December 12, 2016
This is really embarrassing, I’m having Robert Samuelson do my work for me. His column today pointed out that a Washington Post piece from last week may have misled readers on the amount of waste in the Pentagon’s operations.
That article referred to $125 billion in waste that was identified in an internal Pentagon report that was never made public. This figure is then compared with the $580 billion annual budget for the Defense Department.
The problem is that the $125 billion is a cumulative sum over a five-year period. While the piece does identify it that way, it is likely that many readers would be prone to compare the $125 billion in waste identified by the report with the annual budget, rather than taking the implied $25 billion annual figure. The latter figure would imply that just over 4.0 percent of total spending fell into this waste category, while the full $125 billion figure would be more than one-fifth of spending.
Samuelson was right to call attention to this issue. There is no reason the Post could not have been clear in putting these numbers in an apples to apples context, either highlighting the amount of money spent annually that is identified as waste or comparing the $125 billion figure to five-year spending.
Remember, the point is supposed to be informing readers.
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