Out of all the ambitions of President-elect Donald Trump’s upcoming Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), one that will likely face considerable pushback in Washington is slashing the ever-growing defense budget of the United States military.
DOGE, soon to be led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, will examine the Defense Department’s sprawling budget and try to rein in costs.
Due to the Pentagon’s history of failing audits and clandestine accounting, this could be one of DOGE’s most ambitious goals in its quest to slash $2 trillion from the federal government’s budget.
Furthermore, policy experts suggest that DOGE will face significant obstacles in cutting the Pentagon’s budget—including the increasing foreign threats overseas, the lobbying pushback in Washington, and the sheer cost of payments and benefits for service members on the Defense Department’s payroll.
“The international security picture keeps getting worse,” Eric Gomez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, whose research explores the U.S. military budget, told The Epoch Times.
“I expect opponents to reductions in military spending to make arguments that greater instability means more spending is necessary.”
Historically cuts to the military budget have been difficult, John Boyd Jr. of the Boyd Company—which specializes in corporate site relocation and economic development—told The Epoch Times.
However, there’s also the “changing political calculus occurring” after Trump’s election win last month, including growing bipartisan support for reevaluating the Pentagon’s budget.
“A number of high-profile progressives have actually signed on and applauded these efforts,” Boyd said.
Explosive Pentagon Budget
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) have praised DOGE’s goal of cutting defense spending, with the latter suggesting the effort would produce “huge bipartisan cooperation.”“Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud,” Sanders wrote. “That must change.”
This accounts for 70 percent of a weapon system’s “total life-cycle cost,” including expenses to operate and sustain the weapon system from the beginning to the end of its service life.
Another large portion of the military budget encompasses military service members’ pay and retirement benefits, Gomez said.
“Unless DOGE recommends deep cuts to military end strength—the number of men and women who are in uniform—then getting defense spending down will be difficult,” Gomez said.
“If the Trump administration is highly sensitive to rising unemployment numbers, then it may also resist reductions to end-strength that would create unemployed former soldiers.”
Additionally, the Pentagon’s discretionary budget is expected to grow to more than $1 trillion by 2034, according to the White House.
Musk, who founded SpaceX, one of the nation’s leading aerospace contractors for commercial space travel, pointed out the ongoing issue with the Lockheed Martin F-35 program.
“The F-35 design was broken at the requirements level because it was required to be too many things to too many people,” Musk wrote in a post on X.
“This made it an expensive and complex jack of all trades, master of none. Success was never in the set of possible outcomes.”
The Pentagon plans to use the aircraft through 2088, with its total costs exceeding $2 trillion on acquisition and sustainment.
Sustainment costs alone have increased by 44 percent, from roughly $1.1 trillion in 2018 to $1.58 trillion in 2023.
The GAO noted that a large reason for its costs comes from the extension of the aircraft’s service life.
Hartung and Gledhill called the F-35 a “classic example of this enormously expensive tendency” of the Pentagon spending so much on its weapons programs, noting that the jet went into full-scale production 23 years after the program was launched.
“The fighter [jet] has suffered from persistent engine problems and deficient software,” the authors wrote. “But the official go-ahead from the Pentagon means little since Congress has long funded the F-35 as if it were already approved for full-scale production.”
Boyd, whose company has worked with aerospace contractors like Boeing, said the F-35 project is a “poster child” of one way DOGE could add efficiency to federal spending.
Roadblocks to Reducing Military Budget
If DOGE wants to cut some of the Pentagon’s expenditures, Musk and Ramaswamy will likely see resistance from the lobbying groups in Washington that represent various defense contractors, which “pocket about half of all Pentagon outlays,” Hartung and Gledhill point out in their report.However, one obstacle facing DOGE’s efforts to take on defense spending may prove more substantial: the growing geopolitical instability overseas, Gomez said, noting active conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, and increasing threats from China and North Korea in Asia.
“A lot of this instability can be tied back to an overly aggressive and militarized U.S. foreign policy, so more military spending won’t be this easy fix, but I expect opponents to reductions in military spending to make arguments that greater instability means more spending is necessary,” Gomez said.
There may also be a strategic argument for reducing “end-strength,” which refers to the total number of active-duty military or civilian members in any branch of the military, particularly in the Army. This will face political opposition, Gomez said.
“Even if the United States wants to reduce focus on Europe and the Middle East to balance against China, then the geography of Asia still means spending money on expensive platforms,” he said.
Gomez said that countries like Japan and South Korea could increase their military budgets to reduce U.S. investments in Asia, allowing the United States to surge forces in the region if the local states were facing defeat.
“A U.S. force posture designed for this kind of strategy would be smaller and less expensive than our current posture, but it would still mean spending money on things like large warships, submarines, air defense, and the air and sealift to move things into theater,” Gomez said.
“So there are ways to trim, cut, and invest in less expensive equipment that we ought to pursue, but it may not result in really massive savings on its own.”
He suggested that Trump’s second administration would try to advance a new approach to U.S. foreign policy that defines the country’s interests differently.
That could include a smaller defense budget while still servicing its broader goals, including sticking to its “strategy even if unplanned things happen” overseas.
“That, however, will undoubtedly prove a tough political fight, given how many stakeholders—from Pentagon officials to those corporate executives to compromised members of Congress—benefit from such spending sprees,” they wrote.
