The Pentagon conducted an internal study to find ways to make its bureaucracy more efficient, but buried the findings that it was wasting $125 billion, The Washington Post reports.
The Pentagon feared the news would cause Congress to slash its budget even more, the Post said, citing interviews and confidential memos.
The goal of the study had been to take any savings from its business operations and use them to fund its combat operations.
The report was issued in January 2015 and gave "a clear path" for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over a five-year period.
It would not have required layoffs of civil servants or cuts to military personnel, but would have used attrition and early retirements to cut employees and would have reduced high-priced outside contractors and improved its use of information technology.
"Based on reams of personnel and cost data, their report revealed for the first time that the Pentagon was spending almost a quarter of its $580 billion budget on overhead and core business operations such as accounting, human resources, logistics and property management," the Post reported.
But rather than implement the findings, Pentagon officials quashed the report and discredited it, fearing it would be used by Congress as proof it wasn't making wise use of the funds it already had.
The Pentagon instead scrubbed the study and put secrecy restrictions on the data, making sure the findings could not be replicated. A summary of the report that had been public was taken off the Pentagon's website.
According to the data, the Defense Department was paying more than 1 million contractors for back-office jobs. The number of active troops is currently 1.3 million — the lowest since just before World War II.
The savings could have paid much of the cost of rebuilding the aging nuclear arsenal or could have covered operating expenses of 50 Army brigades, according to the Post.
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