Guess How Much the Dept of Defense Spent to Build a Gas Station in Afghanistan?
While the national debt is projected to double during the 8 years President Obama has occupied the White House, tens of millions of our tax dollars are being wasted on a single gas station in Afghanistan.
The Department of Defense spent $43 million to build a gas station in Afghanistan that should have cost roughly $500,000, the lead oversight team monitoring U.S. spending in Afghanistan has found. The discovery came as part of a broader investigation into allegations of criminal activity within the DOD’s premiere program to kick-start the Afghan economy.
… At issue is spending by the Task Force for Stability and Business Operations, known as TFBSO or the Task Force, which ended in March 2015. But most alarming, according to Sopko, is the DOD’s failure to answer questions about the $800 million program and its claim the Task Force’s employees no longer work for the DOD. “I have never in my lifetime seen the Department of Defense or any government agency clam up and claim they don’t know anything about a program,” said Sopko, a former federal prosecutor appointed by President Obama in 2012 to watch over spending in Afghanistan.
How is it possible that $800 million of taxpayer money can just disappear into an unaccountable program while the entire DOD agency just shrugs and plays dumb? Even the Democrats are dumbfounded by this level of abuse and corruption!
“There’s few things in this job that literally make my jaw drop,” Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said in a statement to FoxNews.com. “But of all the examples of wasteful projects in Iraq and Afghanistan that the Pentagon began prior to our wartime contracting reforms, this genuinely shocked me.”
“It’s hard to imagine a more outrageous waste of money than building an alternative fuel station in a war-torn country that costs more than 8,000 percent more than it should, and is too dangerous for a watchdog to verify whether it is even operational,” said McCaskill, who penned a letter to Carter on Monday demanding information. “Perhaps equally outrageous however, is that the Pentagon has apparently shirked its responsibility to fully account for the taxpayer money that’s been wasted — an unacceptable lack of transparency that I’ll be thoroughly investigating.”
The Department of Defense has a lot of explaining to do. Like $800 million’s worth of explaining to do.
