Chuck Grassley: “One of the General Accounting Office tables shows how much the Department of Defense paid the top executives at…”

“One of the General Accounting Office tables shows how much the Department of Defense paid the top executives at McDonnell Douglas. The Department of Defense paid them a total of $9,273,382. The top executive got $2,713,308. And I have the chart here so that you can see that the cap is $250,000. We have the executive that I just referred to as executive No. 1, because obviously we are not here to embarrass anybody. It is proprietary information. The name does not matter, but the point is, executive No. 1 got paid $2.7 million; executive No. 2 got paid $2,646,773; the third executive got paid $2,046,481; and the fourth executive got paid $1,833,604--all when there is a cap of $250,000. So that cap was designed to limit the size of the Department of Defense paycheck that was sent to McDonnell Douglas for executive pay, and yet we find the cap did not work. Now, every citizen would like to get a paycheck like this from Uncle Sam. This chart shows so obviously I do not even need to say it that the existing caps are not working very well. In fact, you would have to say they are leaking like a sieve. They are riddled with loopholes the size you can drive a Mack truck through. Maybe they were not meant to be that way. Maybe this was just a big game that somebody is playing with the taxpayers. But we should not be playing these games. And if these caps are not going to work, they should not be in the law. That is what the committee would rather have.”