Will the Department of Government Efficiency Tackle the Pentagon?

President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to create a “Department of Government Efficiency,” co-chaired by businessman Elon Musk and former political rival Vivek Ramaswamy. Both have pledged deep cuts.

In a September 2023 speech in Los Angeles, Ramaswamy pledged to shut down the FBI, IRS, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Department of Education. Just to drive home the point, Ramaswamy said that “[m]ass layoffs are absolutely what I would bring to Washington DC.”

Ramaswamy has failed to explain how the government will be able to carry out basic functions like collecting revenue, enforcing the law, dealing with pandemics, or preventing nuclear accidents once his targeted agencies are no more.

For his part, Musk has suggested that he could cut federal government spending by $2 trillion, nearly a third of current spending levels. This would mean taking a wrecking ball to the government, and it would be difficult to achieve without legislative changes that would allow for reductions in spending on Medicare or Social Security. The easiest items to cut are in the federal discretionary budget, which includes virtually everything the U.S. government does other than entitlement programs like the two mentioned above. But the entire discretionary budget is less than the $2 trillion Musk wants to cut.

So let’s stipulate that cuts in the amount Musk has promised will not happen. He can still do great damage to the social safety net and to programs meant to protect Americans from growing threats like pandemics and severe weather events caused by climate change.

All of which leads to the trillion dollar question. Will Musk and Ramaswamy go after the Pentagon budget, which at $900 billion-plus accounts for more than half of federal discretionary spending? There is plenty there to cut without reducing our security. In fact, with a smarter strategy we could be safer while spending less.

Over the past decade, there have been several studies that have provided blueprints on how to cut at least $100 billion from the Pentagon’s annual budget, from the Cato Institute, the Center for International Policy, and the Congressional Budget Office. Potential targets for cuts include the overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft; $13 billion aircraft carriers that are vulnerable to modern high-speed missiles; land-based nuclear missiles, which pose risks of sparking an accidental nuclear war; and the Pentagon’s 500,000 plus cadre of private contractors, many of whom do jobs that could be done better and more cheaply by government employees.

All of the above can and should be done, but the only way to get substantial savings is to reduce the size of the armed forces, which now clock in at over 2 million people when regular and reserve forces are taken into account.

But reducing forces will require a change in strategy. The current “cover the globe” strategy, which calls for the capability to intervene anywhere in the world in short order, needs to be abandoned and replaced with a more realistic, restrained strategy that only uses force as a matter of last resort for purposes that can clearly be defined as defensive. The Iraq war would not meet this standard, and the war in Afghanistan would not have been allowed to drag on for twenty years under this approach. Allies would do more in defense of their own regions, and diplomacy would come first in addressing global problems.

It is unlikely that an efficiency commission will tackle the flaws in current U.S. military strategy, but it could go after price gouging, cost overruns, redundant weapons systems, and corrupt practices. Whether it does so will depend on how much political pressure it gets to hold the Pentagon to account. A parallel effort to prevent the commission from gutting essential functions in the name of cost cutting will also be necessary if we are to have a government worthy of the name.