According to Knight Ridder (Mercury News - registration required) the Pentagon is still pandering to private businesses profiteering from your tax dollars.
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon paid $20 apiece for plastic ice cube trays that once cost it 85 cents. It paid a supplier more than $81 apiece for coffee makers that it bought for years for just $29 from the manufacturer.
That is because instead of getting competitive bids or buying directly from manufacturers as it used to, the Pentagon is using middlemen who set their own prices. It is the equivalent of shopping for weekly groceries at a convenience store.
And it is costing taxpayers 20 percent more than the old system, a Knight Ridder investigation found.
The higher prices are the result of a Defense Department purchasing program called prime vendor, which favors a handful of firms. Run by the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), the program is based on a military procurement strategy to speed delivery of supplies such as bananas and bolts to troops in the field.
Military bases still have the option of getting competitive bids, but the Pentagon has encouraged them to use the prime vendor system. At the DLA's main purchasing center in Philadelphia, prime vendor sales increased from $2.3 billion in 2002 to $7.4 billion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.
The Defense Department touts the program as one of its ``best practices'' and credits it with timely deliveries that have eliminated the need for expensive inventories and warehousing. For purchases under the food prime-vendor program, DLA claimed a savings of $250 million in five years.
But those savings would have happened even without turning to the prime vendor program, competing suppliers say. For years, most suppliers have offered goods on an as-needed basis so that the military does not need to store them in warehouses.
Taxpayers for Common Sense describe the program as "nothing prime...in fact,it's very expensive".
In thousands of purchases of food service equipment items, Knight Ridder found massive markups. The case of a special 7-foot refrigerator-freezer for airplanes illustrates the problem.
MGR Equipment of Inwood, N.Y., which makes the unit, charged DLA $17,267 in 2003 for each one. That is the price that MGR President Gerald Ross said he charges everyone.
In September 2004, prime vendor Lankford Sysco Food Services Inc. sold the government nine MGR refrigerators for $32,642.50 apiece -- a markup of 89 percent. The government paid $138,445 extra, when all prices were adjusted for inflation into 2005 dollars.
I just thought you would like to know.
But even that helping hand to profit-gouging in time of "war" pales into insignificance compared with what Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) and his staff found on a visit to Fort Hood in Texas. 824 brand new Hummers with the very latest armor are sitting in parking lots there and in Kuwait while one in four US casualties in Iraq die from bombs that the new armor is designed to defeat.
"Let’s not have them in parking lots. Let’s move them up to Baghdad, let’s move them up with the 3rd ID or move them over to the Marines, who’ve taken 50 percent of the hits yet have roughly 6 to 7 percent of the" uparmored "Humvees," said Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., who chairs the House Armed Services Committee.
...
The Army repeatedly has said it has enough top-of-the-line, armored Humvees in Iraq. But Hunter said the 3rd Infantry Division, which has suffered most of the Army casualties in Iraq, has only 20 percent of the vehicles it requires. The Marines have requested 2,814 such Humvees but have received only 744.
The Army told Rep. Hunter that it intends keeping the vehicles out of Iraq until the 3rd Infantry Division’s replacements, the 4th Infantry Division, arrive at the end of the year.
It beggars belief.
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