Pentagon aims to bring jobs back in house

But as the Obama administration looks for ways to reduce growth in the defense budget, the Pentagon is eyeing those contractor jobs as targets. At a House Budget Committee hearing Wednesday morning, Chairman John Spratt, D-S.C., asked the Pentagon's top accountant why the defense budget has grown so much faster than inflation over the past decade.

Robert Hale, the Defense Department comptroller, told Spratt that those outsourced contractor jobs have ended up being more expensive than government workers. Now the Pentagon is looking at bringing some of those contractor jobs back in-house, Hale said. We "need to look carefully at how many contractors we're using," Hale said.

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama promised to cut all federal contractor spending by at least 10 percent and end the abuse of no-bid contracts.

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