DOD to spend $753 million on printing costs, after being asked to trim paper budget

The Golden Horseshoe is a weekly designation from Just the News intended to highlight egregious examples of wasteful taxpayer spending by the government. The award is named for the horseshoe-shaped toilet seats for military airplanes that cost the Pentagon a whopping $640 each back in the 1980s. 

This week’s award is going to the Defense Department for spending a projected $753 million in taxpayer dollars on printing and reproduction costs in 2020.

What makes the department especially deserving of the award is that $753 million is the number it predicted spending – after specifically being asked to cut the number down from the $608 million spent annually every year from 2010 to 2015. For those keeping score, the department is moving in the wrong direction.

In October of 2018, the Government Accountability Office released a report stating that during the fiscal years 2010 through 2015 the DoD spent an average of $608 million annually on “document services." Such services includes costs like purchasing printers, using the printers and electronic content management.

Congress thought $608 million on printing activities and expensive machinery for the department seemed exorbitant and asked DoD to cut its document-related spending by 34%. The report also found that DoD was spending inefficiently on expensive printers.

DoD agreed to comply with the recommendations of the report and scale back their workplace printing costs but never made good on that promise.

According to the DoD’s 2021 budget projections, the department will spend $753 million on printing costs in 2020, which is a similar figure to what was spent in 2019, what will be spent in 2021, and so on and so forth.

Office printing always seems like a marginal cost that no one in particular is in charge of overseeing.

In the DoD's case, this is actually just as true as it is anywhere else; the initial 2018 GAO report found the department isn’t even totally sure of its printing cost estimates because its reporting system isn’t centralized and encompasses many different departments and initiatives.

Nonetheless, when your workplace is the Pentagon, those seemingly small costs can end up totaling three-quarters of a billion dollars in taxpayer money.

This back and forth between Congress, the GAO and DoD is notable as we see lawmakers try to impact responsible spending cuts, agencies agreeing to those budget scale backs, then the precise opposite occurring. This sort of behavior that pays lip service to government scale backs, but shows no follow-through effort is disconcerting as we ramp up government spending across all divisions during the pandemic.

Oh well. Maybe the significant number of DoD employees now working from home because of the pandemic will end up slashing the Pentagon’s printing costs by the margin they haven’t, so far, been able to find.