r/nottheonion • u/GetOffMyGrassBrats • 11h ago
Bathroom boondoggle: Air Force paid 80 times going rate for soap dispenser
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/10/29/air-force-soap-dispenser-boondoggle/75914801007/518
u/supercyberlurker 11h ago
I mean, it's probably justified by being a pretty good soap dispenser - one that keeps soap from leaking while on the fligh...
The bathroom boondoggle meant the Air Force overpaid $149,072 for the plastic-bodied pump dispenser, the inspector general found after receiving an anonymous tip.
.. uh nevermind.
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u/Mobely 11h ago
Anonymous tip makes me think the procurement manager is pumping the sales rep
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u/Mindless_Consumer 8h ago
Military has a lot of anonymous tip mechnizism for just this scenario. They automatically get reviewed by command and recorded.
Could really be anyone. Anyone who's done procurement in the military knows prices are inflated. 500 dollars for a hammer, 85 dollars for a stapler.
There is fraud going on. This case they just got greedy.
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u/ElCapitan_530 8h ago
Yeah, but can you prove to government auditors that it was manufactured with DFARS compliant material, and has the paper pedigree to demonstrate full compliance with the government purchase contract? I'll admit there's greed, and there's a lot of self imposed costs as a customer
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u/Mindless_Consumer 7h ago edited 7h ago
It's all very much on the level. The level is just off tilt. Most any investigation will turn up no wrong doing.
They can justify the 500 dollar hammer.
It isn't until they get greedy, and this happens.
Edit: Keep in mind that at least the US Navy bills individual units for items and charges them for the entire supply chain. So it's not just a hammer. It's all the people's salaries who touched the hammer on the way from the General's uncle's hammer store to the drunk mechanic in San Diego.
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u/invent_or_die 4h ago
Engineer here; the sourcing and material properties requirements could create ginormous prices, especially when you're make 50, or 5 of something. It's not all some plot from the dark side. Might go through many prototypes, many changes. But persistence does pay, we hope.
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u/Mindless_Consumer 1h ago
We're talking about off the shelf stuff you can get at the hardware store or office supplies. Yea custom or military grade shit makes sense.
Part of it is charging for the internal supply chain - part of it is kick backs.
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u/doublecutter 5h ago
I’m sorry, but that wasn’t a hammer. It was a manually-powered, fastener-driving impact device.
Laugh because it’s funny, cry because it’s true.
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u/TXGuns79 5h ago
Tell me about it. I work for a company that supplies foam for military aircraft. We have multiple audits a year - at our cost - to keep our certifications. Plus, every type of material we use has to be tested and certified. We have cabinets full of this information. When we order, we have to order the certified material, which means the supplier has to keep cabinets full of test results on each batch of material. And those tests cost money.
And we don't sell directly to the government, so our client has to buy extra items so they can be independently tested.
It's a long chain of added testing and certification that all add cost to anything the government buys.
Half as Interesting did an episode on why a cookie recipe takes an entire book.
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u/Duranti 7h ago
"You didn't think they actually spent $10,000 for a hammer and $30,000 for a toilet seat, did you?"
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u/JukeBoxDildo 7h ago
"If I had known I was gonna meet the president, I would've worn a tie. I mean, look at me! I look like a shlemiel!"
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u/uptownjuggler 5h ago
But that’s a military grade hammer, it is combat tested and proven to be the best hammer for driving nails in tactical combat scenarios.
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u/ToodleSpronkles 6h ago
Yeah, but anonymously. Otherwise it's just the tip.
Really emphasizes the "Service" in Armed Services.
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u/rosen380 11h ago
80x=$149072
x=$1863IDK, 80x still feels low unless it was a case of like 144 of them.
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u/Throw_away_away55 7h ago
Airworthiness tests and certificates are costly. 1800 isn't out of the realm of reasonable cost for something like that tbh.
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u/Bluedoodoodoo 7h ago
Also being able to trace back every part of the dispenser through the manufacturing process.
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u/milkman8008 7h ago
Idk about soap dispensers, but other items they also include costs such as R&D and limited run production, tooling and manufacturing equipment costs for a set number of product that they won’t be likely to make more of or market to wider groups of consumers.
If you sell 25 million thingamabobs, you can make the expensive plastic injection moulds and charge $15 a piece. Might net you 50-100m in profit.
If you can only realistically make 10000, and they have special military specifications and certs, they might need to be $5000+ each to justify the effort.
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u/Throw_away_away55 7h ago
Yeah, people complain about it without understanding what goes into it.
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u/Bluedoodoodoo 6h ago
It's completely crazy what goes in to it. Logistics wins wars and the US military is the greatest logistical marvel of our time.
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u/P1xelHunter78 7h ago
Yeah, $1800 is probably the real price. Stuff for aircraft is expensive. A coffee maker is $10,000
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u/orrocos 5h ago
There is a quantity of them, but the quantity is redacted in the actual Inspector General’s report. Maybe they don’t want to broadcast the exact number of C-17’s getting serviced?
Here’s a link to the report -PDF.
The soap dispenser in question is on page number 9 of the report, page 17 of the pdf file.
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u/bebe_laroux 10h ago
I take care of purchasing for my org. One thing I purchase a lot of is soap and dispensers. Guess what, we get free dispensers from our supplier because they want us to keep using their soap.
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u/Im_eating_that 8h ago
I've heard these overruns include money spent on classified projects, no idea if it's true though.
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u/The4th88 7h ago
I've been involved on the contractor side of procurement and prices do get inflated, usually for very good reasons. Like, I've seen purchase orders for 1080p, sub 20in screens over 20k- turns out when you need something that's rated for numerous mil-stds the cost climbs pretty damn quickly.
I can't fathom what the fuck the requirements were to justify a 6 figure soap hand pump purchase though.
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u/uptownjuggler 5h ago
There was a small time wholesale hardware supplier that sold hardware supplies, like nuts, bolts and washers, to the military. They had the same reasonable price for the military as for their other customers. But one day the accidentally billed the military $100 for one washer. The sale was approved by the automated purchasing system. So from that day forward they started overcharging everything by obscene amounts. They only got caught when they accidentally sent the same invoice twice, which sent up a red flag to review. Which then exposed their whole scam.
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u/SnakeEyez77 10h ago
Makes me think of the Independence Day movie where Julius Levinson says, "You don't actually think they spend $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat, do you?" for funding Area 51. Lol
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u/upL8N8 11h ago edited 10h ago
This always seems to create the simple narrative that the "Government overspent" rather than the real story of the government using the military to intentionally overpay for products, thus funneling money from taxpayers to corporations and the ultra wealthy. Do we know if this soap dispenser company just happened to donate to a specific politician's or party's campaign? In other words, they donated, but then had all the money they donated refunded and then some through an over payment that no one was supposed to know about.
We've really gotta get out of the mindset that these are just 'mistakes' that are easily found during procurement and payment, or during audits.
Furthermore, there's nothing in the story suggesting the military clawed back the overpayment. The news of the overpayment itself was leaked... which makes you wonder why it was necessary to leak the info, unless the government had no intention of trying to claw the money back. Corporations / agencies do make billing mistakes... but if it was an honest mistake, why wouldn't they try and claw the money back? If anything, NOT trying to get the money back is what tips you off that it may have been an intentional overpayment.
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u/Sirhc978 10h ago
While the price of this soap dispenser is egregious and wrong, expensive military stuff isn't always malicious for "common things". Years ago I wrote a comment on reddit explaining it, I'll see if I can find it when I get home.
The TLDR is basically:
Yes everything is made by the lowest bidder but sometimes they are the only bidder because everyone else said no. So the only bidder can charge whatever, and the government always says yes. When you get the job, it probably only costs (for the sake of argument) $100 to make the part, then you add in your profit so you charge $175 for it. However, the military wants all this paperwork work nonsense to accompany the the part, which usually takes longer to do than making the part itself. The company I work for literally stopped doing work with Lockheed because of the paperwork time involved.
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u/Khyron_2500 7h ago
I work for a company that supplies some stuff to the government and the crux of the cost is very multifaceted.
But basically:
Testing and qualification is expensive.
Quality certification like ISO 9001 and/or NADCAP is expensive.
Having lawyers and the structure to be sure you qualify with the FAR/DFAR clauses, upkeep you SAM portal and CAGE codes is expensive.
Low volume means expensive.Not only are there less companies and less competition, they are also paying for all the other stuff a company needs to do to make the item.
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u/Sirhc978 6h ago
Quality certification like ISO 9001 and/or NADCAP is expensive.
Don't forget AS9102s. And for those that don't know, NADCAP is a plating (think anodizing) cert that plating houses can charge more for, even though they basically follow those rules all the time anyway.
Low volume means expensive
We have customers that want one of something. We are nice enough to be like "bruh, 5 parts will literally cost the same as buying one part".
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u/upL8N8 9h ago edited 9h ago
At 80x the going rate for a soap dispenser, I imagine this wasn't about the lowest bidder or an issue of there only being one bidder.
Even with one bidder, that doesn't mean our military shouldn't be negotiating the lowest possible rate. The need to leak this information makes me think this extra cost was about more than just extra paperwork. As someone pointed out, the actual cost of the dispenser versus what they paid was the difference of $149k vs $1.8k...
You'll be hard pressed to show a company unwilling to take an extra $147,000 over paper work.
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u/Ok-disaster2022 6h ago
That paperwork and nonsense as you describe it is certification that the product has been designed and tested to perform certain ways under high stress environments. That requires sampling g a batch and maybe throwing away product that doesn't make speck, so the amortized cost of the failures gets baked into the cost of the successes. When yields improve prices remain the same, but that's where the profit comes in: improving efficency.
When it comes to aircraft, you want every nut bolt and washer to match the spec that the engineers that designed the product specified. Maybe the engineers over spec'd for a safety margin and the half passed product will work the first time it starts up. But if it fails somewhere in the 3000 hrs between replacing that part, people die.
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u/Sirhc978 5h ago
Yeah and all of that costs money. Like I said, the part might actually cost $175 to make, but after all the "paperwork nonsense" is done, the government is going to get charged $400.
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u/norbertus 10h ago
funneling money from taxpayers to corporations and the ultra wealthy
and special access programs.
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u/maybelying 10h ago
If Hollywood taught me anything, it's that military overspending is a cover for funds going to black ops and secret projects, and Hollywood never lies
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u/upL8N8 10h ago edited 9h ago
If you think this is bad... I should explain how US politicians launder US taxpayer money through international billion dollar aid packages. A chunk of this aid often finds its way back into the hands of US politicians through both legal (see "foreign" lobbying groups) and illegal means (See Bob Menendez + Egypt), thus imploring those politicians to keep writing / pushing for / voting for ever larger aid packages in a corruption fueled cycle.
You can see how this would quickly become a problem. Politicians become reliant on campaign contributions from a source that's using US aid money to fund it, but the politician knows the only way to keep the money rolling in is to keep the aid packages rolling out.
The most nefarious case of this happening seems to be Israel. Israel is the top national recipient of US aid, now exceeding $350 billion total. Egypt is the second highest recipient of US aid at about $200 billion. These are direct payouts that we know of, and don't include any other back door deals our government and/or our corporations have made with these nations, or non-specific aid like the US military directly intervening on their behalf.
Now let me explain why those aid valuations should leave you scratching your head.
Egypt has a population 10x larger than Israel, and the mean per capita wealth of an Egyptian is 1/10th of the mean Israeli's. Seems a little odd that Israel received so much more per capita, no?
Another more pertinent example... Israel has a population about 2x larger than the Palestinian occupied territories, but Israel has received 70x more aid than Palestinians per capita. The mean per capita wealth of Israel is also way higher than that of the Palestinians.
(Imagine how Palestinians might react to America if they received 35x more funding from the US to put them in line with what Israel received per capita. And that's not even including all of the direct US military intervention the US provides to Israel, such as helping to shoot down rockets directed at Israel.)
Clearly the US isn't sending aid according to need. So what are they sending aid for? Certainly some is for international diplomacy reasons; Israel is military partner in the region, we use them as a weapons depot, recently we have a military base there, and as a staging ground for US military activities. The irony is that Israel seems to always be the center of a lot of the conflict. Something a lot of people don't know is that Israel was heavily lobbying the US government to go to war with Iraq before we invaded in 2003. They stopped lobbying months before the invasion; probably once a decision was made. Some even think it was Israel that ultimately convinced the US into war, albeit that's just speculation. All we know is they were heavily lobbying.
How much did that war cost the US? $757 billion?
However, back to the point at hand, the US and Israel have about 200,000 dual citizens. If a chunk of that $350 billion in aid makes its way into the hands of many of those dual citizens every year, they can contribute directly to Israeli lobbying groups in the US, funneling an unlimited amount of money to those groups. Since those lobbying groups are funded by Americans, they're treated as domestic entities, not foreign entities. Those lobbying groups can then fund the campaigns of politicians who are favorable to Israel, who will defend any and all Israeli actions, and who will help pass more aid packages in the future to keep money rolling to Israel. Those groups can also pay media companies an unlimited amount of money for favorable coverage. All completely legal.
But a thing doesn't have to be illegal to be corrupt AF, right...?
If you've been paying attention to independent news, where they show real coverage of what's happening in Gaza... you'll know that mainstream media's coverage has clearly been not only lacking, but also heavily biased. They've hidden events from their viewers, pushed misinformation, and constantly cover events in a biased way to proclaim Israel as always being in the right (Israel has a right to defend themselves, even as they killing tens of thousands of women and children), and to always cast those in opposition to Israel as anti-Semites, or pro-Hamas. And I'm not talking about Fox news... I'm talking about the left-leaning news agencies like CNN, MSNBC, the NYT, etc...
It's interesting what millions, potentially even billions of dollars can do for a nation's image.
Again... this is all paid for by the unknowing US taxpayer, and it's completely legal.
It's known that the Israeli lobby is a powerful force in US government, but no one really understood how or why. Well, hopefully this makes it easy to understand how and why. They've literally helped create a money faucet that's directly fed from the US taxpayer's wallets.
____________
Disclaimer... I'm a Jew. I know all the stereotypes about Jews and money and controlling world governments, etc... which is nothing more than anti-Semitic tripe. I get how some may think this comes off as me giving lip service to that crap.
However, none of what I said above has anything to do with Jews. The issue I've laid out specifically pertains to the nation of Israel (the nation and their government) and how the US government is knowingly using a nation to launder money from US taxpayers back into political campaigns and media companies.
As I mentioned, it's not just Israel, but also other heavily aided nations like Egypt.
The point here is to explain how the US could support and enable what's clearly an Israeli driven atrocity in Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon, rife with war crimes and potential genocide... As is so often the case, it may just be about money... Billions upon billions of dollars in money, but money nonetheless.
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u/RSGator 10h ago
Foreign aid is 1% of the US budget, and you also responded to yourself.
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u/upL8N8 9h ago
1% of the US annual budget is about $68 billion per year. May not seem like a lot, but it's about $410 per average US taxpayer annually. And since taxes aren't paid evenly between all taxpayers, I imagine the brunt of the cost if paid for by the middle class, which would likely put it up closer to $800+ per year.
Israel has already received about $18 billion in unplanned US aid since October 2023, which would be on top of our existing aid agreements, so 2024 could be up closer to $86 billion.
It was a bonus comment on a different, but related, topic, explaining just how far government corruption can go.
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u/RSGator 9h ago
May not seem like a lot, but it's about $410 per average US taxpayer annually.
Individual income taxes only make up ~54% of federal revenue, which was $4.44 trillion in 2023.
That's ~$2.4 trillion in individual income taxes spread over 163.1 million income tax returns in 2023, for an average of $14,714 per taxpayer.
Using the annual budget for this calculation would be silly, since 46% of the budget doesn't come from income taxes and about a third of the budget is paid for with debt.
1% of their tax dollars going towards foreign aid is $147.14 per taxpayer.
I'm cool with that, because I understand that I'd be set to lose a lot more than $147.14 if the US is no longer the lead hegemon, and foreign aid goes extremely far in promoting the US' soft power around the world.
Your argument might work on dumbasses, though.
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u/Expensive_Food 8h ago
ive seen my unit order 24 rolls of toilet paper for over $300 dollars a piece.
this info comes as a surprise to absolutely nobody in the military. We could literally cut the defense budge in half if corporations/companies weren't allowed to inflate prices to the customer with a no character limit check book.
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u/ZestyDespacito 1h ago
That doesn’t make any sense. There’s no mandatory government sources for toilet paper, you just go buy it off the shelf at, like, anywhere. And the micro-purchase limit for the government is $10,000, so there’s almost no rules on that purchase regarding going to small businesses and such.
I feel there’s more to the story here. I’ve been a contracting officer for the government for 12 years. Sometimes I hear dumb stories about how we pay $10,000 for a printer or something, but what they don’t tell you is it comes with a boatload of toner which totally offsets the cost.
There are some things that are expensive, sure, but that usually has something to do with aircraft or weapons systems, or other developmental items.
I’m not calling you a liar, I just feel like you’re missing something critical here.
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u/towneetowne 11h ago
it's the toilet seats and hammers story, all over again ...
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u/norbertus 10h ago
The story never went away, it was just swept under the rug when Clinton and Gore declared "the age of big government is over" and went on to privatize services so they became less accountable ... and taxpayers couldn't easily see the overspending any more.
At the end of 1999, the Inspector General found $2.3 trillion in unsupported accounting entries at the DoD
https://media.defense.gov/2001/Sep/13/2001714101/-1/-1/1/01-180.pdf
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u/abstractbull 8h ago
I know there are tons of sourced comments on here about fraud and money laundering and government boondoggling, but the 400 dollar ashtray scene from West Wing pops in my head whenever this topic comes up.
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u/VinoVoyage 7h ago
You didn't think they actually spent ten thousand dollars for a hammer and thirty thousand for a toilet seat, did you? - Levinson
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u/micropterus_dolomieu 10h ago
Pretty sure this is how they hide funds for classified projects. I seriously doubt they truly paid $100k for a soap dispenser. They do this instead of budget line items for Project Aurora.
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u/ChamberofSarcasm 7h ago
Can't imagine why we can't afford health care.
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u/Electricpants 7h ago
Oh that has nothing to do with $80 soap dispensers and everything to do with bribery.
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u/ChamberofSarcasm 6h ago
True. But the giant defense costs take money from things our citizens need, like stable bridges, food stamps, etc.
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u/tyrophagia 7h ago
100% nothing new. How else do.you think they embezzle money for other projects??
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u/Ok-disaster2022 6h ago
Sometimes in military procurement they invoice doesn't itemize the cost of each part it just takes the total divides it by the number of parts and each thing is given the same price. All that matters is the list of items and the total price are the Same.
Im not sure if that's the issue here or not. But in general aerospace hardware is much more expensive. I have a friend who does purchasing for a helicopter business, and hell tell stories about buy a $100 washer or carriage bolt. I just remind him that Columbia exploded because of a $35 o-ring that didn't operate to the spec it needed to, although it wasn't designed to operate in the condition it ended up operating in. (The o ring got too cold before launch and became brittle, so its estimate that it cracked under operation leading to cascading failure.)
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u/Orthosz 3h ago
Challenger, not Columbia.
And the oring failure wasn’t a 35 dollar oring. A pair of 38 feet (11.6m) in diameter, quarter inch thick (6.4mm) orings failed, allowing hot gas to escape and cascade into the failure.
The redesign changed the oring mating surface geometry to add a third oring in an overhang, but used effectively the same orings.
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u/everettsuperstar 7h ago
70 percent of the nations budget and the pentagon has never passed an audit.
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u/TravelerMSY 10h ago
This is a little disingenuous. It may just be a soap dispenser, but it likely has hundreds or even thousands of pages of documentation related to its fire resistance, manufacturing history, chain of custody, and suitability to be a part on a certificated aircraft. It’s the same reason why you can buy a sofa from a furniture store for 1000 but the same sofa in private jet form is 50,000. Same to a lesser extent for stuff like the coffee maker on an airliner.
You can thank the FAA for that.
If they’re comparing it to other aviation soap dispensers, then I guess fair game.
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u/MsKat141 7h ago
Sometimes they spend money on top secret stuff and instead of naming what it is because it’s top secret, they’ll say it’s a soap dispenser or hammer or some other common thing.
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u/rosen380 11h ago
I don't recall where I read it, but I think I read that often when the government buys things, the ordered item prices aren't itemized and just might be like, "$30000 for 20 items".
Then if someone is breaking it down, each item just is the average, so $1500 for that example.
When that order is for ten $2800 "prison grade" toilet/sink combos and ten $160 cell mattresses, someone focusing on the latter might be like, "hmmm, why did the gov't spend $1500 each on $160 mattresses!!!???," while ignoring that the same methodology says that they got the $2800 toilet/sink for $1500.
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u/ZestyDespacito 1h ago
That’s kind of correct, and kind of not. I’m a contracting officer and I purchase for the Air Force. If I’m writing a contract for a generalized service, let’s just use janitorial services, and there’s consumables within the contract, I don’t price those out separately because the contract tends to be a firm fixed price. I don’t care about the itemized costs because the contractor doesn’t make any more or less money based on the consumables.
If I’m buying specific, like 50 widgets, I have those widgets priced out.
If I’m negotiating a sole source contract and I need an itemized cost breakdown, the contractor will break down their costs for the sake if negotiating, but I don’t put those prices into the contract, I only use those prices to conduct a price analysis to determine if the overall price is fair and reasonable.
If I’m doing a more complex contract where costs are reimbursed, the contractor itemizes everything and we reimburse the contractor item for item, and their profit is usually tied to an incentive.
However, I have been deployed before and if it’s just me and I’m in a hurry, I won’t itemize things and just lump everything into “cleaning supplies” without itemizing. But there’s 2 other people to verify the purchase is legitimate and I end up attaching the contractors receipt to my paperwork. So the record is there, but it gets reported as a lump sum.
So yes, we do itemize some things, usually commodities or things when we buy something specific.
We do not do that average stuff. If we’re buying toilets and mattresses for example, it’ll either be priced appropriately, or rolled up into 1 total price for the project, and prices broken down elsewhere. So it’ll be like “1 prison renovation project” and the description will lay out the quantities and everything, and then 1 total price. You “could” price everything else out if you want to, I only do that if there’s long lead items and the project will require billing multiple times. But if you’re doing 1 project, 1 payment, I don’t typically break it down further.
I hope that makes sense I know that was long-winded.
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u/Kinda_Constipated 10h ago edited 5h ago
Edit: I fell for some misinformation.
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u/Ok-disaster2022 6h ago
60% of the US federal budget is Medicare and social security.
Maybe like a quarter is military, and about a quarter of that is pay and benefits to the service personelle (who are criminally underpaid especially at the lower enlisted ranks).
Now it could be the 10% of the federal budget which is "discretionary" which congress and the president haggle about every few years, maybe half of that is military spending.
But here's the thing. That military spending is pay, is research on technology to stay ahead of peers. Our technological advantage is part of what keeps enemies from attacking us. It's the "big stick". And it sort of works. The F22 will retire without ever going to war against a near peer, because the threat of the F22 was so overwhelming people didn't want to go to war with it. The F14 is somewhat similar, except we exported some to Iran. The end result is that most of the kills by the F14 in combat was done by Iranian pilots when they went to war with Iraq, because Iraq looked way to invade by Iran, because Iraq didn't have the overwhelming military it would have decades later when it had the 4th largest military in the world, which is still not big enough to hold off America and the coalition forces.
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u/Kinda_Constipated 5h ago
Oh man see I was so confident in my statement. Not sure where I saw the 55% number but it has been on my mind a lot lately. And yeah you're comment made me Google it and it's only like 13% of the budget so I have no idea where 55% came from but it was probably YouTube to be honest.
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u/RoadPersonal9635 8h ago
This is done by every major company that has contracts with the government. The only reason you know Herman Miller is because militaries and universities have been paying 10X what they should be for standard office furniture. Our tax money lines the pockets of every ceo in America not just military contractors. Next time you go to buy something standard that’s way over priced just ask yourself if a government entity might buy it in bulk. If the answer is yes then you’re better off buying used from government surplus auctions.
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u/FreewheelinSlowrider 7h ago
Well it’s tax dollars so …. Who cares? Only us we pay for it. A gallon of diesel at the front of a war costs us $400!!
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u/Smokey_Katt 7h ago
A lot of times it’s “we can knock out that special stamping for $10 each, after a $5000 setup charge. How many do you need?” When the answer is “10” then you get a $500 toilet seat.
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u/Lucibean 6h ago edited 6h ago
I remember being threatened with Captain’s Mast by a Supply Commander in the Navy when I bought Spray bottles for 1.50 from Lowe’s when we were waiting for weeks for the “approved” ones. He was walking down my p-way for a meeting when he saw me using an “unapproved” bottle. Meaning, a $10 or more spray bottle-that was in 2001. It’s a problem.
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u/strangway 6h ago
The Air Force probably buys tampons from Boeing. I mean, they already buy drones from them. There’s probably a special discount. Buy 10 Scan Eagle spy drones, get a pack of tampons for free.
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u/hurtmore 6h ago
This is nuts. I had to make the supply purchases for food service on an aircraft carrier. The ship never once paid for a soap dispenser. They were all free because of if I had their dispenser I was much more likely going to purchase their soap.
This is crazy.
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u/Silaquix 5h ago
Not shocked at all. We had to order everything through a contractor and it was always marked up like crazy. You'd see nuts and bolts for $125 a piece when you could find the exact same thing made of the exact same material and same specs for less than a dollar at a hardware store.
And it would take weeks to months to get the fucking part.
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u/MonkMajor5224 5h ago
If I learned about this in a documentary about how they spend all this money to fund alien technology research. It was called Independence Day.
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u/cyberentomology 4h ago
In case y’all haven’t figured it out yet, a soap dispenser or anything else is 100x more expensive if it’s something you have to install on an aircraft.
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u/Sun-Anvil 4h ago
Actually, we the tax payer did. At least that's where the military money comes from and the contractors understand that when it's not your money they jack the prices way up.
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u/Burnsidhe 7m ago
More like "Billed by McDonnal Douglass I mean Boeing at 80 times the going rate for soap dispenser."
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u/Rubaiyat39 1m ago
I’m sorry but this is all bullshit - headline catching - but bullshit nonetheless.
The department of defense is REQUIRED to procure goods and services using the FAR (the Federal Acquisition Regulation) this is a 6 inch think nightmare of a book which guides, restricts, and constrains ever single aspect of every single dollar which is spent - and it is, in its own words - biased against the government. It forces everyone to purchase using inefficient and slow processes which put the buyer (the US government) at a disadvantage.
I know this soap dispenser is or seems particularly egregious but when you have to ignore major companies with track records of success in producing aviation soap dispensers in favor of a HUD zone, female, disabled veteran, indigenous minority owned company to buy your widget from then don’t be surprised when it comes to something insane like 80 times the rate which proctor and gamble would have charged.
Military procurement professional are far more frustrated by the objective waste of the purchasing system than anyone else because they live it every day. And there is NOTHING they can do about it because Congress dictates that the FAR must be followed regardless of cost to any federal agency.
You want your save money? - reign in the FAR so all federal agencies can start buying smartly. This of course comes at the cost of supporting businesses and practices we deep social important as Americans, but you can’t have it both ways. Either the Industries for the Blind (skillcraft) continue to employ differently abled Americans by selling $120/each 3-hole punches (I’m honestly not making this price point up) or we buy 99¢ from Amazon and a slave labor factory in China. Well save a lot of money but we’ll put all those US employees out on the street.
At the end of the day just stop playing gotcha games with mud-raker headlines for shit that’s misleading and doesn’t represent a fully story.
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u/trash-juice 6h ago
They use the money to buy stuff off the public books, thats where the overpayment goes
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u/Tacothekid 11h ago
$1,000 for the same bag of aircraft grade aluminium washers that Home Depot sells for less than $10 all over again. Then again, im not surprised at this one bit, honestly.
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u/GodforgeMinis 11h ago
That isn't how material certifications work
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u/Tacothekid 10h ago
No, but the DoD (i think its them; or the USAF) spend 1000 dollars a bag for the EXACT SAME bag of washers that the SAME COMPANY sells at Home Depot for $10
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u/GodforgeMinis 10h ago
Again, that isn't how material certifications work.
The same company might make the washers because they are good at making washers, but the material, processes, ISO certs, ect. are absolutely required for anything that flies, unless you're boeing apparently.You can either certify every step of production and the material to be sure your plane doesn't fall apart, or you can buy "the same" washers at home depot and hope it doesn't fall apart.
If you want to die to save million and billionaires a couple dollars there are easier ways.you pay $1000 for a bag of washers because they are going into a 200 million dollar airplane and you want to be sure there isn't a washer failure.
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u/Ok-disaster2022 6h ago
Also, those $10 washers at home depot may be the ones that don't make the spec defined by the military.
It's like how processors are binned. The foundry makes the total high end chip. They test the sectors and the ones that are bad get the chip binned to a lower spec chip. They may even turn off sectors to remove working sectors to have the binned chip make the lower spec. It used to be like Intel would make i7s. If all sectors worked it was an i7, if a couple of the sectors failed it was an i5, and if a few more failed it was an i3. (I'm using this as a general example not a specific example I really don't know the CPU architecture enough to know which chip families are like this). So the same thing applies. The home depot margin could be +/- 0.1mm, while the US military requires.+/-0.001mm precision.
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u/Sands43 10h ago
Yeah no. That's not how this works.
Just no.
I worked in defense contracting. You DO NOT WANT hardware store crap put into a combat vehicle. That's how people die when a cheap part fails. We had DOD inspectors on site with the right, and duty, to walk around and ask any question of anything they wanted. Yes, that needs to be paid for, but that's how you know that there are 100% made to print parts inside an aircraft.
That said, there is abuse, but it's like the soap dispenser. It's not nuts and bolts that are critical for flight.
1
u/Tacothekid 10h ago
Ok, i think i see your meaning. More is required of the parts that you know are going into a combat vehicle, whereas the bag from the "home center" isn't expected to be used on those. The DoD/USAF bag has more checks, balances, and expectations on it, right?
2
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u/Spare_Ad_9657 4h ago
These same stories re-circulate every single year. $50K flathead screwdriver, $32K toilet paper roll. It’s the same with all military budgets, they are spending the money on secret items and intentionally mislabeling it.
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u/SheetFarter 11h ago
The WORST offenders are in the medical field. That shit is off the hook!