The upcoming fate of Congress on Tuesday with the possibility of a Republican controlled Senate on top of a Republican controlled House should send shivers of fear through anyone concerned with the cost of government. That is, the cost of government as something besides a political football. Republicans have already promised if they take control, they will use the budget process as a weapon to dismantle everything the President and the Democratic Party support, at the behest of their big money, corporate donors.
Here's what Mitch McConnell is on record promising the Koch Brothers.
“In the House and Senate, we own the budget,” he said, explaining that the initial blueprint on taxes and spending does not require the president’s signature. “So what does that mean? That means that we can pass the spending bill. And I assure you that in the spending bill, we will be pushing back against this bureaucracy by doing what’s called placing riders in the bill. No money can be spent to do this or to do that. We’re going to go after them on health care, on financial services, on the Environmental Protection Agency, across the board. All across the federal government, we’re going to go after it.”
It's worth a look at the damage their budget games have already done. Remember
the Sequester? It was supposed to be a political doomsday device, an across the board budget cut so terrible that it would force Congress to come up with a solution to the
debt ceiling crisis - a 'crisis' manufactured by Republicans in their never-ending quest to cut the budget and cut government at all costs. (As long as those costs fall on someone else.)
The problem with the sequester as a doomsday threat is that Republicans were perfectly happy to see the government cut. It reinforced their narrative that government never works right, everything is Obama's fault, spending is out of control, etc. etc.
It might play well in the headlines, but when you get down to ground level, there are real consequences. Follow me past the Orange Omnilepticon for an example of the sequester in action.
Whatever problems people may have with the amount of the federal budget devoted to military spending, there's this to be said for it. The military is responsible for programs and equipment over a time scale that can stretch decades into the future. Huge amounts of money are involved, and how it is spent depends on expectations. When the federal budget becomes a political football, with budget deadlines shifting month to month and estimating funding levels is like throwing darts at a board in a high wind... controlling costs and effective planning gets compromised all up and down the line.
Unlike Congress, the military has to take the long view. (One reason the Pentagon is taking climate change and alternative energy seriously, for example.) Keeping the armed forces ready to go is a full time job in peacetime as well as war. Consider the Air Force - without aircraft ready to fly as needed, when and where needed, well it would not be good. Part of providing that readiness is a thing called Depot Maintenance, like taking your car to the shop for an overhaul - on steroids.
Depot level maintenance includes the repair, fabrication, manufacture, rebuilding, assembly overhaul, modification, refurbishment, rebuilding, test, analysis, repair-process design, in-service engineering, upgrade, painting and disposal of parts, assemblies, subassemblies, software, components, or end items that require shop facilities, tooling, support equipment, and/or personnel of higher technical skills, or processes beyond the organizational level capability. Depot level maintenance can be independent of the location at which the maintenance or repair is performed, the source of funds, or whether the personnel are government or commercial (contractor) employees.
It's expensive, complicated, and vital. Aircraft get used hard and we have
an aging Air Force fleet.
The average Air Force warplane is 23.5 years old compared with 8.5 years in 1967. In 2001, the average plane was 22 years old.
The Air Force says it wants to buy new planes to lower the average age of its fleet to 15 years over the next two decades. That will cost an estimated $400 billion.
The above quote is from 2007; those planes haven't gotten any newer since then.
Age is taking a toll, as per this 8-20-14 report.
The Air Force on Tuesday announced it had grounded 82 of the two-seater versions of the Fighting Falcon made by Lockheed Martin Corp. after finding cracks between the front and rear pilot seats. The service has an overall F-16 fleet of almost 970 aircraft, including 157 F-16D models, which entered production in the 1980s and are mostly used for training.
It's easy to talk about waste in military spending - there are plenty of horrible examples - but it's important to remember there are those working to get the most 'bang for the buck' out there too. One such case is from the October 2014 issue of
Air Force Magazine. Autumn A. Arnett has a report on efforts at the
Warner Robins Air Logistics Complex to move to
Depot Redirection. The article is behind a subscription paywall, but I'm pulling some snippets from it because it sums up how a program to improve quality and save money was impacted by sequester budget games.
The idea behind the redirection is straightforward: transform an idiosyncratic, highly individualized depot procedure into something more formalized, based on results and best practices. It began in 2012.
Up until recently, the complex’s approach to depot maintenance was to treat it as an art form. Restoring an aircraft was a delicate art, and each artist—or worker or crew chief—had an individualized approach to the process. This approach made the process (and the results) very personality-driven and ensured that any movement in personnel could disrupt the entire operation. Something had to give. All too often that was the F-15 repair schedule.
...According to an April white paper on cost-effective readiness released by AFSC [Air Force Sustainment Center], the new way would be based on a shared leadership model emphasizing speed, safety, quality, and cost-effectiveness. Based on the Theory of Constraints—focusing on identifying hindrances to productivity and restructuring the approach to get around them—the AFSC Way systematically identifies waste and constraints to productivity to create a more efficient process.
It takes time to get something like this going - it's not just about changing one or two things. It requires changing the entire culture and the mindsets within it. Results at other depots had shown it pays off in reduced costs and reduced time to get an aircraft in and out - and a higher quality job. But...
...Federal budget maladies trickled down to affect base operations that were already moving slowly. Just as the new approach to depot maintenance was being implemented, sequestration hit. Voluntary early retirements, separations, and furloughs further knocked back productivity.
“Throughput was not where we wanted it, actually, going into the furlough, and then … as we went into the furlough, we realized why [we aren’t] getting the throughput,” why it was disturbed, and that it was “because we didn’t have the process discipline,” [Brig. Gen. Cedric D.] George said.
With roughly 7,500 civilians working on depot operations at Warner Robins, the overtime bans before sequestration made it difficult for teams to work off a backload of aircraft, and the mandatory furloughs of sequestration set the teams even further behind. “We ended up having an additional 18 to 22 aircraft just basically clogged here,” George said. “You could not work any overtime, you could not do anything to just move those machines.”
“If you were an aircraft [maintenance] squadron that was in trouble before the furlough, the furlough killed you,” said 561st Aircraft Maintenance Squadron director Mike Arnold. He said that due to “lots and lots of ‘nobody can come out here and work’ time,” the squadron “gained nearly 25 days on every airplane just during that six-week furlough.” Not only that, he said, 20 percent of the squadron’s workforce was eliminated because of separations and scale-backs.
emphasis added
With the economy still weak, and unemployment high, with Congress cutting off unemployment benefits, did the sequester really save money? Did anyone consider the consequences of playing games with numbers on real people and the work they do?
...George made it plain: When Warner Robins’ 7,500 civilians stop working, the depot shuts down. For George, it is the “devastating effect” on the people he commands that he thinks about most. “Many people made the mistake … of thinking it was just one civilian, but we had civilians married to civilians, so it was families,” George said. Cuts had an “impact ... across entire families, and so it had a huge effect and we are still restoring the trust of our civilians.”
Beyond mandated time off from the aircraft, time that may have otherwise been spent repairing airplanes was redirected. Trying to deal with ensuring the personal welfare of the employees who were the heart and soul of the depot operations was a necessary process, but it took effort away from the job at hand.
“What really hurt us here in that time is [that] the focus came off the mission,” Keene said. “The focus came on to managing through the furlough. We were very concerned about our employees. We were making sure that they were given every opportunity off base to seek financial counseling,” Keene said.
emphasis added
The article by Arnett goes on to report that with the end of the sequester, things finally began to move forward on the redirection to the AFSC plans - but there was a backlog of aircraft to deal with, an increase in the time needed to work on them, and quality issues from the rush to get them back out on the flight lines for training and operations. The overall program is starting to meet its goals, and is seeing the expected improvements in almost every aspect of the process - but the budget games in Congress were like a monkey wrench thrown in the machinery.
I'm not going to argue with anyone who thinks we spend too much money on our military; I'm citing this as a specific example of how just one part of our government suffered crippling effects from conservative ideology and game playing run wild. I expect similar stories can be found in every agency across the government, and in all the states where Republicans hold power. (Let's not forget how the CDC response to Ebola has been hampered by budget cuts.)
If you want a easy to understand metaphor for the Republican approach to governing, here it is. Republicans govern the same way a slum lord manages apartment buildings. The rents are as high as they can get away with, they put as little money into them as possible, they underpay and understaff the workers needed to keep the buildings running, they cut corners wherever possible, they bitch about health department regs and building codes while roaches run rampant and toilets overflow, they never fix anything, and they complain how the government is going to drive them out of business while blaming every problem on the people forced to live in their hell holes. And then they helicopter off to the Hamptons to be with their own kind.
If we end up with the Congress entirely in Republican hands, that's what their vision for America amounts to.
Vote as if your life depends on it - it does.