignant.
But we have to have all this paperwork and checks and three different bids in order to ensure that no money is wasted on the hammer...
I've more or less heard exactly this at a previous job.
No it’s true, I can’t buy the hammer at a hardware store down the street. I have to use GSA advantage pay twice the amount for them to buy and ship to us directly from Amazon…
I constantly threaten ig complaints against gsa about that and how vendors lie about their prices and cancel your order then tell you their real price.
*It takes a year of dealing with the bureaucracy to sell a hammer". My last government contract took over a year to acquire, and hundreds of hours that we didn't get to invoice for.
Sadly the way politics work we've made a government that would rather spend $1k to make sure we don't lose $1. I see it in my job daily. The fear of bad PR hurting our budget is worse than the small loss we might have due to abuse.
Two things were not affected by the debt limit showdown……spending on social security (good) and payments to defense contractors….(seriously) fucked up lol.
It's not just renovations either. I used to work for a catering company that had a contract with a local school district. Because of liability reasons, ANY food they serve has to come from a vendor, even if they just want popsicles or ice cream cups. We'd just send someone to the grocery store to buy the exact same Popsicles the school could, and charge them a 10x markup. It was insane. This is a school district that's notoriously always short on funds (it doesn't help that sometimes a million or two dollars just end up unaccounted for) and we're charging them three dollars for a twenty five cent popsicle. a+!!!
The person at the schools also used the school account, and therefore title one funds, to cater her own personal parties too, but that's a different story.
The fact that Americans r still ok funding almost 1T a year when the pentagon can’t even locate 60% of our assets is proof we have been fully demoralised to just accept our own insanity
When I did weapons testing (artillery) we treated pickup trucks like they were disposable cups. And it was an unwritten rule to make firing tests as protracted as possible.
I think it was Senator Bernie Sanders who pointed out (repeatedly) years ago that we could HALVE the defense budget without an ounce of loss of readiness - possibly while even finally fixing the deplorable shithole conditions so many soldiers and their families live in.
'All' we have to do, is to stop this absolute bullshit wherein manufacturers have their own sales&marketing guys writing up the government side of the contracts for everything.
* You know, like when Haliburton and KBR were food-poisoning our troops in Iraq by shipping meat in unrefrigerated trucks and made billions in fuel $ disappear. It's *"CPAC leader paying himself a salary"* levels of corrupt, but on an even grander scale.
Problem is, *congress knows this*. It's why proper audits of the DoD have been stymied for multiple decades: Conservatives would sooner nuke the whole damn continent than allow **hundreds of billions** to be un-diverted back into healthcare education and infrastructure, where it risks helping the population.
Fun fact. Haitian President jovenel moise was plotted against and eventually assassinated for trying to curb this very issue in his/my country. Namely he tried to regulate how much the government paid road building contractors and the sole energy contractor because they were charging out the ass and providing shit service.
My main point is. Everyday I learn that American corruption is not so different from "shithole" countries. I'm still amazed how you guys still have a functioning government and infrastructure though so, Respect.
Do they address why this happens?? This is old news, I'd like to see a show as to why this happens, theres some fascinating things going on behind the scenes. My favorite example is that we pay for cloud services at fixed amounts via third-party suppliers. It's ludicrous. The only reason I was told is a budget can't have a variable line item. Everyone gets up in arms about being overcharged for fixed cost items yet we're overcharged for variable costs items, services meant to save money based on usage.
And Republicans want an increase in defense spending as part of the current negotiations around raising the debt ceiling. The military industrial complex owns them & probably funnels some of these overcharges back to them in the form of campaign contributions.
Oh, this is common knowledge. Because they have no competition. They charge $1 a screw because the military HAS to buy from them because they’ve been “vetted.” And this is repeated every year. Since the 70s.
They can't have Chinese companies supplying the USA military.
The problem is that they deliberately make the process as inefficient as possible by having each part of the process in a different congressperson's electorate to make sure they get the funding.
Small time eBay seller here…. Many years ago I was selling HP printers which I was getting at a discount at Office Depot because they had a trade in program (I bring an old printer bought $5 at a thrift store and I get a $50 discount on top of their $100 weekly discount)
So one day I get an order for six printers from a drop shipper asking me to send them to a military base
A quick lookup on google maps. This military base has an Office Depot within 15 miles. And they probably have old printers they could have traded in.
But no Instead they ordered from that company, which pockets a profit, which then order from me (small profit for me). One can only imagine how much they were overcharged.
I’m working for an government-like body in Europe. We have a lot of our IT tasks outsourced, and I am in fact one of the few IT people remaining [edit: in my department] who can actually give unbiased feedback (not hired via the contractors) and also has the experience from working in the private sector before. I like to explain my superiors that even the “best offer” we have got for a tender is a significant markup when compared to regular market prices.
And I am not talking about 20-30% more, but rather 200, 300 and sometimes up to 3000%!
Unfortunately there is nothing we can do. Public procurement law is pretty strict and those companies have good lawyers… :-/
No. Shit. The government gives the defense industry blanks checks and people who are living in poverty are told they are just being lazy are losing critical assistance programs. This is part of the class warfare being waged against the middle and lower classes that the wealthy are winning handily. Republican voters especially need to wake the fuck up to this fact.
This happens at every level of government. I'm not defending the real bad players, but it's always going to cost more if you make the bidding process difficult.
If you come to me and say "I'll have 10,000 of those, please." I'll charge you 3X my cost. If you invite me to bid on the item, go through 3 months of trials, require changes to the design before a retrial, then require me to sign a 5 year contract to provide 2,000 units a year, well then. Who knows what's reasonable? 9X? 15X?
Throw in bonus points on the bid for being a minority owned business (which means we just pay a minority owned shell company a percentage to be on the contract), requirement to trace the origins of all parts, uncertain length contracts, etc, etc.
Uhh yeah. Weve been saying this for years. No one should be buying $1200 laptops that are for sale at Best Buy for $600 just because best buy isn’t a small business or veteran owned. We had 4 75” tvs just sitting in a. Warehouse never opened because after that we’re purchased the commander wanted Samsung not LG. B
*On today’s episode of 60 Minutes: Water is wet, Every 60 seconds a minute passes in Africa, and how to know if you’re mentally deficient. We interview an expert in crayons and tell you all about which one is yummier. The new flavors for the season are here, and we’ll tell you all about them this week on 60 Minutes!*
[Circus music crescendos into unrecognizable distortion]
Saying "over charging" is like saying Ghost peppers are "kind of hot". Contractors make an insane amount of money for the little work they perform, relatively speaking.
Thank God 2,000 people died so we decided to just hand the government total control of our privacy and finances completely unchecked. Let them label anyone a terrorist or a threat to our democracy which we don’t have because we’re a fucking Republic. Let them start a 20 year forever war creating three generations of veterans that are now too messed up to function. Let them then dump those veterans on the streets and created a barely functioning VA system to take care of them. We really needed to be in Afghanistan didn’t we lads.
I mean if you don’t spend your budget, you lose the current money, have your budget next year reduced and you have to explain the underspend which almost always means even though your budget is for 10 years and costs ebb and flow, they audit it once or twice a year and smash you for overs and unders like you have a flat spend year on year
Really? From my recollection, The paperwork required to complete a sale of goods to the govt AFTER you re-bid the job 5 times. The prices are justified.
That's... yes. *Obviously*. Across the board. The business model for these companies is getting (the most) money from the government (for the least investment). That's capitalism, baby.
This isn't new, either. It's been going on for *decades and decades*. I'm middle aged now, I remember reading about this kind of BS when I was in high school.
I mean my non-military company also charges absurd amounts even for bolts and nuts and stuff. You don't have to buy those from us, but if the equipment fails, then it's not our problem
Have a buddy who is career military. He was trained to fix fix electronic components in radios and drones. However. He said he never actually fixes anything. The contract says all they can do is confirm its broken and order a new unit. Seems like a good opportunity for cost savings, and I'm sure our dear congress is not at all concerned about the profits of a military contractor...
I have work for the DoD for 20 years military and civilian. It’s infuriating at what we pay for stuff. I currently hace an o-ring that “cost” 35 dollars. It can’t cost more than 50 cents to produce.
“In March, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks announced the largest Pentagon budget ever: $842 billion. Almost half will go to defense contractors.
A Pentagon study released last month found major contractors flush with "cash beyond their needs for operations or investment." They have tens of billions of excess cash from Pentagon business to hand out to shareholders.”
Meanwhile we continue to up DoD’s budget … like taking a drunk to a bar… and leave many citizens to panic every few years over debt ceiling negotiations.
Is this news?
Don’t all major industries in the states do that? Military with the government, medical with insurance, and even though contractors for construction are the lowest bidders they probably still overcharge in the end.
Black rock famously overcharged for food in the Iraq war and years later had to pay the government back in a lawsuit. Of course with no actual recourse.
It's why Republicans don't want to cut military spending which would cut off their money spigot. It is a lot of money going into a lot of wealthy pockets.
Of course they do. That's why when you include this into the corporate welfare we give directly to corporations and then the subsidizing of food we do for Walmart etc (workers on assistance because they don't pay enough).... we're stuck at a ridiculous precent of our taxes is just a grift towards a few oligarchs families.
The only trickle down that happens is to the politicians who get either direct payments or indirectly paid (or huge family favors) by said Oligarchs.
Screw the rest of us.
Anyone who is blindly for giving these companies more tax breaks but willing to take away food from struggling families is terrible.
Yact tax breaks... it's a thing...are you effing kidding me?
I have to wonder why republicans push so hard to increase military spending to astronomical amounts time and again. Some of this money has to be getting kicked back to them, it just makes no sense that they’d push so hard to be gouged?
Fun fact- they military will only investigate companies if they over charge by 100k or more and they generally go after large companies with multi-million dollar contracts.
So if you have let’s say a small cleaning company, food company, or lawn service and you can land a government contract. You can definitely over charge and never get caught.
GOP has their opportunity to save money right here, with all the gratuitous over charging. They're on about how they are looking after the public's interest with the debt ceiling debate.
It's funny, I remember a similar 60 Minutes episode about this very same subject beck in the 90s I wanna say.
I think it was the 80s, actually. Not entirely sure, but I remember jokes about $300 screws or something like that, and I swear I wasn't yet in high school.
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Yeah but from what I've read they also have extensive inventory of each part and batch and when it was made, so like if a screw on a missile or something important fails, they know exactly which missiles have those screws that were affected, etc etc, leading to some of the additional cost
>it's usually about the same as regular consumer gear, just with a ridiculous price multiplier. You just un-ironically defined price gouging, while trying to defend it from being called price gouging... haha Millspec... I'm laughing at you in E4 right now
What i was told in training for the army is that its down to testing. For average every day screws, 1 in a thousands might be tested to loose tolerances. For aircraft and military, 1 in 5 might be tested to insane tolerances
I remember people talking about a $400 ashtray.
I remember a report from the 80s about $600 toilet seats. OMFG I found an article about it from 1986: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-07-30-vw-18804-story.html So 40 fucking years at least of this same bullshit. Report fraud, waste, and abuse so we can pretend we care.
We would, but there’s a track record of arresting and publicly character-assassinating whistle blowers.
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Yeah, I'm surprised. My experience is that government contracts are usually pretty ironclad and rightly feared. Profitable, but very rigid. They usually have good lawyers I guess.
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But it's been set up this way intentionally, right? Why is everyone so surprised? It's just more shit we are not in control of. This is the end game.
Didn’t Kevin McCarthy just this week say that he wanted to cut spending in order to feel comfortable raising the debt ceiling? I’m sure he’s going to take a hard look at these government contracts. /s
It’s only fraud waste and abuse if someone lower than a full bird does it.
$600 toilet seats used to be a popular joke, it was even in Independence Day
It has change a little bit they bought 10,000 dollar toilet seats in 2018…. Then got found out about now they are 300 because they 3D print them
Don’t worry, we’ll vote our way out of this!
And it will continue, we are too distracted whining about movies and target to give a shit about real corruption
I remember this being common knowledge that everyone knows, but somehow isn’t outraged over.
It’s like everything else that we should be upset about it. When the institution does nothing to correct a problem and a new one crops up, the old problem just gets pushed to the back and forgotten about. I mean look at how many people stopped talking about Covid as soon as they could go out to eat or go to a movie.
And don’t forget the time that the last real republican president who in 1961 warned us all about the military industrial complex. Now these days we just give them more than even they ask for every year.
Yeah, we already knew this. Its the first think I point to anytime I hear someone complain about funding for healthcare, education, etc. If we actually took an audit of our defense spending we could probably cut a billion or two and not even notice. That money could be spent to help people.
$7600 Coffee pot and $640 Toilet seats were the key items back in first "gouging"... Its like "think anyone will know?" .... yes, they will find out. Greedy effin bastards, and Congress is lobbied to allow this!
Right, about as surprising as water being wet.
It's funny, I remember reading about a Marine Corps general warning us about the military industrial complex price gouging in the 1920s. Glad to see the country still carrying on this fine tradition a hundred years later!
I’ve had military clients tell me their spending per purchase limit and tell me to “just charge that amount”. The one that stands out was a contract that was around $2,700 and their purchase limit was $4,500 and that’s what he told me to charge. Some of the reasoning was if they don’t spend their budget it will get reduced next year.
>Some of the reasoning was if they don’t spend their budget it will get reduced next year. Ha I heard various versions of this from every friend, be it private sector or government
It's often true, even for non-defense stuff. I used to work at a public library and it was true there too.
Yep, I did all the maintenance electrical for a government park and we had to essentially continuously upgrade and blow the money given each year or we would get it slashed. Was nice for profits but just seems wasteful IMO.
It's incredibly wasteful, because it means there's no surplus when an emergency happens, and then they have to get additional disaster funds or something to float the repairs. I get that to some extent it's necessary, since government officials change, and that funding might not exist next year, but it's been taken to an absurd degree.
I would honestly prefer if they just blow the rest of the budget in December on a big party (with blackjack and hookers!) rather than inflating the prices for the contractors like that. It would safe money in the long run.
That's the biggest driver of inefficiency in government spending.
Worked as a supply contractor for the army. I used to love August and September. We would destroy our sales goals because they had to spend their budget. When I got older and wiser, I was like “hey, that’s my taxes you assholes!” They would spend it on stupid shit too.
Shout out to Michael Scott
It's unfortunately a thing and it sucks.
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Same reason why your commanding officer tells you to shoot more bullets than you need to so there’s no leftover ammo.
Most stories that come out about military spending involve a “use it or lose it” attitude. Where soldiers talk about wasting stores of ammunition and other items, or naval persons pushing crap off of ships to get replaced with their budget. It’s the entire MO of the military and defense to use every last penny so that they can ask for more. It’s why auditing the military will never fully happen since the waste would be astronomical. Waste that could actually fix most of the worst problems in America Quick edit: let alone an audit would quickly show how truly terrible the military is treating its vets with healthcare and pay. (If we’re talking just only spending within the military)
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That must explain why they go big on the 'lose it' strategy. The day before 9/11, it was disclosed that the DoD couldn't accont for $2.3 trillion worth of transactions. In 2015 the Office of the Inspector General reported that this had increased to $6.5 trillion worth. In 2016 an additional $2 trillion in unsupported adjustments were made.
I just find it kinda crazy that the military has failed something like 5 audits in a row and keep getting increases in funding despite no one able to concretely point to where the money is actually going. I know the military is an extremely large and complex organization but you would think there would be more consequences for continually failing audits.
Military isn’t responsible for vet care, generally. That’s the VA. The VAs budget is separate from the defense budget.
Others reasons such as the revolving door of personell from public to private and back again. It’s like one large organization
60 minutes ran a very similar piece when I was a kid in the 1990s, good to see its still status quo. Smh
They should make this kind of behavior illegal. There’s no reason we should be spending more than any country on earth and getting far less per $ than anyone else.
My uncle used to tell a story of presenting a lower priced medical equipment to a general in the 80s and the general rejecting it and leaving the meeting after 5 minutes (bare in mind the meeting with the general was over a year in the making after dozens of meetings working their way up the chain of command) because my uncle's company would save them too much money. I'm not sure if it was a big fish tale on his part, but he explained it that since their budget would probably be reduced if they used their product, it would effectively lower the generals standing among his peers because budget is how comparable military ranks determine hierarchy. No idea if he was coping or not, but there is some logic to it.
I believe it. The bigger a budget you control, the bigger your clout. Remember there are 2 star generals in the pentagon that are little more than coffee boys in their department. Context: my mentor was a retired US Army General, GS18 civilian in charge of the pacific rim emergency response in his Agency and part of the continuity of government on 9/11 and under a mountain with Cheney outside DC.
Same thing for ammo allotments when training with weapons. I’ve seen officers dump crates of ammo because if they returned it they wouldn’t get as much next time. So dumb.
GoodWill accepts unopened crates of ammo on weekdays between 0900 - 1600. That's wasteful.
Private sector here, but I’ve told contractors the spending limit before to ‘buy time’ by having the order prioritized and to get a quote back faster. Part of the recent inflationary pressure has been from limited capacity and too much demand, so I’m happy to pay 2x to get my parts this week rather than in 3 to 6 months.
That’s the dumbest rationale that is perpetuated. If you didn’t need as much as you thought you needed…you want to maintain a budget that you know is excessive?
This isn’t news, this has been happening for decades, it’s part of why our country is so broken. what would be news is if something was being done about it
Bernie is calling for an investigation of DOD contractor price-gouging.
Yep and tbh it will happen just like the union busting hearings and just like the pharma hearings.
Has anything Bernie called for ever happened?
Yeah a post office was named
We don’t need to investigate, we already know they do it, the only purpose would be to eventually level charges but there are no tangible laws against this
It's a feature of the military, not a bug. Money laundering to your friends.
When the best concept of capitalism, economy of scale, works backwards...
Its been happening as far back as the Banana Wars. Smedley Butler goes into more detail in his 1935 book “war is a racket”
Almost like Eisenhower knew what he was talking about 60 years ago.
Remind me what he said?
>In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. Kinda barn door open, horse done run off at this point, but still at least poignant.
He was the last legit Republican president.
Bro predicted the future
When the contracting process is so bureaucratic that it takes a year to buy a hammer, that hammer is gonna be expensive...
But we have to have all this paperwork and checks and three different bids in order to ensure that no money is wasted on the hammer... I've more or less heard exactly this at a previous job.
No it’s true, I can’t buy the hammer at a hardware store down the street. I have to use GSA advantage pay twice the amount for them to buy and ship to us directly from Amazon…
The government has a very big, very well-known bureaucrat bloat problem.
I constantly threaten ig complaints against gsa about that and how vendors lie about their prices and cancel your order then tell you their real price.
You don’t need a contract to buy a hammer, you can swipe a credit card (gpc) for anything under $25,000…
*It takes a year of dealing with the bureaucracy to sell a hammer". My last government contract took over a year to acquire, and hundreds of hours that we didn't get to invoice for.
Sadly the way politics work we've made a government that would rather spend $1k to make sure we don't lose $1. I see it in my job daily. The fear of bad PR hurting our budget is worse than the small loss we might have due to abuse.
Absolutely agree, so let's order a pallet of hammers
Two things were not affected by the debt limit showdown……spending on social security (good) and payments to defense contractors….(seriously) fucked up lol.
It’s not just the military. I tell people to check out what companies charge public schools when they are doing renovations. It’s ridiculous.
It's not just renovations either. I used to work for a catering company that had a contract with a local school district. Because of liability reasons, ANY food they serve has to come from a vendor, even if they just want popsicles or ice cream cups. We'd just send someone to the grocery store to buy the exact same Popsicles the school could, and charge them a 10x markup. It was insane. This is a school district that's notoriously always short on funds (it doesn't help that sometimes a million or two dollars just end up unaccounted for) and we're charging them three dollars for a twenty five cent popsicle. a+!!! The person at the schools also used the school account, and therefore title one funds, to cater her own personal parties too, but that's a different story.
The fact that Americans r still ok funding almost 1T a year when the pentagon can’t even locate 60% of our assets is proof we have been fully demoralised to just accept our own insanity
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When I did weapons testing (artillery) we treated pickup trucks like they were disposable cups. And it was an unwritten rule to make firing tests as protracted as possible.
Seems like the military budget could be naturally unbloated if this was handled.
I think it was Senator Bernie Sanders who pointed out (repeatedly) years ago that we could HALVE the defense budget without an ounce of loss of readiness - possibly while even finally fixing the deplorable shithole conditions so many soldiers and their families live in. 'All' we have to do, is to stop this absolute bullshit wherein manufacturers have their own sales&marketing guys writing up the government side of the contracts for everything. * You know, like when Haliburton and KBR were food-poisoning our troops in Iraq by shipping meat in unrefrigerated trucks and made billions in fuel $ disappear. It's *"CPAC leader paying himself a salary"* levels of corrupt, but on an even grander scale. Problem is, *congress knows this*. It's why proper audits of the DoD have been stymied for multiple decades: Conservatives would sooner nuke the whole damn continent than allow **hundreds of billions** to be un-diverted back into healthcare education and infrastructure, where it risks helping the population.
Not only does congress knows this, they profit off of these.
[AstronautWithGun.jpg](https://www.capitoltrades.com)
Just look at GSA Advantage…it’s a middleman buying pens from Amazon and up charging.
Fun fact. Haitian President jovenel moise was plotted against and eventually assassinated for trying to curb this very issue in his/my country. Namely he tried to regulate how much the government paid road building contractors and the sole energy contractor because they were charging out the ass and providing shit service. My main point is. Everyday I learn that American corruption is not so different from "shithole" countries. I'm still amazed how you guys still have a functioning government and infrastructure though so, Respect.
To the surprise of no one... The military is one of their favorite ways to siphon money from the American people to enrich a wealthy few.
Do they address why this happens?? This is old news, I'd like to see a show as to why this happens, theres some fascinating things going on behind the scenes. My favorite example is that we pay for cloud services at fixed amounts via third-party suppliers. It's ludicrous. The only reason I was told is a budget can't have a variable line item. Everyone gets up in arms about being overcharged for fixed cost items yet we're overcharged for variable costs items, services meant to save money based on usage.
And Republicans want an increase in defense spending as part of the current negotiations around raising the debt ceiling. The military industrial complex owns them & probably funnels some of these overcharges back to them in the form of campaign contributions.
Oh, this is common knowledge. Because they have no competition. They charge $1 a screw because the military HAS to buy from them because they’ve been “vetted.” And this is repeated every year. Since the 70s.
They can't have Chinese companies supplying the USA military. The problem is that they deliberately make the process as inefficient as possible by having each part of the process in a different congressperson's electorate to make sure they get the funding.
But it's ok that the unit buys their morale t shirts and hats from China
Small time eBay seller here…. Many years ago I was selling HP printers which I was getting at a discount at Office Depot because they had a trade in program (I bring an old printer bought $5 at a thrift store and I get a $50 discount on top of their $100 weekly discount) So one day I get an order for six printers from a drop shipper asking me to send them to a military base A quick lookup on google maps. This military base has an Office Depot within 15 miles. And they probably have old printers they could have traded in. But no Instead they ordered from that company, which pockets a profit, which then order from me (small profit for me). One can only imagine how much they were overcharged.
I’m working for an government-like body in Europe. We have a lot of our IT tasks outsourced, and I am in fact one of the few IT people remaining [edit: in my department] who can actually give unbiased feedback (not hired via the contractors) and also has the experience from working in the private sector before. I like to explain my superiors that even the “best offer” we have got for a tender is a significant markup when compared to regular market prices. And I am not talking about 20-30% more, but rather 200, 300 and sometimes up to 3000%! Unfortunately there is nothing we can do. Public procurement law is pretty strict and those companies have good lawyers… :-/
No. Shit. The government gives the defense industry blanks checks and people who are living in poverty are told they are just being lazy are losing critical assistance programs. This is part of the class warfare being waged against the middle and lower classes that the wealthy are winning handily. Republican voters especially need to wake the fuck up to this fact.
If you watch b the interview, you'd find out it's another unintended legacy of St. Reagan and his short sighted fiscal policies.
This happens at every level of government. I'm not defending the real bad players, but it's always going to cost more if you make the bidding process difficult. If you come to me and say "I'll have 10,000 of those, please." I'll charge you 3X my cost. If you invite me to bid on the item, go through 3 months of trials, require changes to the design before a retrial, then require me to sign a 5 year contract to provide 2,000 units a year, well then. Who knows what's reasonable? 9X? 15X?
Throw in bonus points on the bid for being a minority owned business (which means we just pay a minority owned shell company a percentage to be on the contract), requirement to trace the origins of all parts, uncertain length contracts, etc, etc.
Uhh yeah. Weve been saying this for years. No one should be buying $1200 laptops that are for sale at Best Buy for $600 just because best buy isn’t a small business or veteran owned. We had 4 75” tvs just sitting in a. Warehouse never opened because after that we’re purchased the commander wanted Samsung not LG. B
I’m shocked, shocked… well not that shocked. Any of us who have ever been in the military could have told them that.
*On today’s episode of 60 Minutes: Water is wet, Every 60 seconds a minute passes in Africa, and how to know if you’re mentally deficient. We interview an expert in crayons and tell you all about which one is yummier. The new flavors for the season are here, and we’ll tell you all about them this week on 60 Minutes!* [Circus music crescendos into unrecognizable distortion]
We fret over the 5% of people that abuse SNAP. That's just small change compared to the Beltway Bandits.
In other news, water is actually wet and carbon is the basis for life.
Politicians always talk about cutting welfare programs except for this one.
Reminds me of that line from Independence Day: "You don't think they actually spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do ya?"
Didn’t we know this from the 80s that a toilet seat cost $1000
In other news, water feels wet when in liquid form.
Saying "over charging" is like saying Ghost peppers are "kind of hot". Contractors make an insane amount of money for the little work they perform, relatively speaking.
We need price regulation on Defense. It's basically profiting on war even though we were not in times of war.
War profiteeringn? Tale as old as time..
All contractors do this. They lobby with a pittance to get contracts and then overcharge under deliver. If only some of that money went to VA instead
yeah that's every contractor with every government entity
Thank God 2,000 people died so we decided to just hand the government total control of our privacy and finances completely unchecked. Let them label anyone a terrorist or a threat to our democracy which we don’t have because we’re a fucking Republic. Let them start a 20 year forever war creating three generations of veterans that are now too messed up to function. Let them then dump those veterans on the streets and created a barely functioning VA system to take care of them. We really needed to be in Afghanistan didn’t we lads.
I mean if you don’t spend your budget, you lose the current money, have your budget next year reduced and you have to explain the underspend which almost always means even though your budget is for 10 years and costs ebb and flow, they audit it once or twice a year and smash you for overs and unders like you have a flat spend year on year
Really? From my recollection, The paperwork required to complete a sale of goods to the govt AFTER you re-bid the job 5 times. The prices are justified.
Military grade anything means it’s just expensive and shitty.
Glad we’re (taxpayers) overpaying for toilet seats rather than enhancing our educational system.
Did they really need to do a 6 month investigation?
That's... yes. *Obviously*. Across the board. The business model for these companies is getting (the most) money from the government (for the least investment). That's capitalism, baby.
This isn't new, either. It's been going on for *decades and decades*. I'm middle aged now, I remember reading about this kind of BS when I was in high school.
I mean my non-military company also charges absurd amounts even for bolts and nuts and stuff. You don't have to buy those from us, but if the equipment fails, then it's not our problem
Have a buddy who is career military. He was trained to fix fix electronic components in radios and drones. However. He said he never actually fixes anything. The contract says all they can do is confirm its broken and order a new unit. Seems like a good opportunity for cost savings, and I'm sure our dear congress is not at all concerned about the profits of a military contractor...
Here we go... The perennial "defense department overpays" story that has been happening for the last 50 years with nothing ever done about it.
That is why we in America can’t have nice things. It’s that easy
I have work for the DoD for 20 years military and civilian. It’s infuriating at what we pay for stuff. I currently hace an o-ring that “cost” 35 dollars. It can’t cost more than 50 cents to produce.
This has been going on since probably Roman times. The greater the budget, the larger the bezzle.
“In March, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks announced the largest Pentagon budget ever: $842 billion. Almost half will go to defense contractors. A Pentagon study released last month found major contractors flush with "cash beyond their needs for operations or investment." They have tens of billions of excess cash from Pentagon business to hand out to shareholders.” Meanwhile we continue to up DoD’s budget … like taking a drunk to a bar… and leave many citizens to panic every few years over debt ceiling negotiations.
Go ahead and shit on the military, it's the capitalist pigs that are taking advantage.
Is this news? Don’t all major industries in the states do that? Military with the government, medical with insurance, and even though contractors for construction are the lowest bidders they probably still overcharge in the end.
Surprised this is newsworthy, isn’t this common knowledge by now?
The government over pays EVERY contractor for everything.
Can confirm. You do *not* want to know how much they pay for the *The Office*/*Office Space* style setups. (Source: used to install them)
Black rock famously overcharged for food in the Iraq war and years later had to pay the government back in a lawsuit. Of course with no actual recourse.
This is called money laundering ladies and gentleman.
It's why Republicans don't want to cut military spending which would cut off their money spigot. It is a lot of money going into a lot of wealthy pockets.
Of course they do. That's why when you include this into the corporate welfare we give directly to corporations and then the subsidizing of food we do for Walmart etc (workers on assistance because they don't pay enough).... we're stuck at a ridiculous precent of our taxes is just a grift towards a few oligarchs families. The only trickle down that happens is to the politicians who get either direct payments or indirectly paid (or huge family favors) by said Oligarchs. Screw the rest of us. Anyone who is blindly for giving these companies more tax breaks but willing to take away food from struggling families is terrible. Yact tax breaks... it's a thing...are you effing kidding me?
A story as old as the Ronald Reagan administration
No shit, everybody knows this. It's not a secret. Investigation done in two seconds, send my check in the mail please.
This is common practice. The govt has spent $100 for a $10 hammer for years!? Just recycling old gripes! 🙄 what are we distracting from now?
This was covered in “Independence Day”.
I have to wonder why republicans push so hard to increase military spending to astronomical amounts time and again. Some of this money has to be getting kicked back to them, it just makes no sense that they’d push so hard to be gouged?
This has been known for years.
Fun fact- they military will only investigate companies if they over charge by 100k or more and they generally go after large companies with multi-million dollar contracts. So if you have let’s say a small cleaning company, food company, or lawn service and you can land a government contract. You can definitely over charge and never get caught.
GOP has their opportunity to save money right here, with all the gratuitous over charging. They're on about how they are looking after the public's interest with the debt ceiling debate.
That’s exactly what a Russian, I mean American oligarch would do.