President Donald Trump wants more cash for the US military, despite his close friend Elon Musk’s plan to cut trillions from the federal budget and also audit the Pentagon. Speaking to Fox News’ Bret Baier in a taped interview aired this morning, Trump said: “We want to raise defense spending. I think we have to have it.”
The US president added that it’ll happen only after he speaks with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. “One of the things I’ll be doing with President Xi and with Putin and everybody else is saying, let’s ease up on all this, you know, building all of this, you know, the bombs,” Trump said, calling current spending on unused weapons “crazy.”
D.O.G.E. digs into defense spending
Military spending made up nearly half of the $1.8 trillion discretionary budget in 2024, with the US shelling out more on defense than the next nine countries combined, according to data from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
Elon’s Department of Government Efficiency, or D.O.G.E., was set up to tear through the federal budget and cut $2 trillion in expenses—more than all discretionary spending in a single year.
D.O.G.E. has already ripped into agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and USAID, freezing operations and triggering legal battles. Now it’s digging through the Pentagon’s financial books, reviewing payment systems, employee communications, and the Defense Department’s audit trail.
Elon, who described many weapons programs as needing to be “completely redone” or shut down, is determined to cut defense expenses.
Congress, defense contractors, and legal obstacles stall budget cuts
The US deficit hit 6.4% of GDP last year, more than double Europe’s 3% target. Economists say that reducing the shortfall could lower bond yields and spark investment. But so far, D.O.G.E.’s aggressive approach has thrown Wall Street into confusion.
Analysts are struggling to model realistic scenarios for Elon’s cuts, with many admitting they can’t predict how D.O.G.E. will affect markets. One major roadblock is, of course, the Congress. The US Constitution gives Congress authority over federal spending, which means Elon and Trump can’t just cut defense budgets without approval.
The Republican-majority House and Senate are divided. Some Republicans want deep spending cuts, even in defense. But others, like Trump and his VP J.D. Vance, want to pump more money into the military.
Now, military funding is spread across many states, with bases, contracts, and factories providing jobs that lawmakers want to protect. Any mention of defense cuts is gonna bring a ton of backlash and resistance. Even politicians who back spending cuts overall balk when it comes to their own districts.
Meanwhile, the Democrats are understandably quite unhappy with Elon and Trump’s D.O.G.E. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to defend D.O.G.E.’s actions during a Bloomberg interview, saying, “This is not some rogue band going around doing things; this is methodical.”
But the courts tell a different story. Judges have already blocked many of D.O.G.E.’s actions, including the freezing of federal loans and grants and the closure of USAID.
Interestingly, Federal Judge John McConnell, who ordered Trump’s administration to unfreeze federal grants and stop Elon from accessing federal data, has a daughter, Catherine McConnell, who works as a senior policy advisor at the Department of Education. As Cryptopolitan reported earlier this month, this is yet another agency Trump and Elon are eyeing for budget cuts.
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