Musk versus Pentagon

Established on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration via executive order, the new department is charged with implementing “the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity”. Trump made it clear that virtually no agency or department would be exempt. “Pentagon, [the Department of] Education, just everything. We’re going to go through everything.” In an interview with Fox News, Trump was convinced that, “We’re going to find billions, hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud and abuse.”

When it comes to Musk’s hungry intentions regarding the US Defense Department, things start getting cloudily confusing. In the first place, letting this “special government employee” loose on a department with which his own companies, notably SpaceX, have contracts with, sounds like a recipe for self-interested slashing.

The broader premise of cutting back on wasteful Pentagon spending, however, is nigh irrefutable. And as much as he is loathed by establishment wonks in the Pentagon, that other Trump ally-in-cutting, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, is merely stating the wondrously obvious in noting that many programs at the Pentagon “don’t have the impact you want them to.”

Much to the horror of defence mandarins, Hegseth has also insisted that the Pentagon pass “a clean audit.” That, at the very least, was what the US taxpayers deserved. “They deserve to know where their $850 billion go, how it’s spent, and make sure it’s spent wisely.”

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has already identified an area of interest for the DOGE razor gang: shipbuilding. “Everything there seems to cost too much, take too long and deliver too little to the soldiers… We need business leaders to go in there and absolutely reform the Pentagon’s acquisition process.”

Defence departments the world over specialise in innovative, fantastic, even fraudulent accounting in justifying projects that will either never see fruition or, if they do, will only do so at vast cost to the taxpayer. From the outset, the question of necessity is almost never asked in any serious way, let alone the need to coherently identify the relevant threat against which, presumably, the weapons system is intended to combat.

The unaccountable costs and expenditures associated with US defence place it in an almost peerless category. When one can fork out money to the value of $5 trillion for failed and catastrophic conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan, something is rotten in the state of budgetary economics. Much of this can be put down to post-9/11 spending, which dramatically departed from the previous model which focused on raising the marginal tax rate and reducing non-war expenditure. Taxes were actually cut in 2001, 2003 and 2017, while expenditure ballooned. Huge borrowings for war were made and emergency funds, which do not fall within standard processes of oversight, became the norm.

What emerged was the phenomenon Linda Bilmes describes as the “Ghost Budget”. It was aided by abundant capital markets the US Treasury could readily draw upon, a dysfunctional budget system typified by hobbling federal government shutdowns, and a Pentagon determined to reverse the post-Cold War budget cuts it had suffered. Money flowed in the nature of funding for emergency and Overseas Contingency Operations, passing under the radar of the Planning, Programming, Budgeting & Execution Process. This incentive for underwriting permanent wars was also a license for permanent waste, characterised by the continuous resort by administrations to supplemental emergency funds (assistance to Ukraine being a case in point) with minimal administrative and Congressional scrutiny.

This situation is further complicated by the entanglements governments have with self-interested weapons companies and arms manufacturers, whose boards are very often packed by former government employees and civil servants who identify their own profits with the security of the nation.

Defence budgets the world over would seem to be subject to a more elastic treatment than those of other departments. The $400 billion deal for the transfer and construction of nuclear-powered submarines to the Royal Australian Navy by the United States is a case in point, a project criminally needless as to demand those overseeing it to be charged with sedition and baleful stupidity. It has all the ingredients that should make it a prime target for trimming, if not culling altogether: the absence of a genuine security threat (China is lazily designated as the primary one); the presence of self-interested former politicians who quaff and gobble from a seemingly endless gravy train; and military fatuity.

Excerpted: ‘Cutting the Ghost Budget: Elon Musk Versus the Pentagon’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org