by Rick Albertson

It's nothing short of scandalous just how much the Department of Defense has been able to get away with during George Bush's two terms as President. Without adequate oversight, the people running the Pentagon have been able to manipulate the system and break more rules than ever before.

There's always been a revolving-door problem in Washington, where government officials turn around and go to work for the same people they're supposed to be regulating. But under the Bush administration, the problem has grown exponentially. This is especially true in the defense industry these days, thanks to its ever-increasing reliance on outside contractors to do the heavy lifting. Defense officials quit their government jobs, go to work for defense contractors, then go back to work as hired guns for the government again.

There's always been a problem with inefficiency, waste, and downright corruption in military purchasing and logistics management. But here, again, the problem has grown exponentially while George Bush has been in office. Not only have hundreds of billions of dollars been wasted during the Iraq war, where despite all the outlay there's still a persistent shortage of the right equipment in the right places at the right time, but tens of billions of dollars in cash and assets have simply disappeared. Gone missing, off the books, vanished. That's an awful lot of money that the Pentagon just can't account for.

There's always been a problem with the government trying to spin the facts and massage the message, something the Bush administration has perfected all the way across the board. This especially applies to military matters in times of war, from the deliberately inflated body counts in Vietnam to the carefully-controlled reporting from Iraq. The Pentagon has always known how to use propaganda to advance its aims. But never before has it had so many people on its payroll applying propaganda directly to its own citizens at home.

But now, finally, the official oversight system in Washington is starting to do something about it. The Government Accountability Office is now taking on the Department of Defense in several key areas of concern:

-- They're addressing the DoD Pipeline problem, in which thousands of former DoD officials have resigned in the last few years and gone right to work for the defense contractors they were originally overseeing. (In fact, GAO reports show that 65% of those thousands of officials work for just the seven largest contractors in the system.)

-- They're pushing the DoD to retool its logistics and supply-chain tracking systems to reduce waste, fraud, and mismanagement. Those systems have been hopelessly out of date for years, and are not adequate to handle the size and complexity of our current military operations.

-- They're investigating the Boeing/Northrop dispute over the Air Force's recent decision to buy a new fleet of air refueling tankers, along with a rapidly growing number of other contested contracts.

-- They're digging into the Pentagon's recently-exposed propaganda pundits program. And now so is the DoD's own inspector general's office, thanks to angry House Democrats who pushed through an amendment to the appropriations bill demanding an investigation into the government's use of paid shills to push propaganda to its own citizens.

The GAO investigations and rulings can only accomplish so much, of course. As a non-partisan Congressional investigative arm, its focus is on contracting procedures and administrative issues. It can't enact legislative reforms or alter the system of checks and balances by which our government is supposed to operate. (Only Congress can do that.) But it certainly can do a lot just by enforcing the rules and making sure the system works. And it's good to see that the General Accountability Office is finally starting to hold the Department of Defense accountable again.