Did everyone in the Bush administration sign some sort of bad-government pledge?

The Pentagon paid $20 apiece for plastic ice cube trays that once cost it 85 cents. It paid a supplier more than $81 apiece for coffeemakers that it bought for years for just $29 from the manufacturer.

That's because instead of getting competitive bids or buying directly from manufacturers like it used to, the Pentagon is using middlemen who set their own prices....

And it's costing taxpayers 20 percent more than the old system, a Knight Ridder investigation found.

The higher prices are the result of a Defense Department purchasing program called prime vendor, which favors a handful of firms....

Knight Ridder Newspapers conducted a computer database analysis of prices charged by a small segment of prime vendors and how much the DLA paid for the same items from companies outside the prime vendor program....

The average prime vendor price - when adjusted for inflation - was higher for 102 of the 122 items....

In the 1980s, the high cost of Pentagon supplies was a scandal, and the butt of a lot of jokes (e.g., this 1986 humor book) -- though as I did some searches I learned that there were defenders of that era's Pentagon procurement who weren't necessarily Reagan apologists (see the Washington Monthly article here, and this National Journal article). So maybe there's a good explanation for this. Somehow, though, I doubt it.

(Link via DU.)