Friends Committee on National Legislation – 2010-07-22 18:42:13

http://capwiz.com/fconl/issues/alert/?alertid=14938571

Pentagon Waste:
Cut Spending by Eliminating Waste
Take Action:
Write Your Candidates for Congress Today

The Pentagon wastes more money than some other cabinet agencies spend in a year. Yet when Congress and the president talk about cutting government spending, they start by saying “of course we should exempt the Pentagon from cuts.”

What?! The Pentagon is the first place to find savings at the level of billions of dollars. Why protect waste?

You can help us by urging members of Congress and candidates for office this fall to put Pentagon waste back on the cutting table. The first place to cut federal spending is wasted spending. The Pentagon has a lot of it to cut.

Many of you have told us that your elected officials in Washington are not yet ready to talk about cuts in Pentagon spending. The Pentagon has never been audited. Congress can’t know where military spending is going. Perhaps as a first reasonable step, you could urge them to insist that the Pentagon fix its broken bookkeeping system and pass an audit.

As Defense Industry Daily noted in 2009, “It’s not that the US Department of Defense fails audits. The problem is more fundamental: it is not currently possible to audit it, and any comprehensive audit would be a first-ever event in modern times.” The Pentagon spent 33 cents of your income tax dollar paid in 2009. It should be required to account for that money like every other government agency.
Take Action

As election season moves into high-gear, will you ask candidates for Congress in your area to publicly endorse the call for the Pentagon to be subject to annual audits? We have a simple tool on the FCNL website that allows you to send this message to every candidate.

Background
The good news, as Ruth Flower reminds me, is that, for the first time in decades, we at FCNL see an opportunity to make real cuts in Pentagon spending. Members of Congress across the political spectrum, from Barney Frank in Massachusetts to Tom Coburn in Oklahoma, are saying that Pentagon spending cannot be off the table in debates about how to get federal spending under control.

Yet Congress and the administration remain unwilling to call for cuts in Pentagon spending.

Today, you can use FCNL’s Our Nations’ Checkbook Campaign information, analysis, and action alerts to alert your community to the fact that, unlike all other federal agencies, Pentagon spending is not audited. Good government requires auditing for accountability.

Whether one thinks the Pentagon budget is too big, just right, or to little, we can all agree that its federal spending should be regularly audited. Mobilize your neighbors to ask your candidates for office to demand a regular audit of Pentagon spending.