Yang’s Top-Gun Tale
Making a point about Defense Department waste, Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang related a secondhand story about a Navy fighter pilot who said that airmen routinely dumped fuel into the Pacific Ocean at the end of the fiscal year as a way to preserve the following year’s fuel budget. But the story doesn’t add up.
Yang allowed that he could not verify it. Neither could we. The Navy denies it. And Navy budget experts we interviewed said that’s not how the department’s budget works.
Yang related the anecdote at CNN’s “Climate Crisis Town Hall” on Sept. 4.
: We’re spending $750 billion that we know of on our military industrial complex every year. And I’m going to share a story that I heard secondhand, so I can’t verify it. But there was a Top Gun, a fighter pilot, who said that his least favorite time
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