THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

First he promised to make it bigly yuge again and second he promised to pay for it by cutting waste. The first part is almost guaranteed to happen, Republicans love to throw a shit-ton of money at the military.The second part will never happen because the Republicans never cut anything unless poor people and others are involved.

That criticism triggered meetings a week ago with the heads of those two projects’ main manufacturers, Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., at the billionaire’s Mar-A-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump said afterward that he’d extracted promises to cut costs.

But it remains to be seen whether Trump will be able to stay on top of Pentagon excess after he becomes president Jan. 20. The day after Trump met with the leaders of the two defense contractors, the Pentagon announced a long list of spending projects that totaled nearly $550 million.

Trump will have a difficult time focusing on that wide range of spending and carrying out his pledge to pay for expanded military operations by trimming Pentagon waste, say experts on the way the Pentagon oversees its contracts. He won’t find many friends in the process, they note.

“He’s going to encounter a Pentagon bureaucracy that will instinctively say ‘no’ to most reforms he proposes,” said Todd Harrison, a former defense lobbyist and retired Air Force Reserves captain who’s now an analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “He’s certainly not the first president to come in saying we can cut waste and abuse within the Pentagon budget. Very few have had much success.”

William Hartung, who in 2011 wrote a book about the clout F-35 contractor Lockheed-Martin wields in the U.S. Congress, made a similar observation about the Pentagon.

“They don’t scrutinize the original bids carefully enough, so contractors come in with a low bid while understanding that they’re not going to meet it,” Hartung said. “And then the Pentagon will add requirements and new features along the way. Eventually the costs get out of control.”

By the time that’s evident, however, inertia keeps the program going. “Once they put a certain amount of money on the table, they’re reluctant to end or dramatically scale it back,” Hartung said.

Whether Trump will be able to change that culture is what experts in Pentagon procurement are watching. With a price tag of $400 billion and rising, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, for example, already is the most expensive weapons system ever built. It could end up exceeding $1 trillion by the time all planned 2,457 planes are manufactured.

The military previously scored points with the locals with base locations across all the states. Now that the Pentagon has closed most of the bases and shipped them overseas, it has replaced its influence point with the states in defense spending. The F-35 is a true mutt, being built in all 50 states and several countries overseas that we hope will buy the Flying Dogs Breakfast when the time comes. This insertion into the national being makes useless and wasteful programs next to impossible to kill and a man like Trump will soon find out how few friends he has in Congress if he tries to cut spending in any meaningful way.