By ANNA MEIER
Uproar at the Pentagon. Confusion in Congress. Defense proponents hitting the road to rant about the “devastation” of national security. With all the hullabaloo surrounding impending cuts to the defense budget, you’d think the world was coming to an end. On Monday, Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte began their “Preserving America’s Strength” tour, which will take them through four states and provide plenty of opportunities to warn of the dangers of sequestration. But, as the Project On Government Oversight wrote earlier this week, the thing most likely to suffer from sequestration is the amount of money doled out to Pentagon contractors.
As POGO’s Director of Public Policy Angela Canterbury pointed out in an interview with Public News Service on Wednesday, the U.S. uses half of its discretionary spending every year for defense, much of which ends up in contractors’ pockets. These are the same contractors who claim they’ll need to eliminate one million jobs if cuts go through, despite frequent cost overruns and sky-high executive salaries.
“We really need to get leaner and meaner, and to spend smarter,” Canterbury said. “There’s a lot of inefficiencies. There’s a lot of fat to cut.”
To hear more from Canterbury, listen to the full story from Public News Service above.
Anna Meier is a communications associate at the Project On Government Oversight.
these tactics to preserve district jobs and pouring money into special interest "projects" have been going on for as long as i remember and i am 73...as long as the american people chose to remain politically ignorant and the media chose to print very little reality based balanced information it will continue...
Posted by: canticle | Aug 23, 2012 at 05:32 PM