In the “accountability” White House where the “grown-ups are in charge”, what do you get when your company blows $152,000 of taxpayer money on video rentals and $1,500,000 on tailoring, plans so poorly that they ditch $85,000 trucks for lack of spare parts and leave flat-bed supply trucks open for looting, overcharges soldiers $1,000,000 per month for laundry and spends 100 times more housing its employees than we spend housing our soldiers, hides $212,000,000 in overcharges from the UN, purchases cases of soda pop for $45 apiece, bribes Nigeria to get contracts for natural gas, charges the government $2.64/gallon of gas (in the middle of friggin’ Iraq!) when others can sell for half that, bills the government $1,800,000,000 for work that was never undertaken or completed, just loses $18,600,000 worth of property, and charges $86 for a $14 piece of plywood, all on government-awarded no-bid contracts (a.k.a. no competition from other companies who could do it cheaper) that are completely open-ended, poorly managed, and rife with fraud and abuse?
What do you get? That depends on whether or not your former CEO is the Vice President of the United States of America…
(Washington Post) The Army has ordered nearly $5 billion in work from Halliburton Co. to provide logistics support to U.S. troops in Iraq over the next year, $1 billion above what the Army paid for similar services the previous year.
The increased bill parallels ballooning overall costs in Iraq. President Bush said in March 2003 that combat in Iraq would cost about $60 billion. But the cost for military operations alone had hit $135.3 billion as of March 2005, according to the Office of Management and Budget. The price tag would be far higher if the costs to fund the Coalition Provisional Authority, reconstruction projects and intelligence operations were included.
The Pentagon last week confirmed a report by congressional Democrats saying that the Defense Contract Audit Agency has questioned more than $1 billion of Halliburton’s bills for work in Iraq under LOGCAP and an energy contract called Restore Iraqi Oil. Among the costs that Pentagon auditors questioned were $152,000 for movie rentals, $1.5 million for tailoring and two multimillion-dollar transportation bills that appeared to overlap.
Remember, this is above and beyond the $72,000,000 in bonuses they got for doing such great work. Meanwhile, the VA is $1,000,000,000 short and new recruits have to buy their own body armor.
