
Pentagon Reportedly Buried Study Exposing $125B in Waste - eth0up
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2016/12/06/pentagon-reportedly-buried-study-exposing-125-billion-in-waste.html
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wahern

      Among its other findings, the report showed that the Defense
      Department was paying just over 1 million contractors,
      civilian employees and uniformed personnel to fill back
      office jobs. That number nearly matches the amount of
      active-duty troops -- 1.3 million, the lowest since 1940.
    

Relying on contract workers (effectively, out-sourcing) is how Congress and
the President have been able to grow discretionary spending for 50 years while
being able to claim that they aren't growing the size of the federal
government. The number of government employees literally hasn't changed since
the 1960s.

Here's the data:

    
    
      https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-documentation/federal-employment-reports/historical-tables/total-government-employment-since-1962/
    

The game of hiding the size of government by out-sourcing has been going on
for decades. That's nothing new, and it's as close to a long-term government
conspiracy as you could possibly get at that scale. (Not that it is a
"conspiracy". It's just obviously intentional, systematic, and incredibly
long-lived; and one of its functions is to deceive, or at least provide
plausible deniability during election cycles.)

In fact, it's such an old game it makes me question whether any report was
actually wrongly suppressed. Congressional politicians, not the military, are
the ones mandating the out-sourcing. And the Congressional budget committees
would be well aware of how much money was being spent on contract work.

