Where is Harry Truman When We Need Him?

In 1941 freshman Senator Harry Truman of Missouri got the Senate to establish a new subcommittee, the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. America had yet to enter World War II, but with the conflict already raging in Europe, Asia and North Africa President Franklin Roosevelt convinced Congress it was imperative to bolster America's military preparedness. Given a budget of $15,000, Truman set off across the country to see for himself if there was any truth to the rumors he was hearing about fraud and war profiteering in the defense industry.

Roosevelt initially viewed the effort with skepticism, wary that this might be an exercise in political grandstanding that would harm the war effort. Instead, what came to be known as the Truman Commission functioned throughout the war, calling 1,798 witnesses, holding 432 hearings, issuing 51 reports, and saving the taxpayers $15 billion in 1940s dollars. It also saved thousands of American lives by exposing defectively produced weapons and equipment such as aircraft engines whose malfunctioning would otherwise have killed U.S. aviators. Truman did his work so well that a grateful FDR chose him as his running mate in 1944.

An April 4 editorial in USA Today, "Contractors Gone Wild," shows why we could use a Harry Truman again. While politicians point to earmarks as the prime spending culprit ($17 billion a year), little is said about defense outlays. USA Today reports, "The Governmental Accountability Office, the watchdog arm of Congress, reported this week on significant waste and abuse, if not outright fraud, in the nation's major weapons procurement. It looked at 95 programs and found them collectively $295 billion over budget. That's enough to cover last year's (official) federal deficit." The piece continues, "The GAO report is a blistering indictment. Of the programs it examined, not one met all the standards for best practices. The average one came in 21 months late, up from 5 months as recently as 2000. The Navy's new coastal combat ship, with contracts awarded separately to Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, is more than 100% over budget. A Boeing program to modernize avionics on the C-130 cargo plane is expected to come in more than 320% over budget."

The profiteering and cronyism so pervasive under the present Administration, marked by secret no-bid deals and open-ended cost-plus signoffs, is all the more odious for its hypocrisy. In one example, an additional $2 billion a year for children's health, the S-CHIP program, was ostentatiously vetoed as an economy measure in 2007 while at the same time, according to the Los Angeles Times, 180,000 contractors in Iraq actually outnumbered the 160,000 military personnel there. They earned up to $1,000 a day doing work formerly performed by soldiers for $100 a day. Even Gen. Petraeus, for instance, is protected by a private security team.

Harry Truman opened his committee's work by explaining, "We intend to see that no man or corporate group of men shall profit inordinately on the blood of the boys in the foxhole.” We could use some of that kind of spirit again.