Sources: USASpending.gov, OMB

While Elon Musk's DOGE brings its wrecking ball to agency after agency, leaving destruction everywhere it goes, as yet there are no reports that it has set foot in the discretionary budget's* biggest and most expensive agency - the Pentagon. This is despite some big talk from President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from the Pentagon. In particular, they have yet to touch Pentagon contracts.

To be clear, the DOGE effort is illegitimate and likely illegal, run by an unelected and unaccountable billionaire with a major conflict of interest, as his companies have benefited from billions in public dollars and Pentagon contracts. In 2023, the average U.S. taxpayer paid $11 for Musk's SpaceX - more than they paid for renewable energy and energy efficiency efforts that DOGE is meant to purge.

And the DOGE effort is already having devastating effects. The look of the world's richest man pulling food from hungry mouths around the world is hardly a good one. 

The job of saving taxpayer dollars really belongs to Congress, with their power of the purse. But Republicans leaders in Congress are planning to add, not cut, billions of dollars in Pentagon spending.

But for anyone looking for real taxpayer savings, Pentagon contracts would be the place to start.  

If Pentagon contracts were a federal agency, in 2024 they would have been the single biggest federal agency in the discretionary budget* - bigger than the rest of the Pentagon, and far bigger than the agencies Musk has targeted.

Out of the $445 billion in Pentagon contracts in 2024, there were easy targets to cut: from the infamous F-35 jet fighter that has cost the government billions more than planned, to aircraft carriers (stealth jobs programs that would be better reincarnated in another industry), to nuclear weapons delivery systems, there are countless deserving targets among Pentagon contractors. 

To add tremendous injury to insult (to flip a phrase), these weapons contractors also enable death and destruction in wars around the world, and profited tremendously from twenty years of nonstop war in the response to 9/11. 

DOGE has yet to take on the Pentagon, so we’ll see how serious the promises are. In the meantime, here's a thought: Congress should do its job instead of being overtaken by an unelected billionaire, and take a hard look at the largest category of discretionary spending.

* Why just the discretionary budget? Even if you include mandatory spending, Pentagon contracts are still bigger than everything except: Social Security and Medicare - which Republicans have (rightly) said are off the table for cuts; Medicaid - which should be off the table but is very much under attack; and interest payments on national debt, which absolutely has to be off the table.