Pentagon buries evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste, Craig Whitlock and Bob Woodward: “The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post. Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results. The report, issued in January 2015, identified ‘a clear path’ for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years..The data showed that the Defense Department was paying a staggering number of people – 1,014,000 contractors, civilians and uniformed personnel – to fill back-office jobs far from the front lines.”

• Via Ben Amata, Government Documents Librarian, California State University Sacramento, with many thanks – Two documents with links referenced in the article: These are the final briefing slides as approved by the Defense Business Board in its public meeting held on January 22, 2015. The full DBB report will contain more detailed text which will reflect the totality of the points discussed and any modifications adopted by the Board during their deliberations – Transforming DoD’s Core Business Processes for Revolutionary Change, January 22, 2015;
  Interim Update – Pending Study Completion DoD Core Business Processes Task Group, October 23, 2014.