How Much Money Does Dod Spend On Contracters
The Pentagon Got $i Billion to Fight Coronavirus. It Went Shopping for Military Equipment Instead.
In March, equally the number of coronavirus infections was escalating, Congress passed the $3 trillion CARES Act, which, among other things, provided the Pentagon $one billion in emergency funding to "prevent, set for, and respond to coronavirus." The billion-dollar fund was, in fact, allocated under the Defense Production Act, which allows the president to compel private companies to help in producing items deemed to exist essential to the national interest. Presumably, the Department of Defence would use that money to help procure medical supplies as was the intent of the funding. That is, the U.S. military was charged with assisting the teetering nation in fulfilling its most dire—life and death—medical needs: hospitals, masks, ventilators, and, ultimately, a vaccine.
After the stimulus money was out the door, however, the military repurposed it, the Washington Mail service reports, instead using the taxpayer money to make up for what it considered to be funding gaps on its ain wish list, procuring equipment that had niggling to nothing to practise with the pandemic. This also involved funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to defense contractors for items that Defence force Department lawyers contended could still be shoehorned into the very broad spending rules attached to the funds. Congress later on disputed that interpretation of the law.
From the Post:
Among the awards: $183 million to firms including Rolls-Royce and ArcelorMittal to maintain the shipbuilding industry; tens of millions of dollars for satellite, drone and space surveillance engineering; $80 million to a Kansas shipping parts concern suffering from the Boeing 737 Max grounding and the global slowdown in air travel; and $2 million for a domestic manufacturer of Army clothes uniform fabric.
That doesn't exactly sound like PPE. "DOD officials contend that they have sought to strike a balance betwixt boosting American medical production and supporting the defense industry, whose health they view as critical to national security," the Post reports. "Some defence contractors were given the Pentagon money even though they had already dipped into another pot of bailout funds, the Paycheck Protection Program." In brusque: a colossal backdoor bailout for the defence force industry.
Source: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/09/the-pentagon-dod-defense-department-usd1-billion-coronavirus-fund-defense-contractors.html
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