The Department of Defense has received a list of DOGE officials tasked with cutting 8% from next year’s budget. “We welcome DOGE to the Pentagon,” said Secretary Pete Hegseth. “And I hope to welcome Elon to the Pentagon very soon.”
The Pentagon employs 3.7 million personnel with a budget exceeding $850 billion, but it has never passed an audit.
Tara Dougherty, CEO of Govini, a defense software company, worked for three Defense secretaries going back to Robert Gates. She says the biggest savings will be found in overhauling the decades-old weapons acquisition process, which still uses manual spreadsheets and fax machines.
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The Pentagon, headquarters of the Department of Defense (DoD photo by Master Sgt. Ken Hammond, U.S. Air Force)
“I would put a big red bull’s eye on the process by which we manage weapons systems and military platforms,” Dougherty said in an interview with Fox News. “The defense acquisition process is massively broken…. It’s too slow. I mean, the United States is issuing missile purchases through fax machines. It’s using spreadsheet sheets and data calls in order to get nuclear capable platforms off of production lines.”
As a result, fifth-generation stealth fighter jets, the F-35, can’t get out of depot because they’re missing parts and the defense industrial base in the U.S. doesn’t produce what they need. The next generation intercontinental ballistic missile, a key part of the nuclear triad, is $35 billion over budget. And the cost of the B-21 nuclear bomber is rising and behind schedule.
“A lot of the weapons systems and the ships, jets, tanks and other capabilities that the department relies on for the military have such complex supply chains that the Department of Defense doesn’t actually know where all of those parts are coming from. And because they’re using spreadsheets to manage the programs overall means they have no ability to see if there are foreign suppliers or in some cases, Chinese suppliers of critical components like microelectronics in our military systems. This is the kind of thing that Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Trump administration are saying, this is no longer acceptable, and that’s what they’re going to root out,” Dougherty said.
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The Pentagon employs 3.7 million personnel with a budget exceeding $850 billion. (Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images)
To get ahead of the DOGE team, the Navy is considering cutting its fleet of frigates, while the Army is looking for savings by eliminating outdated drones and surplus vehicles.
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., says it is about time.
“I, for one, as chairman of the Armed Services Committee, welcome, DOGE coming in to the Pentagon and helping us cut red tape, make the acquisition process more efficient and spend our dollars better,” Wicker said in an interview with Fox’s Maria Bartiromo.
But not everyone is happy that DOGE is coming to the Pentagon, where there are many classified systems and a lot of secret information that U.S. adversaries would like to gain access to.
“We’ve already seen that this DOGE, I call it the Department of Government inefficiencies, is causing a reign of terror chaos across the federal government,” Rep. Eugene Vindman, D-Va., told CNN. “Just this week, they released classified information about a U.S. intelligence agency. They have access to the American people’s personal information, bank accounts and things like that that they’re frankly not entitled to. And so I have a major, major concern about them going into the Department of Defense and sitting around with, you know, the internal systems there and U.S. national security.”
The Department of Defense has received a list of DOGE officials tasked with cutting 8% from next year’s budget. (Reuters/iStock/Getty)
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Concern that the DOGE team will move too fast at the expense of national security materialized after it purged 2,000 federal workers from the Department of Energy, including 350, many of whom oversaw the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Many of these federal workers were working at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, reassembling nuclear warheads, one of the most sensitive jobs that requires the highest level of security clearance.
The administration did an about-face last week and quickly tried to locate and rehire the Department of Energy employees overseeing the nukes.
At the Department of Veterans Affairs, the agency announced the dismissal of over 1,000 employees, following DOGE guidance. Veterans Affairs employees joined Democratic lawmakers outside the D.C. headquarters to protest DOGE’s actions at the VA last week.
