If Nancy Pelosi and the congressional Democrats wanted to discourage people from signing up for the National Guard, they could not do much more to denude the force of recruits than station them in D.C. for months as props in an insurrection theatre fantasy, and then feed them raw meats and metal filings.  To top it off, no changes are going to be made in the contracting for food supplies because the bureaucrats claim they could find nothing wrong when they inspected the food prep facilities.

Ellen Mitchell reports in The Hill:

The Pentagon on Monday said that no moves are being made to remove any company from food service operations after National Guard troops assigned to protect the U.S. Capitol got sick from eating tainted meals served to them last week.

About 50 National Guard troops have been treated for gastrointestinal complaints — six as outpatients at military treatment facilities and the others at an aid station set up at the Capitol, Defense Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters.

But after food vendor facilities were inspected multiple times, "with no substantial issues having been recorded," Kirby said he is not aware of any changing contracts due to the illnesses.

The is a classic conflict between bureaucratic process and actual results, with the process winning.  The bureaucratic process of inspections says that there is nothing wrong, so even though the food has been making members of the Guard sick, nothing is going to change.

Hardly reassuring to troops who are worried about the food they are getting.

The whole question of who has been poisoning the troops is shrouded in obscurity.  According to this article from Military.com:

To feed the thousands of troops on the D.C. mission, the Guard awarded an $11.5 million contract to Sardi's Catering in College Park, Maryland, according to Maj. Matt Murphy, a Guard spokesman. But now there are 5,200 Guardsmen in D.C., versus 26,000 at the mission's peak. Murphy said the Guard is continuing with the contract.

Sardi's looks like a fairly upscale operation, one with a long history, according to its website and Yelp page.  Timothy Carney of the Washington Examiner reported that while he has "gotten conflicting answers from various National Guard officials"...

In the five days after the Capitol riots, Sardi's food order went from fewer than 500 to more than 10,000. The D.C. National Guard was still placing the orders and was feeding the out-of-town troops. By Jan. 17, three days before the inauguration, the food order increased to 17,000 breakfasts, 17,000 lunches, and 17,000 dinners. And this food was just fine, my sources all tell me. But then, on Jan. 18, things fell off a cliff.

That day, it seems, the National Guard Bureau took over the food contracting from the D.C. National Guard. The NGB asked for 75,000 meals. Sardi's said they could only fulfill part of that. The NGB went to another contractor — I haven't gotten the name yet — who dropped the ball. That NGB contract with the unknown contractor is what delivered the terrible meals.

On Jan. 26, though, the D.C. National Guard took over again — and hired Sardi's again. At this point, nearly a week after the inauguration, the contract was back down below 9,000 meals. And at this point, the food was good again.

But in a dispatch by Lexi Lonas in The Hill dated March 3, we learn that the problems have not stopped:

The undercooked food has continued to appear in guardsmen's meals this week. The sergeant said on Monday that the meat for dinner on Sunday was raw.

"Now, after the raw meat yesterday for dinner, they have told us not to eat the meals for the next two days and are giving us MRE's instead. Soldiers are now paying for all their meals for the next two days in order to get real food," the sergeant said on Monday.

I have been looking and have been unable to find out which supplier(s) provided the tainted food.  One would think that would be the top priority, for the safety of the troops.  It leads to wonder what might be behind the reluctance to name names.  Might it be something related to the National Guard Bureau's formidable operation promoting "small business, small disadvantaged business, women owned small business, Historically Underutilized business (HUBZone), and service disabled veteran owned small business"?  That operation has had some scandals.

Bureaucratic obfuscation is the last thing that ought to be tolerated when our Guard troops are being poisoned.