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In December 2016, just a few weeks before moving into the White House, President-elect Donald Trump tweeted that once he was in office, “billions of dollars can and will be saved on military (and other) purchases" . . .. . . While Trump’s critics were questioning whether he was actually capable of achieving big savings in the military budget, over at the Pentagon the man whose job it was to negotiate those weapons deals welcomed the president’s attention to the issue . . . [Pentagon pricing director Shay] Assad had already built a reputation as the Department of Defense’s toughest contract negotiator, having spent more than a decade battling defense companies on behalf of taxpayers, trying to get the prices down on skyrocketing weapons costs. Over the course of his career, he has been decorated with a panoply of awards from the Pentagon for his work, and praised for saving the government billions of dollars . . .. . . Trump’s interest in negotiating better prices for the government made it seem like Assad’s work would get White House attention.Yet within two years of Trump’s entrance into the White House, Assad would find himself removed from his job, and his efforts to save money and recover hundreds of millions of dollars in potentially fraudulent spending tabled.His treatment, he contends, was the direct result of his attempts to save the Pentagon money and identify potential contract fraud, which brought him into conflict with the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer . . . Assad has his own description of what’s taking place inside the Defense Department. “It’s kind of like the fox is in the chicken coop,†he said.
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Topic: Trump tweeted ‘billions . . . ’ would be saved on military contracts. Then the Pentagon fired the of (Read 125 times)
