Guess who is standing between DOGE and the Pentagon?

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

On February 19, news broke that the Pentagon was planning to cut its budget by a whopping $50 billion per year. While critics of wasteful spending at the Pentagon rejoiced, there was just one catch: the Pentagon wasn’t actually planning to cut a dime from its budget. As my Quincy Institute colleague Bill Hartung explained in Responsible Statecraft, “the plan is not to reduce the Pentagon’s top line, but to shift any savings found in one part of the department to pay for other systems and activities more in line with the preferences of the administration.”

As if to hammer home the point that the Pentagon budget wasn’t headed south, the very next day, February 20, the Senate passed a budget resolution that would ultimately increase the Pentagon budget by $150 billion, pushing it to near historic levels.

Yet, President Trump has made repeated references to reining in spending at the Pentagon. On the campaign trail, candidate Trump pledged to “carry out a much needed clean up of the military industrial complex to stop the war profiteering.” Just two weeks ago, he announced he’d meet with Russia and China to discuss the possibility of all three countries cutting their military budgets in half, explaining that, "We're all spending a lot of money that we could be spending on other things that are actually, hopefully much more productive."

Despite Trump’s rhetoric, the Pentagon is not getting the same treatment that other government agencies have received from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). This is most certainly not for a lack of gross inefficiencies at the Pentagon, including rampant price gouging by contractors. Even the traditionally pro-military Heritage Foundation — the architects of Project 2025, which includes a number of proposals the Trump administration has adopted — earlier this month published an article entitled, “$1,500 Coffee Cups and $150,000 Soap Dispensers: Pentagon Waste Must End.”

So, why then is the Pentagon being spared the DOGE axe? In short, that military-industrial complex that Trump pledged to clean up is thriving, and much of Washington is cashing in.

To understand how this process starts you’ll need to know a statistic that is conveniently kept out of Department of Defense budget requests, congressional hearings, and industry talking points: most of the Pentagon’s budget does NOT go to the troops; it goes to Pentagon contractors. The more than $400 billion of taxpayer dollars that goes to Pentagon contractors every year is then used, in part, to fuel an enormous influence machine that pushes its agenda in Hollywood, at think tanks, but, above all, in the halls of Congress where the Pentagon’s budget is created.

Lobbying by Pentagon contractors reached a fevered pitch in 2024. By the numbers, Pentagon contractors spent over $148 million on lobbying and had 945 lobbyists working on their behalf, according to OpenSecrets. That’s more lobbyists and more lobbying spending by Pentagon contractors than we’ve seen in over a decade. To put that in perspective, there are 535 voting members in Congress, so today’s military-industrial complex fields almost two lobbyists and spends more than $275,000 on lobbying for every member of Congress. That’s more money than even the highest salary of a member of Congress ($223,000).

Pentagon contractors are literally spending more money to influence members of Congress than those members are making themselves.

The lobbyists that extraordinary spending buys are also, more often than not, coming from Congress itself. Of the 945 lobbyists hired by Pentagon contractors in 2024, nearly two-thirds (62.54%) had come through the revolving door, with previous experience in Congress or the executive branch.

That lengthy list of revolving-door lobbyists for Pentagon contractors includes an all-star bipartisan list highlighted by several former lawmakers. Democrat Bart Stupak, for example, previously represented Michigan’s 1st district but now works as a lobbyist for Venable where he represents a dozen clients, including arms industry titan Lockheed Martin. On the other side of the aisle, Republican Jack Kingston represented Georgia’s 1st district from 1993 to 2015, and in 2024 lobbied on behalf of 17 clients, including Boeing, which was awarded nearly $23 billion in contracts from the Pentagon in 2024.

And, to be clear, this is just the part of the revolving door involving people who are registered lobbyists. It does not include the thousands of former acquisition officials hired by Pentagon contractors or high-ranking retired generals and admirals who go on to serve as consultants for, or sit on the boards of, Pentagon contractors without registering as lobbyists.

In fact, as a Quincy Institute brief found, more than 80% of four-star generals and admirals who retired from the military between 2018 and 2023 went on to work for the arms industry. For example, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford receives over $356,000 a year in compensation serving on Lockheed Martin’s board of directors. And, he’s not even the only four-star on Lockheed’s board — he’s joined by (Ret.) Air Force Gen. Bruce A. Carlson. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Lockheed Martin is by far the world’s largest arms maker and reports receiving more U.S. taxpayer dollars every year than many government agencies.

While the revolving door offers the promise of lucrative paydays after high-ranking government officials leave office, Pentagon contractors have a much more direct way to influence current members of Congress: campaign cash. According to OpenSecrets, the defense sector donated at least $30 million to 2024 election campaigns. While a pittance compared to the $15.9 billion that was spent on all House, Senate and presidential races, Pentagon contractor cash wasn’t evenly distributed to all candidates — far from it. The money flowed disproportionately to candidates who could tip the scales in contractors’ favor, like the presidential candidates and lawmakers who serve on key committees.

The top congressional recipient of campaign contributions from the defense sector was Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which is critical in setting the Pentagon budget every year. In the 2024 election cycle, Calvert received over $810,000 from the defense sector, more than one in every 10 dollars his campaign raised.

The second highest recipient of Pentagon contractor contributions was Alabama Republican Mike Rogers, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, which exercises oversight of the Department of Defense and annually drafts the defense policy bill, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). In the 2024 election cycle, Pentagon contractors, who could see their revenues shift by billions of dollars if the NDAA doesn’t go their way, donated over half a million dollars to Rogers’ campaign, more than a quarter of what his campaign raised in the 2024 cycle.

All told, every single one of the top 20 recipients of Pentagon contractor contributions sat on a key committee that could influence the flow of government funds to those very same Pentagon contractors.

These and many more beneficiaries of Pentagon largesse will be all too eager to protect this system of pork-barrel politics that forces taxpayers to enrich beltway bandits. But this legalized graft has dangerous consequences for U.S. national security, as evidenced by abject failures like the F-35 and the littoral combat ship (better known as the little crappy ship) that have already wasted tens of billions of taxpayer dollars while doing nothing to improve our national security.

This broken system is costing us more money every year while giving us less security. It’s time for Trump to hold true to his campaign promise and clean up the military- industrial complex, to save taxpayer money and make us safer. It’s time to actually cut the Pentagon budget.