links for 2010-07-29

  • I listened to a several-minute-long story on NPR on Wednesday morning about the $8.7B in Iraq reconstruction money that the DoD cannot account for. I think I paid pretty close attention. Yet something, the data encapsulated in this one pie chart by the folks at Good didn't reach my brain. Is it reasonable to assume that the DoD was funneling most or all of this money to black ops?

Published by Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Char­lottes­­ville, VA, USA. more »

2 replies on “links for 2010-07-29”

  1. Intelligence would be my first guess, for a number of reasons. No one is shy about funding the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) — Congress critters love giving money to Navy SEALs or Army Special Forces operators, and because those programs require dedicated resources the DoD isn’t shy about asking for that money up-front in their annual budget requests.

    On the other hand, intel is the sort of thing that people will shovel money into when they need near-term results, and the less institutional capacity we have to develop that intelligence by other means, the more money you need to shovel in. And this would jive with some stories I’m hearing about some newer additions to the intelligence community who lack an appreciation for the rules and procedures by which programs are normally approved and funded.

  2. The reason the money is gone is because Iraq is all rebuilt, just like new, so we can go home now.

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