President Trump is reportedly preparing to assign the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by successful billionaire businessman Elon Musk, the task of looking into fraud and abuse at the Pentagon, Reuters reports. Trump said he expects the DOGE will find “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse” in the department, which is approaching a $1 trillion per year budget.
According to Reuters, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz is supportive of the effort to clean up the Pentagon’s spending, describing the department as “full of unnecessary bloat.”
In an interview on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press,’ Waltz said, “Everything there seems to cost too much, take too long and deliver too little to the soldiers…,” adding, “We do need business leaders to go in there and absolutely reform the Pentagon’s acquisition process.”
Of particular interest, Waltz said, should be expenditures on shipbuilding, which he says is “an absolute mess.”
Waltz is not the only one to have criticized the department for “waste and inefficiency” as other leaders have brought up their own concerns as well.
Still, there are critics of the effort who question Musk’s authority to oversee an audit of government spending that is done with taxpayer dollars. Some argue that doing so “risks exposing classified information” and could be “illegal” as federal agencies using American taxpayer dollars are being held accountable for possible fraud without “congressional approval.”
Some of those defending the DOGE’s effort, however, have suggested that the only people criticizing it would be those who have more than likely been benefiting from the corruption.
The DOGE’s actions, which began immediately upon Trump taking office, have raised both praise and ire across the country. Last week, talk over the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) came under scrutiny as the DOGE team discovered that American taxpayers were supporting what some said were ridiculous efforts, such as LGBT activism in foreign nations, including a musical and the distribution of a comic book. Although actual life-saving efforts undertaken by USAID were not paused, there was still an uproar over the review of the agency’s finances.
In an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier on Sunday morning, President Trump mentioned that he was likely to send Musk’s DOG
The Pentagon finances are going to be the stuff of nightmares. They spend money like there’s no tomorrow. I remember getting emergency spend orders on a Wednesday because someone found unspent money somewhere: deadline Friday.
Yes, I too have seen this crap. I also worked for a federally funded company that did a lot of work for the navy. My boss would come around and tell us what job codes to put down on our time sheets and how many hours for each job regardless of what he had us actually working on. Talk about fraud… It wasn’t like that when I went to work for the feds, we didn’t have to put down our hours or what we were working on. Then I transferred to purchasing. OMG!!!
They should dismantle the entire building. Spread the work around so that there’s less opportunity for collusion. It’s a real shame that so many people seem to forget their oaths of office that everyone who works for the federal government is required to take. Someone needs to remind them of what the word “oath” actually means. You don’t protect and defend the constitution by breaking that oath the second you go on the job. It goes like this: “An individual, except the President, elected or appointed to an office of honor or profit in the civil service or uniformed services, shall take the following oath: “I, ___, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.” https://www.fedsmith.com/2021/01/06/oath-of-office-what-it-means/