Think tanks are helping DOD dodge the DOGE

Enjoy our new column by the Democratizing Foreign Policy team exposing stealth corruption infecting our system — in plain sight.

For months, the Washington establishment has been raising alarm bells about how the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) could harm the Pentagon.

In January, days after the new Trump administration was sworn in, an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholar argued that when it comes to DOGE, “The Pentagon must spend to save,” and that for the “DOGE initiative to succeed at the Pentagon…it must pair persistent efforts to create efficiencies and eliminate waste with increased defense investment.”

In early February that same AEI scholar further explained this Orwellian logic in a hyperbolically titled article, “The U.S. Military is Crumbling,” that those investments should include “plans to grow the fleet, rebuild munitions stockpiles, grow manned and unmanned aerial inventories, upgrade bases, and increase homeland air and missile defense capabilities.”

In other words, those “investments” in savings would cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.

The DOGE dread drumbeat kept rolling at other Washington think tanks. “On the current trajectory, if left unchecked, DOGE could do more damage to the U.S. military than 20 years of war in Afghanistan,” wrote an Atlantic Council senior adviser in late February. Then, last week, the headline of a Foreign Policy article penned by an Atlantic Council senior fellow read: “How Trump is Killing the U.S. Defense Industry,” and argued that, “Eroding the United States’ much-feared defense-industrial complex was almost certainly not what Trump predicted. But the erosion has arrived.”

What isn’t mentioned in any of these commentaries is that these experts all hail from organizations funded by the very same defense industry whose fate they are bemoaning.

As documented in the Think Tank Funding Tracker — which the Quincy Institute created to let the public follow the money behind foreign policy debates — none of the top think tanks in the U.S. have received more money from Pentagon contractors than the Atlantic Council. From 2019-2023 the organization received at least $10.27 million from more than three dozen Pentagon contractors. As noted in a report accompanying the tracker, AEI is a “dark money” think tank that doesn’t disclose any donor information, but staffers have let slip in public events that it too is funded by the weapons industry.

Besides conflict of interest disclosures, another key ingredient missing from these doomsday prophecies about DOGE at the Pentagon is, well, the doomsday part. The simple fact is that Trump and DOGE have cut next to nothing from the Pentagon, and the agency is slotted to receive hundreds of billions of dollars more — not less — funding in the coming years.

The same day Foreign Policy published the Atlantic Council scholars piece, the New York Times published an article explaining that the Department of Defense (DoD) has been virtually untouched by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. As the Times analysis of all federal government contracts explained, while approximately 60% of all federal government contracts are made by DoD, less than 1% of all DOGE cuts have come from the department. Among the top Pentagon contractors — Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Boeing — just one (General Dynamics) had any contracts slashed by DOGE and that amounted to less than one percent of the firm’s total contracts.

That same day the Pentagon announced the grand total of all DOGE cuts at DoD: just $80 million. Defense News put this paltry total in perspective, noting that the Pentagon’s budget is just under $850 billion, so, “[t]he first round of DOGE’s Pentagon cuts represents about .009% of that budget.” Put differently, $80 million is less than the cost of just one F-35, and the Pentagon is planning to buy 145 of these notoriously over-priced and underperforming “part-time” fighter jets next year.

The long-term news is even rosier for U.S. arms makers, as the Pentagon budget is actually expected to soar in the coming years. A recently passed House budget resolution would add $100 billion to the Pentagon’s budget, while the Senate, not to be outhawked, is proposing a $150 billion increase for the Pentagon over the next four years. This week Congress is expected to pass a continuing resolution that will fund the government for the remainder of the fiscal year, and increase Pentagon spending by $6 billion while slashing $13 billion in funding at other agencies.

Despite all of this, the Atlantic Council senior fellow argues that “[i]n recent days and weeks, the markets have been watching the announcements from Washington and unsurprisingly concluded that the Trump administration wants to slash the defense budget.” Yet, literally within hours of the article being published, business media outlets were riddled with headlines like, “Now is the time to buy U.S. defense stocks,” and arguing that, “It’s a great time to buy defense stocks as DOGE cuts fears are overblown,” following an announcement from Wall Street giant CitiGroup that the stocks were a good buy precisely because of a European commitment to increase defense spending as well as Congress’s budget resolutions boosting the Pentagon’s budget.

One of the reasons the Atlantic Council analyst claims that there may be hard times ahead for the U.S. arms industry is the claim that many countries buy U.S. arms not because they provide better capability, but because there is an implicit understanding that buying American means the U.S. will come to your aid in a crisis. In other words, buying weapons from an American company is tantamount to buying security guarantees from the United States. If true, this would be a terrible way to make decisions on defense — locking the U.S. military into a commitment to a foreign purchaser without review by Congress or careful consideration by the executive branch.

If that were the only way to sell U.S. arms, it would not be worth the price. In reality, there are many factors that go into arms sales decisions, including buying systems that are compatible with a nation’s existing arsenal. This factor gives U.S. companies an edge in markets where they have been dominant for many years. The idea that arms sales require a U.S. military commitment to the purchasing country is nonsense.

While think tanks funded by Pentagon contractors have been spreading false-fears of a military industrial complex crisis, they aren’t the only players helping DoD dodge the DOGE. As Responsible Statecraft previously documented, Pentagon contractors have more than 900 lobbyists working on their behalf, including several former members of Congress, and donated tens of millions of dollars to current members in the last election.

But, there’s a key difference between that and think tank influence: transparency. Those lobbyists are registered. Those campaign contributions are public record. Think tank funding usually isn’t. There is currently no legal requirement for think tanks to publicly disclose their funding and more than a third, including AEI, disclose absolutely nothing.

The Atlantic Council, then, should be commended for its donor transparency. But the think tank ecosystem, as a whole, should strive for an even higher level of transparency by disclosing potential conflicts of interest in their publications. Reasonable people can certainly disagree on the best path forward for Pentagon spending and efficiencies but, as we're having that debate, we should strive to be fully transparent with our readers and let them know who is funding our work, particularly when our work relates to those funders’ financial interests.

To analysts without these conflicts of interest, it is abundantly clear that there are few better places to find wasteful spending than the government’s largest bureaucracy — the Pentagon. If the Trump administration is serious about saving taxpayer money, DoD can’t dodge the DOGE forever.