[December 15, 2016] “Your senior Warrant Officer has been arrested for taking bribes and giving favorable treatment to contractors,” so said a Criminal Investigation Division1 employee to me one day. One of the greatest shocks in my career was when one of my most trusted associates had, years earlier, given U.S. and foreign contractors unethical favors for monetary kickbacks. Wasting resources is a crucial leadership issue.
“Fraud, waste, and abuse” … gosh, how many times had I heard this? What I couldn’t imagine was that one of my soldiers would be involved in any illegal, immoral, or unethical behavior. But it did happen and sometimes those trusted folks are the least likely to be suspected and are the very ones involved. The arrest of the Warrant Officer placed a stain on our ability to improve the professionalism of our engineer regiment. No one ever forgot about it.
“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” – Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of the United States
It’s not just bribery that is a problem. The U.S. military is well known for wasting resources; $500 toilet seats, $250 wrenches, $100 screws, and the list goes on and on. Measured in terms of total dollars wasted, the winner of a U.S. organization wasting resources would be Medicare overspending. Yet government spending in all countries where it is tracked has historically been the most wasteful when compared to any other organization regardless of how it’s measured.
Waste is a leadership problem, yet we never seem to get a good grasp on how to prevent it or of either its short-term effects or impacts on our country’s citizens over time. The U.S. Government Accounting Office is responsible to help us identify fraud, waste, and abuse and it’s good at it. But so much goes undetected that the government has become a haven for those untrustworthy to handle the responsibility granted them.
Ultimately wasting resources hurts the American people by taking more money from them in the form of taxes but also in the form of less and poorer services, increase security risks, and the list goes on. Citizens of the U.S. like so many others are perfectly aware of the problem. In part this explains the election of President-elect Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. She was “business as usual” and our citizens were tired of it.
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