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Pentagon Spent $5 Billion For Weapons On Day Before Shutdown
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "John Reed at Foreign Policy reports that the Pentagon awarded 94 contracts Monday evening on its annual end-of-the-fiscal-year spending spree, spending more than five billion dollars on everything from robot submarines to Finnish hand grenades and a radar base mounted on an offshore oil platform. To put things in perspective, the Pentagon gave out only 14 contracts on September 3, the first workday of the month. Some of the more interesting purchases from Monday's dollar-dump include the $2.5 billion award the Defense Logistics Agency gave to aircraft engine-maker Pratt & Whitney for 'various weapons system spare parts' used by the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, $65 million for military helmets from BAE Systems, $24 million for 'traveling wave tubes' to amplify radio signals from Thales, $17 million for liquid nitrogen, $15 million for helium and $19 million on cots. The Air Force, traditionally DOD's biggest spender, was relatively restrained; it dished out only 17 contracts including $49 million to help France buy 16 MQ-9 Reaper drones, $64 million to Lockheed for help operating spy satellites that are equipped with infrared cameras, and $9 million to URS Corp. for maintenance work on the Air National Guard's fleet of RC-26B spyplanes that help domestic law enforcement agencies catch drug dealers. The air service also spent $9 million on a new gym at the Air Force Academy that includes areas for CrossFit training, space for the academy's Triathlon Club and a 'television studio.' It just goes to show, says Reed, that 'even when the federal government is shutdown and the military has temporarily lost half its civilian workforce, the Pentagon can spend money like almost no one else.'"
Aside from it being incrementally more legal than just handing the money directly to the manufacturer, why would the US be helping France pay for MQ-9s? Is there any way in which this isn't a pure handout to General Atomics, essentially Uncle Sam offering a manufacturer's rebate on their behalf?
Stop whining for money.
Stop envying money.
Stop money.
It will be cool.
This article is pointless--the Federal fiscal year ended on September 30th. Of COURSE the Pentagon's going to spend money like crazy--just about every purchasing department in the Federal Government waits until the very last day to fill out their orders. Doing so allows them to negotiate for better deals to benefit us taxpayers, or allows them to be told how much they've got to spend. This is not a surprise, folks. It's just timing, that's all.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
a) nerds also follow politics
b) a lot of nerds are employed from defense department money
This is a pure politics story. Why the fuck is this on slashdot? Its not news for nerds and not stuff that matters to anybody but political junkies.
No, its not even politics. Its just business.
Its *normal* for most companies to deal with contracts at the end of the quarter. Its especially normal for the end of the fiscal year. Budgets ended that day, so there's a desire by both the bean counters in the DoD and the companies they're buying things from to get the contracts signed before the end of the fiscal year.
Anyone who thinks this is some big conspiracy or shocking is staggeringly ignorant of the real world and likely has either never had a job or had a job so low they never were exposed to things like fiscal years and end-of-quarter.
Why do you think damn near every finance and sales person was chained to their desk until late on Monday evening? Because *every* business works that way.
The government continues to spend money on whatever it wants.
The government, after the shutdown, spent money to rent barricades to close off national monuments that are normally open 24x7 with no means of closing access.
They also spent money and time to turn off things like the "Panda Cam" that they could have just kept on until it failed.
Any actual layoffs or closures are wholly there to annoy you and make you think you need government more than you do.
Reject closures and go where you like. It's your land.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This article is pointless--a fiscal year ended on September 30th. Of COURSE the business is going to spend money like crazy--just about every purchasing department in the company waits until the very last day to fill out their orders. Doing so allows them to negotiate for better deals to benefit the shareholders, or allows them to be told how much they've got to spend. This is not a surprise, folks. It's just timing, that's all.
There. Tweaked it a bit, just to drive home how moronic this article is.
Pretty much any large organization with annual budgets burns through any remaining money before the fiscal year runs out. The reasoning is simple: if you don't spend every penny, budget planners inevitably use that as evidence you didn't need the money and will give you less the next year, even if you then turn out to need it.
In addition, there may be special projects the authorization for which expires at the end of the fiscal year.
Lastly, the people selling the stuff have targets of their own to meet and will often give special deals if you close the deal before the end of their fiscal year.
It's certainly not news for nerds with any kind of a filter. $5 billion is less than 1% of the military budget. Assuming 260 work days per year and a $665 billion budget, an "average" day would be $2.56 billion. Obviously not all of that is procurement, but still this should elicit a yawn.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I agree, I wanted to read more about the robot submarines.
This falls under "stuff that matters." And if I was going to read or participate in a discussion on this sort of thing, I'd rather be surrounded by Slashdot types.
Why do you think damn near every finance and sales person was chained to their desk until late on Monday evening? Because *every* business works that way.
And here I was under the impression that the military wasn't a business. But I guess suiting up for the next avoidable war has higher margins than providing basic sustenance to women and children.
Way to go, guys. You're really doing a heckuva job.
Wow, even more moronic posts, or maybe you're just trolling. In either case, it doesn't matter if you're a non-profit, a public company, a private company, an individual, a church, a charity or a government agency. You buy goods and services to utilize in producing whatever it is you're expected to produce. Could be a healthy community, could be a flock of followers, cars, growing children into adults or blowing the everliving shit out somewhere on behalf of a country. The need to do reasonable bookkeeping is common across all of them, even if most individuals suck about it. From that standpoint, they're all businesses.
Of course, via a certain level of abstraction, the military IS there as a business. We've overthrown governments for corporate interests many times in the last 150 years. It may happen via back room handshakes and sweet consulting deals after leaving office rather than invoices for services rendered, but it still happens.
So you're basically trolling or stupid on two counts -- feigning a belief (or actually holding a belief) that government didn't exist for the powerful, and feigning a belief (or actually holding it) that basic accounting practices are only held by independent corporations.
I'm shocked, SHOCKED to find that gambling is going on in here!
You don't think some naive teabagger malcontents in the House are going to interfere with biddness as usual, do you?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I work for a telecommunications systems company, specifically serving government/military channels.
Over the 3 days leading up to 9/30, the volume of contract awards that came through was more than double that of the last 2 months. In the end it was still about 40% less than this time last year.
They delay some purchases until the end of the year so they can be sure their budget doesn't run out in the middle of the year. When we get to the end of the year, they pull the trigger on the purchases they'd put off because they weren't sure what they have money left for. The rest are put on hiatus until next year when they get a new budget. Plus, some vendors have fiscal year-ends coinciding with the gov't, so to get bookings into the fiscal year-end and maximize year-end bonus comp., salesmen will push to provide the sharpest discounts they can manage to bring those awards into this year.
It's not surprising to see a spurt of purchases at the end of the budget year.
We're here for you! Group hug!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It's not surprising to see a spurt of purchases at the end of the budget year.
You are correct in all that you say. I just wanted to make sure this one part was clear.
In the government being run on Continuing Resolutions like we've been on since this president took office, much of the budgeted money expires when the CR expires and this is usually written to be the end of the fiscal year. If you don't use the money in your budget, it goes away (expires) when the CR lapses.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You obviously don't understand what "I'm in the Army" actually means... They own you, lock stock and barrel. Paid or not, you are in the Army. Your commitment to the services does not allow you to quit before your term is over. Further, if they don't want you to go and can invent a national security reason for you to stay, you get to stay.
Now it might be hard to get folks to sign up if they are not getting paychecks, but those who where unlucky enough to already be in the service have no choice.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The problem is not that they renewed all these contracts at the EOY, the problem is that while the asshats in washington are bitching about spending on things like social programs and health care (not saying they are good or bad programs) the asshats at the Pentagon are spending money like a /.er at Frys and no one is discussing that.
I would love the discussion to be about whether or not we need to make these purchases given the state of our government budget and the global military situation.
Do we need to bribe France to buy war machines from American defence companies? Especially when we are sending home kids in Head-Start?
The cutoff date was also the end of the third quarter of 2013, and budgets have to be overrun or it would get cut next year (provided Congress and the President ever came up with a budget). My guess is that there's a flurry of spending on 9/30 (or the Friday directly before then if 9/30 falls on a weekend) every single year going back a couple of decades.
It's sort of like Neil DeGrasse Tyson's argument against one of the 2012 scares about planetary alignment: The planetary alignment the worrywarts were claiming was a disaster was going to happen on December 21, 2012, but it also happened on the winter solstice in every year before that.
I am officially gone from