McCaskill Quizzes Hagel on Wasteful Spending at Pentagon During Nomination Hearing

After a recent face-to-face discussion with Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel, U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill questioned him during a Senate Armed Services confirmation hearing on a variety of issues, including deterring Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and efforts to tamp down wasteful spending at the Pentagon—a longstanding priority for McCaskill.


“It is clear that in Iraq there was a failure in the infrastructure investments we made—and I’m convinced we have made the same mistakes in Afghanistan,” said McCaskill.

McCaskill requested that Hagel, if confirmed, commit to providing a report evaluating the level of waste in infrastructure spending in Afghanistan, and whether that spending had enhanced U.S. security.

“And as you know--our Special Inspector Generals have come up with billions and billions and billions of dollars that are unaccounted for—corruption, fraud, waste, abuse. It really is quite astounding,” said Hagel, who agreed to provide such a report. “We need to learn from this.”

Also discussed was the ability to audit the Pentagon, an effort that has encountered significant delays over the past decade. A vote by the Armed Services Committee is expected soon, and if successful, Hagel’s nomination will move to the full Senate for a final vote.

McCaskill has served on the Armed Services Committee since joining the Senate in 2007. She has been a leader on identifying waste within the Pentagon, particularly within the area of federal contracting. Last year, after identifying up to $60 billion in contracting waste in Iraq and Afghanistan, she passed an historic reform bill overhauling how federal contracts are awarded and monitored during military contingencies.

In Benghazi Hearing, McCaskill Sets Sights on use of Private Contracts in Embassy Security

In a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing today investigating security failures in the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill raised significant concerns about the use of private contractors in volatile regions.


“Can you imagine the money we’re wasting on private contractors who are not getting the job done?” asked McCaskill, a senior member of the Armed Services Committee, and a former Missouri State Auditor. “It’s time for us to do a gut check on whether we should be relying on inept contractors instead of the best-trained military in the world. Why can’t we use the best-trained military in the world to protect our most valued assets in our most dangerous places?”

Leon Panetta, in what will be his last Congressional testimony as Secretary of Defense, commended McCaskill’s longstanding efforts to crack down on contracting waste, and noted the Pentagon’s reliance on private contracts, saying “Let me commend you for the work you’ve done on these types of contracts…Right now we depend on contracting a great deal.”

Panetta and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey were witnesses for today’s hearing.


McCaskill, who is also Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight, has been a Senate leader on investigating embassy security standards and the use of private contractors:

* In 2009, McCaskill’s Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight held a hearing on security contracts at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, which revealed that the State Department had found that deficiencies by the contractor, ArmorGroup, had “endanger[ed] performance of the contract to such a degree that the security of the US Embassy in Kabul is in jeopardy.”

* In 2010, in response to the hearing, McCaskill introduced legislation to require that the Secretaries of State and Defense establish and implement an appropriate ratio of U.S. government security personnel to private security contractors at U.S. missions where the United States is engaged in combat operations.

* New requirements included in the fiscal 2013 National Defense Authorization Act as part of McCaskill’s Comprehensive Wartime Contracting Reform legislation now require the State Department, Defense Department, and USAID to conduct risk analyses for the use of private security contractors in contingencies and to develop risk mitigation plans to eliminate such risks where identified.

Aimed at Protecting Taxpayer Dollars, McCaskill and Coburn Take Next Step Toward Pentagon Audit

U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill, a former Missouri State Auditor, is helping lead an effort with Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) to audit the Pentagon’s books and cut down on waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars within the Department of Defense.

“It’s not just a matter of accountability—it’s a matter of national security that the Pentagon be able to account for the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars it receives every year,” said McCaskill, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “How can we protect taxpayer dollars from waste and abuse, or set the priorities for protecting our freedoms, if the Defense Department can’t even tell us how these vast sums of money are being spent? This legislation is bipartisan, it’s common sense, and it’ll take some big steps toward stronger accountability over federal spending.”

McCaskill has joined a bipartisan group of Senators led by Coburn on legislation designed to ensure that the Pentagon submit to a comprehensive financial audit.

“By failing to pass an audit, the Pentagon has undermined our national security,” Coburn said. “This bill ends the culture of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ budgeting within the Pentagon that says, ‘don’t ask us how we’re spending money because we can’t tell you.’ When the Pentagon can’t tell Congress, or itself, how it is spending money good programs face cuts along with wasteful programs, which is the situation in which we find ourselves today under sequestration.  In short, this bill helps the Pentagon help itself.  Passing an audit is a critical step that will protect vital priorities and help the Pentagon comply with current law and our Constitution.”

Tough provisions included in the bipartisan bill include:

·         The creation of a Chief Management Officer position, with the power to oversee and fix the Pentagon’s finances and IT problems

·         After years of failed attempts to standardize payroll software, transferring the Defense Finance and Accounting Service to Treasury, which oversees payments for the rest of the federal government

·         Preventing any new major weapon system past the research and development phase until a full accounting of Pentagon finances takes place

In April, McCaskill chaired a Senate hearing to check the Pentagon's progress on a full audit, telling military leaders, “Sound financial systems and good data are critical to our efforts to provide efficient management, save money, and ensure accountability at the Department of Defense. We simply have to do better.”

In March, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that current Pentagon efforts to achieve auditability were years behind schedule and had cost taxpayers over $8 billion.

As Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight, McCaskill has consistently fought to crack down on wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars, recently introducing bipartisan legislation to overhaul wartime contingency contracting, after it was revealed that $60 billion dollars had been wasted in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Senators Introduce Legislation to Assist Victims of Sexual Trauma in Military

Today, U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill, along with her colleagues Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), introduced bipartisan legislation to assist victims of sexual trauma in the military. The Support for Survivors Act would assist servicemembers who were victims of sexual trauma during their military service by requiring the Department of Defense to ensure life-long storage of all documents connected with reports of sexual assaults and sexual harassment across the military branches. The legislation would also prevent the military from destroying any records relating to sexual assault.

“The men and women in our military put their lives on the line for our country and they deserve to know that the military is looking out for them in their time of need. Too often victims of sexual assault don’t report the crime because they are afraid of retribution or that nothing will be done. We must do better. This legislation will provide victims with the tools they need to seek justice and guarantee them the confidentiality they deserve throughout the process,” McCaskill said.

Earlier this year, following a series of stories in the St. Louis Post Dispatch about the incidence of sexual assault at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, McCaskill sent a letter to Major General David Quantock, the Commanding General at Fort Leonard Wood, and subsequently met privately with him in her Washington office. Quantock has assured McCaskill that the base is taking the allegations seriously and has brought in a special prosecutor to handle sexual assault cases, among other changes. McCaskill also continued to follow this issue by questioning top officials from the Pentagon on what the military is doing broadly to address the issue of sexual assault at a hearing of the Armed Services Committee.

Currently, there is no coordinated policy across the service branches to ensure the preservation of medical and other reports connected with sexual trauma. Each service branch has been left to develop its own policy, resulting in inconsistent recordkeeping and records often being destroyed. Long-term preservation of records currently helps a victim pursue legal action and records can also be used as evidence in a later crime involving the same perpetrator.

In recent years, there has been an increase in reports of sexual assaults in the military. According to the Department of Defense, there were 3,158 official reports of sexual assaults in the military in 2010. Because most incidents are not reported to a military authority, the Pentagon estimates this number represents only 13 to 14 percent of total assaults – making the total actual number of sexual assaults in the military potentially as high as 20,000 in 2010.

Research has shown that sexual trauma not only hurts the victims, but can also take a toll on their fellow servicemembers by severely undermining military cohesion, morale, and overall force effectiveness.

The Support for Survivors Act would:

· Require the Department of Defense to ensure the preservation of documents connected with reports of sexual assault and sexual harassment in the military.

· Ensure full privacy and identity protection for both the victim and the perpetrator, if known.

· Ensure life-long access by the servicemember to his or her personal documents.

· Grant the VA access to documents only at the request of a servicemember, for the purpose of assisting with the processing of a disability compensation claim.

· Allow the Department of Defense to review the data (but not the names of the individuals mentioned in the reports) to improve research and reporting.

McCaskill: We Need to Find Places to Cut at the Pentagon

In her first hearing as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness and Management Support, U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill pledged to focus her tenure at the helm of the subcommittee on finding efficiencies and rooting out duplicative programs that can be cut at the Pentagon. Today’s hearing was a review of military construction, base closures and environmental programs made as part of the FY2012 Department of Defense budget request. Administration officials from the Army, Air Force, Navy and Office of the Secretary of Defense answered questions about finding efficiencies in military construction.

“As far as I am concerned, however, every hearing that we hold will be an efficiencies hearing. Earlier this week, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the DOD budget has grown by 75 percent over the last decade – and that is the base budget, not including the cost of overseas contingency operations. I do not believe there is anything the Department is doing that we cannot do better, and I do not believe that there is any part of the budget that can be off limits as we look for savings,” McCaskill said in her opening statement.

Specifically, she asked questions on construction costs associated with a scheduled move of Marines and Naval facilities from the base in Okinawa to Guam, and whether a re-evaluation would take place in light of the recent earthquake in Japan. She also questioned whether permanent buildings were labeled temporary to avoid the oversight processes associated with permanent military construction projects and focused on finding efficiencies in military construction by drawing on examples at bases in Germany and San Diego.

“I just want to let the word go out that we’re going to look very carefully at all of this, because we want our men and women to have the best, particularly in terms of their safety and their ability to achieve their mission and a quality of life for them and their families, but we’ve got to be really careful about the expenditures and justifying them,” McCaskill said.

McCaskill also asked the witnesses to commit to returning money to the Treasury when projects come in under budget rather than repurposing the money for something else:

“The question is should bid savings be allowed to be reprogrammed or should bid savings be allowed to go back to the taxpayers to reduce the overall price tag since the savings belong to the taxpayers,” she said.

McCaskill pledged to focus her chairmanship on finding savings and eliminating wasteful spending in the Pentagon’s budget without interfering with military readiness. McCaskill, who has fought for an end to the earmark process since arriving in the Senate in 2007, also promised to not allow any earmark requests in legislation that comes before the Subcommittee.

Your tax dollars at work.

Your tax dollars at work -- it seems that James Montgomery, a con man, bilked the government out of $20 million of your money by falsely claiming that his software could catch terrorists. Turns out that it was a hoax. Now, the Obama Administration is using the State Secrets Privilege to cover it all up. Which brings up the question -- what else do they have to hide?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/us/politics/20data.html?hp

McCaskill Questions DOD Failure to Cover Treatments for Injured Soldiers

U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight, is questioning the Department of Defense over about their continued failure to cover certain treatments for service members recovering from traumatic brain injuries and has opened an investigation into contracts that may have contributed to the Pentagon’s decision to deny coverage.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, McCaskill requested information about contracts awarded by TRICARE, the Defense Department’s medical insurance program for service members, to ECRI Institute, a health research organization, to study the effectiveness of cognitive rehabilitation therapy. A 2009 ECRI Institute study commissioned by TRICARE found insufficient evidence that this therapy was effective, but recent media reports by Pro Publica and National Public Radio have called into question the validity of the study. The reports have characterized the study as ‘deeply flawed’ and noted that it is in conflict with other similar studies on the effectiveness of cognitive rehabilitation therapy.

“If true, these reports raise significant questions regarding the Department’s award and management of the contract with ECRI Institute, and may have profound implications for hundreds of thousands of injured service members and their families,” McCaskill wrote. “We owe it to our brave service members to find the truth.”

Pro Publica and NPR reported that experts also questioned the methodology of the ECRI study, including the decision to exclude important research. Additionally, the same reports suggested the DOD may have awarded the $21,000 contract to ECRI Institute with the expectation they would reach the same conclusion as a 2007 ECRI review, which also concluded that there was limited effectiveness of this therapy.