Ernie Fitzgerald, described in the pages of the Washington Post as “America’s best-known whistle blower,” was also “the most hated person in the Air Force,” according to Verne Orr, secretary of the Air Force during the Reagan Administration. By the time Fitzgerald died on January 31, 2019, in Falls Church, Virginia, he had also become the patron saint of government whistleblowers. He was 92…
He discovered that so-called “direct labor costs” for a Boeing cruise missile were $14 an hour, but that the Pentagon was paying $114, that People profile noted. His influence only grew when he turned his sights from gigantic programs and their mind-numbing data to simple spare parts. He helped bring to light a 34-cent plastic stool-leg cap that cost the Air Force $916.55, and a simple airplane maintenance tool that cost $11,492. ”It took seven engineers a total of 63 hours to design a straight, three-inch piece of wire,” Fitzgerald groused. The Pentagon’s bill: $14,835.
That was a really nice article in memory of Ernest Fitzgerald from POGO. Also see Chuck Spinney’s remembrance.
I’ll add some of my favorite “Ernie” quotes. Here he is on the Lockheed C-5A bail-out:
To me, the Air Force’s bail-out plan is evidence of the Pentagon’s collapse of will in dealing with its giant contractors. If the Lockheed bail-out precedent is established, how can the Pentagon ever hold a large contractor to his commitments?
The second thing that I believe needs to be looked at is the relationship of the Government to big contractors. Are they part of the Government? Should they be? If you can’t allow them to go broke, you can’t enforce contracts. So, as I said earlier, we combine the worst features of a private monopoly and a Government bureaucracy. You create something very akin to the Mussolini corporations which were the most notoriously inefficient organizations ever put together by man, I believe. I see absolutely no reason for the big contractors to behave differently than they are presently behaving in this atmosphere.
Here he defines competition:
…competition, which, incidentally, I would define as the ability to take your business elsewhere without unacceptable penalty.
Here’s one on the effects of parametric cost estimating:
Fitzhugh also endorses parametric cost estimating for procurement. This approach builds in, and indeed amplifies, mistakes and inefficiencies of the past in establishing prices for new procurements. While the parametric, or “will cost,” approach to estimating has some application in projecting funding requirements, the “should cost” approach is infinitely better in procurement if one is interested in saving money.
However, over-dependence on the probable cost estimating techniques has had a bad effect in other areas. To begin with, since the techniques used do not recognize inefficiencies in the bases used for projections, the approach then is to build excess costs into future estimates. For example, the cost estimates for the new generation of fighter aircraft, the F-14 and F-15, are heavily influenced by cost experience on the F-111, which is highly suspect to say the least.
And here’s Rickover citing Fitzgerald:
As Mr. Fitzgerald put it, it is “antisocial” behavior and it is behavior that often results, as they both testified, with people not staying in the Pentagon very long.
I highly recommend reading some of the Congressional hearings with Ernest Fitzgerald.
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