While the media massed outside the courthouse for a career update from Kenneth Starr, a congressional hearing was drawing flies despite disclosures of billion-dollar bungling.
Welcome to the capital, where 90 percent of the media tends to cover 10 percent of the news.
A House subcommittee learned Thursday about the one army the Defense Department could not vanquish, namely one from H & R Block or Ernst & Young. Its accounting ineptitude leaves it missing billions of dollars and not knowing the whereabouts of missile systems, aircraft and boats.
Perhaps they’re in the hands of foreign governments or really bad guys?
The subject was broached during a head-turning colloquy seemingly missed by even the few newsies who surfaced for a session reported on briefly by ABC’s “World News with Peter Jennings” and The Associated Press and, according to staffers, nobody else.
The General Accounting Office, as part of the first government-wide financial audit, concludes that the Pentagon’s auditors “could not be relied upon to provide basic information” regarding the existence, location and value of much of its $635 billion in property, plant and equipment.
That includes arcana such as missile launchers ($1 million apiece), tugboats (nearly $1 million a pop), F-18 engines ($4 million each), as well as grenades, industrial diamonds, computers, planes, boats, landing gear, hydraulic pumps and rocket motors, to name a few.
Oh, throw in 200 cruise missiles only now just accounted for (they had been destroyed “years ago as part of a treaty with the Soviet Union,” reports the GAO).
With Congress still on recess, just two committee members showed: Chairman Steve Horn (R-Calif.), a farm boy and Harvard-trained political scientist who worked for Sen. Everett Dirksen whom he helped draft the Voting Rights Act in 1965, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), the onetime “boy mayor” of Cleveland.
Near the end, Kucinich asked whether any of the audit’s findings about missing military equipment were classified.
“You mean in terms of any items that might have been diverted?” asked David Warren, who heads national security and international affairs for the GAO.
Yes, Kucinich responded, has the Central Intelligence Agency ever been involved in trying to figure out where stuff wound up?
“The answer would be yes, but I really couldn’t go any further on classified.”
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“Well, you’ve answered my question by saying yes,” Kucinich said.
The dialogue went on and involved Gene Dodaro, assistant comptroller general of the GAO, and Eleanor Hill, the Pentagon’s inspector general. By the end, you were left with the distinct notion that Pentagon hardware may have wound up in the hands of bad guys and that administrative incompetence makes it hard to account for what’s missing.
I wondered if I was nuts the next day, having by then read the hearing transcript but not having seen a word about any of this. Kucinich said no, that I was the first person to ask about a matter which he found “mind-boggling.”
“The Pentagon tries to blow off this stuff as a paper problem. But weapons systems are missing, and questions about national security and foreign policy are raised.
“Consider the illegal transfer of arms in Iran-contra,” he said. “Then look here: You don’t even need to go through the steps Oliver North went through. All you need is to lose some paperwork. Weapons may be falling into the hands of foreign entities. It may dwarf Iran-contra.”
A series of GAO reports dwarf previous claims of federal ineptitude or stupidity. Forget about $600 toilet seat covers. On Thursday, the Pentagon’s chief financial officer revealed that there are more than $10 billion in “problem disbursements,” a lovely euphemism for payments that can’t be matched against contracts.
But if the Pentagon is the prime offender, it is far from alone. After having combed through several hundred pages of GAO reports and congressional transcripts, I offer a few highlights:
– The Housing and Urban Development Department spends $18 billion a year in annual rent and operating subsidies. But $1 of every $18 is being paid out unjustifiably, given poor accounting.
– Financial management is so poor at federal credit agencies, “the true cost of the federal government’s loan and guarantee programs cannot be reliably determined,” the GAO says.
– The Federal Aviation Administration’s records on $5.5 billion in equipment and property are unreliable. “For example, $198 million in recorded assets no longer existed, $245 million in spare parts were omitted from the financial statements; and $3.3 billion in works-in-process could not be verified.”
– The Forest Service lacks “a reliable system for tracking its reported 378,000 miles of roads, which GAO determined exceeds the mileage of the national highway system.” After starting its own inventory count, the service has only now “identified $1.3 billion of roads in one region alone (the Pacific Northwest) that had not been previously recorded.”
It’s child’s play compared to the Pentagon.
“During my previous testimony, I recounted that as long as 213 years ago, the Congress and the military establishment had been debating the need for adequate audit trails for military expenditures,” Hill said.
“Unfortunately, we are now going on 217 years, and the department still cannot provide you an acceptable accounting of expenditures.”
Cheery.
After Dodaro did his thing, Horn was justifiably quizzical about many matters, including the question of precisely how many accounting systems the Pentagon has.
“When we held this hearing several years ago, I would swear on 20 Bibles that I was told there were 49 different accounting systems. When I mentioned this the other day to the representatives of the General Accounting Office, I was told there were several hundred accounting systems.”
Hill’s formal statement said the Pentagon’s plan was to “reduce accounting systems and cut 82 down to 15.” But Nelson Toye, the Pentagon’s deputy chief financial officer, said there were 100 systems and the aim was to cut down from 100 to 23 by the year 2003.
Please, please, said Horn, could somebody finally give him the correct answer?
“A hundred and twenty-two, I think, right now,” Hill said.
More telling was the general Pentagon thrust in rationalizing the mess it represents. The line goes like this: We’re fighters, not accountants. The nation should be worried about the quality of our fighting force, not whether we can’t keep track of anything.
“Yeah, I know,” Horn said Friday when asked about the Pentagon approach. “It’s a smart-ass answer, frankly.”
He suggested they find a few master sergeants and chief petty officers. “They usually know how to solve those problems.”
As for Kucinich, he was still taken aback by the possibility that military equipment has been lost to forces, good or bad, overseas and that the CIA may well know. “It’s mind-boggling. We’re talking boats, planes, grenades and weapons systems, missing and unaccounted for, in amounts that just dwarf the imagination.”
Sounded like a good story to Kucinich, even if the Washington press corps was uninterested, at least on a huge news day when the Whitewater independent counsel disclosed he would not take a law school job in California.
“I guess the problem was that all this (the hearing) happened as everybody was camped out, waiting for a breathless announcement from Kenneth Starr.”
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