Republicans are always railing against “government waste” in their never-ending quest to cut government programs. Well, the Washington Post has presented them with the quintessential example of what they can tackle as soon as the new Congress is sworn in: an almost unfathomable amount of taxpayer dollars being wasted at the defense department.

The Post’s Craig Whitlock and Bob Woodward published an incredible investigation on Monday uncovering that the Pentagon itself commissioned an internal report aimed at identifying wasteful spending within its bureaucracy. The auditors, which only looked at the agency’s business and support operations, found a staggering $125bn that the Pentagon was wasting.

The Pentagon was apparently terrified that Congress would find out about the massive sum of money they were throwing down a black hole every year, just as defense officials were clamoring for yet another budget increase. So officials there suppressed the results of the study, even going as far as “impos[ing] secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings,” the Post reported.

See, the Pentagon and its allies love to complain about the disaster that will befall the agency due to mild budget cuts agreed in 2013. Back then, Congress agreed to a four-year, across-the-board reduction in spending as part of the “sequester” budget deal (they conveniently never mention that the department’s budget had ballooned to over $700bn annually over the previous decade). This new report proves they could easily shift billions of dollars to programs that they claim are in desperate need; they’re just choosing not to.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, repeatedly claimed during the presidential campaign he would cut “waste, fraud and abuse” from the budget of all sorts of things , including the Pentagon. (It was his go-to cliché whenever someone asked him how he was going to pay for something he proposed). In fact, it’s been the Republican party’s mantra for years anytime they bring up the debt or the deficit.

So Trump and his Republican colleagues wants to get rid of “waste,” there’s literally never been a more giant and obvious example. Here’s their time to act!

The numbers in the Post’s report are so large they are sometimes hard to fully grasp: the defense department employs 1,014,000 people “to fill back-office jobs far from the front lines” – that’s almost as many as the total number of active duty troops that the Pentagon employs, which is 1.3 million. They employ more expensive private contractors than several federal agencies combined.

Now, no one should exactly be surprised that the Pentagon is a bloated money pit where good accounting goes to die. There are so many horror stories of outrageous spending at the Pentagon it’s hard to keep track of them all. Last year, the Army alone had to make trillions of dollars of shady accounting adjustments to even come close to balancing its books. That’s trillions with a “t.”

As Reuters reported in August, “The defense department’s inspector general ... said the army made $2.8tn in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5tn for the year. Yet the army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.”



It’s unlikely that the Republicans will hold the Pentagon accountable for its free-spending ways even as they try to nickel and dime social programs. In the Republicans’ fantasy world, the Pentagon’s enormous budget is never a problem.

Defense conglomerates and weapons makers fill the coffers of Republicans (and a lot of Democrats) each year, and spread large construction projects across virtually every state in the country, so lawmakers are loathe to cut funding for jobs in their respective districts. Add to that a hawkish tendency to support multiple wars around the world, and the Pentagon budget becomes virtually untouchable.

Legislators often argue for it to be increased while simultaneously calling for tax and spending cuts, coupled with a balance budget constitutional amendment. It was Marco Rubio’s position in 2016, Mitt Romney’s position in 2012 and a whole host of Republican hawks in Congress are always pushing for more military spending beyond its record levels.



Next time you hear Republicans complaining about food stamps for poor people, or calling for a reduction of social security benefits or proposing to privatize Medicare, make sure to throw this report back in their face. Because whatever the waste problems in one government program or another, they pale in comparison to this.