1,300 dollars of coffee cups, 8,000% overwhelming for soap doses show waste while Doge locks on Pentagon

President Donald TrumpThe team of zealous costs under Elon Musk will soon be its largest discretion budget in the US.

With an annual budget of $ 850 billion, Pentagon has long plagued waste and inefficiency charges in his defense programs and has recently failed Its seventh direct audit.

“We will find billions, hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud and abuse,” Trump predicted in an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier on Sunday.

The Congress takes on the budget of the Ministry of Defense (DOD) each year, and the invitation of the legislators to reduce the costs can be where the Republicans publicly break through with male and its combustion style.

Here’s a look where the team of the Government Efficiency Department can direct its sights.

Men’s next target? Trump says Doge will view the Department of Education, Financing Pentagon

Staff and contracting

Tendency musk And it seems that his team is rejected by federal employees, but advocates of reduction of costs claim that the work on outsourcing performers could have the opposite effect.

Usually, about half Pentagon budget He goes to the performers, corporations that have a profit motive unlike the Government itself. The government relies on performers for software support, training, weapons and act as paramilitary forces in foreign missions.

“The main driver of Pentagon’s waste is actually contracting services for what are really basic government functions and administrative capacities, such as simple things [such] As supporting, “said Julia Look,, researcher of the National Security Reform Program, Stimson Center.

“This could be contrary to their larger project based on the effort to reduce civil labor, but there are many areas to reduce the Pentagon waste by actually increasing the Government capacity to perform basic administrative functions, not outsourcing with very high costs. ”

Hegsetth welcomes to Doge Elon Musk because of the “long -ranked” consumption of consumption consumption

In 2015, the Defense Committee, at the request of the DOD leader, found that Pentagon could save $ 125 billion over five years by negotiating a services contract, simplifying bureaucracy of decay and premature withdrawal and consolidation of the IT process.

The report found that the Pentagon had paid about 1,014,000 performers to fill in the office work far from the front line. The DOD currently states only about 1.3 million active soldiers.

However, the plan was never widely implemented, and the leaders of the Pentagon took steps to “bury him” for fear of reducing the budget, according to a Washington post report.

In October 2024, a two -year audit of the Ministry of Defense Inspector General revealed that Boeing had exceeded air forces by 8,000% for soap spray for which the service subsidiary paid $ 149,072 compared to the market price. Of the chosen 46 spare parts reviewed by the audit, the report found that the aviation had been overpaying about $ 1 million for 12 for their C-17 traffic planes.

This was followed by a 2018 congress investigation that revealed that air forces spent $ 1,300 for each cup of coffee on their KC-10 aircraft, then replaced them, instead of repairing them when their handles broke. Senator Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, found that the Air Force had spent $ 32,000 replacing 25 cups.

Weapons Programs: F-35S and land ICBMS

Musk suggested that it would look like to eliminate the F-35 Stealth Fighter Jet program, long-full costs, omissions and delays. In posts on X, he called him “the worst military value for money in history,” and the jet himself “set and complex Jack of all trades, the master of Nona”, adding that “jets for combat combat strokes are already drone.”

However, leaving the F-35 encountered opposition to Congress every time it proposed it.

AND recent report The taxpayers who set up for common sense, Quincy Institute and Stimson invited to retire to F-35 nozzles and eliminate the Balistic missile program.

Stopping the F-35 combat jet program, full of costs, omissions and delays, as some advocated, would reduce $ 12 billion a year, according to a joint report.

But the Congress should be on board with the departure of the F-35 in its annual defense law, and Lockheed Martin produces parts of aircraft in many countries across the country, where legislators have components with risk.

“Opened weapons that have been overrated, a weaker effect and out of steps with current missions, such as F-35 fighter jets and intercontinental Balistic Jentinel rockets, would allow us to invest more in real priorities, and we also deal with a huge long nation,” said Gabe, “Gabe said Murphy from taxpayers for common sense.

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“ICBM is no longer necessary, you know, the weapons we have in our nuclear arsenal,” Vradhill added.

“We have sea and air legs of nuclear triads that are equally accurate and, you know, not as vulnerable as our ICBMS because, you know, ICBM are in the country, we know where they are. It is public knowledge.”

The report found that Sentinel ICBM removal of the $ 3.7 billion a year would save the Sentinel ICBM program.

Base establishment

Stimson’s report found that “targeted and diverting” US military bases could save another $ 3-5 billion a year.

“Even if I say that I accept all the missions we now have in the world, you could probably reduce some foreign bases without any reconsideration of the strategy,” said Ben Friedman, Director of Policy on Defense Priorities.

“If you accept that we are trying to manage the Middle East through the presence of a US military troops or at least the ability to distribute the trunk and say, okay, we could do with fewer bases.”

The Trump team is reportedly considering the exclusion of its presence in Syria, where 2,000 soldiers are currently stationed.

In the 1980s, under President Ronald Reagan, the Government has made an effort known as basic diverting and closure (BRAC), after the Cold War procedure for coordinating the end of force that is no longer needed. Five rounds Brac is a closed 350 installation with a savings of $ 12 billion, but the last marriage ended in 2011.

Defense research

Some of the $ 143.2 billion pentagon budget for research may also be supervised.

MPs last year asked to know As the AI ​​researcher in China gained $ 30 million in US support. In 2021, Song-Chun Zhu was a major investigator on two projects in the total amount of $ 1.2 million from Dod’s scholarships who want to develop a “high-level robot autonomy” that is “important for DOD tasks” and “platforms cognitive robots “for” intelligence and monitoring systems. ”

In addition, the General of the Ministry of Defense Last summer found that $ 46.7 million in defense funds from 2014 to 2023 went to the Ecohealth Alliance, a non -profit organization that funded the study of function at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a laboratory that is Many suspects were the origin of the Pandemia Coid-19.

Consumption

According to the policy of use-or or bad, in the last month of the fiscal year, the Federal Agency works to wear everything left in their federal budgets, it is concerned that Congress will adopt a smaller amount next year, if not. Pentagon is no exception.

In September 2024, Dod spent more than he had in any other month since 2008, with a huge price of taxpayers for a fine dining room.

Spent $ 6.1 million on lobster tails, $ 16.6 million on a fish eye steaks, $ 6.4 million on salmon and $ 407,000 on Alaskan King Crab, as stated by UX The theme of Senator Joni Ernst, R-Iowa.

The same month DOD spent $ 211.7 million on new furniture, including a $ 36,000 break.

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Political winds

Cost reduction initiatives will face opposition from Congress It never wanted to take a scalpel in the defense of the nation.

“If history is any precedent, I think you will start seeing at least a real type of tension here,” said Diana Shaw, a former State Department Inspector. “There is a lot of interest, not just economic.”

“There are people with philosophical interests throughout the defense infrastructure and the military. And so, this is an area that is historically protected good. And so I think this will now be an interesting test case to see if it will be, even within the Republican Party now, Some return to the type of aggressive cutting and separation we saw in other agencies that were historically less favored by members of the Republican Party. “