As American infrastructure crumbles, taxpayers built $40 million gas station in Afghanistan

Republicans like to pretend like budget cuts that would affect the Department of Defense would render the nation unable to properly defend itself. But the latest tale of questionable DOD spending suggests that the military’s reckless use of taxpayer dollars actually poses a major threat to national security.

According to an inspector general report out Monday, the Pentagon somehow managed to blow $43 million on a natural gas station in Afghanistan. A similar facility in Pakistan was constructed for about $300,000, according to Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko.

The government reportedly built the gas station in Sherberghan, Afghanistan, in a bid to show Afghan citizens that natural gas could serve as a viable energy alternative.

The so-called Downstream Gas Utilization project, part of the Task Force for Business & Stability Operations (TFBSO), was originally bid at around $3 million. But between 2011 and 2014 the project cost ballooned to a whopping $42.7 million, $30 million of which the government claimed was overhead.

So what went wrong? Don’t ask the Pentagon.

“One of the most troubling aspects of this project is that the Department of Defense claims that it is unable to provide an explanation for the high cost of the project or to answer any other questions concerning its planning, implementation, or outcome,” Sopko noted.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) is asking Pentagon officials to explain the boondoggle to American taxpayers.

“There are few things in this job that literally make my jaw drop,” McCaskill said in a press release.

“But of all the examples of wasteful projects in Iraq and Afghanistan that the Pentagon began prior to our wartime contracting reforms, this genuinely shocked me. It’s hard to imagine a more outrageous waste of money than building an alternative fuel station in a war-torn country that costs 8,000 percent more than it should and is too dangerous for a watchdog to verify whether it is even operational.”

While the Pentagon’s wasteful use of tax dollars is shocking, it isn’t exactly unusual.

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