By John Solomon
How the government's punishing of the exposure of official wrongdoing can linger for years
Several conservatives who sat in on closed-door meetings at last week's Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., came away worried by GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney's foreign and defense policies.
The Pentagon is planning deep spending cuts this year to a new mobile computing network for soldiers — a move that critics say punishes Army technology buyers for not spending appropriated funds fast enough.
GOP presidential front-runner Mitt Romney has assembled a cast of conservative George W. Bush-era veterans as his key national security advisers. Some of them played important roles in the war on terror and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The U.S. has lost billions of dollars to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan and stands to repeat that in future wars without big changes in how the government awards and manages contracts for battlefield support and reconstruction projects, independent investigators said Wednesday.
The Obama administration has not settled on a plan to protect and supply thousands of State Department diplomats and employees left behind in Iraq once all but a relatively few U.S. troops leave the county in a little more than a year.
"The comptroller staff is a highly professional group," he said. "This isn't a meat ax."
"If they're not spending it by midyear, come August and September, they're throwing money at anything," he said. "We've all heard the horror stories about government spending in the closing weeks of the fiscal year. ... They're true."
