ProPublica is examining U.S. military budgeting, spending and contracting, and we’re asking for your help.

We’ve spent years talking to people who’ve worked in the defense industry, the Pentagon and the armed services, so we know that these topics are critically important. Every day, Pentagon contracting officers, defense industry workers, congressional staffers and others make decisions that affect the most expensive military in the world, with great consequences for the safety of soldiers and for the country at large. Yet it’s well documented that, even when those involved have good intentions, many Pentagon projects end up mired in delays, cost overruns and performance issues. The causes of these problems are often opaque to the taxpayers who foot the bill.

“There’s no way that you can follow the money, because it keeps getting twisted like a Rubik’s Cube,” said John Ferrari, a retired Army major general and now a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “None of it is set up to be transparent.”

ProPublica is setting out to untwist this Rubik’s Cube with the help of those who understand the issues best. These topics are especially relevant right now, with Congress considering the president’s proposal to increase the defense budget to a record $1.5 trillion next year. To help the public understand what’s really at stake here, we need to speak to experts in this world, which means anyone who knows how the Pentagon is spending taxpayer money and what defense contractors are doing with it. 

We especially want to learn from those who can help us understand whether things are working as they should. In our first story in this series, we spoke to dozens of people who’ve worked for General Dynamics, the Army and the Pentagon. Many of them spoke to us because they felt that things they were seeing on the job weren’t good uses of taxpayer money or weren’t helping to keep the country safe.

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