Defense Dept. "Misplaces" Assets

In my search for something interesting to post, I came across this article from the San Francisco Chronicle from May of 2003. In the article, the journalist reports that the Department of Defense, one of our largest bureaucracies, has “misplaced” assets that total nearly $1 trillion. Worsening this exorbitant monetary value is the assets that have been “misplaced,” which includes “56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units.” Now, according to our studies of Weingast and Moran’s Congressional Dominance Approach, this waste would presumably be the result of the desires of those Congressmen who oversee the Department of Defense. I don’t know about you, but I would hate to think that our legislators would support such huge wastes and/or losses of assets and funds. So, in order to discover the true preferences of the legislators, in accordance with the views of Weingast and Moran, one must uncover the incentives that they have put in place to coax the bureaucracy into doing their bidding. As opposed to my expectations, Congress’s incentives seem to point to their desire for the Department of Defense to continue wasting money! There has been no outcry by the Oversight Committee, nor has the Appropriations Committee threatened to take the department funds. In fact, the budget of the Department of Defense has grown substantially in recent years. Why does it seem like legislators support such flagrant losses? It may be possible for the larger bureaucracies to ignore their funder’s desires more so than the smaller ones, since the larger bureaucracies often are more widespread and more difficult to do without. The Department of Defense may also have special leeway because it is seen as highly important nowadays, as we have multiple military engagements in multiple countries at present. Therefore, it seems that the monopoly powers of the funders may have been overcome by necessity of the monopoly supplier of national defense, at least for the time being. Legislators assuredly do not approve of or support such wastes of resources, it just seems that there is not much that they can do about it. It is much more reasonable to think that the legislators would do better for themselves, as vote maximizers, to support bad accounting over cutting the budget of our Defense Department in a time of war.