Posted on 08/10/2010 3:09:03 AM PDT by Scanian
WASHINGTON— The Defense Department plans to shed one of its 10 major military commands as Defense Secretary Robert Gates tries to pare billions from the Pentagon budget, officials briefed on the plan said Monday.
Gates wants to eliminate the Joint Forces Command, long a presumed target for belt-tightening, and will also announce Monday that he wants to cut the Pentagon's use of outside contractors by 10 percent next year, The Associated Press has learned. The Virginia-based command trains troops from different services to fight together.
Military and other officials described the planned cuts on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss Gates' plans ahead of a Pentagon news conference Monday.
Joint Forces Command, with nearly 4,900 employees and annual salaries of more than $200 million, is the largest single cut to be announced Monday.
Gates is not expected to say how much money will be saved by shutting down the command, which holds more than 1 million square feet of real estate in Suffolk, Va., and Norfolk, Va. Savings will be offset by the cost of shifting some jobs and roles elsewhere.
The Pentagon has already announced a target of cutting $100 billion over five years. And earlier this year Gates ordered a top-to-bottom paring of the military bureaucracy in search of at least $10 billion in annual savings needed to prevent an erosion of U.S. combat power.
Gates took aim at what he called wasteful business practices and too many generals and admirals, and noted that "overhead" costs chew up as much as 40 percent of the Pentagon's budget.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Just a suggestion here...but if you moved the entire Pentagon staff out of DC...say forty miles up the road to the ‘boonies’ of Pennsylvania...then you’d be outside of the beltway and you could lower salaries of all non-GI’s (civilian workers and contractors) by roughly twenty percent.
They might try to cut 10 percent of the outside contractors, but that means they will turn right around and hire in-house government folks at the same cost. No real savings (that is the reason they went that route in the first place), and means more union members. Now THAT makes the real reason.
Except that you’d then be on the hook for a new facility, built this time from the ground up, that has the same infrastructure and capabilities that the current Pentagon does. Granted, by building new, you can overcome some of the problems of the existing building, which was originally supposed to be a hospital, and realize some new features that are currently not feasible due to the complexity of remodeling the Pentagon, but overall you’d be spending billions on the facility, and that’s without the government contracting tangle that would inevitably result. I’d say moving the Pentagon at this point would be a net loss.
Of course the Obama Democrats will NEVER do anything like that. It would reduce their campaign donor base in the Government unions.
He's right about that.
I just hope they do not cut the EPA or the IRS. I just do not know what I would do without them.
Rescue UAW - CHECK
Take over student loans - CHECK
Socialize healthcare - CHECK
Nationalize home loans - CHECK
Rescue teacher unions - CHECK
Radicalize the DOJ - CHECK
Gut military - CHECK
Amnesty - NEXT
Nationalize energy industry - ON DECK
“NOW expand that same belt tightening to every other single Federal agency.”
Exactly...
Too many Beltway bandits too. Way too many. And a lot of them are retired officers.
And this regime and its congress of people's deputies can piss that amount away in a flash with stimulus and other pork-fests. FUBO
Actually, at a higher costs on the government side, because the government doesn't pay contractors' benefits.
Common thought. The Government does pay for contractor benefits. It is included in the labor rates billed to the government. The benefits are often lower than what is earned by an equivalant government employee. How many private companies offer an extra 4 hours of sick leave perpay period? And up to 8 hours of reqular leave plus all federal holidays. That is just the tip of the benefits difference.
Not really - if you read the news you will see that most agencies are not going to be allowed to backfill insourcing slots past FY10.
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