If anyone thought Chuck Hagel wants to be a caretaker defense secretary, he worked hard to disabuse them of the idea in an April 3 speech to a roomful of generals and other senior officers at Washington’s National Defense University, an elite school chartered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Read more» 
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The cold reality, as spelled out in a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, is that the Pentagon’s use of competitively-bid contracts has been declining steadily for the past five years and last year stood at just 57 percent of its total contract spending. In fiscal year 2008, it was 62.6 percent. Read more»
An ad from a fiscally conservative group makes a true but misleading claim that the sequester only amounts to “a 3 percent cut in federal spending.” A majority of federal spending is exempt from the sequester cuts, so the parts that are not will be cut much more deeply than …
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New funds provided for the troubled F35 just before the sequester. Read more»
President Obama and Congress now have just over seven weeks to reach an agreement on the federal budget that would avert a round of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts in defense and social programs that members of both parties have depicted as draconian. Read more»
Paul Ryan insisted in the Oct. 11 debate that Mitt Romney will not increase defense spending. Joe Biden interrupted Ryan twice to say Romney will increase it by $2 trillion. Who’s right? The answer depends on another question: compared with what? Read more» 7
Military personnel costs have nearly doubled since fiscal year 2001. If these costs are allowed to continue rising at their current rate, they will eat through the entire defense budget by FY 2039. Read more»
The House Republican budget released Tuesday purports to boost economic growth by cutting taxes and government spending. Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric. Read more»
The real costs of some defense programs to the federal budget are unlikely to be disclosed in budget documents or dozens of detailed weapons program reports due on Capitol Hill in March, according to a recent federal audit report. Read more»
Republican senators proposed a plan that would spare the U.S. military from nearly $500 billion in automatic spending cuts next January by reducing the federal workforce instead. Read more»
The next election will turn on what voters believe about five issues. Democrats need a clear message in order to win. Democrats don’t need to fight every crazy lie that will be told. Truth is they can’t. Telling a lie is much easier than debunking one. To win, Democrats need to do just one thing – keep voters focused on how Republicans don’t represent people anymore. Read more»
