WASHINGTON DC (October 7, 2019) — Senator Charles "Chuck" Grassley sent a letter to Ellen M Lord, Under-Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, seeking additional information about the Department of Defense’s (DoD) commitment to aggressively confront and end excessive price-gouging of spare parts by the TransDigm Group Inc (TransDigm).
“I was pleased to learn that TransDigm agreed to return to the taxpayers $16.1 million — the amount that DoD IG found TransDigm overcharged the Department in their February 25, 2019 report. However, in your June 6, 2019 letter to my office, you stated that TransDigm currently has $634,718,073.64 in contracts with the Department,” Sen Grassley wrote.
“The current dollar amount committed to TransDigm contracts, knowing that TransDigm has vastly overcharged the Department on multiple occasions and that the Department does not track voluntary refund-requests, raises serious concerns about the Department’s stewardship of tax-payer money.”
Sen Grassley has been a watchdog against waste, fraud and abuse at DoD for nearly four decades. Sen Grassley’s extensive oversight work throughout his career has included a dogged pursuit for answers from the Pentagon over decades of wasteful spending and its inability to produce a clean financial audit.
Most recently, spurred by reports of TransDigm’s egregious price-gouging, Sen Grassley sent a letter to former Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick M Shanahan seeking information about how DoD contracts with businesses and other entities engaged in overcharging DoD on spare parts. Sen Grassley also inquired about DoD’s process to collect cost-data from those entities and how Congress can help DoD in stopping price-gouging practices.
Earlier this year, Sen Grassley pressed DoD on its contracting practices in the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) after an audit released by DoD Office of Inspector General showed significant failures in contract-oversight and management. Sen Grassley also pressed DoD on why it was purchasing cups that cost $1,280 each. Last year, Sen Grassley sent a letter to Fine seeking answers on why the department was wasting $14,000 of taxpayer money on individual toilet seat covers. Sen Grassley has also worked to hold the Defense Department accountable for its excessive and largely unaccounted for spending in Afghanistan, including a $43 million gas station.
Text of the letter is available HERE.
