Capitol Hill’s hearing rooms again witnessed a vale of tears this week as the Armed Services Committees of both the House and Senate hosted the Pentagon’s top guns— chiefs of all four military services, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, and the Pentagon’s #2, Deputy Secretary Ashton Carter—to discuss sequestration. The idea was for military brass to turn up the volume on their earlier claims that sequestration-level cuts would compromise our top national security priorities. They delivered, with Dempsey declaring that he would be unable to implement DOD’s national security strategy with one slim dollar less of funding.

Yet barely 24 hours later, a report from the government’s own watchdog released a highly-anticipated report confirming that the Defense Department remains riddled with waste and inefficiency. The report released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is the latest edition of its High Risk series produced for the 113^th Congress. The GAO started releasing its High Risk list in 1990 to identify government functions with “greater vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement,” and DOD has always played a starring role. Here’s just a sampling of the most recent report’s findings:

• While DOD made some progress in reforming its business management approach, GAO found that “many of same fundamental weaknesses that cause these areas to be at high risk for fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement still remain.” For example, DOD’s efforts to modernize business systems “have yet to yield significant results in materially improving the cost, schedule, and performance” of these systems.
• Despite many efforts at reform, DOD “has yet to demonstrate sustained improvements in cost and schedule outcomes on major defense acquisitions programs” and “does not provide any information on what is causing the cost growth for DOD’s major defense acquisition programs.”
• DOD has a plan for how to finally pass an audit as required by law, but has “not made significant progress in addressing some of the key weaknesses,” such as arresting constant delays in fielding new resource planning systems.
• Though DOD admits it needs two additional rounds of the Defense Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) process to reduce excess infrastructure, it will have a hard time identifying which facilities to close because it “does not maintain complete and accurate data concerning the utilization of facilities.”

As TCS President Ryan Alexander testified earlier this month at a hearing on the report before the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, it should be no surprise that the world’s largest bureaucracy is vulnerable to this kind of waste and duplication. DOD has (allegedly) battled the problems described in the report for years: Imagine the resources our military would have on tap if the Pentagon could win the struggle with its own inefficiency.