President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to be led by entrepreneur Elon Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, is taking aim at one of Washington’s biggest spending targets: the Pentagon’s $895.2 billion defense budget for fiscal year 2025.
The ambitious cost-cutting initiative comes on the heels of the Pentagon’s seventh consecutive failed annual audit, fueling widespread concern over the military’s ballooning expenditures.
During Trump’s campaign, he pledged to tackle what he called “wasteful government spending,” a promise his supporters and several lawmakers are now hoping to see fulfilled through DOGE.
Experts say slashing the defense budget will be a monumental challenge, given the Defense Department’s vast array of global commitments and its extensive payroll of active-duty service members and veterans.
“Unless DOGE recommends deep cuts to military end strength—the number of men and women in uniform—getting defense spending down will be difficult,” Eric Gomez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told The Epoch Times.
However, dogged critics of excessive defense spending point to the controversial Lockheed Martin F-35 jet program—projected to cost taxpayers more than $2 trillion over its lifetime—as an example of Pentagon overspending.
Musk has openly criticized the F-35’s design, calling it “an expensive and complex jack of all trades, master of none” in a recent post on X (formerly Twitter).
Meanwhile, prominent left-leaning figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) have lauded Trump’s incoming team for vowing to review the Pentagon’s finances. Their support suggests there may be a rare bipartisan opening for reining in defense costs—an opportunity that DOGE’s leadership hopes to seize.
Still, powerful defense contractors, supported by well-funded lobbying efforts, are preparing to push back. Foreign threats overseas also complicate any plan to reduce military expenditures. With active conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, and rising tensions in Asia, GOP lawmakers and national security hawks may resist significant cuts.
Despite these hurdles, some analysts see political momentum building for reform. John Boyd Jr. of the Boyd Company noted an emerging “changing political calculus,” highlighted by a diverse coalition of lawmakers who want a more efficient defense budget.
If DOGE succeeds, it could reshape federal spending on a grand scale—while signaling a major policy victory for Trump’s administration and supporters eager to see Washington’s “bloated budgets” finally trimmed.