CSIS: Slow-moving Defense missed stimulus cash

[unhappycamper]

CSIS: Slow-moving Defense missed stimulus cash
By Antonie Boessenkool - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Feb 11, 2009 18:59:23 EST

The Defense Department has missed the opportunity to benefit from spending in the stimulus bill now making its way through Congress because it could not make fast decisions, David Berteau, director of the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said during a CSIS panel discussion Tuesday on the stimulus bill.

Defense and national security spending is “one of the smallest aspects” of either the Senate or House of Representatives versions of the bill, Berteau said.

The hundreds of acquisition contracts the DoD has are designed to spend dollars over years, but that spending could have been accelerated with the stimulus bill, Berteau said.

“The typical management tool in DoD is, in fact, to stretch out programs, which only drives up costs and delays delivery of needed items,” Berteau said. “But in this case, we really should’ve been doing the opposite. The stimulus effect would’ve been as powerful as anything else in this bill, with very high multiplier effects. And yet virtually no one — in the Pentagon, in the White House or the Congress — took a look at this.”

One reason DoD wasn’t able to take better advantage of stimulus spending, Berteau said, was that the “Bush administration largely abandoned its disciplined long-range planning and programming process. The flood of supplemental funding … the idiotic collapsing of the program review in the budget cycle combined to make it very hard for anybody in the Office of the Secretary of Defense or in the White House to make any quick decisions on options regarding stimulus or even to know what those options were.”


Reest of article at: http://armytimes.com/news/2009/02/military_csis_stimulus_021109w/%2e



uhc comment: I wouldn't feel too bad; the military already has a trillion dollar 2009 budget.