Your Money for This?

A $20,000 mini-fridge -- and other mind-boggling ways your tax dollars are squandered.

Hot Plate Special

At a time of war, when our troops don't always have the best and safest equipment, the Pentagon is buying $20 plastic ice-cube trays. That's right, 99 cents at the Dollar Store or $20 each from a Pentagon vendor. Since the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) initiated what it calls the prime vendor program, the Pentagon has been encouraged to buy from a cherry-picked group of manufacturers. The idea is to favor vendors who will speed up the delivery of goods to our military bases. It's a great deal -- for the manufacturers, that is. They don't have to worry much about competitive bids, which means they can charge absurd prices for their products and services.

It turns out that in the spring of 2004, the Pentagon paid $1,000 each for hot plates, even though it had previously bought the same ones for $450. What's worse, the Pentagon shelled out $22,797 apiece for 34-inch refrigerators -- more than $7,000 a foot -- causing Congressman Joe Wilson to exclaim, "That looks like it costs $99.99 at Lowe's!"

"This is the heir to the $600 toilet seat and the $400 hammer that you had in the 1980s," says Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense. But what really burns him up is that "it doesn't take an acquisition professional to know that paying $20 for an ice-cube tray is a bad deal!"

It's that kind of infuriating waste that led California Congressman Duncan Hunter to bark, "This is a real slap in the face to the guy making $13,000 a year who is engaged in a firefight in Ramadi."

After getting an earful from the House Armed Services Committee, which called the Pentagon purchasing agents incompetent, the Defense Department initiated an internal review of the prime vendor system. The DLA ultimately agreed to seek out more competitive bids, but only among the preselected vendors.

So has the system changed? Not nearly enough. A Knight Ridder investigation found that the process, which was supposed to save money by saving time, actually cost American taxpayers 20 percent more in 2005 than it had the previous year -- or an additional $1.5 billion.

Maybe we should just let Wal-Mart handle Pentagon procurement. At least that outfit knows a good deal from a really lousy one.

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