Two Democrats who serve on panels that oversee the Pentagon have stepped up their campaign to curb what they call widespread “price gouging” in contracts for military spare parts.
Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. John Garamendi of California, both of them members of their chamber’s Armed Services Committee, pressed their case Wednesday in a pair of letters obtained by CQ Roll Call.
Warren and Garamendi expressed outrage that defense contractors are exploiting loopholes so the companies can regularly refuse to provide the Defense Department legally required data to document that their parts’ prices are fair and reasonable on contracts awarded without competition.
One of the missives went to Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and the other to Kevin M. Stein, president and CEO of Cleveland-based TransDigm Group Inc., a company that has been at the center of the spare parts pricing controversy for more than a decade.
“Contractors who consistently refuse to turn over cost and pricing data continue to rake in DoD contracts,” Warren and Garamendi wrote to Austin.
In the lawmakers’ letter to Stein, they wrote that his company’s “ongoing refusal to provide DoD with pricing data is unacceptable given the company’s record of ripping off the government and taxpayer.”
‘Egregious’ records
The lawmakers cited not just TransDigm but also Boeing Co., one of the Pentagon’s top…
