Roughly two months after being confirmed as secretary of the Army in February, Dan Driscoll is focused on eliminating waste within the Army, vowing the U.S. will have a “strong, functioning Pentagon and Army.”
Driscoll sat down with Fox News chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin to lay out some serious goals in terms of cutting waste in the Army.
Since taking on his new position, Driscoll revealed that the “calcification of the bureaucracy of the Pentagon” was one of the most surprising realities he uncovered.
“Everyone I knew, whether it was a politician or a soldier or a civilian, had these stories of kind of these insane decisions and these, the spending that was preposterous,” Driscoll said during the interview on “Special Report” Friday.
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“What I thought was just one-offs that everyone had kind of had one or two stories. What it has turned out to be, in my opinion, is that the whole kind of decision-making process over the last couple of administrations going back 30 years, has led to a place where we’re having very irrational decisions that don’t always look out for soldiers and their needs,” Driscoll continued.
The Yale Law School graduate went into further detail on the wasteful spending project that “really broke” him.
Driscoll pointed to recent attempts to build an app which would provide up-to-date details on operating hours for the gates and food facilities on the military base. The Iraq veteran claimed that although the Army developers found an internal $1,400 solution, the Army acquisition team required a solution from the private sector, where the lowest quote was around $40 million.
“That was the one that really broke me and said we’ve got to start to do something,” he told Griffin.
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Driscoll also pointed to “bloat” within the Army acquisitions department as another area to address.
“We have 36,000 human beings buying our things. And so the problem with this is not just the cost,” he explained. “It’s not just a cost savings of getting rid of some of the employees. That is helpful. It’s actually the bloat that makes the decisions worse.”
“When you have 36,000 people making decisions about what we’re buying, you are just getting bad outcomes nearly every time,” he reasoned.
Driven to cut waste, the North Carolina native praised the Trump administration for creating a “lane for change” within the military. He also pointed to Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency for making change “possible.”
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Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin contributed to this report.