My Polka Dot Apron

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May 12, 2018 10:38 pm  #1


do u think the USA wastes $ overseas?

Oh yeah, traincars full of it - - hourly.

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Dr. Rand Paul Holds Hearing Exposing Wasteful Spending in Afghanistan 
 
On Wednesday, my Federal Spending Oversight and Emergency Management (FSO) Subcommittee held a hearing entitled, “Afghanistan in Review: Oversight of U.S. Spending in Afghanistan.”

"I think we went in for the right reasons, but we stayed too long," I said in my opening statement.  "It isn’t our job to build countries, and frankly, I think we do a poor job of it.  If you talk to our soldiers, I think they’ll tell you that’s not why they enlisted."  (You can watch my entire opening statement HERE.)

Our subcommittee heard from two panels of witnesses.  First, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), testified regarding waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars.  Laurel Miller, Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation, also addressed the subcommittee on U.S. assistance to Afghanistan.

In his testimony, Special IG Sopko noted, “We have seen much good work done, but we have also reported on far too many instances of poor planning, sloppy execution, theft, corruption, and a lack of accountability.  Some of the most egregious examples SIGAR has identified include DoD’s purchase of nearly a half-billion dollars’ worth of second-hand airplanes from Italy that were unusable and later sold as scrap; the construction of an Afghan security forces training facility that literally melted in the rain; numerous schools, clinics, roads, and other infrastructure built dangerously unsound and with little if any concern for the costs of supplying and sustaining them; and a failed $8.7 billion counter-narcotics effort in a country where poppy cultivation increased by 63% last year alone.”

For our next panel, we heard from two of my senior staffers, Greg McNeill, Majority Staff Director for the FSO Subcommittee, and Sergio Gor, my Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications.  In April, they went as part of a bipartisan team to directly conduct on-the-ground oversight of U.S. spending in Afghanistan, a mission that consisted of more than a dozen meetings and four off-site visits over the course of two and a half days in the country.  Sergio reported to the subcommittee on their findings, including wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars, lack of oversight on projects, and rampant corruption in the country.

Their testimony featured examples such as the failed Kabul Marriott hotel, which cost taxpayers nearly $60 million and sits unfinished and abandoned, along with an adjacent apartment building that cost nearly $30 million more.  Both now represent a security threat to U.S. Embassy personnel. 

They also found brand-new, unused electrical equipment that was set to be destroyed in an industrial shredder, and they told the subcommittee about a $750 million electrification project that placed towers on land we don’t own without getting consent and the $210 million Afghanistan Ministry of Interior, which features issues such as non-functioning air conditioners and an unconnected fire sprinkler system.

You can watch the entire hearing HERE, which features pictures from Greg and Sergio's trip.  I also spoke about our "colossal waste of taxpayer dollars" in Afghanistan for my latest update video.  "The waste in Afghanistan is staggering," I said, "confirming my opinion that it's long past time to come home."

You can watch my update HERE.








 


A government which robs Peter to
pay Paul can always depend on
the support of Paul.
-- George Bernard Shaw
 

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