The Pentagon’s contracting gurus repeatedly made massive, preventable mistakes while managing contracts for a critical software project of their own, violating federal budget law along the way, according to scathing internal reports and other records obtained by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO).
Ironically, the purpose of the mismanaged system is to help manage the rest of the Pentagon’s contracts.
The Pentagon relies on the obscure Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) to negotiate and administer $5 trillion in contracts across the Defense Department as an average of $455 million in taxpayer dollars are paid out each day to contractors. How well that agency does its job directly affects both how wisely taxpayer dollars are spent and whether our troops get what they need when they need it. Yet the cascading series of major, systemic failures within the agency, which has nearly 12,000 employees and an annual budget of roughly $1.5 billion, led an independent investigator from the Army to go so far as to recommend that it be prohibited from awarding its own contracts in the future.
Documents obtained by POGO — including a September 2017 preliminary investigative report, an April 2018 internal memo, and a draft of the final report from this summer — show that over the course of several years, the agency mismanaged contracts for the software project. The agency spent far more than it was authorized to spend, violated numerous policies and regulations, and received insufficient oversight from the Pentagon. When these documents are viewed alongside Defense Department watchdog findings from recent years, there appears to be an agency-wide pattern of failing to adequately support the Pentagon’s procurement efforts and sufficiently protect the taxpayer — the agency’s very mission.
Keep reading this article at: http://www.pogo.org/our-work/articles/2018/pentagons-contracting-gurus-mismanaged-their-own-contracts.html
In the second volume of its report to Congress, the Section 809 Panel said the Pentagon’s current decision making and incentive structures are far too focused on individual weapons programs, not on broader portfolios of capabilities.
Defense Undersecretary and Comptroller David Norquist—under questioning by Senate Budget Committee members seeking efficiencies and defense budget reforms—said the price of $367 million in contract audit costs just in fiscal 2018 is about 1/30th of 1 percent of the Pentagon’s budget. That is “less than what Fortune 100 companies such as General Electric, Proctor & Gamble and International Business Machines Corp. pay their auditors,” he said.
On Jan. 31, 2018, 
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