Trump announces $1 Trillion Defense Budget

What the Doge-ing frick is that??

Congress should add a rider to any defense spending bill that $0 can ever go to SpaceX or Tesla. Elon Apartheid has already had too many hand-outs.

 

We could cut our military budget in half, then cut it in half again; bring home our hundreds of thousands of troops stationed all over the world … and no ten nations in the world combined could invade and subjugate us.

 

If conservatives have their way, the only thing Americans will be paying taxes to their government for for is for the state to kill or imprison people

 

Defense is first place Doge should have looked if they actually wanted to find fraud and waste.

 

Same thing at this point. Would be nice to have an American President support an American endeavor, as opposed to looking out for Russian interests, yet, we don't have one of those just now. So, is it really any different if we give more money to Putin or to Elon Apartheid? Not really.

 

Or, the mirror if they were truly looking for frauds.

 

If goods can't cross borders, soldiers will.

I'll give him credit for being consistent here.

Sucks for humanity, but he's on point.

 

They are. Absolutely. Every armed service is undergoing an audit. So far, only the Marine Corps has passed. Also there has been a tremendous reduction in the Defense civil service. For example, I’m trying to move back to Tampa at the end of my command and start transitioning to military retirement. I had applied to every government job in the area that required a clearance, military background, etc. Of the roughly 10 or so for which I had received referrals (which just means you have passed the first line of screening), eight have already been cancelled. Not saying that to whine, just to point out that the fat-trimming is going on everywhere, including in Defense.

 

Thanks for sharing. My hope would be that they find savings through identifying efficiencies and not just taking a hatchet to all open positions like they have in other departments. It could be that some of the positions were found to be redundant, but my best guess is that what you're describing is the same approach to indiscriminately cut positions and then learn if what they cut was critical and needs to be added back.

 

Yep, we have a hiring freeze

 

And the reward for all the belt-tightening ... more money (for defense contractors probably)

 

They'll just blame the dems for the ballooning deficit. Rinse and repeat.

 

In the scheme of things, a $100 billion dollar swing either way for the defense department is a drop in the bucket to the 2 trillion dollar deficits. Maybe it is a bit pricy but it isn’t the root cause of the problem.

 

Super clown.

I wonder how the return on $30 billion in cancelled foreign aid would further US goals as compared to spending all of that on defense.

 

Have you tried SAIC.com? We have friends that work for them in the Tampa area.

 

Gosh, I hope so. I have a metric s**t ton of applications in with them, too. I don’t find something in a couple of months, I’ll be talking to you all regularly about the exciting products of Amway or giving handies under railroad bridges.

In earnest, though, converting civil servants to contractors is a mixed bag of benefits and drawbacks. On the whole, contractors cost less per person even though they generally bring home more money for the exact same work. That all comes down to benefits, and the tradeoff for the worker is the greater job security in a government job. For the organization, contractors are also much easier to get rid of for poor performance, misconduct, or because the contract is no longer necessary. One example that comes to mind when I was in Kosovo a few years ago was a contractor who got caught by security bringing meth onto the base. That dude was fired and booted out of country within two days. If the same guy under the exact same circumstances had been a GS employee, then it probably would have taken months during which he would have been suspended with pay while the organization would not be allowed to hire against his loss.

Another feature of contracting is the ability to expand or contract capabilities quickly, especially between two geographic sites. Let’s say the decision is to shift focus from the Middle East to the Indo-Pacific, and you now have way more civil servants at CENTCOM in Tampa than you need and not enough in Japan. Well, you can’t just make GS employees move, they have no motivation to move for a parallel position, and you have to wait until they decide to quit before you can move their vacancy to another location. That can take years, and you need the capability three months from now. A contractor can make that happen.

The other side of the coin is that you get what you pay for with contracting. You want top-notch people, you have to pay top-notch prices. When I was in Afghanistan in 2014, to reduce the number of uniformed personnel needed, many of the analyst, planner, advisor, etc. positions were filled with retired colonels and lieutenant colonels. They were good at their jobs and made pretty decent money (ask yourself how much pay it would have taken to lure you to Afghanistan for a year). Around that time there began a great hue and cry that these same contractors were “mercenaries” and “profiteers,” so the Obama Administration put its foot down and said they would work for less or go home. Most of them shrugged and went home. In my role, I had to tell about 15 people that their contract was being ended early and they would be sent home in two weeks unless they found another contract. Flash forward two years, and I was back in Afghanistan on the successor mission, and many of the contract positions simply remained unfilled. Some positions that had been previously held by retired War College graduates were now filled by former junior enlisted personnel, some of whom had been kicked out of the military for offenses not serious enough to affect their clearances. I remember my boss asking me to solicit the contractors I had known back in 2014 to see if there was any interest. Every single one of them politely (sometimes with amusement) declined to come back for the pay that was on offer.

 

Yes, but only what SAIC has posted publicly, and none of the positions they’ve posted fall into any of my areas of expertise. I actually just checked this morning. If you want to send me a PM, I would be glad to network with your friends for a referral. It’s not what you know. It’s who you know, right?