If Elon Musk Had Any Real Guts, He Would Go After the Gigantic Budget of the US Military

For the past week or so, Elon Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” has been ripping into government databases on a quest to cut as much federal waste as it can find.

So far, the cost-cutting has been piecemeal and clearly motivated by ideological grudges, like $45 million in “DEI scholarships in Burma” and $110 million in “non-performing, media, and consulting” expenses related to more diversity initiatives.

But let’s be real. That’s chump change; little cuts like that will never add up to the $2 trillion Musk pledged to trim from the federal budget.

If he really wanted to cut government waste, he’d go after the nearly $850 billion our government lavishes on the military every year.

It’s not a new or novel idea. Americans have been fighting against warfare taxes since at least 1637 — long before the foundation of the United States, in fact— when the Algonquin people fought off taxation by Dutch colonizers to improve their fort. In recent times, opposition to defense spending has become something of a staple of progressive politics, though it hasn’t stopped the Department of Defense from securing a larger and larger bag each fiscal year, with no end in sight.

Now with a new regime in place, DOGE has the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever: cut that one thing weighing the entire country down.

Consider a few numbers.

In 2023, the United States was responsible for 40 percent of all global military expenditures, or more than the next nine countries combined. It has well over 750 military bases located outside of its sovereign territory, and 111,000 auxiliary facilities spread throughout the globe.

That’s tens of billions in personnel, requisition, and maintenance fees every single year. Musk’s diversity bogeymen couldn’t spend that type of money if you gave it decades.

Or, if DOGE truly wanted to cut to the heart of wasteful and fraudulent spending, it might look at the Pentagon, which has a storied history of overbudgeting for basic supplies in order to supercharge its budget. In late 2024, it was found that Boeing was overcharging the Pentagon by as much as 8,000 percent for supplies as common as humble soap dispenser.

And does any of that military spending do anything to actually safeguard US citizens? More often, as Musk’s boss Donald Trump has often groused, it seems to go toward further involving us in disastrous and lengthy — not to mention fantastically expensive — wars around the globe.

Just 1 percent of the federal defense budget could provide a year’s worth of public housing for almost one million Americans. And 10 percent could give over 32 million low-income children healthcare — an urgent task, given that over 16 percent of all children in the US are living in poverty.

It would be an unprecedented move, but let’s be real, it will never happen. Musk has occasionally griped about aspects of the military’s ludicrously inflated budget, but he knows which side his bread is buttered on; he’s allowed to go after DEI softballs, but not the stuff that would save real money.

But it might be the clearest illustration that the whole DOGE thing is just a bunch of posturing and pageantry. If Musk and his DOGE boys really wanted to walk the walk, they’d roll their sleep pods over to the Defense Department and get to work.

More on cutting costs: There’s Actually an Incredibly Easy Way for Elon Musk to Trim $2 Trillion of Government Spending: Cut Funding for Nuclear Weapons