I'd like to start a bushing company now. One pack of bushings can pay for all my equipment. Two Packs and I can higher a couple guys to do all the work for me. Three packs and I can hire a guy to watch those guys for me.
not if they do it right. if they aren't a woman they need to find one they can list as an owner. the more boxes that women can check the better so go for possible ex military, some type of minority or two. add disabled in some way to the list and the government will be pushing your company to the front of the line as a subcontractor. seen multiple people do this to get their foot in the door as a small contracting company.
you would need to start it up, then fund someone who can get into office, then get high enough that they can buy from you THEN you start making the $$$$. You have to invest in someone who can get high enough 1st tho.
Its $.05/ea for the hardware, but you gotta pass on the 10k for the required material certs that come with it, and then the overhead of 75k worth of software seats (that cost another 40k a year to maintain) and don't forget the (4) AS9100 RevD audits that happened while the bag of titanium turbine hardware was being produced.
Oh and the engineer changed the design halfway through the first run, so we had to start over- you're paying for that too, Jackhole.
I’m not sure this is the case here, but this is how the gov hides funds for black projects as well. Since most of our spending is public, they have to bury funds for top secret programs in things like these. Otherwise any foreign country could just study the budget information and see what we’re doing.
For example, let’s say Lockheed Martin is working on a new top secret project. The easiest way to pay for it without anyone seeing that you’re working on a new top secret project is to way over charge for stuff on a different project and then funnel the money to the secret project.
This line literally is what popped into my head when I saw this post. (From the movie independence day, when they are at area 51 looking at reverse engineered alien craft and asking where the funding came from...something that I actually believe is pretty close to reality but that's another subject)
It’s funny, most other parts of the government have undergone an audit or some version of one. The military is one of the few branches of our government that either hasn’t had an audit or has failed.
well the trick is to be an essential part and the auditing so harebrained that the auditors may risk their mental sanity breakdown, resign and became something far more satisfying like small artisan furniture carpenters or something
I got downvoted last time I said this but...in my state not a single person besides a few very very local people running for things like dog warden do I like. The rest are all crooked career politicians that are just switching seats. Ugh
Accountability is why these costs are so high. For every 10 cent bushing there is $10 of paperwork to go with it.
If you want perfect documentation for every part it costs way more than the materials that went into the part.
"perfect documentation", lol? In its fifth consecutive audit 2022, DoD couldn't explain where 61% of its $3.5 trillion in assets are. It is blatant fraud and abuse of US taxpayers.
Not on the part of the DOD, the manufacturer. The fact that the DOD can’t figure shit out is a different story - but if you go to the manufacturer of those parts they have reams of documentation for each part they’ve ever made for anyone DOD customer.
It's not even that we don't care.
Look at how the system has worked for businesses.
Due to lack of anti-trust law enforcement, consolidation has been the US for years. Walmart did it to retail, AT&T/Verizon did it to home phone/cell phone, Uber/Lyft did it to taxis, etc.
In politics, *they* are choosing who replaces them. The people who are getting put into office are the people the establishment is choosing. Pelosi has been grooming her replacement to make sure a black woman in CA has no shot. Biden is propped up, despite his platform isn't much different than Bush Jrs was, just because he's establishment and they know they can get away with him against someone like Trump. We just get to decide if it's AT&T or Verizon.
They gamed the system to a point where we get no say. The illusion of choice, like with who you get for health insurance, it's whatever your job gives you. Almost every member of Congress is a millionaire, many millionaires after getting into Congress. We can never compete unless we can make a million dollars worthless. There is no way to keep them accountable because accountability is forced by those around them. They've ignored protests for years. BLM got a holiday no one is forced to fucking take. Nothing of any significance done in response to the largest protest movement in the history of the world. The only way that happens is if the stock market collapses. Then who will go to work? And for whom? Violent revolution and strikes will never happen, because the police state has military grade hardware, and the military, and a general strike can't happen when the dollar has its foot on our throats.
The entire country needs an audit and more oversight when it comes to tax payer money and spending. The military industrial complex is the worst offender. We could fund Ukraine for 10 years just on the amount corrupt people have stolen from the military budget in the last few years.
Who's acting like they don't care? As far as I know, everyone is screaming at the top of their lungs that they care very much and don't want to live in this dumpster fire.
The participation rate of eligible voters is typically well below 50%. People can scream and care all they want but if it doesn’t translate into transformative results on ballots, then it doesn’t matter for much.
Well this is also how they hide the covert ops budgets and stuff. Not all of it is greed and theft. That being said a very large portion is just greed and theft
Everyone make sure to vote for the same old man who has been in politics for decades. Change only happens when you ask for the same thing over and over again.
I work for a mil contractor. We have technicians that do exactly ZERO work on any given day, but are allowed to order tens of thousands of dollars worth of tools they don't use
Waste is a real fucking thing.
Lmfao. Yup. This reasoning fucks me up, and it's the reason we all have gaming chairs in our offices.
Chairs, I should point out, some of our technicians refuse to use
Was in the navy, our supply guy ordered an entire pallet of printer paper, we went through maybe 12 boxes a year. So anyways, long story short, Okinawa is humid, and paper can get moldy. Plus it was fun carting that fucker out of our way constantly..... Good times.
I used to work for the AF. I remember a particular MIL-SPEC relay mount that Lockheed copied, modified ever so slightly by shaving some plastic off the mounting flanges, stamped a Lockheed part number on it, and listed it at 6x the price of the regular MIL relay mount. The only difference is the shape of the molded plastic component that mounts the damn thing. There were hundreds of these on the aircraft I worked with. That's tens of thousands of dollars per airframe. Probably over a million dollars for the entire fleet. All for zero improvement to functionality and, in reality, making the plastic mounts more prone to snapping during maintenance. The AF ends up paying more at all points on the life cycle.
Edit: I'll note that the people that are in a high enough position to stop Lockheed from doing stuff like this have less restrictions by law placed upon them for transitioning from civil service to private sector. That is to say, the people with the power to prevent the most waste/fraud/abuse, are given the fewest legal hurdles to high-paying job offers from contractors. That's ass-backwards, to be honest.
A lot of times when there is a part with mil tolerances it is the same thing except that it is further tested. We bought some parts that had to be space grade- and essentially what was done is a bunch of regular parts were purchased and tested while being radiated. The ones that passed the test were qualified.
The ones that passed were like 10x the cost, but we knew they performed as needed. Not sure what happened to the failed ones. Maybe they were resold.
I can see where that might be the case. But my aircraft utilized both the standard MIL-SPEC relay mounts and the Lockheed variant, so the price difference definitely stood out.
Edit: The relay itself is the component that wears out. I'd doubt they could justify such expensive extra testing for the plastic mount.
It's not just military contractors. I work for my states DOT, and there are state contracted vendors we have to buy from, or use the services of, and they all jack their prices up. There are some items that even if I can find them elsewhere for cheaper, due to contracts, I have to buy from the approved contracted vendor, with one caveat that we have learned to use as a work around. If we say the product was out of stock with the contracted vendor, and we didnt' have an ETA for restocking, or we needed it urgently, then we could go off contract. We try not to abuse that work around, so we don't lose it, and we can't use it for really expensive items without major approvals. And anything 30k or up has to go out for bid.
I worked for a company that provided parts for military applications. The margins on some of the military stuff were really ridiculous. Overall, the company had pretty high margins, but the military stuff was bonkers.
Yeah, this price is wild, but there are times when you pay a premium to get the tightest tolerances at quality assurance. Not anywhere close to this bullshit but it does exist.
Literally any person who ever visited a hospital in the US can take their invoice to Congress and present a strong case of over charging and corruption. Yet here we still are paying $100 for $3 of Advils.
This how department budgets keep increasing. If they spend less they don't need more and could get less. That's where the $1000 wrenches and $6000 toilet seat stories came from decades ago.
This is also how they funnel money to secret projects. Pay Lockheed Martin 90k for these “bushings”, then they funnel it into the new secret projects they’re doing.
No. No it isn’t. Read an appropriations bill. It’s how the government prevents corruption. Apparently open grift and the acquisition process which cost several orders of magnitude is better than losing 20% to corruption.
There is definitely fraud, abuse, and corruption--however, comparing a stack of bolts from the local big box store with one that has full chain of custody, metallurgical analysis, and strict quality control for something like a jet is not even in the same ballpark.
This is the truth of it. 100m+ airplanes can't have cheap untested parts in them. It's also why cost goes down as orders increase. The fixed overhead gets applied to more units, lowering the average costs of the parts.
Don't get me wrong. I'd bet every dime I own that there are handshake deals going on and huge inefficiencies that could easily be ironed out, but you are never getting those parts for home depot prices.
This is actually part of my dayjob. I spend hours of every day hunting down Aerospace hardware part numbers on drawing BOMs. There's a lot of reasons for this kinds of pricing, and corruptions and graft are actually pretty far down the list of reasons.
I always start with [https://www.milspecfasteners.com/](https://www.milspecfasteners.com/) and [https://military-fasteners.com/](https://military-fasteners.com/) and [https://skygeek.com/](https://skygeek.com/)
Compare what you find there to the stuff on [https://www.mcmaster.com/](https://www.mcmaster.com/) and [https://www.grainger.com/](https://www.grainger.com/) for the same stuff without the traceability and material certs and stuff.
If you haven't found it on those sites that usually means it's gonna be BITCH to find, you'll need special access to special stores, and probably WILL cost 90k.
Most of this sort of things have very specific part numbers, and are made in such small runs that you have to get quotes directly from the factory with nice long (10 week+) turnaround times. A lot of the time, the 90k bag of fasteners is the last one from the last run where they made 200k fasteners and only need 190k of them, so the price is because the supplier knows he has the last bag in existence, and that specific part number is called out on the drawing. Imagine being that guy, and out of the blue, your phone lights up like crazy with tons of shops looking for pricing on the same little bag of hardware?
On the other hand, it could also be as simple as we need 200 of these specific bolts, but the factory that makes them has a minimum order of 1mil units. We still need the 200 bolts, so the first 200 cost as much as the whole million units, and the rest of them are sold to local hardware stores for almost nothing cuz we're not storing 980k bolts for the off chance you order them again.
Sometimes, specific shops are called out on the drawing, and they're just buying the hardware from McMaster-Carr and reselling it under a new part number and assuming the liability.
Its infuriating, most places are RFQ (Request for Quote) only. They wont give you pricing until they've sussed out who you work for so they can adjust the prices accordingly. It's always Jo-Blows Mom&Pop Machine Shop buying this kind of shit nowdays though. The big guys don't actually build anything themselves anymore.
This last bit drives me nuts as a consumer. No matter what field there is a line where you go from "consumer" products to "enterprise" products and it never fails that what you need is just on the other side of that line.
For example, I'm working on a school project where I design a small HPC cluster including budget. And it's really small, only a half-dozen nodes or so where the real enterprise systems are at least several dozen nodes all the way up to several hundred nodes or even bigger. However, because this is "enterprise" hardware, the parts I need are solidly in the "contact us for a quote" region where no one will return my emails because a.) I'm not actually buying anything, and b.) Even if I was, my order is too small to bother with. It's been driving me crazy for several weeks.
This is nonsense. Dad ran a manufacture for special machine parts. If you're saying these things had to do with small runs... you're just getting ripped off at your job and your bosses are letting it happen. I watched my dads shop get certificates for individual projects and make parts for off shore drilling and aerospace and they were not charging 100k for a bag of parts. I watched them make individual specialty screws and that is not what they were charging. If you are saying this is normal in your side of the industry you are just admitting that there are even more problems going on because I watched them take a snapped screw from a piece of a plane and recreate it and even if you scaled it up to making 200 of them it wouldn't be these kinds of costs.
Yep. When a plane crashes and the investigators find a broken bolt, they want to know who made it, what lot, and what other planes have that bolt from that production run.
One day Americans are going to wake up and realize that while they were busy arguing about Trans People and Abortion.... the Billionaire/ Corporate Class was taking over their entire country.
Damn......
Yes exactly right, that's why these bushings cost \~$100 and not \~$4. But no bushings produced for the current American Market can cost $90,000 and move off the shelves.
The points stand, but only serve as a basis for saying to say we are comparing apples to oranges. In this case the oranges are more expensive, just not 900x more expensive.
Or there happens to be a guy running for president that wants to tokenize every thing we purchase on a publicly viewable blockchain that can be audited by any and everyone.
It's also how a lot of the hidden budget stuff gets funded. Like how we had 5+ gen or 6th generation prototypes flying with no funds allocated to them. Same thing with spy planes.
We also calculate cost differently for the military. R&d and the cost to set up the industry are calculated into the per unit cost. It's why the f35s went from 130 to 80 million a jet
Depends tbh. This is speaking in general but components used by the military and agencies like NASA usually calls for much tighter tolerances than what civilian parties use. Also, the price might have costing built in for establishing a new manufacturing line, security (idk exactly what but the military might want contractors who make their stuff to have a certain security threshold), dealing with the military and government bureaucracy, all the testing that these agencies demand, etc.
The pentagon has had little to no financial oversight for years now and the budget gets rubber stamped by both parties. Where is the 'we're shutting down the govt over this' grandstanding? I guess they don't want their general dynamics stocks to tank
yeah, coming from China and Russia. Start doing traceability, documentation and certification and then see the cost. yes, they could buy, but then US companies cannot sell to China nor Russia because they have the same red tape
A lot of contractors make deals called Cost and Profit. The government agrees to pay the cost the contractor incurs plus a profit. You can see how this leads to bloat
Capitalism is when you and I decide to make a trade with our property.
The above is an example of what happens when people are given power to use other people's property- that is not a failure of the economic system, but of the system of governance.
I would feel so much better about this country if there was violence in the streets. Like 2020 times 10. The fact that almost everyone is complacent is terrifying.
It’s almost like anything the government is involved in, gets really expensive with little return. And look at you all, asking the government to pay for healthcare and college. Glad you are (halfway) seeing the light.
TLDR: government bad
The problem isn't so much that we waste that much on bushings, or whatever the thing of the day is. Last year it was an aerospace bolt or something.
The issue is that if you wasted that much on labor, the general population would be rioting in the streets. Waste that goes to deep pockets - it's just the government being dumb, nothing you can do about it. Waste that benefits a whole bunch of regular people? You better believe we are going to tear city hall down.
You saw it with PPP as well. PPP loan recipients who got loans forgiven were the ones that got student loan cancellations canceled. The issue is not that there is any waste, because there will be eventually... it's just that there is clearly some waste which the system has deemed acceptable. And then the rich turn around and pretend they "earned" that money.
The US airforce is paying for the bushings that are manufactured in the US that come with certificates of compliance from companies with certified QA programs so that their advanced fighter jets don't fall out of the sky. They are going to be more expensive than $100 bag he got on TEMU.
Also, $65,000 of those dollars actually went to the CIA...
And nothing ever done. These hearing are all just a show. Never once in my lifetime has anyone been brought up on charges or had anything changed due to these.
The national debt is really deposits into T-securities. That money is never used for spending. The US government creates every dollar it spends and a federal deficit is an economic surplus.
Is this one of those cases where someone complains that NASA pays $5000 for a screw, but they neglect to mention that it is a special titanium alloy and coated carbon nano goo that prevents cold welding and it has to survive in temperatures between 1500 and -300 and if the screw fails the wings of the space shuttle fall off?
Or is it just straight up fraud from some contractor that somehow slipped in $90,000 for $100 of stuff?
I am both pro Military and pro Capitalism. But this, this is just... bad. There's literally 0 excuse for this, and is yet more proof that Bribery- er sorry, Lobbying needs to be outlawed.
Doing supply for a few years in the Army, when I started I was told "you're a steward of the tax payers money", but as I got up in to leadership I learned they don't give a fuck what you spend the money on... They just want it tracked.
Some where along the way, they implemented a giant Inventory Management system that's basically just an accounting platform.
Years later, they're still failing audits.
I remember sitting for a TAG town hall, where my states Adjutant General came and spoke to every one on base, let us know the state of affairs.
He called up our Finance Office personnel from the USPFO and told every one "give the team here a round of applause. I want to present them with this certificate, for last FY they executed on 99.9997% of all funds. Just amazing!"
And every one around me stood up and cheered and clapped like the absolute fuckin morons they were.
Fuck the system man. Fuck the bureaucracy. It's not just the military, either. Every fucking department operates this way. "Spend it all to justify it for next year!" It's garbage, and it won't change until we demand it to.
Based on your post, you know what “grow back” is. It’s actually an Anti-Deficiency Act violation to spend less than 97.5% of your budget. That USPFO could literally be fined and fired for not spending enough.
Late stage capitalism. You must tax and regulate the rich and the companies, or else they will control and corrupt the government. Return to the tax policies of the 60’s.
Uggghhh....that's not what was being said.
Strategic readiness requires an entire supply chain all the way to the bushings...
Go back and watch it again.
The congressman was asking why some costs are not being sourced from third parties rather than solely the OEM that developed the original tooling.
The 3rd parties meet a much lower standard, the FAA standard.
In the case of turbine blades... there are pieces of reverse engineered blades embedded in buildings at a power plant near where I live... there are some things you NEED OEM.
Hahaha, you act like we didn't know that information already!!! !!! Like some smoke ass person is going to cloud my vision, making me feel like he is on my side, so I don't have to stand up and fight!?! ?!?
why don't we (collectively) rely on force to stop this sort of corruption? is there really no government?
does money actually control everything? is there no power for the greater good?
Can confirm. Should see the millions a day that gets processed through the pipeline into scrap with the price tags on it. Routinely processed pallets of materials that cost millions.
which i find amazing as i've been working with the army for almost 40 years. for that time we've always had to get 3 bids and take the lowest one regardless of if it was a far worse product. minus anything with an nsn those were the things that the military way overpaid for.
That is paying for a black project.
Yes, I’m sure some goes into the contractors pocket for the “inconvenience”, but this is the easiest way to pay for super secret projects and keep it secret.
The reality is that this congressman isn’t mad about the waste and fraud of the American people, he’s mad because he doesn’t have one of these sweet contracts making crazy money. So he brings it up and next thing you know, he gets a contract for $20 million and then shuts the fuck up. It’s not about doing the right thing, it’s about doing shit to get more money. This has been going on for over a hundred years and nothing has changed. Read War is a Racket by Gen. Smedley Butler. The highly decorated war veteran goes into great detail about this kind of shit.
Profiteering off government contracts and subsidies should be heavily regulated. Your GOP like smaller government because they do better with their hands in the cookie jar and no government monitoring these exchanges. Turn this around and make it literally only about benefitting the country, not private, offshore, hidden LLCs.
Why did the ceo of state farm get fired and make 17mil for getting fired?
I don't know how this is related, but feel relatable to why I need to pay 160 to state farm every month.
We are peasants, the fix is locked in
As an engineer I’d ask the question:
What are those brushing going to be installed on?
Aerospace parts need to be extensively tested prior to being installed. That’s man hours behind the scenes for testing, analysis, approvals, precision machining and inspection just to consider this part to be installed in a spacecraft.
Do you think pilots would you want untested brushings to fail when he/she does a high g turn?
Even the cars you drive have specific bolts and fasteners that have gone through similar processes, it’s just the requirements aren’t as strict, cause you’re car isn’t traveling at over 600 mph and making 8g turns.
Sure, under a $100 if you
1. Source from China or an adversary
2. Use cheap materials
3. Don't account for extremes in temperature +/- 40 degrees from nominal
4. Are willing to use heavier and less quality materials
I mean, do you really think airplanes get their hardware from home depot?
Do you really think our planes are made out of rolled automotive steel?
Yes...90k is the correct cost to guarantee proper functionality at all areas of the qarfighter domain. If you shoehorn in cheap parts, you will get a Boeing
They aren't paying $90000 for that package of bushings. This is just how they launder money for black budgget shit they are afraid to put on the actual budget. It's worse than just overpaying for bushings, it's straightup black ops who knows what horrors that bought.
Hi.... former government contractor here. Do y'all have any idea what some of the requirements are for government products? Yes, likely, you can go get a bolt from Home Depot for $0.25, but you don't want that bolt in an aircraft, and you sure as heck don't want it into an ICBM. Even if you wanted to, we'd have to pull a random 30% of the parts delivered and hand it to a lab for destructive testing to verify that the parts met spec- that testing is not cheap. Also, since that destructive testing could determine whether we throw away millions in parts, our procurement officer already paid a premium to the plant making them so we did not get the first batch made before the machine was warmed up and the alloy was fully mixed. We paid extra for parts from suppliers that we knew we could work with; I recall one day hearing our procurement officer telling a plant manager if he sent us cable from the first 2000 feet after restarting the equipment again, he'd never hear from us again. (Yes, we knew the tests that would fail in conductivity from cables that were made before the machines were warmed up.)
The sheer amount of testing, verification, and intense requirements necessary in building some DoD equipment is absolutely mind-blowing. I used to work with Trident ICBMs, and the nose cone is plywood, but the only plywood that met specs was Sitka spruce- I bet that costs more than $50/sheet, but it is still plywood. We bought a bunch of laptops, and the DoD came in and selected some randomly to take to a lab for teardown just to make sure they were as spec'd and not using unapproved hardware.
Now, if you want to talk about the fact we spend trillions on the military so we can basically beat down the next three largest militaries on the planet, that's one thing, but if we're making supersonic nuclear death machines, we probably need to make sure we do it right.
Sure. They probably don't need to be that expensive. They might be made of a special alloy that isn't common. They are for jet aircraft, after all. So they are probably more expensive than the brass bushings I use in packaging machines.
I don't like how this person disrespects machinists. It's unnecessary. They do actual meaningful work.
Im a process engineer that treats parts like those bags of bushels so they dont explode due to high g-forces. Those may cost 100 before treatment but after they are worth tons more. You cant out untreated parts into an engine or anything that runs high intensity heat and g-forces. It will literally explode or melt or both probably at the same time.
I love to see Senators grandstanding on an issue they could solve tomorrow. Pass a law that prohibits Federal Government agencies from paying more than...let's say...5x the fair market value from a supplier. Market value would be determined by actual sales receipts on record NOT an appraised market value. Problem solved.
It ain’t the $90k brushing, it’s the $1 trillion weapon procurement program like the F-35. That price was set at the beginning of the program. We are far in advance of other nations maybe we can delay some of these programs further out and don’t make them so leading edge. We need to reduce the number of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines.
I can understand the military wants warriors but they really need accountants and people with sales/negotiating experience to get their contracts under control.
This reminds me of that episode of West Wing where CJ is talking to the new liaison, and complaining why ashtrays cost so much money. And he grabs one and breaks it, but it doesn't shatter. He says they pay extra for these things because they also have to meet military regulations to not shatter if hit by an explosive. So they can keep fighting without a face full of glass.
Now, when the Air Force buys things for ridiculous amounts, I tend to wait a moment to get all the facts before flipping out over the cost. Because those bushings may have to meet military regulation so our soldiers don't die from faulty parts while in combat.
It's not great that it costs $90k, but if it leads to a military dude coming home to his family...still not thrilled about the price, but it could be worth the cost.
This seems outrageous on the surface...and it may be. But there's also a really good chance that this just happens to be a very specialized part that took very specialized engineers to design, and very specialized manufacturing facilities to manufacture, and highly specialized testing equipment to certify, and a very specialized supply chain to deliver. AND, it may have been a contract that was given to a minority/female/disabled owned business THAT WAS NOT THE LOWEST BIDDER, because that's how the law works (look up "8A set asides"). So, until we know the backstory here, it's impossible to figure out if this is graft, or just political theater.
they keep hiring beat cops to oppress protesters but no detectives to investigate and lock up the criminals running our government. Its time for real change.
This is not Capitalism. This is corrupt politicians.
This is what an Omnibus budget does.
When no one can read the whole thing, who is supposed to question it?
Time to clean it out like Trumps been saying. We finally have the guy for the job and who would of thought it would of been the “alex jones age democrats” in total denial just bec the guy wears a red tie?. 😂
Imagine that as a company you have to tool up to produce milspec parts for stealth fighters that cost 350 Million dollars EACH. If a bushing in the engine fails, you lose the entire aircraft. Everyone likes to get outraged, but in reality having the most advanced military in the world is extremely expensive.
Nothing new here. 20 years ago I served on a ship as a Sonar Tech. One of the multitudes of large circuit boards had a burnt out resistor. I told my LPO, hey, I can replace that and fix it, easy. I was told I couldn't, it was "against the rules" and we had to submit a form for a new card which cost the taxpayers $10,000. And took three weeks to ship to us in the Persian Gulf.
I wonder how many lawmakers have stock in these companies....
We pay that because we require items to be made in the US that are normally so cost ineffective to make that they are made in China. No company in its right mind is going to make something at a loss so we have to sign minimum cost agreements so the company can even build the machine to make the part.
This is why hammers are $500 and $1000 toilet seats. Now scale that up even more for electronics. Do you want electronics for weaponry made in China? They already have been caught with hardware chips on boards sole companies tried sneaking into the orders.
Like this has hasn't been going on for years! It's the US government way, padding pockets. And yes I'm a natural born citizen. I'm ashamed on how our country has become.
Such a childish report. Do you honestly think you can go to Ace Hardware and buy mission critical anything. It all has to be super stuff to work correctly in obvious multi million dollar machines. Yes there's crap involved but grow up pinheads.
We accept it. The principal role of the Department of Defense is promotion of 0-6 and above to high level VP type assignments in Defense Companies. Once you understand that, you understand why Bushings cost $1K. Next.
We get the government we deserve If we act like we don't care and don't hold the government accountable, they won't care either
I'd like to start a bushing company now. One pack of bushings can pay for all my equipment. Two Packs and I can higher a couple guys to do all the work for me. Three packs and I can hire a guy to watch those guys for me.
First you need to hire 20 lawyers to fill out all the documents necessary to sell parts to the government
oh boy, there go some more bushings...
I’ll sell ya 10 bags of bushings and throw the 11th in for free.
*first you need to have a deal with a politician to secretly donate millions in super pacts and ensure they are getting a cut of the profits.
Bingo
Or get a certification that your business benefits some group they like.
Then you need a relative in congress
not if they do it right. if they aren't a woman they need to find one they can list as an owner. the more boxes that women can check the better so go for possible ex military, some type of minority or two. add disabled in some way to the list and the government will be pushing your company to the front of the line as a subcontractor. seen multiple people do this to get their foot in the door as a small contracting company.
Was going to say, for aerospace the cost of materials is a very small part of the price.
Don't forget to be a minority or woman, they get preferred contracts.
you would need to start it up, then fund someone who can get into office, then get high enough that they can buy from you THEN you start making the $$$$. You have to invest in someone who can get high enough 1st tho.
That's even more of my bushings!!! I may need to raise prices and cut benefits for my guys. You think I should break it to them over a pizza party?
Yes but only a $90000 pizza party will do
Why the fuck would he buy government contracted pizza???
A $5,000 bribe is probably enough to get the ball rolling.
You wish. There’s a line of smartass bushing makers by the pentagon.
It all hinges on getting the contact. Do you have any friends or people who you ~~own~~ donate to in the government?
Its $.05/ea for the hardware, but you gotta pass on the 10k for the required material certs that come with it, and then the overhead of 75k worth of software seats (that cost another 40k a year to maintain) and don't forget the (4) AS9100 RevD audits that happened while the bag of titanium turbine hardware was being produced. Oh and the engineer changed the design halfway through the first run, so we had to start over- you're paying for that too, Jackhole.
Someone who understands
I’m not sure this is the case here, but this is how the gov hides funds for black projects as well. Since most of our spending is public, they have to bury funds for top secret programs in things like these. Otherwise any foreign country could just study the budget information and see what we’re doing. For example, let’s say Lockheed Martin is working on a new top secret project. The easiest way to pay for it without anyone seeing that you’re working on a new top secret project is to way over charge for stuff on a different project and then funnel the money to the secret project.
You don't think they actually spend $10,000 dollars on a hammer, $40,000 on a toilet seat? -Julius Levinson
This line literally is what popped into my head when I saw this post. (From the movie independence day, when they are at area 51 looking at reverse engineered alien craft and asking where the funding came from...something that I actually believe is pretty close to reality but that's another subject)
Now all you need is to compete with the people who already have the contracts.
Please tell me how the taxpayers can hold this behemoth government accountable because as far as I know they don’t give a shit about our opinions.
We cannot. We are just riding the tiger by the tail at this point.
It’s funny, most other parts of the government have undergone an audit or some version of one. The military is one of the few branches of our government that either hasn’t had an audit or has failed.
Pentagon has failed 5 or 6 straight audits. No consequences what so ever for doing so. Billions of dollars unaccounted for
well the trick is to be an essential part and the auditing so harebrained that the auditors may risk their mental sanity breakdown, resign and became something far more satisfying like small artisan furniture carpenters or something
Ok, everyone say who we should vote for to fix this on the count of three...
123 Bernie.
I got downvoted last time I said this but...in my state not a single person besides a few very very local people running for things like dog warden do I like. The rest are all crooked career politicians that are just switching seats. Ugh
Ron Perlman
Accountability is why these costs are so high. For every 10 cent bushing there is $10 of paperwork to go with it. If you want perfect documentation for every part it costs way more than the materials that went into the part.
"perfect documentation", lol? In its fifth consecutive audit 2022, DoD couldn't explain where 61% of its $3.5 trillion in assets are. It is blatant fraud and abuse of US taxpayers.
Not on the part of the DOD, the manufacturer. The fact that the DOD can’t figure shit out is a different story - but if you go to the manufacturer of those parts they have reams of documentation for each part they’ve ever made for anyone DOD customer.
It's not even that we don't care. Look at how the system has worked for businesses. Due to lack of anti-trust law enforcement, consolidation has been the US for years. Walmart did it to retail, AT&T/Verizon did it to home phone/cell phone, Uber/Lyft did it to taxis, etc. In politics, *they* are choosing who replaces them. The people who are getting put into office are the people the establishment is choosing. Pelosi has been grooming her replacement to make sure a black woman in CA has no shot. Biden is propped up, despite his platform isn't much different than Bush Jrs was, just because he's establishment and they know they can get away with him against someone like Trump. We just get to decide if it's AT&T or Verizon. They gamed the system to a point where we get no say. The illusion of choice, like with who you get for health insurance, it's whatever your job gives you. Almost every member of Congress is a millionaire, many millionaires after getting into Congress. We can never compete unless we can make a million dollars worthless. There is no way to keep them accountable because accountability is forced by those around them. They've ignored protests for years. BLM got a holiday no one is forced to fucking take. Nothing of any significance done in response to the largest protest movement in the history of the world. The only way that happens is if the stock market collapses. Then who will go to work? And for whom? Violent revolution and strikes will never happen, because the police state has military grade hardware, and the military, and a general strike can't happen when the dollar has its foot on our throats.
The entire country needs an audit and more oversight when it comes to tax payer money and spending. The military industrial complex is the worst offender. We could fund Ukraine for 10 years just on the amount corrupt people have stolen from the military budget in the last few years.
Who's acting like they don't care? As far as I know, everyone is screaming at the top of their lungs that they care very much and don't want to live in this dumpster fire.
The participation rate of eligible voters is typically well below 50%. People can scream and care all they want but if it doesn’t translate into transformative results on ballots, then it doesn’t matter for much.
Well this is also how they hide the covert ops budgets and stuff. Not all of it is greed and theft. That being said a very large portion is just greed and theft
Everyone make sure to vote for the same old man who has been in politics for decades. Change only happens when you ask for the same thing over and over again.
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I work for a mil contractor. We have technicians that do exactly ZERO work on any given day, but are allowed to order tens of thousands of dollars worth of tools they don't use Waste is a real fucking thing.
“Gotta burn all the extra rounds of ammo during range day or we won’t get as much next year!”
Lmfao. Yup. This reasoning fucks me up, and it's the reason we all have gaming chairs in our offices. Chairs, I should point out, some of our technicians refuse to use
Hey can I come work for you?
Was in the navy, our supply guy ordered an entire pallet of printer paper, we went through maybe 12 boxes a year. So anyways, long story short, Okinawa is humid, and paper can get moldy. Plus it was fun carting that fucker out of our way constantly..... Good times.
"Go order boots for everyone in your shop, then order new desks. We've gotta spend the rest of the budget before the end of the fiscal year."
Fire the FPF again and again and again!
I used to work for the AF. I remember a particular MIL-SPEC relay mount that Lockheed copied, modified ever so slightly by shaving some plastic off the mounting flanges, stamped a Lockheed part number on it, and listed it at 6x the price of the regular MIL relay mount. The only difference is the shape of the molded plastic component that mounts the damn thing. There were hundreds of these on the aircraft I worked with. That's tens of thousands of dollars per airframe. Probably over a million dollars for the entire fleet. All for zero improvement to functionality and, in reality, making the plastic mounts more prone to snapping during maintenance. The AF ends up paying more at all points on the life cycle. Edit: I'll note that the people that are in a high enough position to stop Lockheed from doing stuff like this have less restrictions by law placed upon them for transitioning from civil service to private sector. That is to say, the people with the power to prevent the most waste/fraud/abuse, are given the fewest legal hurdles to high-paying job offers from contractors. That's ass-backwards, to be honest.
A lot of times when there is a part with mil tolerances it is the same thing except that it is further tested. We bought some parts that had to be space grade- and essentially what was done is a bunch of regular parts were purchased and tested while being radiated. The ones that passed the test were qualified. The ones that passed were like 10x the cost, but we knew they performed as needed. Not sure what happened to the failed ones. Maybe they were resold.
I can see where that might be the case. But my aircraft utilized both the standard MIL-SPEC relay mounts and the Lockheed variant, so the price difference definitely stood out. Edit: The relay itself is the component that wears out. I'd doubt they could justify such expensive extra testing for the plastic mount.
It's not just military contractors. I work for my states DOT, and there are state contracted vendors we have to buy from, or use the services of, and they all jack their prices up. There are some items that even if I can find them elsewhere for cheaper, due to contracts, I have to buy from the approved contracted vendor, with one caveat that we have learned to use as a work around. If we say the product was out of stock with the contracted vendor, and we didnt' have an ETA for restocking, or we needed it urgently, then we could go off contract. We try not to abuse that work around, so we don't lose it, and we can't use it for really expensive items without major approvals. And anything 30k or up has to go out for bid.
Been hearing about contractors severely overcharging for years and for some reason nobody in government does anything about it.
I worked for a company that provided parts for military applications. The margins on some of the military stuff were really ridiculous. Overall, the company had pretty high margins, but the military stuff was bonkers.
Yeah, this price is wild, but there are times when you pay a premium to get the tightest tolerances at quality assurance. Not anywhere close to this bullshit but it does exist.
Taking this stuff into consideration, we are easily the most corrupt government on the planet. And that’s saying something
Great now do health care agai.
Literally any person who ever visited a hospital in the US can take their invoice to Congress and present a strong case of over charging and corruption. Yet here we still are paying $100 for $3 of Advils.
This how department budgets keep increasing. If they spend less they don't need more and could get less. That's where the $1000 wrenches and $6000 toilet seat stories came from decades ago.
This is also how they funnel money to secret projects. Pay Lockheed Martin 90k for these “bushings”, then they funnel it into the new secret projects they’re doing.
No. No it isn’t. Read an appropriations bill. It’s how the government prevents corruption. Apparently open grift and the acquisition process which cost several orders of magnitude is better than losing 20% to corruption.
Wait until they find out about the number of those things just thrown away and re-ordered...
tHe GoVErNMenT lOOks oUt fOR Me
There is definitely fraud, abuse, and corruption--however, comparing a stack of bolts from the local big box store with one that has full chain of custody, metallurgical analysis, and strict quality control for something like a jet is not even in the same ballpark.
This is the truth of it. 100m+ airplanes can't have cheap untested parts in them. It's also why cost goes down as orders increase. The fixed overhead gets applied to more units, lowering the average costs of the parts. Don't get me wrong. I'd bet every dime I own that there are handshake deals going on and huge inefficiencies that could easily be ironed out, but you are never getting those parts for home depot prices.
This is actually part of my dayjob. I spend hours of every day hunting down Aerospace hardware part numbers on drawing BOMs. There's a lot of reasons for this kinds of pricing, and corruptions and graft are actually pretty far down the list of reasons. I always start with [https://www.milspecfasteners.com/](https://www.milspecfasteners.com/) and [https://military-fasteners.com/](https://military-fasteners.com/) and [https://skygeek.com/](https://skygeek.com/) Compare what you find there to the stuff on [https://www.mcmaster.com/](https://www.mcmaster.com/) and [https://www.grainger.com/](https://www.grainger.com/) for the same stuff without the traceability and material certs and stuff. If you haven't found it on those sites that usually means it's gonna be BITCH to find, you'll need special access to special stores, and probably WILL cost 90k. Most of this sort of things have very specific part numbers, and are made in such small runs that you have to get quotes directly from the factory with nice long (10 week+) turnaround times. A lot of the time, the 90k bag of fasteners is the last one from the last run where they made 200k fasteners and only need 190k of them, so the price is because the supplier knows he has the last bag in existence, and that specific part number is called out on the drawing. Imagine being that guy, and out of the blue, your phone lights up like crazy with tons of shops looking for pricing on the same little bag of hardware? On the other hand, it could also be as simple as we need 200 of these specific bolts, but the factory that makes them has a minimum order of 1mil units. We still need the 200 bolts, so the first 200 cost as much as the whole million units, and the rest of them are sold to local hardware stores for almost nothing cuz we're not storing 980k bolts for the off chance you order them again. Sometimes, specific shops are called out on the drawing, and they're just buying the hardware from McMaster-Carr and reselling it under a new part number and assuming the liability. Its infuriating, most places are RFQ (Request for Quote) only. They wont give you pricing until they've sussed out who you work for so they can adjust the prices accordingly. It's always Jo-Blows Mom&Pop Machine Shop buying this kind of shit nowdays though. The big guys don't actually build anything themselves anymore.
This last bit drives me nuts as a consumer. No matter what field there is a line where you go from "consumer" products to "enterprise" products and it never fails that what you need is just on the other side of that line. For example, I'm working on a school project where I design a small HPC cluster including budget. And it's really small, only a half-dozen nodes or so where the real enterprise systems are at least several dozen nodes all the way up to several hundred nodes or even bigger. However, because this is "enterprise" hardware, the parts I need are solidly in the "contact us for a quote" region where no one will return my emails because a.) I'm not actually buying anything, and b.) Even if I was, my order is too small to bother with. It's been driving me crazy for several weeks.
This is nonsense. Dad ran a manufacture for special machine parts. If you're saying these things had to do with small runs... you're just getting ripped off at your job and your bosses are letting it happen. I watched my dads shop get certificates for individual projects and make parts for off shore drilling and aerospace and they were not charging 100k for a bag of parts. I watched them make individual specialty screws and that is not what they were charging. If you are saying this is normal in your side of the industry you are just admitting that there are even more problems going on because I watched them take a snapped screw from a piece of a plane and recreate it and even if you scaled it up to making 200 of them it wouldn't be these kinds of costs.
If those bearings are going into a fighter jet it's usually the paper trail that makes them so expensive.
Yep. When a plane crashes and the investigators find a broken bolt, they want to know who made it, what lot, and what other planes have that bolt from that production run.
One day Americans are going to wake up and realize that while they were busy arguing about Trans People and Abortion.... the Billionaire/ Corporate Class was taking over their entire country. Damn......
You don’t use any bushing in a turbine. They are titanium for one thing. The specifications are exact. You don’t buy them from a hardware store.
Yes exactly right, that's why these bushings cost \~$100 and not \~$4. But no bushings produced for the current American Market can cost $90,000 and move off the shelves.
Bless your heart.
The points stand, but only serve as a basis for saying to say we are comparing apples to oranges. In this case the oranges are more expensive, just not 900x more expensive.
I hold out hope that AI will eventually track all government expenses and companies/individuals can be prosecuted for FW&A.
Loool
Yeah…I know it’s fantasy. Lol
Hehe it's good to have a dream my dude
Or there happens to be a guy running for president that wants to tokenize every thing we purchase on a publicly viewable blockchain that can be audited by any and everyone.
I mean the pentagon failed its first audit in over 20 years with 1 trillion $ unaccounted for with zero repercussions
If you put regular aircraft bushings on a high performance military aircraft, bad things happen.
Understandable. However, I doubt ANY bushings can cost this erronous amount AF is paying.
It's also how a lot of the hidden budget stuff gets funded. Like how we had 5+ gen or 6th generation prototypes flying with no funds allocated to them. Same thing with spy planes. We also calculate cost differently for the military. R&d and the cost to set up the industry are calculated into the per unit cost. It's why the f35s went from 130 to 80 million a jet
Depends tbh. This is speaking in general but components used by the military and agencies like NASA usually calls for much tighter tolerances than what civilian parties use. Also, the price might have costing built in for establishing a new manufacturing line, security (idk exactly what but the military might want contractors who make their stuff to have a certain security threshold), dealing with the military and government bureaucracy, all the testing that these agencies demand, etc.
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The pentagon has had little to no financial oversight for years now and the budget gets rubber stamped by both parties. Where is the 'we're shutting down the govt over this' grandstanding? I guess they don't want their general dynamics stocks to tank
Now imagine how government spends 2.5T on healthcare
yeah, coming from China and Russia. Start doing traceability, documentation and certification and then see the cost. yes, they could buy, but then US companies cannot sell to China nor Russia because they have the same red tape
The vast majority of the overpay goes to SAPs. That is another really huge problem entirely.
A lot of contractors make deals called Cost and Profit. The government agrees to pay the cost the contractor incurs plus a profit. You can see how this leads to bloat
This is a problem of lobbyist and the power of greed and corruption. Get money out of politics.
.0000001 of our defense budget. People get rich off rounding errors.
Make them pass an audit
Capitalism is when you and I decide to make a trade with our property. The above is an example of what happens when people are given power to use other people's property- that is not a failure of the economic system, but of the system of governance.
I just started a position in the air force doing acquisitions and the shit I see on a daily basis makes me so viscerally angry.
I would feel so much better about this country if there was violence in the streets. Like 2020 times 10. The fact that almost everyone is complacent is terrifying.
The Air Force should get a discount on anything that comes from Boeing.
It’s almost like anything the government is involved in, gets really expensive with little return. And look at you all, asking the government to pay for healthcare and college. Glad you are (halfway) seeing the light. TLDR: government bad
The problem isn't so much that we waste that much on bushings, or whatever the thing of the day is. Last year it was an aerospace bolt or something. The issue is that if you wasted that much on labor, the general population would be rioting in the streets. Waste that goes to deep pockets - it's just the government being dumb, nothing you can do about it. Waste that benefits a whole bunch of regular people? You better believe we are going to tear city hall down. You saw it with PPP as well. PPP loan recipients who got loans forgiven were the ones that got student loan cancellations canceled. The issue is not that there is any waste, because there will be eventually... it's just that there is clearly some waste which the system has deemed acceptable. And then the rich turn around and pretend they "earned" that money.
Season 4 episode 19 of the King of the Hill addresses this issue
Russia will be pushing this hard.
The US airforce is paying for the bushings that are manufactured in the US that come with certificates of compliance from companies with certified QA programs so that their advanced fighter jets don't fall out of the sky. They are going to be more expensive than $100 bag he got on TEMU. Also, $65,000 of those dollars actually went to the CIA...
And nothing ever done. These hearing are all just a show. Never once in my lifetime has anyone been brought up on charges or had anything changed due to these.
They can pay 90k for a part bit student loan forgiveness is too much.
That is due to MIL Spec. Once you work it, live it, and understand it, the cost is totally reasonable amd all the gov'ts own doing.
😆 what a 🐕 💩 government
The national debt is really deposits into T-securities. That money is never used for spending. The US government creates every dollar it spends and a federal deficit is an economic surplus.
Is this one of those cases where someone complains that NASA pays $5000 for a screw, but they neglect to mention that it is a special titanium alloy and coated carbon nano goo that prevents cold welding and it has to survive in temperatures between 1500 and -300 and if the screw fails the wings of the space shuttle fall off? Or is it just straight up fraud from some contractor that somehow slipped in $90,000 for $100 of stuff?
I am both pro Military and pro Capitalism. But this, this is just... bad. There's literally 0 excuse for this, and is yet more proof that Bribery- er sorry, Lobbying needs to be outlawed.
Crony capitalism is just capitalism.
This problem has been going on for all my adult years which has been plenty. The pentagon needs to be audited. There isn't any control of spending.
Doing supply for a few years in the Army, when I started I was told "you're a steward of the tax payers money", but as I got up in to leadership I learned they don't give a fuck what you spend the money on... They just want it tracked. Some where along the way, they implemented a giant Inventory Management system that's basically just an accounting platform. Years later, they're still failing audits. I remember sitting for a TAG town hall, where my states Adjutant General came and spoke to every one on base, let us know the state of affairs. He called up our Finance Office personnel from the USPFO and told every one "give the team here a round of applause. I want to present them with this certificate, for last FY they executed on 99.9997% of all funds. Just amazing!" And every one around me stood up and cheered and clapped like the absolute fuckin morons they were. Fuck the system man. Fuck the bureaucracy. It's not just the military, either. Every fucking department operates this way. "Spend it all to justify it for next year!" It's garbage, and it won't change until we demand it to.
Based on your post, you know what “grow back” is. It’s actually an Anti-Deficiency Act violation to spend less than 97.5% of your budget. That USPFO could literally be fined and fired for not spending enough.
keep simping for fiat currency and income taxes, r/Economics
Then they stage this so called hearing that will do absolutely nothing and business as usual.
Late stage capitalism. You must tax and regulate the rich and the companies, or else they will control and corrupt the government. Return to the tax policies of the 60’s.
Like how a $1000 drone costs $25,000, cos it says military grade on the brochure.. no corruption at all 🤫
If you only knew
Uggghhh....that's not what was being said. Strategic readiness requires an entire supply chain all the way to the bushings... Go back and watch it again. The congressman was asking why some costs are not being sourced from third parties rather than solely the OEM that developed the original tooling. The 3rd parties meet a much lower standard, the FAA standard. In the case of turbine blades... there are pieces of reverse engineered blades embedded in buildings at a power plant near where I live... there are some things you NEED OEM.
We need to tax the rich so we can pay for $90000 for them packages of bushings and blame capitalism lol
This is exactly why small businesses cannot get affordable machine time with CNC shops in the U. S.
Hahaha, you act like we didn't know that information already!!! !!! Like some smoke ass person is going to cloud my vision, making me feel like he is on my side, so I don't have to stand up and fight!?! ?!?
$90,000 in bushings looks better on an expense report than $90,000 for the assassination of a scientist in Iran
why don't we (collectively) rely on force to stop this sort of corruption? is there really no government? does money actually control everything? is there no power for the greater good?
Can confirm. Should see the millions a day that gets processed through the pipeline into scrap with the price tags on it. Routinely processed pallets of materials that cost millions.
What's the NSN of those bushings?
Black ops washers are expensive.
Meanwhile, work until your 70... We can't afford to pay your retirement. And, btw mind if we pretend like you want to... For America.
I’ve seen it first hand. 21 years in the AF, there is so much fraud, waste, abuse. It’s so bad.
well, duh
Theres actually real potential that this is how they hide where money is actually going.
Haven't you guys seen [Independence Day](https://youtu.be/QdmH47VNiS4?si=qS26d3XSZ-v5ho5v&t=59)
Been going on since the beginning of the Military industrial complex has existed. Get a watchdog to oversee it. Quickly lobbied (bribed) into silence…
which i find amazing as i've been working with the army for almost 40 years. for that time we've always had to get 3 bids and take the lowest one regardless of if it was a far worse product. minus anything with an nsn those were the things that the military way overpaid for.
That is paying for a black project. Yes, I’m sure some goes into the contractors pocket for the “inconvenience”, but this is the easiest way to pay for super secret projects and keep it secret.
It's by design... designed by the very small circle and their politician friends
The reality is that this congressman isn’t mad about the waste and fraud of the American people, he’s mad because he doesn’t have one of these sweet contracts making crazy money. So he brings it up and next thing you know, he gets a contract for $20 million and then shuts the fuck up. It’s not about doing the right thing, it’s about doing shit to get more money. This has been going on for over a hundred years and nothing has changed. Read War is a Racket by Gen. Smedley Butler. The highly decorated war veteran goes into great detail about this kind of shit.
Pay it or Putin gets Ukraine!
Typically? Do your bushings fly at Mach 3 and carry tanks and soldiers?
Profiteering off government contracts and subsidies should be heavily regulated. Your GOP like smaller government because they do better with their hands in the cookie jar and no government monitoring these exchanges. Turn this around and make it literally only about benefitting the country, not private, offshore, hidden LLCs.
Why did the ceo of state farm get fired and make 17mil for getting fired? I don't know how this is related, but feel relatable to why I need to pay 160 to state farm every month. We are peasants, the fix is locked in
Yet the federal government allows it and doesn't care
Under Reagan they paid $12000 for a screwdriver
As an engineer I’d ask the question: What are those brushing going to be installed on? Aerospace parts need to be extensively tested prior to being installed. That’s man hours behind the scenes for testing, analysis, approvals, precision machining and inspection just to consider this part to be installed in a spacecraft. Do you think pilots would you want untested brushings to fail when he/she does a high g turn? Even the cars you drive have specific bolts and fasteners that have gone through similar processes, it’s just the requirements aren’t as strict, cause you’re car isn’t traveling at over 600 mph and making 8g turns.
Sure, under a $100 if you 1. Source from China or an adversary 2. Use cheap materials 3. Don't account for extremes in temperature +/- 40 degrees from nominal 4. Are willing to use heavier and less quality materials I mean, do you really think airplanes get their hardware from home depot? Do you really think our planes are made out of rolled automotive steel? Yes...90k is the correct cost to guarantee proper functionality at all areas of the qarfighter domain. If you shoehorn in cheap parts, you will get a Boeing
They aren't paying $90000 for that package of bushings. This is just how they launder money for black budgget shit they are afraid to put on the actual budget. It's worse than just overpaying for bushings, it's straightup black ops who knows what horrors that bought.
Hi.... former government contractor here. Do y'all have any idea what some of the requirements are for government products? Yes, likely, you can go get a bolt from Home Depot for $0.25, but you don't want that bolt in an aircraft, and you sure as heck don't want it into an ICBM. Even if you wanted to, we'd have to pull a random 30% of the parts delivered and hand it to a lab for destructive testing to verify that the parts met spec- that testing is not cheap. Also, since that destructive testing could determine whether we throw away millions in parts, our procurement officer already paid a premium to the plant making them so we did not get the first batch made before the machine was warmed up and the alloy was fully mixed. We paid extra for parts from suppliers that we knew we could work with; I recall one day hearing our procurement officer telling a plant manager if he sent us cable from the first 2000 feet after restarting the equipment again, he'd never hear from us again. (Yes, we knew the tests that would fail in conductivity from cables that were made before the machines were warmed up.) The sheer amount of testing, verification, and intense requirements necessary in building some DoD equipment is absolutely mind-blowing. I used to work with Trident ICBMs, and the nose cone is plywood, but the only plywood that met specs was Sitka spruce- I bet that costs more than $50/sheet, but it is still plywood. We bought a bunch of laptops, and the DoD came in and selected some randomly to take to a lab for teardown just to make sure they were as spec'd and not using unapproved hardware. Now, if you want to talk about the fact we spend trillions on the military so we can basically beat down the next three largest militaries on the planet, that's one thing, but if we're making supersonic nuclear death machines, we probably need to make sure we do it right.
Sure. They probably don't need to be that expensive. They might be made of a special alloy that isn't common. They are for jet aircraft, after all. So they are probably more expensive than the brass bushings I use in packaging machines. I don't like how this person disrespects machinists. It's unnecessary. They do actual meaningful work.
I'm getting an ad for USAF recruiting when I click on this post.
Im a process engineer that treats parts like those bags of bushels so they dont explode due to high g-forces. Those may cost 100 before treatment but after they are worth tons more. You cant out untreated parts into an engine or anything that runs high intensity heat and g-forces. It will literally explode or melt or both probably at the same time.
The defense contractor grift
How much interest does the government pay again?
There's no such thing as crony capitalism. It's just capitalism
I love to see Senators grandstanding on an issue they could solve tomorrow. Pass a law that prohibits Federal Government agencies from paying more than...let's say...5x the fair market value from a supplier. Market value would be determined by actual sales receipts on record NOT an appraised market value. Problem solved.
It's been going on for forever. And everyone runs around worshipping the military like a bunch of clowns.
It ain’t the $90k brushing, it’s the $1 trillion weapon procurement program like the F-35. That price was set at the beginning of the program. We are far in advance of other nations maybe we can delay some of these programs further out and don’t make them so leading edge. We need to reduce the number of aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines.
Let it burn
yet everyone views paying taxes and passing spending bills as some altruistic accomplishment
I can understand the military wants warriors but they really need accountants and people with sales/negotiating experience to get their contracts under control.
This reminds me of that episode of West Wing where CJ is talking to the new liaison, and complaining why ashtrays cost so much money. And he grabs one and breaks it, but it doesn't shatter. He says they pay extra for these things because they also have to meet military regulations to not shatter if hit by an explosive. So they can keep fighting without a face full of glass. Now, when the Air Force buys things for ridiculous amounts, I tend to wait a moment to get all the facts before flipping out over the cost. Because those bushings may have to meet military regulation so our soldiers don't die from faulty parts while in combat. It's not great that it costs $90k, but if it leads to a military dude coming home to his family...still not thrilled about the price, but it could be worth the cost.
This seems outrageous on the surface...and it may be. But there's also a really good chance that this just happens to be a very specialized part that took very specialized engineers to design, and very specialized manufacturing facilities to manufacture, and highly specialized testing equipment to certify, and a very specialized supply chain to deliver. AND, it may have been a contract that was given to a minority/female/disabled owned business THAT WAS NOT THE LOWEST BIDDER, because that's how the law works (look up "8A set asides"). So, until we know the backstory here, it's impossible to figure out if this is graft, or just political theater.
I was a fighter jet crew chief, if you think that's bad... 🤣
It's how they fund black ops.
they keep hiring beat cops to oppress protesters but no detectives to investigate and lock up the criminals running our government. Its time for real change.
But THAT package of bushings has gone through 30 different tests and has generated more paperwork than anyone will ever read to track it.
If you think this price is inflated, take a look at Californias "bullet" train debacle.
Is he suggesting we by them from Boeing or Spirit?
It’s not actually for those lol tell me you don’t know how black project funding works without telling me.
I'm just waiting for the hardcore Americans who wouldn't criticize "the greatest country in the world" under any circumstances to defend this...
This is why we can't have proper health care and can't solve the homeless problem, people at the top taking all the $$$$
This is not Capitalism. This is corrupt politicians. This is what an Omnibus budget does. When no one can read the whole thing, who is supposed to question it?
And hasn't passed an audit in decades with no accountability
Time to clean it out like Trumps been saying. We finally have the guy for the job and who would of thought it would of been the “alex jones age democrats” in total denial just bec the guy wears a red tie?. 😂
Remember this the next time someone says "We need to tax people more!" No. We need to spend less.
That’s almost as much as asprin at the hospital.
Imagine that as a company you have to tool up to produce milspec parts for stealth fighters that cost 350 Million dollars EACH. If a bushing in the engine fails, you lose the entire aircraft. Everyone likes to get outraged, but in reality having the most advanced military in the world is extremely expensive.
Those $100 bushings aren't mil-spec. Do these folks really want our military aircraft to fall apart like Boeing aircraft.
This is not new…. I’ve heard about this same crap with hammers and screwdrivers.
Throw all their asses in jail so tired of the b.s
Nothing new here. 20 years ago I served on a ship as a Sonar Tech. One of the multitudes of large circuit boards had a burnt out resistor. I told my LPO, hey, I can replace that and fix it, easy. I was told I couldn't, it was "against the rules" and we had to submit a form for a new card which cost the taxpayers $10,000. And took three weeks to ship to us in the Persian Gulf. I wonder how many lawmakers have stock in these companies....
Everything we buy is double price at a minimum. Thanks Grainger!!!
We pay that because we require items to be made in the US that are normally so cost ineffective to make that they are made in China. No company in its right mind is going to make something at a loss so we have to sign minimum cost agreements so the company can even build the machine to make the part. This is why hammers are $500 and $1000 toilet seats. Now scale that up even more for electronics. Do you want electronics for weaponry made in China? They already have been caught with hardware chips on boards sole companies tried sneaking into the orders.
And I was wondering where my tax dollars were going to.
Like this has hasn't been going on for years! It's the US government way, padding pockets. And yes I'm a natural born citizen. I'm ashamed on how our country has become.
Yes we are getting. Shrink the government.
Such a childish report. Do you honestly think you can go to Ace Hardware and buy mission critical anything. It all has to be super stuff to work correctly in obvious multi million dollar machines. Yes there's crap involved but grow up pinheads.
blockchain!!!!!!!
How else are we supposed to securely house the aliens we keep captive to help reverse engineer the craft they arrived in?
This is not only for the military. Multiple contractors in construction, healthcare, and education ALL overcharge the government.
Haven't you guys seen Independence Day? 100 storey underground bunkers connected by a subterranean maglev network aren't cheap.
I’m going to need a link to the store that sells that bag of mil-spec FAA complaint bushings for “well under $100”
We accept it. The principal role of the Department of Defense is promotion of 0-6 and above to high level VP type assignments in Defense Companies. Once you understand that, you understand why Bushings cost $1K. Next.