Senator Calls for Heads to Roll at the Pentagon for $64M Wasted on a 'Hangar Queen'

Government Executive: If you contract to the tune of $64 million for a counternarcotics plane and it never flies, should you keep your job?

That’s what Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wondered in a Sept. 20 letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis blasting the Defense Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration for their seven years of work on a “hangar queen,” as the senator called it.

The ATR-42-500 aircraft was adopted for the joint-agency Global Discovery Program aimed at curbing the opium trade in war-torn Afghanistan. But it became the subject of probes for waste by inspectors general for both the Justice and Defense departments.

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