From Yahoo News:
Trump tweeted ‘billions of dollars’ would be saved on military contracts. Then the Pentagon fired the official doing that.
In December 2016, just a few weeks before moving into the White House, President-elect Donald Trump tweeted that once he was in office, “billions of dollars can and will be saved on military (and other) purchases.”
Presidential candidates often campaign for or against defense spending, but Trump was perhaps the first to promise that his business acumen — an image bolstered by his bestselling book “The Art of the Deal” — would enable him to shave billions of dollars off costly weapons, like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, estimated to top $1 trillion.
Meet Shay Assad, the Pentagon’s pricing director:
“When you get somebody who is the president of the United States who understands precisely what you do for a living and understands how it’s actually done, it becomes a pretty rewarding thing to do, especially when someone at the top is world-class himself in terms of negotiating,” Shay Assad, the Pentagon’s pricing director, told attendees at a conference held by McAleese and Credit Suisse in March 2017, just two months after Trump’s inauguration.
Assad had already built a reputation as the Department of Defense’s toughest contract negotiator, having spent more than a decade battling defense companies on behalf of taxpayers, trying to get the prices down on skyrocketing weapons costs. Over the course of his career, he has been decorated with a panoply of awards from the Pentagon for his work, and praised for saving the government billions of dollars. A 2016 Politico profile described Assad, known for his dogged campaigns to force defense industry companies to justify their costs, as “the most hated man in the Pentagon.”
And of course:
Yet within two years of Trump’s entrance into the White House, Assad would find himself removed from his job, and his efforts to save money and recover hundreds of millions of dollars in potentially fraudulent spending tabled.
His treatment, he contends, was the direct result of his attempts to save the Pentagon money and identify potential contract fraud, which brought him into conflict with the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer. It was a conflict that ended dramatically, he says, when shortly after he emailed senior Pentagon officials about potential fraud, details about his travel records and his demotion were published in the press.
People in the Pentagon were not getting their sweet kickbacks so they euchred him out.
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