Rachel Morris, author of ‘Shock and Audit: The Hidden Defense Budget,’ discusses the real defense budget numbers, Obama’s promise to stop using supplemental bills to pay for U.S. wars, the lack of penalties against defense contractors that don’t perform and the overriding power of Congress to save endangered weapons programs.
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Anti-War Radio, Chaos, 95.9 FM, in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And I lied.
It's not time for an interview of Daphne Eviatar.
I got my time slots mixed up.
That's second hour.
Up right now, it's okay that I lied, though, because the truth is just as good.
It's Rachel Morris from Mother Jones Magazine.
She's written this new article, Shock and Audit.
Well, so far, part one, the hidden defense budget.
Welcome to the show, Rachel.
How are you?
I'm good.
Thanks for having me.
Well, thank you very much for joining us today.
So the hidden defense budget, I guess let's start with what's the admitted to defense budget?
The amount that is in the budget that President Obama submitted to Congress is $534 billion.
And $534 billion, so now I'm thinking of my Robert Higgs maxim, which is you take whatever number they say it is and you double it.
Yeah, it's not quite double, but once you start adding in, I guess, that amount doesn't count supplemental appropriations money for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
So once you add that plus spending on defense that takes part in other parts of the government, such as nuclear weapons spending in the Department of Energy, the total number goes up quite significantly to basically more than about $800 billion.
You talk here in the beginning of your article about just the amount of money wasted in cost overruns and now I guess, you know, we all assume that any project that they do, any product that they contract for there at the Pentagon is going to be way more than it should be anyway.
But then this $300 billion worth of cost overruns is all the costs that go even above and beyond what they told us they were going to be ripping us off for.
But I'm curious, I don't think it specifies in there, $300 billion over how long?
That's cumulative.
So that's basically all of the commitments that the Pentagon is currently signed up for.
That's the amount by which the cost of increased over what we were originally told they would be.
OK, so I guess in terms of time frame, we'd have to go back to when was the earliest of those contracts agreed to.
So all of them were approved at different points in time.
So there's sort of no there's no one starting point.
You have to look at each individual program and when it was first approved and how much the the original cost estimate was.
Yeah.
Well, you know, $300 billion is a lot of money.
It is.
It is.
It's kind of a staggering amount of money when you think about that.
I guess one of the things that we did in our package was to sort of compare it to, I guess, other GDP of other countries that are less than than $296 billion.
Which was, you know, quite surprising when you consider that some of the countries are not small or unknown ones.
I think it's great the way you list in the article all the different little commissions and committees and special investigations that have been set up over the years to solve these problems and and to, I guess, tighten the belt around all this waste, that kind of thing.
Yeah, well, basically one of the things that I think and one of the reasons that we decided to do this was that, you know, there was so much sort of press attention given when Robert Gates first announced his budget and the fact that it was cutting some of these big programs like the F-22 fighter jet and things like that that are notorious for going over budget and having all kinds of technical problems.
But when you look at the history of it, it's basically all the things that people are saying are broken about the Pentagon now.
They've been saying since, you know, basically the 1950s, every couple of years, a new commission rolls along or a special investigation or a congressional task force.
And they all pretty much come up with the same recommendations every time.
But somehow they never seem to seem to be addressed.
And I think at the moment, it's kind of too early to tell that the sort of early actions by Congress on the Gates budget suggests that something quite similar might be happening this time around.
Well, it doesn't seem like there's any built in incentive for people to save money.
Why should they?
Right.
I mean, there's a lot of people at different parts in the process who all have an incentive to keep things the way they are.
Let's see if we can get to break down some of these numbers and figure out how we get from five hundred and thirty five billion to upwards above eight hundred billion there.
You mentioned that the costs of the wars are always done separately.
Now, that's something that Barack Obama has promised to change.
Right.
He's only doing supplementals for now because to finish out Bush's fiscal year or whatever, that kind of thing.
But from now on, at least, he's promised to put the costs of the war in the defense budget.
Right.
That's right.
I think the other thing to remember about the supplementals is that in addition to the war funding, they usually wind up with a bunch of other either weapons programs or completely non defense related earmarks stuffed into them.
And because the supplemental is emergency spending, then the sort of oversight and the process for it are a lot less stringent than a regular budget bill.
So this time around, for instance, one of the supplemental bills that Congress just approved has got an extra two billion dollars in it for the C-17 cargo plane, which is one of the planes that Gates wanted to cut that extra money for that kind of made its way into the supplemental.
So Obama has definitely promised that from now on he's going to basically put the bulk of all of the spending into the official defense department budget and then, you know, not have these sort of extra amounts of money floating out there, which which don't receive the same kinds of oversight.
Well, that really is remarkable, isn't it?
I mean, here's Secretary Gates is not even, you know, kind of a despised character like Donald Rumsfeld or anything like that.
He's considered to be a very, you know, prominent person in Washington, D.C.
He's the head of the Defense Department, for crying out loud.
And yet when he wants to cut a plane that he doesn't want or even a couple of different kinds of planes that he no longer thinks are necessary, he can't stand up to Congress one bit over stuff like that.
Right.
It's very difficult because, I mean, I think he has made a pretty significant public relations effort to, you know, to put out there the information about some of these programs and what's wrong with them and why we can no longer afford them or why they don't do the job that they were supposed to do.
But really, once it gets to Congress, it's out of his hands and he's, you know, I mean, other people in the past who have a lot of credibility with, you know, in defense circles like, you know, Dick Cheney tried to cut some of these programs when he was secretary of defense and didn't get anywhere either.
So it really all comes down to Congress.
And, you know, they obviously have other interests other than does this plane work or not when they're deciding whether to to provide money for it.
Well, and, you know, we were talking about on the show before you came on the great article by Richard Cummings, Lockheed stock and two smoking barrels.
Have you ever read that?
I don't think I have.
Oh, well, it's great fun.
And it's about well, it's actually horrible, but it's very interesting.
And one of the things they talk about in there is how Lockheed decided to just stop trying to compete in the marketplace after a failure with a commercial jet that they tried to market back in the 70s.
And so they just decided they would do nothing but target the military as their customer.
And even that they would set up all these, you know, think tank front groups in order to figure out in order to determine what the foreign policy should be so they'd know which kind of weapons to make.
And hence, you have Bruce Jackson running the Committee for NATO Expansion and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and all of his influence with the project for a new American century and all that, that really the neocons whole thing is simply just, you know, welfare payments for airplane manufacturers.
Right.
Well, I think I mean, that raises a very good point, which is that a lot of the attention so far on the Gates budget has kind of focused on, you know, which programs that he cut, like, you know, which planes, which tanks, like sort of very specific.
Did he fund this weapon or that weapon?
But there's kind of this larger question of how exactly the contracts are awarded and overseen.
And as you know, I'm sure there's, you know, basically situations where a company like Lockheed Martin can be years and years late on delivering something and they deliver it for, you know, it doesn't do what they originally said it would do.
Or, you know, there are technical glitches that cost more money to fix.
And yet there's no kind of there's no requirement that, you know, if you're late or if you run way over budget, that you get some kind of some kind of penalty.
And so I think the big question is whether Obama and Gates are prepared to do something about the end of the process rather than just looking, you know, program by program in terms of what they're going to fund.
Hmm.
Well, and this is really goes back to Eisenhower's military industrial complex speech, which he was going to call it the military industrial congressional complex.
But I guess some aides convinced him to take it out since he was the president.
He wasn't really in the in the right position to be challenging the Congress's authority in that way kind of thing.
It would sound too dictatorial or whatever.
But his point was really right that when you have, you know, four hundred and thirty five little bitty districts all around, it doesn't take much money to be able to influence those races.
It doesn't take really apparently much effort at all for Lockheed and Raytheon and Northrop Grumman to decide who makes up the House of Representatives in any given decade.
Right.
Well, I think I mean, the other part of it that is pretty apparent when you look at the stuff is that also it's not an issue where the president, for instance, can necessarily lean on members of his own party to get through the budget that he wants.
I mean, you know, the history of this and it's playing out the same way again this time around is that, you know, there are plenty of supporters in the Democratic Party for some of these big weapons programs where there are, you know, manufacturing or supply suppliers in their in their districts or in their states.
So, you know, it's it's kind of an issue where some of the normal partisan considerations don't don't really apply.
Yeah, we saw there's an article in the Christian Science Monitor about the plan to close the Lockheed F-22 factory, and they were talking about how many jobs it would cost, never mind how much money is being taken from somewhere else in order for them to destroy it.
But the way they look at it is this is their factory jobs and and the pressure is on.
And now I guess they're they've saved the F-22, right?
They came up with the excuse that they're going to sell some to Japan or something, and they're keeping them rolling off the assembly line.
I mean, not rolling off.
They come off really slow, I'm sure.
Yeah, no, that's right.
So far, there's two things.
Like there's the idea that maybe they can keep the F-22 going by finding foreign customers for it.
And I think, you know, ultimately kind of sneaking it back into the U.S. sort of defense arsenal as well.
But also, I mean, at the moment in the House, at least, it has made its way back into the budget bill and the Senate, I think, at least in the Armed Services Committee, which gets the first crack at these things, they will probably take it out because both Carl Levin and John McCain have said that they don't want funding for it.
But then after that, it will go to the floor for a full vote in the Senate.
And there, I think it will be pretty tough.
There's a lot of supporters of it there.
And then the committees that are in charge of actually dispensing the money for for the defense budget are much more sympathetic to adding the plane back in.
So I think it's it's really sort of pretty difficult to tell what will happen.
But I think there's at least a reasonable chance that the F-22 will, you know, at least survive for a little while longer.
Well, you know, I interviewed Winslow T. Wheeler about some of the same stuff last week, and someone wrote in the comments section on Antiwar.com that I guess this is something that Robert Gates doesn't understand either, that we need those F-22s, F-15s and F-14s and all those planes are basically useless now.
And they're all 30 and 40 year old designs.
And we need planes now for the wars we'll be fighting in 30 and 40 years, which Lord knows we'll be at war in 30 and 40 years from now.
Right.
I guess that is one of the things that, you know, if you are that's one of the arguments you hear from supporters of the plane most often, you know, even though it's never been flown on a combat mission in Iraq or Afghanistan, we need it to maintain some kind of air superiority against, you know, in a future conventional war against someone like China or Russia or something like that.
I think the thing about that is that the Defense Department, for one, in addition to cutting the F-22 about doubled its order of F-35.
So it's not, you know, basically taking out the F-22 and not replacing it with anything.
There's kind of problems with the way in which it's ramping up the production of the F-35, but it's not just simply taking out a plane without, you know, without any kind of replacement.
I see.
Now, I wanted to go through some of these numbers here.
Again, it's motherjones.com shock and audit the hidden defense budget.
And we have here five hundred and thirty four billion dollars for the Pentagon regular budget.
But then you have extra appropriations for military personnel, another four point one billion.
Iraq and Afghanistan supplemental for the fiscal year 2010 is another hundred and thirty billion.
Iraq and Afghanistan supplemental funding for fiscal year 2009, another eighty two billion, which wasn't that like one hundred and six by the time they passed that one?
Yeah, that's right.
It's since in the period since it was passed, it went up.
Yeah.
And then the nukes now see, this is something that they love to not count because this is the Department of Energy.
So this has nothing to do with with the military.
But another almost twenty billion dollars spent maintaining and I guess building new nuclear weapons every year.
Is that right?
Yeah, it's basically maintaining and cleanup and security and all of those kinds of things.
And then direct economic aid to the war zone countries that we destroy Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Another five billion Coast Guard spending.
I like that thrown in there.
You end up here at seven hundred and eighty, but then there's also the V.A.
Right.
Right.
And what I wanted to do there was to basically I mean, there's really there's a couple of different ways you can add in these totals.
But I wanted to start out with the really just core defense related things.
So basically military aid, weapons, anything that's just like very direct military spending and pull out a total for that and then show, you know, say something like the V.A., which is, you know, it's obviously related to and the costs that it has are directly related to what the Department of Defense does.
But it's you know, it's not sort of a strictly directly defense related cost.
So so that's why there's kind of two separate breakdowns in there.
And then there's also the Department of Homeland Security, which is, you know, got a lot of security spending in it for mostly domestic security.
So once you add in those sort of two optional extras, I guess you could call them that takes you to almost nine hundred billion.
And of course, the other thing that's not there is intelligence spending, which is classified.
So we couldn't add in it.
Right.
Which is what?
At least 50 billion or hundreds of billions.
Or do you have any idea?
I'm not sure.
Actually, I don't I don't have any sort of good sense of a of a ballpark figure on that one.
All right.
Well, you know, this is a very interesting thing here.
It looks like it's going to have another four parts to it.
Shock and Audit at Mother Jones magazine.
And I guess maybe after part four and five are published, we can have you back on to talk about some more of the ideas developed in these articles.
Sure.
And we're going to be, you know, following pretty closely kind of what goes in and out of these various budget bills as they make their way through Congress.
So we'll be adding that to the to the package as well.
Right on.
OK, well, thank you very much for your time on the show today.
Thank you.
All right, everybody.
That's Rachel Morris from Mother Jones magazine.
You can find the website, of course, at Mother Jones dot com.
And again, the article is called Shock and Audit.
Chaos Radio, 95.9 in Austin.
