President Donald Trump's team of enthusiastic cost-cutters will soon set their sights on the largest discretionary budget in the United States under Elon Musk.
The annual budget is $850 billion, and the Pentagon has long been plagued by blame for waste and inefficiency in its defense program, with seven consecutive audits recently unsuccessful.
“We're going to find billions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud and abuse,” Trump predicted in an interview with Fox News' Brett Bayer on Sunday.
Congress is paying very detailed annually the Department of Defense (DOD) budget, and urging lawmakers to cut costs could be a place where Republicans publicly break in masks and his burnt-out style There is.
Let's take a look where government efficiency teams can set their sights.
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The cost-cutting guru of President Donald Trump under Elon Musk, depicted here, will soon set his sights on the largest discretionary budget in the United States. (Anna Money Maker/Getty Images)
Personnel and contract
Musk and his team's trends seem to be culling federal employees, but cost-cutting advocates argue that outsourcing work on contractors could have the opposite effect I'm doing it.
Usually, half of the Pentagon's budget is sent to contractors who have profit motives, unlike the government itself. The government relies on contractors to act as software support, training, weapons, and paramilitary forces for foreign missions.
“The main driving force of Pentagon waste is actually contracting government functions and management capabilities, like simple things (such as) that actually support government functions and management capabilities. It's about doing it,” said Julia Gredhill, a researcher at the Stimson Center's National Security Reform Program.
“It could be carried out against bigger projects based on efforts to reduce the private workforce, but rather than outsourced at a very high cost, governments are required to perform basic management functions. There are many areas where Pentagon waste is reduced by actually building its capabilities.
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The Pentagon will be seen from Air Force 1 as it flew over Washington, DC on March 2, 2022. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)
In 2015, at the request of DOD leaders, the Defense Business Committee said 125 billion over five years by the Pentagon renegotiating service contracts, streamlining bureaucracy through attrition and early retirement, and integrating IT processes. I discovered that I can save money on dollars.
The report found that the Pentagon is paying 1,014,000 eye-catching contractors to fill back office jobs far from the frontline. Currently, DOD lists only around 1.3 million active duty troops.
However, the plan was never widely implemented, according to a report by the Washington Post, and Pentagon leaders took steps to “bury” them for fear of budget cuts.
In October 2024, a two-year audit by a Department of Defense inspector, Boeing found that service branches had increased by 8,000% due to soap dispensers that paid $149,072 above market price. Of the 46 selected spare parts vetted by the audit, the report found that the Air Force overpaid about $1 million, $12, for a C-17 transport.
It follows a 2018 Congressional investigation that revealed that the Air Force spends $1,300 per reheatable coffee cup on KC-10 aircraft, instead of repairing them when the handles break. I replaced them. Sen. Chuck Grassley of R-Iowa discovered that the Air Force spent $32,000 in place of 25 cups.
Weapon Program: F-35 and Land-based ICBM
Musk suggests that it will consider eliminating the F-35 stealth fighter jet program for a long time due to cost overruns, glitches and delays. In X's post, he calls it “the worst military value of money in history”, and the jet itself is “the expensive and complicated jack of all trades”, and “manned fighter jets are the era I added that it's outdated. Anyway, of a drone.”
However, repealing the F-35 was encountered opposition in Congress every time it was proposed.
A recent report issued by taxpayers for common sense, Quincy Institute and Stimson called for the retirement of the F-35 jet and elimination of the ballistic missile program.
Elon Musk suggests that they will consider eliminating the F-35 stealth fighter jet program, which has long been dogged to cost overruns, glitches and delays. (Andrej Tarfila/SOPA Images/Lightrocket via Getty Images)
Stopping the F-35 Fighterjet program, which is suffering from cost overruns, glitches and delays, as some advocates, according to the joint report.
However, Congress will need to take part in repaying the F-35 in the annual defense bill, and Lockheed Martin is part of the plane in many states across the country where lawmakers have components at risk. We produce.
“Responding to the country's incredible debt by reimbursing too high, low-performing, gradual weapons for current missions, such as F-35 fighter jets and inter-sential intercontinental ballistic missiles, while working on the country's incredible debt. We can invest more in matters.” Gabe Murphy, the taxpayer for common sense.
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“ICBMs are not necessarily the most accurate and have weapons found in nuclear weapons,” added Gredhill.
“We have the sea and air legs of the nuclear triad, but it's just as accurate and not as vulnerable as our ICBMS, you know, ICBM is ground Because it's in.
The report found that eliminating the Sentinel ICBM program could save $3.7 billion a year.
Reorganizing the base
Stimson's report found that “targeted closures and reorganizations” of US military bases could save another $3 million to $5 billion a year.
“Even if we embrace all the missions we have in the world right now, we can probably cut back on our overseas bases without actually rethinking our strategy,” said Ben, Policy Director for Defense Priorities. Friedman said.
“If we are trying to manage the Middle East through the existence of US military forces, or at least through the ability to put the military and say, we can say we can do it with less bases. ”
The Trump team is reportedly considering closing its presence in Syria, where 2,000 troops are currently stationed.
In the 1980s, under President Ronald Reagan, the government took an effort known as the post-Cold War process, the Basic Restructuring and Closure (BRAC), to coordinate the end of the force posture that no longer needed. Five rounds of BRAC shut down 350 installations with a savings of $12 billion, but the final BRAC process ended in 2011.
Targeted basic closures could save taxpayers $3-5 billion. (Photo by Hedil Amir/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Defense Research
A portion of the $143.2 billion budget for the Pentagon research could also be scrutinized.
Last year, lawmakers demanded that Chinese AI researchers know how they won US grants $30 million. In 2021, Song-Chun Zhu totaled 1.2 million from DOD grants seeking to develop “critical for DOD tasks” and “high-level robot autonomy” for “cognitive robotics platforms” for intelligence and surveillance He was the lead investigator for two projects at Dollar. system. ”
Additionally, last summer, a Department of Defense inspector told EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit organization that funded the Wuhan Virology Institute's gain of function research, a $46.7 million defense fund from 2014 to 2023. I discovered that I had been there. of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Veteran Sen. Joni Ernst of R-Iowa, chairman of Senate Doge Caucus, called for wasted spending in the Pentagon. (Reuters)
use-it-or-lose-it spending
Under the Yousit or Rose It policy, last month in the fiscal year, federal agencies have worked to spend everything left in the federal budget, and are worried that Congress will make a smaller amount even better next year. Masu. Pentagrams are no exception.
In September 2024, DOD spent more money than other months since 2008, and fine dining restaurants came with a large taxpayer price tag.
As highlighted in the X-thread by Senator R-Iowa, he spent $6.1 million on lobster tails, $16.6 million on rib-eye steaks, $6.4 million on salmon and $407,000 on Alaskan King Crab.
That same month, DoD spent $221.7 million on new furniture, including $36,000 in footprints.
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Political headwinds
Cost reduction initiatives will face opposition from Congress, which did not necessarily want to incorporate Meth into the country's defense.
“If history is some kind of precedent, I think this will start to start seeing real tensions at least occur,” said Diana Shaw, a former State Department inspector. “We have many vested interests, not just economic.”
“There are people who have a philosophical interest in the entire defense infrastructure and the military. And this is a field that has historically been well protected. And this is what we're looking for now to see if this is present. I think it's going to be an interesting test case. Some pushbacks to aggressive cutting and picking, such as those occurring in other institutions that have historically been less favored by Republican members, even within the present day. .”
