GAO: Pentagon has no handle on its bloat

[unhappycamper]

http://hamptonroads.com/2015/01/gao-pentagon-has-no-handle-its-bloat

GAO: Pentagon has no handle on its bloat\
By Lisa Rein
The Washington Post
© January 26, 2015

Facing budget pressures, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said two years ago that he was ordering the number of top brass and senior civilians at the Pentagon to start shrinking by 20 percent. But federal auditors reported last week that the Defense Department has not produced a realistic plan to make the cuts — and can't say how many people it has or needs at its management headquarters.

In a new report, the Government Accountability Office described an unwieldy personnel system that seems unable to account for the size of military and civilian staffs at the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, and the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force secretariats and staffs — all headquarters that ballooned in size after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and have only recently begun to level off.

Compounding the problem, contractors form a large chunk of these employees, but the Defense Department does not have an accurate handle on how large, auditors found.

"Without a systematic determination of personnel requirements and periodic reassessment of them, DOD will not be well positioned to proactively identify efficiencies and limit personnel growth within these headquarters organizations," the GAO concluded in the 90-page report.

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DOD Needs to Reassess Personnel Requirements for the Office of Secretary of Defense, Joint Staff, and Military Service Secretariats

[Fred Sanders]

1. The solution is obviously to defund the GAO. "Republicans will get right on that, Sir Koch".

[merrily]

2. Taking money from the seniors, disabled, widowed, orphaned and otherwise disadvantaged

will solve it.

[bemildred]

3. I worked in defense for almost 20 years, they never did have a handle on it. nt