By Nick Turse

But after more than a month running roughshod through government, DOGE has made strikingly few cuts at the Pentagon, whose bloated budget tips the scales at around $850 billion -accounting for about 13 percent of federal spending.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth encouraged DOGE to hack away at his department on X last week. “We welcome DOGE and finding those efficiencies is how we save taxpayer dollars.” But experts question just how open the Pentagon really is to DOGE, and whether Musk’s merry band of bean-counters has the mettle to do battle with the Department of Defense and its backers.

On DOGE’s “Agency Efficiency Leaderboard,” which shows some of the largest “savings” it has claimed to achieve, the Defense Department is currently wallowing in 16th place out of a total of 22 spots. It’s an especially dismal showing since Defense is the largest government agency, with a budget rocketing toward $1 trillion per year, and has failed seven straight annual audits. The US military budget is the largest in the world -more than triple that of China, 8.5 times higher than Russia, and exceeds the next nine countries combined. Military expenditures are the largest component of discretionary spending in the US budget and are projected to rise over the next decade.

If agencies devoted to saving lives -such as the Department of Health and Human Services or USAID- are on the chopping block, a department that has spent some $8 trillion on foreign wars since 9/11 deserves a close look by DOGE.

Potential cuts aren’t hard to find: The Intercept easily sketched a road map amounting to more than $75 billion in annual savings for Musk and DOGE -and as much as $2 trillion over the next decade.

That figure dwarfs the $65 billion DOGE claims to have already saved taxpayers through a combination of “fraud detection/deletion, contract/lease cancellations, contract/lease renegotiations, asset sales, grant cancellations, workforce reductions, programmatic changes, and regulatory savings.” Independent analyses say many of DOGE cuts so far have been overstated or are ephemeral, with some contract cancellations double or triple-counted.

The Intercept, for instance, found that DOGE’s claim of saving taxpayers nearly $232 million by canceling an IT contract for the Social Security Administration was off by about $231 million.

It’s obvious that the Defense Department is ripe for cost-cutting. The question is whether DOGE -which is neither a federal executive department nor headed by Musk and may well be unconstitutional- is up for a fight with the department, its contractors, and their backers on Capitol Hill. One Pentagon official said that DOGE has so far taken on “weak” agencies, but that Musk’s cost-cutters will be “steamrolled” if they lock horns with the Defense Department. The official offered comments on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the media.

The Defense Department’s press office failed to respond to The Intercept’s questions about DOGE’s efforts. DOGE did not reply to repeated requests for comment sent to the agency’s X account.

“Cuts to the astronomical Pentagon budget have been urgent for a long time -not just because of rampant waste, fraud, and abuse, but because a disproportionately high amount of US taxpayer dollars go to war and preparation for war,” Stephanie Savell, the director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, told The Intercept. “Let’s see if the vested interests of the military-industrial complex will allow for any real changes to take place as a result of what, so far, is largely rhetoric.”

There is plenty of low-hanging fruit that can catapult the Pentagon to the top spot on DOGE’s leaderboard. That’s if DOGE can resist the Pentagon pressure that has allowed the department to wring an endless stream of tax dollars out of Congress -scaring, beguiling, flattering, and battering both sides of the aisle into regularly increasing the budget despite a string of losses and stalemates stretching from the Korean War to the Afghanistan War to the forever war still sputtering away in Somalia.

Major savings at the Pentagon can be found through the reduction or elimination of dysfunctional, expensive, or dangerous weapon systems like the F-35 combat aircraft; vulnerable Navy ships with limited utility like a new generation of aircraft carriers; and the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile program, according to William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft who has been digging into Pentagon budgets for decades.

The F-35 combat aircraft is a bloated boondoggle, and it’s already on Musk’s radar. More than two decades in, the F-35 is still suffering from key flaws in its software and hardware -a total of 873 unresolved defects, according to one Pentagon analysis. If it’s allowed to run its course, the F-35 will be the most expensive weapons program in history, at a total cost of $1.7 trillion. Musk has called it “the worst military value for money in history.” It’s perfect for a splash cut to save big money and put the Pentagon on notice that the days of milk and honey are done. Nixing the program now would save an estimated $13 billion a year, according to Hartung.

Aircraft carriers are another cakewalk cut. New models have been plagued by defects, such as aircraft launch systems. The ships themselves are also especially vulnerable to new high-speed, long-range missiles. Continuing to build them courts catastrophic losses in a future great power conflict.Each new aircraft carrier scuttled would save at least $13 billion, Hartung said.

If DOGE wants to really get serious, there is an easy path to saving close to a trillion dollars over 10 years at the Pentagon and Department of Energy -and a spot atop the DOGE leaderboard for all time. Plus, President Donald Trump has suggested he’s onboard with it.

The United States is in the midst of a 30-year, $2 trillion plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, missiles, and submarines. The US is already shelling out $75 billion each year -the equivalent of two Manhattan Projects annually-on new nuclear weapons. The commander-in-chief thinks it’s a ludicrous idea. “There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many,” Trump announced earlier this month, calling for new nuclear arms control negotiations with Russia and China. “You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons.”

First on the chopping block should be America’s new intercontinental ballistic missile, the Sentinel, which set off alarm bells when its cost overruns triggered a so-called Nunn-McCurdy breach: occurring if the cost of developing a new program increases by 25 percent or more. The Sentinel ICBM project -which involves not only building missiles but also modernizing 450 silos across five states, launch control centers, nuclear missile bases, and testing facilities- is already 81 percent over budget, with costs skyrocketing to more than $140 billion. Worse yet, former Defense Secretary William Perry called ICBMs “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” because a president would have just minutes to decide on launching them, increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war resulting from a false alarm.

Saving taxpayer dollars with this cut could also save the world from nuclear annihilation. It’s a win-win far more rewarding than DOGE cuts to USAID which have left people starving and screaming in pain from hunger.

For decades, the US has also poured hundreds of billions of dollars into what the Pentagon calls “missile defeat and defense,” which includes short, medium, and long-range systems to counter enemy ICBMs. The history of missile defense systems is, however, a history of failure.

The Government Accountability Office found that the Missile Defense Agency did not meet its planned testing goals in 2019 due to significant “developmental delays,” continuing “a decade-long trend in which MDA ha[d] been unable to achieve its fiscal year flight testing as scheduled.” That same year, the Pentagon canceled its Redesigned Kill Vehicle program due to technical design flaws.

It was just the latest in a long list of missile defense duds including $2.2 billion spent on worthless sea-based radar and $2.7 billion squandered on an unsuccessful blimp-based radar system. Keeping these programs on the books is a waste and cutting them, Hartung told The Intercept, would save $10 to $15 billion per year.

DOGE has been handing out pink slips all across the government, firing Forest Service personnel whose work helps tamp down wildfires, workers responding to the bird flu outbreak, and inspectors general who conduct audits and fight fraud. But somehow, the mammoth Pentagon workforce has been largely exempt.

   The Pentagon is swimming in personnel of all sorts -most of them devoted, in some way, to killing people and destroying things. The department has more than 700,000 full-time civilian workers, about one-third of the total federal civilian workforce, as well as 2.5 million troops -including more than 1.2 million active-duty personnel. The Department of Defense also employs around 500,000 civilian contractors, according to the best available numbers. These people and their benefits cost taxpayers tons of money. Yet the department announced that it was cutting a mere 5,400 probationary workers this week and will put a hiring freeze in place. Uniformed military personnel are, however, exempt.

Reducing the civilian work force by 150,000-200,000 and a comparable cut in contract employees would result in dramatic savings, according to Hartung. “On average, contractors cost more than civilian government employees, carry out redundant functions, and are less carefully monitored. The Pentagon doesn’t even have an accurate count of how many contract employees it funds,” he told The Intercept. “Cutting contract spending by 15 percent could save $26 billion per year.”

He cautions, however, against quick-and-dirty massive layoffs and recommends a slower pace to make sure that essential functions aren’t impacted.

Last week, Hegseth reportedly ordered senior Pentagon officials and military brass to develop plans for cutting 8 percent from the defense budget in each of the next five years. It turned out, however, that the plan called not for cuts but for savings to be shifted to programs most favored by the administration -with many types of spending, from military operations at the southern border to the acquisition of submarines, preemptively off the table.

If DOGE wants to prove its independence and pursue real cost-cutting, it can call out Hegseth and pursue a real 8 percent cut. Nixing the F-35 program and missile defense programs, plus a 15 percent cut in private contractors, would net $26 billion in savings annually -something in the neighborhood of a 9 percent reduction in the current proposed Pentagon budget for fiscal year 2025.

But why stop at 9 percent?

Trump himself recently suggested that a warming of US relations with Russia and China could result in massive Pentagon budget cuts. “I’m going to say there’s no reason for us to be spending almost $1 trillion on the military. … I’m going to say we can spend this on other things,” Trump said. “I want to say let’s cut our military budget in half. And we can do that.”

Hartung said that with some effort, and over about five years or more, a 50 percent cut is possible if the US were to vastly reduce the size of the US military; shutter the majority of the sprawling empire of US overseas bases; and make significant cuts in Navy ships, ground vehicles, and nuclear weapons programs. He said that, over a decade, the US could shed up to $2 trillion in military spending.

“That would mean abandoning America’s ‘cover the globe’ military strategy in favor of a genuinely defensive approach, and one would have to make sure that cuts in legacy systems weren’t just filled in with drones and other emerging tech,” he explained.

Then the question becomes: What to do with those savings?“We need a better balance between military spending and investments in diplomacy, development, humanitarian aid, global public health, and environmental protection,” Hartung said. “Some of our biggest existential threats are not military in nature -such as climate change and pandemics.”

Savell similarly called for plowing Pentagon savings into programs addressing health care and combating climate change, which she said would provide real security for Americans.

Experts are, however, still skeptical DOGE can stand up to the military-industrial-congressional complex and believe that even deep-sixing one boondoggle program like the F-35 could prove beyond Musk’s capacity. “They’ll have a huge fight because there is an F-35 caucus in Congress, there are parts suppliers in 46 states, and it has fierce backers,” said Hartung. “There are even members of Congress who recognize that the F-35 is terrible and that it’s like pouring money down a rat hole but say it’s too late to do anything about it.”

The Pentagon official predicted that DOGE would make “cosmetic” cuts that might put people out of work and would root out anything that could be cast as related to climate change and diversity, equality, and inclusion programs. But don’t expect meaningful Defense savings from Trump and DOGE. “You heard it here,” the official said. “They might shift money around but they aren’t going to gut DoD.”