House GOP pressures Pentagon on lack of financial accountability
By Bryant Harris
Thursday, Jul 13
WASHINGTON ― House Republicans convened a hearing on Thursday to spotlight the Defense Department’s repeated failures to pass an audit, with conservatives joining liberal Democrats in a scathing rebuke of the Pentagon’s financial management.
The hearing highlighted the emerging Republican schism between the party’s fiscal hawks and defense hawks on top of ongoing tension within the party over Ukraine aid.
“The U.S. spends more on defense than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan and Ukraine combined,” said Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wisc., who convened the hearing as chairman of the House Oversight Committee’s national security panel. “The American people work diligently to earn every dollar, but it seems the [Defense Department] has become a master of squandering those funds without batting an eye.”
The Pentagon has never passed an audit, failing five in a row. Republicans on the panel joined Democrats in grilling John Tenaglia, the Defense Department’s principal director for pricing and contracting, on some of the underlying reasons for this failure. He attributed the repeated audit failures in part to the slow pace of retiring legacy systems.
https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2023/07/13/house-gop-pressures-pentagon-on-lack-of-financial-accountability/
