New Hybrid Military-State Dept. Agency Proposed: Blessing or Boondoggle? An International FEMA?

[Are_grits_groceries]

GAH! Run for your lives!

When a large corporation decides that an unsaleable subsidiary business’s operations are no longer serving its interests, it folds up shop. It cherry-picks the best people and redeploys them elsewhere, and then it cuts costs by eliminating all other now-unnecessary expenses, including departments and personnel. This is what we, the shareholders of the United States, have asked the management team installed as the Obama administration to do, with regard to the occupation of Iraq; we want them to close up shop and stop spending money related to the war’s operations.

And yet certain elements of the Department of Defense and the Department of State are doing everything they can to sustain or inflate costs through continued operations.

In short, these interests are so determined to save their own jobs they will ignore the will of the people. They will actually go so far as to ask for the creation of a mega-department at cabinet level to preserve their jobs, making a boondoggle so unwieldy it practically invites abuse.

There’s no way to justify keeping the jobs for a business that no longer exists. There’s no sane rationale for inflating overhead costs to other operations for no real improvement in other operations, while increasing risk to the parent organization.


But this is exactly what the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, Scott Bowen is trying to do, now that operations in Iraq are winding down. Bowen submitted a proposal yesterday which recommends creation of

a single agency, which he analogizes to an “international FEMA,” ought to be the single civilian point-of-contact with the military if the United States is to avoid future wartime coordination fiascoes. He calls it, in typical Washington acronym-ese, USOCO –the U.S. Office for Contingency Operations.

Further, sources say that Bowen’s 27-page proposal advocates for a single point-of-contact which serves both Department of Defense and the Department of State, co-mingling the resources to carry out the separate and sometimes divergent missions of these two departments. The entity would suck up the roles of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, retain most if not all of the personnel from SIGIR, while spreading its tentacles into all contracts issued by DOD and DOS — perhaps even contracts issued by the Department of Interior.
<snip>

http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/12853

The horror! The horror............

Haven't we inflicted enough pain around the world without letting some mutant FEMA loose?

[Solly Mack]

1. K/R