The Pentagon allowed a private firm providing food and water to U.S. troops in Afghanistan to overbill taxpayers $757 million and awarded the company no-bid contract extensions worth more than $4 billion over three years, according to the Pentagon’s chief internal watchdog and congressional investigators.

The deal represented one of the largest U.S. military contracts in Afghanistan. But the Defense Logistics Agency, which was overseeing the contract, failed repeatedly to verify that the contractor’s invoices were accurate, an official in the Defense Department inspector general’s office said. "This has to be one of the prime poster childs for a government contract spun out of control," Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., said last week.

Mica and other members of the House Oversight and Governmental Reform Subcommittee on National Security expressed outrage at a hearing last week about the Pentagon’s handling of the deal, especially two contract extensions awarded amid a dispute between the government and the company over as much as $1 billion.

The criticism was bipartisan, and it also targeted the Swiss-based private contractor, Supreme Foodservice GmbH, which had previously supplied British troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and other hot spots.

The panel’s hearing, the first focused solely on the food contract, was convened to hear from agency and company officials about how a straightforward deal in 2005 to supply food and water to troops ballooned into a still-unresolved dispute with so much money at stake.

The company has denied wrongdoing. But several lawmakers at the hearing also accused it of trying to bill taxpayers improperly for a $58 million warehouse and charging $12 million to deliver food from that warehouse across the street to Camp Leatherneck in Helmand province.

Last year, the Energy Department disclosed that guard forces at two key nuclear facilities had cheated on tests meant to assess their capability to respond to terrorist threats. One facility, located in Tennessee and known as Y-12, is the principal storage location for highly-enriched uranium used in nuclear warheads, and the other, located in Texas and known as Pantex, is the main storage site where the warheads themselves are assembled and taken apart.

Now it appears that the culture of fudging test results extends to the guard force protecting the department’s top officials in Washington. A new report by the department’s inspector general claims the small unit assigned to keep the Energy Secretary and his top deputies out of harms’ way scored well on tests of their response times and tactical skills partly because examiners gave them advance notice of exams and drilled them on the correct answers, and partly because they automatically got passing grades on sections they did not complete.

Inspector General Gregory H. Friedman called the 2011 and 2012 performance tests for the unit “compromised” and said that as a result the department does not know its capability for responding to emergencies.

His report calls the unit a “relatively small, core professional staff” with low morale that works with other security agents to protect top DOE officials when they are at headquarters or traveling. One section of the report indicates that the unit has slightly over a dozen members. The probe was evidently initiated after a series of internal complaints that it had been mismanaged.

Pentagon officials have been warning that budget cuts will provoke a “hollowing out” of warfighting capabilities in coming years, with tens of billions of dollars on the table under so-called “sequestration” cuts.

Somehow, however, there is still enough money to pay for the construction of some new sun rooms for military housing used by senior officers in Stuttgart, Germany, a country the U.S. military has begun to flee. There also is enough — amid persistent military threats by North Korea — to pay for a new $10 million museum in South Korea lauding the U.S. Army’s years of work there. And there is also sufficient cash to finance millions of dollars worth of netting around an Army golf course at Camp Zama in Japan, helpfully listed as “safety countermeasure” netting.

The Senate Armed Services committee, in a new report, called these “questionable projects” in the military’s overseas military construction spending, which totals $10 billion a year. Three-quarters of that sum is disbursed in three countries with a large U.S. troop presence — Japan, Korea and Germany. But the spending occurs without much oversight and in some cases has violated military regulations and Pentagon promises to Congress, according to the committee.

The sun rooms and museum shared a common feature, the Senate investigators learned. They were approved under an obscure rule that lets the military benefit from host country work undertaken in lieu of cash payments to the Pentagon for military facilities that are being relinquished. Here’s how it worked in the case of the sun rooms, which were constructed at the request of the Pentagon’s regional Africa Command:

The baggy camouflage uniforms currently worn by American troops in Pentagon corridors and in Middle East combat zones may not look flashy, but they aren’t cheap.

After having just two basic uniforms in the 1990’s, members of the military services in recent years have started sporting seven outfits, all with different patterns and colors. The design costs alone have been $12.5 million.

The profusion of styles reflects the robust and enduring tradition of the four military services to go their own way, a circumstance that can cause blurry eyes from the mashup of disparate green, grey, and brown tones when soldiers from different units deploy to the same locale.

But it’s not just a fashion faux pas, according to a new, 199-page report by the Government Accountability Office that examined programs and purchasing at 26 federal agencies to look for needless overlap and duplication.

The fragmentation boosts the costs — the Pentagon’s tab in fiscal 2011 for its camo couture was $300 million — and also produces garb that in some cases lacks a rigorous connection to research about how to remain hidden, according to the report.

The problem is about to get worse: The Army is considering replacing its battle uniform for the third time in 11 years, with three separate new uniforms of its own — including helmets and body armor — printed with  “desert,” “woodland,” and “intermediate” camouflage patterns. The GAO estimates this new line of fashions could cost the government $4 billion to purchase over five years.

Of the four services that developed new uniforms in the 1990s — the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines — only the Marines appear to have done a proper job, according to the GAO.

The Obama administration will propose a deep cut in funding for nuclear nonproliferation programs at the Energy Department largely so it can boost the department’s spending to modernize its stockpile of nuclear weapons, according to government officials familiar with the proposed 2014 federal budget to be unveiled Wednesday, April 10.

The half-billion-dollar shift in spending priorities reflects an administration decision that nuclear explosives work the Energy Department performs for the military should be both accelerated and expanded. But Democrats on Capitol Hill and independent arms control groups predicted the decision will provoke controversy and a substantial budget fight this year.

Under the 2014 proposal, the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons activities funding — which includes modernization efforts for bomber-based and missile-based warheads — would be increased roughly 7 percent, or around $500 million, above the current level of $7.227 billion for these activities.

The department’s nonproliferation programs, aimed at diminishing the security threat posed by fissile materials in other countries that can be used for nuclear weapons, would be cut by roughly 20 percent, or $460 million, below the current level of $2.45 billion, the officials said.

The new weapons-related spending would expand efforts to upgrade the W76, W88, W78, and B-61 warheads, and help fund construction of a new facility in Tennessee for processing uranium, a nuclear explosive used in these and other warheads. These programs have experienced billions of dollars in cost overruns in recent years, forcing the administration to look elsewhere in the DOE budget to find the money it needs to keep them alive.

Promoting competition among military contractors is the “single most powerful tool available” to the Pentagon to improve productivity and drive down costs, the U.S. government’s chief weapons buyer Frank Kendall declared in March 2011 testimony to a Senate subcommittee.

Moreover, auditors and government officials have repeatedly described the routine use of noncompetitive contracts as one of the signal mistakes of the U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, contributing to the waste of billions of dollars in those conflicts.

Yet the cold reality, as spelled out in a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, is that the Pentagon’s use of competitively-bid contracts has been declining steadily for the past five years and last year stood at just 57 percent of its total contract spending. In fiscal year 2008, it was 62.6 percent.

The Air Force rate was the lowest — just 37 percent — followed by the Navy and the Army. The Defense Logistics Agency, which buys weapons parts and supplies troops in the field, did much better, achieving a rate of 83 percent for its spending in 2012.

Nobody knows why the rate is steadily going down, the GAO report said, although it noted that the number of sole-source — or noncompetitive —contracts in the Pentagon’s database is inflated somewhat by purchases made by foreign governments, which typically specify a particular weapon and supplier. Also, the Air Force and Navy tend to buy large equipment in small numbers from specialized suppliers, such as the makers of ships and planes.

If anyone thought Chuck Hagel wants to be a caretaker defense secretary, he worked hard to disabuse them of the idea in an April 3 speech to a roomful of generals and other senior officers at Washington’s National Defense University, an elite school chartered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Hagel, a former Senator and longtime Washington politician, knows that the first tasks of any policymaker seeking major change are to broadcast intent and build a constituency — and he clearly sought to begin that process in his first major address since being confirmed in March by the smallest margin of any defense secretary.

“The world today is combustible and complex,” Hagel said, before making clear that everything done by his two predecessors — Robert Gates and Leon Panetta — is now up for grabs, due to the austere fiscal climate and Hagel’s own stated desire to refocus his department more carefully on future military threats.

Yes, both men organized cutbacks in planned spending, Hagel said. “However, we will have to do more.” Hagel said he is now seeking change “that involves not just tweaking or chipping away at existing structures and practices but where necessary fashioning entirely new ones that are better suited to 21st century realities and challenges.”

His premier targets, he said, will be the three areas responsible for the greatest spending growth in recent years: acquisitions, personnel costs, and overhead.

The U.S. delivered a very expensive message this week in dispatching a couple of its $3 billion, B-2 stealth bombers from Missouri to drop dummy bombs during training exercises in South Korea.

As David Axe explains in the story below, by some estimates the planes cost $135,000 per hour to fly — nearly double that of any other military aircraft. And their hefty price tag in today’s dollars makes them too expensive to put at serious risk in all but the direst circumstances.

So how much did it cost to drive home the Obama administration’s not-so-subtle point at a time when Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel says the Pentagon faces a $41 billion shortfall because of the sequester?

The planes, capable of carrying nuclear weapons, fly at “high-subsonic” speeds, about that of a civilian airliner. If both flew the roughly 6,500 miles from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to Seoul, South Korea, the trip could have taken as little as about 10 hours. That would make the price somewhere in the neighborhood of $5.4 million.

That’s a rough guess, but the military isn’t saying. When pressed by reporters Thursday, neither Hagel nor Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey could provide a figure.

Meanwhile, $6 billion in U.S. hardware was zooming over the South Korean countryside.

The flights came after North Korea’s recent nuclear and missile tests led to U.N. sanctions, which provoked a barrage of threats against the United States. The increasingly bellicose pronouncements have set nerves on edge in the U.S., Japan and neighboring South Korea.

“I think their very provocative actions and belligerent tone, it has ratcheted up the danger, and we have to understand that reality,” Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel told reporters Thursday.

Department of Energy Inspector General Gregory H. Friedman has told Congress that the agency should launch a program patterned on the military’s BRAC base closure program to streamline, downsize or shut some of the Energy agency's 16 national laboratories.

The agency’s chief internal watchdog is pushing to overhaul some of its nuclear and energy research labs and programs, saying that it is “highly questionable” whether a business-as-usual approach can continue in a time of budget cuts.

In an appearance before the House Science Committee’s subcommittee on oversight March 14, Friedman also called on the DOE to focus its sponsored research programs on those that could yield maximum short-term benefits. And he said the agency should concentrate its $6 billion annual environmental cleanup program on a few high-risk, high-priority sites rather than spread the effort out over dozens of sites in multiple states.

“The operative question going forward from our perspective may well be, what can the department afford in this environment?” Friedman asked the oversight committee.

Friedman did not make any specific recommendations on closures.