Pentagon Ordered To Plan For Budget Cuts

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The Trump administration has ordered the Pentagon to develop plans for budget cuts over the next five years.

According to a memo obtained by The Washington Post, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered senior leaders at the Pentagon to make plans for cutting 8 percent from the defense budget in each of the next five years.

“The conventional thinking in Washington is that higher defense spending equals a safer America, but the reality is the exact opposite. While lobbyists and contractors got rich, America squandered our strength on pointless wars, outsourced our factories, lost our technical expertise, and hollowed out troop quality for the sake of DEI, LGBT, and Covid shots. They did it all, because they assumed they were untouchable,” Turning Point USA Founder & CEO Charlie Kirk said.

“Secretary Hegseth is proving they are not,” he added.

From The Washington Post:

Hegseth ordered the proposed cuts to be drawn up by Feb. 24, according to the memo, which includes a list of 17 categories that the Trump administration wants exempted. Among them: operations at the southern U.S. border, modernization of nuclear weapons and missile defense, and acquisition of one-way attack drones and other munitions.

The Pentagon budget for 2025 is about $850 billion, with broad consensus on Capitol Hill that extensive spending is necessary to deter threats posed by China and Russia, in particular. If adopted in full, the proposed cuts would include tens of billions of dollars in each of the next five years.

The memo calls for continued “support agency” funding for several major regional headquarters, including Indo-Pacific Command, Northern Command and Space Command. Notably absent from that list is European Command, which has had a leading role in executing U.S. strategy during the war in Ukraine; Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East; and Africa Command, which manages the several thousand troops the Pentagon has spread across that continent.

“President Trump’s charge to DoD is clear: achieve Peace through Strength,” Hegseth wrote in the memo, dated Tuesday. “The time for preparation is over — we must act urgently to revive the warrior ethos, rebuild our military, and reestablish deterrence. Our budget will resource the fighting force we need, cease unnecessary defense spending, reject excessive bureaucracy, and drive actionable reform including progress on the audit.”

The memo follows the Pentagon welcoming the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to analyze where to make cuts and reduce waste.

“Great kickoff with @DeptofDefense. Looking forward to working together to safely save taxpayer dollars and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse,” the DOGE X account said Friday.

Per Barron’s:

The cuts, if implemented in full, would reduce that figure by tens of billions each year to some $560 billion at the end of the five years.

The report did not give details of where the cuts would be made in the world’s biggest military, but an earlier Post report said that junior civilian workers, not uniformed personnel, were being targeted.

The report — which comes after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency reportedly visited the Pentagon last week — was likely to be met with stiff resistance from both the military and Congress.

The stock prices of major US defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumann dropped briefly on the news.



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