Congress is always looking for ways to cut spending and save money…..Dems have their way and Repubs have theirs……and the two save very little and what they do save they quickly find ways to piss it away…….instead of facing reality they always seem to look for the grand schemes and overlook the obvious…….

Here is one useless waste that could be solved easily……..

Ammunition worth $1.2 billion, much of it still usable, is going to go up in smoke because the Pentagon is using antiquated inventory systems and different service branches can’t share data effectively, a Government Accountability Office report says. Despite decades of trying to develop a single database, only the Army uses the standard Pentagon system, while the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps have their own systems, resulting in huge amounts of waste as excess ammunition piles up in one service branch while another buys fresh supplies, according to the report obtained by USA Today.

Billions of dollars could be saved if the Pentagon makes some “common-sense improvements to how it manages ammunition,” says Sen. Tom Carper, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “Despite years of effort, the Army, Navy, and Air Force still don’t have an efficient process for doing something as basic as sharing excess bullets,” the Democrat says. The Pentagon, which manages a stockpile of around $70 billion in ammunition, said in a statement that there is clearly a need to “automate the process” and it will be made a priority in future.

Governmental Efficiency?  sounds like an oxymoron to me….how about you?

And then there is the big problem in Afghanistan….no not the Taleban…..the problem would be the opium trade……..yes, we fight drugs but at what cost?  Easy peasey……..

There are plenty of failures to focus on in Afghanistan, but while they usually center around the calamitous US military occupation, another US war in the country, the “war on drugs” continues apace, with similarly feckless results.

12 years into this war, and with $7.5 billion spent, the latest figures (PDF) from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) show remarkable consistency, as the US continues to throw money and manpower at poppy eradication and appears to have no real impact on cultivation or export.

2013 saw a record 2,090 square km of Afghanistan used for poppy cultivation, and the grand US eradication program managed to destroy roughly 70 of them, so roughly 3.5% of the overall total.

That’s not even slowing them down, as poppy production in 2012 was 1,540 square km, so the US eradication isn’t even putting a meaningful dent in the rate of growth of the cultivation, one of the few viable crops for many Afghan farmers.

UN estimates put the value of the crop at around $4 billion by the time it leaves the country, with farmers receiving around $1 billion of that and the rest going to the assorted bribes needed to keep the crop moving. $4 billion amounts to about 20% of Afghanistan’s nominal GDP.

Absent in this is another point about the main failing war in Afghanistan. Production of opium poppies in Afghanistan, though never this high in modern history, was actually virtually nil in 2001, when the Taliban was being feted by DC drug warriors for its brutally effective crackdown on cultivation. 2014 still has most of the brutality, but none of the effectiveness, and the US seems unable to even remotely replicate the Taliban’s “success” on this front.

Just two examples of money spent with no return on investment…….

Can you think of any other ones we could add to this list?