Any effort to suggest what Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency should put forward for cuts must begin with a rather large caveat: should a major government contractor with billions riding on government spending priorities be in charge of setting the tone for the debate on federal budget priorities?
Musk’s SpaceX earns substantial sums from launching U.S. government military satellites, and his company stands to make billions producing military versions of his Starlink communications system. He is a sworn opponent of government regulation, and is likely, among other things, to recommend reductions of government oversight of emerging military technologies.
Then there is the scale of Musk’s ambitions. He suggested in a press interview that he could cut $2 trillion in federal spending — nearly one-third of the entire federal budget. If his proposal were to be implemented, it would dismantle large parts of the federal government, including agencies that provide essential services that are not being supplied by the private sector.
In short, I hesitate to endorse Musk’s initiative in any way, shape or form. But his recommendations will not be the last word; there is room for Congress and the White House to make reductions in federal spending. This is especially true at the Pentagon, which accounts for more than half of federal discretionary spending. The discretionary budget includes virtually everything the federal government does except for payments under entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.
Musk is onto at least one of the Pentagon’s major boondoggles, the F-35 combat aircraft. If carried to completion, the F-35 will be the most expensive weapons program in history, at a cost of $1.7 trillion over its lifetime. Yet 23 years into the program, the F-35 still has major flaws in its software and hardware — over 800 unresolved defects according to one Pentagon analysis. And it spends inordinate amounts of time out of action for maintenance. Versions of the plane for the Air Force, Navy, and Marines were designed to carry out multiple functions — aerial dogfights, bombing targets on the ground, close air support for troops, landing on both airstrips on land and the decks of aircraft carriers — and it does none of them particularly well.
For his part, Musk has referred to the F-35 as “jack of all trades, master of none” and “the worst military value for money in history.” His critique is right on target. It is long past time to cut the F-35 program short in favor of cheaper, more reliable alternatives.
There are plenty of other big ticket, current generation systems that could be cancelled with no detriment to U.S. security, including $13 billion aircraft carriers, which are vulnerable to current generation high speed missiles, and heavy tanks that have little or no relevance to current or likely conflicts.
Another treasure trove of potential savings is the Pentagon’s three decades long, $2 trillion plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles and submarines. The last thing the world needs at this moment of extreme tension is a new nuclear arms race. The new intercontinental ballistic missile, dubbed the Sentinel, is not only unnecessary but it is outright dangerous. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry has called it “one of the most dangerous weapons we have” because a president would have only a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch it on warning of an attack, increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war triggered by a false alarm.
Another potentially rich area for savings is trimming the Pentagon’s cohort of over 500,000 private contractors, many of whom do jobs that could be done better and cheaper by government employees. Cutting spending on service contractors by 15 percent would save $26 billion per year.
A number of independent studies, including one by the Congressional Budget Office, have suggested that the Pentagon budget can be cut by $1 trillion over the next 10 years by a combination of eliminating redundancies and narrowing the missions required of our armed forces.
Regardless of what Musk and Ramaswamy recommend, Congress has a chance to scale back the Pentagon’s enormous budget, which is spiraling towards $1 trillion per year. Given all of the other challenges facing the country, to do otherwise would be a case of budgetary malpractice.
