Trump directs Elon Musk and DOGE to review Pentagon spending

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency team will be taking a close look at Pentagon spending to search for potential waste and fraud, President Donald Trump said Friday.

Trump officially established DOGE via an executive order on Jan. 20, the day of his inauguration. Its purpose is to “implement the President’s DOGE Agenda, by modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity,” according to the directive.

Musk, the billionaire businessman who’s leading the organization, has been designated a “special government employee.” He and his team has been making headlines with their controversial probes of organizations like the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is now being gutted amid accusations from the White House of wasteful spending and fraud.

The DOGE team is also turning its attention to other agencies.

“Pentagon, [the Department of] Education, just everything. We’re going to go through everything,” Trump told reporters during a press conference at the White House alongside Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who is in Washington for bilateral talks. “It was so bad with what we just went through with this horrible situation we just went through [at USAID], and I guess 97 precent of the people [there] have been dismissed. It was very, very unfortunate. You’re not going to find anything like that [at some of the other agencies], but you’re going to find a lot. And I’ve instructed him [Musk] to go check out Education, to check out the Pentagon, which is the military. And you know, sadly, you’ll find some things that are pretty bad. But I don’t think proportionally, you’re going to see anything like we just saw” at USAID.

The DOD is the largest department in the U.S. government and has an annual budget of more than $800 billion.

Earlier on Friday during a town hall with troops at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth suggested he’s ready to cut military programs and capabilities that wouldn’t be useful in a fight against advanced adversaries like China.

“There’s a lot of programs around here that we spend a lot of money on that, when you actually war game it, don’t have the impact you want them to. One of the benefits I have is … I don’t have any special interests. I don’t have a background invested in any systems or services. I’m agnostic to that,” he said.

Hegseth also raised the issue of audits.

“We are going to focus heavily to ensure that, at a bare minimum, by the end of four years [of the second Trump administration], the Pentagon passes a clean audit. The American taxpayers deserve that. They deserve to know where their $850 billion go, how it’s spent, and make sure it’s spent wisely,” he said. “I believe we are accountable for every dollar we spend. And every dollar of waste we find or redundancy is a dollar we can invest somewhere else, as President Trump has committed, directly to rebuilding our nation’s military.”