Pentagon Spent $5 Billion on Weapons on the Eve of the Shutdown
October 3rd, 2013Via: Foreign Policy:
The Pentagon pumped billions of dollars into contractors’ bank accounts on the eve of the U.S. government’s shutdown that saw 400,000 Defense Department employees furloughed.
All told, the Pentagon awarded 94 contracts yesterday evening on its annual end-of-the-fiscal-year spending spree, spending more than five billion dollars on everything from robot submarines to Finnish hand grenades and a radar base mounted on an offshore oil platform. To put things in perspective, the Pentagon gave out only 14 contracts on September 3, the first workday of the month.
Here are some of the more interesting purchases from Monday’s dollar-dump…
Not to mention – they quickly passed a bill exempting military staff from the furlough. There are 100,000s or millions of military staff (not including contractors or equipment suppliers). http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/government-shutdown-senate-sends-obama-military-pay-bill-97582.html If you look at the # of staff laid off in other departments of government like interior, it is in the 1000s. (scroll down http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/30/absolutely-everything-you-need-to-know-about-how-the-government-shutdown-will-work/?hpid=z1 ) Most federal government is the military, social security, and medicare, while most tangible aspects of government are at the state and city level.