Well now. Isn't it a good thing we jumped up and down and stomped our feet for an expenditure report?
Now, make it law that reporting is required bi-weekly. Period. Three million for personnel, equipment and travel? And four million for what? incidentals? Balderdash. (let's see, who'd be good at pushing this thru? ahhh...Cruz...he's the ticket to ride on this baby.)
“Now, make it law that reporting is required bi-weekly. Period.”
As a military project manager in a company organized in a matrix, where nobody reports directly to me and I don’t sign timecards, I learned a trick. What normally happened was, say, the engineering manager, would assign a few people and give them charge numbers I was responsible for. They’d play computer games or stare at their navels and charge my numbers. The trick is, stop by each day, ask what they are doing for me that day, then stop by again at the end of the day and chat about their results. Not only does this keep me informed about what they are doing, it prevents them from wasting my money on something else. When somebody is billing you lawyer rates and they are not productive for a day, it adds up pretty fast. Especially, when you have a lot of them doing it.
You have to wonder, what, exactly, are we, the taxpayers getting for $1.5 million dollars per month. I’d bet if you brought one of those guys in and had him bullet point for you what he’d accomplished, it would be a prosecutable crime.
On the Future Combat Systems program at least a year went by when we had no requirements defined to which we could design to. But the award fees were based on a spend plan that assumed all those requirements were in place on day one, which they should have been. Management insisted that the spend plan be adhered to (or they wouldn’t get their bonuses.) So, for nearly the entire program engineers in a dozen or so companies charged the government and maybe did some work, nearly all of which was wasted because the government didn’t tell us what it was they wanted until a few weeks before the preliminary design review. The charts all of those companies submitted were pure fiction. By that point, I am certain everybody was praying the program would be cancelled as there was no way to meet the budget because the money to do so had long ago been wasted.
This is how government works.