The Defense Department’s decision to trim the number of furlough days for employees came at a cost to contractors, with the Pentagon making up for the sacrificed savings by delaying and trimming contracts, among other things.
The savings needed to be found somewhere. The original plan to furlough employees for 11 days would have saved about $2 billion; trimming that number to six days, which was announced Tuesday (August 6, 2013) meant the Pentagon had to find roughly $1 billion in savings from somewhere else.
And a lot of the savings came from approval from Congress of some reprogramming requests, enabling the department to move money from acquisition accounts, impacting 200 programs.
Defense officials were a little short on specifics in a briefing Tuesday. Speaking on background, they said this: “Sometimes contracts had been delayed. Sometimes we just made a decision [about what] was lower priority.”
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