Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will find hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and waste at the Pentagon, President Trump believes.
Trump told Fox News’s Brett Baier, in an interview held at the Super Bowl on Sunday, that an audit of the Pentagon will reveal massive irregularities and misspending.
“I’m going to tell him very soon, like maybe in 24 hours, to go check the Department of Education. … Then I’m going to go, go to the military. Let’s check the military,” Trump said in.
“We’re going to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse.”
The Pentagon’s budget currently stands at nearly $1 trillion.
Elon Musk, who leads DOGE, has been tasked by President Trump with making swingeing cuts to the federal workforce and making cuts to inefficient spending and processes.
In another interview on Sunday, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz suggested the Pentagon’s shipbuilding contracts could be an area of particular interest for DOGE.
“Everything there seems to cost too much, take too long and deliver too little to the soldiers… We do need business leaders to go in there and absolutely reform the Pentagon’s acquisition process,” Waltz said in an interview on NBC.
On Friday, at a town-hall event, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said there needed to be transparency about defense spending, and committed the Pentagon to a clean audit within four years.
The Pentagon failed its seventh straight audit in November. Around half of all agencies failed their audits. The Pentagon became legally obliged to pass its audits in 2018.
Only the Marines have passed a clean audit. This week the branch was given approval for its $49 billion in financial assets.
“The American taxpayers deserve that,” Hegseth said. “They deserve to know where their $850 billion dollars go, how it’s spent, and make sure it’s spent wisely.”
“Nearly a trillion dollars of taxpayer money is being spent by the Pentagon every year,” he continued.
The Pentagon is “accountable for every dollar we spend, and every dollar will waste we find or redundancy is one dollar we can invest somewhere else.”
Hegseth told the town hall that the Pentagon’s new focus would be on deterrence and protecting the southern border. He called for accountability for top officials who oversaw the withdrawal from Afghanistan under Joe Biden, and also promised tat diversity, equity and inclusivity (DEI) initiatives in the military would end.