An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.
The history, the first official account of its kind, is circulating in draft form here and in Washington among a tight circle of technical reviewers, policy experts and senior officials. It also concludes that when the reconstruction began to lag ”” particularly in the critical area of rebuilding the Iraqi police and army ”” the Pentagon simply put out inflated measures of progress to cover up the failures.
In one passage, for example, former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is quoted as saying that in the months after the 2003 invasion, the Defense Department “kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces ”” the number would jump 20,000 a week! ”˜We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.’ ”
It’ll sure be interesting to see how right-wingers dismiss this report and smear its authors. Sometimes denial requires ingenuity.
I won’t dismiss the report, but it is just more of the same. Democrats can waste money at least as fast and furious as Republicans, if not faster. They just claim to do it for more noble motives and causes. The farther you get the taxpayers’ money away from the taxpayers before redistributing it, the easier it is to throw it away on pork, cronyism, fraud, and just plain waste.
As a take on what John Glenn said while he waited to be blasted into space (this rocket was built by the lowest bidder), what do you expect when you hand billions of dollars over to be doled out by people who can only get a civil service job earning far below what they could earn if they could get a private sector job.
Before I hear the howls of protest, I freely admit that there are quite a few civil servants and military personnel who are very good at their jobs and have the public interest foremost in their minds. I also, however, have worked on enough government contracts to be utterly disgusted at how taxpayer money is routinely and cavalierly wasted by middle and upper-middle level bureaucrats, protected by public employee unions and civil service procedures when they should be thrown out on the streets and forced to get a real job in the private sector.
Daniel [#2]: This is a story not of underproductive career employees but of blindness and high-level blunders by political appointees.
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BTW, where are all the “middle and upper-middle level bureaucrats, protected by public employee unions” you refer to? Unionization is not the norm at the upper and middle levels of the civilian federal workforce.
Irenaeus is quite correct. I would also point out that federal workers that are in unions do not have the right to strike and most do not have binding arbitration. The only “protection” available is to file ULPs and grievances if the contract is violated by their employer. These have about a 50:50 chance of success, regardless of merit because there seems to be an unwritten code saying, “well, they won the last one so we should probably let the other side win this one.” That isn’t always true, but it seems to be that way to most on the inside. BTW, my particular specialty required years of training (in sophisticated electronics and automation systems) after having already had years of training from prior service in the DoD and college. The folks that I work with are some of the most professional and dedicated people you could ask for. They genuinely care about the safety of the general public and regularly work all sorts of weird hours in all sorts of nasty weather, including weekends and holidays…and most Americans don’t even know what we do for them. Last December, I was called into to work at 4 AM in the middle of an ice storm to climb a tall metal structure coated in half an inch of ice and restore a system critical to the safety of the general public. I injured my left arm in that process and it still has not fully recovered. The doctor said it would take 12 – 18 months.
The problem, from my perspective, is not with the first level managers or even their bosses or their bosses boss. It is with the Senior Executives and political appointees who have ideological agendas rather than fulfilling the stated mission of the particular agency or department and those agendas supercede the good of the country or the safety of the public. It is very frustrating to try to save taxpayer money day in and day out, only to see it squandered by those who are clueless about the mission or how things actually work. There is a lot of waste in the government, but it is generally at the highest levels, not the middle or lower end…at least in my experience.
I hope this was a helpful insight for all concerned. I don’t mean to come across as defensive. I just want you all to know that your public servants, for the most part, really are trying to serve you as best they can, even in a broken system. Are there slackers? Whiners? Of course there are. But, they are the exception, not the rule in my experience.
God bless. Merry Christmas.
In response to #1….
I would consider myself to be pretty much a “right winger” and I welcome reports like this. We need to identify things that failed and why so that we can improve. Hiding or spinning things is not helpful and it isn’t good for the country. Maybe I’m alone in thinking this way, maybe not. I really hope that we Republicans do not try to white wash our failings. We need to face up to them to improve. I know that I have been so disappointed with the Republican Party that I was planning to change my affiliation to Independent. I still might.
I’ll be real specific here. I have personal knowledge of lots of money wasted by Foreign Service Officers diddling around with government contracts. They were among the most arrogant and incompetent government officials with whom I have ever worked. I also have personal knowledge of contracts “terminated for the convenience of the government” due to mishandling by government bureaucrats, only to be rebid several months later after the first terminated contract spent millions of dollars and produced no workable product. Another example is today’s news report that the Commonwealth of Virginia’s outsourcing of almost all its IT systems will not meet the deadlines stated in the contract and thus will not “save” the money it was supposed to save. Need more examples? They are all over the place.
I do concede that there are many hard working, dedicated public servants, but there are enough arrogant incompetents and slackers to destroy their efforts.
I again state that the closer you keep the money spent to where it is taxed, the better oversight you will have and the less waste there will be, ceteris paribus. Of course the D.C. Public Schools are the exception that prove this rule, but I don’t know how much of their budget comes from U.S. taxpayers. The tragedy of all this is that it is not hard to identify waste, inefficiency, incompetence and fraud. It’s just that the government bureaucracy mind-set makes it almost impossible to change the status quo. Anybody remember Ronald Reagan’s Grace Commission? It came up with lots of ways to cut pork, but you know the story – One congressman’s pork is another’s program vital to the economic security of our nation and uplifting of the middle class, while penalizing the evil rich.
[i] The folks that I work with are some of the most professional and dedicated people you could ask for. They genuinely care about the safety of the general public and regularly work all sorts of weird hours in all sorts of nasty weather, including weekends and holidays…and most Americans don’t even know what we do for them [/i] —Sick+Tired [#4]
I believe you. I’ve seen much that’s consistent with what you describe here.
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[i] It is not hard to identify waste, inefficiency, incompetence and fraud. It’s just that the government bureaucracy mind-set makes it almost impossible to change the status quo. … One congressman’s pork is another’s program vital to the economic security of our nation [/i] —Daniel [#6]
Pork-barrel and other dubious government spending is primarily a political problem, not a product of recalcitrant bureaucracy. Few bureaucracies can keep a costly program going unless the program has a significant political constituency.
[i] Few bureaucracies can keep a costly program going unless the program has a significant political constituency [/i]
Consider the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. If it were up to career employees at the Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget (those “bureaucrats” you fulminate about), Fannie and Freddie would have been privatized 10 or 20 years ago. But neither those employees nor their bosses could beat the National Association of Homebuilders, the National Association of Realtors, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, the Mortgage Bankers Association, the Independent Community Bankers of America, the mayors, and the rest of Fannie and Freddie’s political network.
Government does not operate according to profit-and-loss, and hence its planners are unable to allocate resources according to their best uses.
I have some sympathy for the Pentagon not wanting to get bogged down in rebuilding efforts. It is sheer insanity to spend billions bombing a country and then billions to rebuild a country. And before everyone leaps up to scream, “The Marshall Plan!,” remember that this vast subsidy and continuing US military presence enabled Europe to erect vast, corrupt welfare states that are headed toward default and militantly hostile to classical liberal values.