William Hartung
Under the guise
of efficiency, the Trump administration is taking a sledgehammer to essential
programs and agencies that are the backbone of America’s civilian government.
The virtual elimination of the U.S. Agency for International Development
(USAID) and plans to shut down the Department of Education are just the most
visible examples of a campaign that includes layoffs of budget experts, public
health officials, scientists, and other critical personnel whose work
undergirds the daily operations of government and provides the basic services
needed by businesses, families, and individuals alike. Many of those services
can make the difference between solvency and poverty, health and illness, or
even, in some cases, life and death for vulnerable populations.
The speed with
which civilian programs and agencies are being slashed in the second Trump era
gives away the true purpose of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
In the context of the Musk-Trump regime, “efficiency” is a cover story for a
greed-driven ideological campaign to radically reduce the size of government
without regard for the human consequences.
So far, the
only agency that seems to have escaped the ire of the DOGE is — don’t be
shocked! — the Pentagon. After misleading headlines suggested that its topline
would be cut by as much as 8% annually for the next five years as part of that
supposed efficiency campaign, the real plan was revealed — finding savings in
some parts of the Pentagon only to invest whatever money might be saved in —
yes! — other military programs without any actual reductions in the
department’s overall budget. Then, during a White House meeting with Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 7th, Trump announced that “we’re
going to be approving a budget, and I’m proud to say, actually, the biggest one
we’ve ever done for the military . . . $1 trillion. Nobody has seen anything
like it.”
So far, cuts to
make room for new kinds of military investments have been limited to the firing
of civilian Pentagon employees and the dismantling of a number of internal
strategy and research departments. Activities that funnel revenue to weapons
contractors have barely been touched — hardly surprising given that Musk
himself presides over a significant Pentagon contractor, SpaceX.
The legitimacy
of his role should, of course, be subject to question. After all, he’s an
unelected billionaire with major government contracts who, in recent months,
seemed to have garnered more power than the entire cabinet combined. But
cabinet members are subject to Senate confirmation, as well as financial
disclosure and conflict-of-interest rules. Not Musk, though. Not only hasn’t he
been vetted by Congress, but he’s been allowed to maintain his role in SpaceX.
A Hollow
Government?
The Trump and
Musk hollowing out of the civilian government, while keeping the Pentagon
budget at enormously high levels of funding, means the United States is well on
its way to becoming the very “garrison state” that President Dwight D.
Eisenhower warned against in the early years of the Cold War. And mind you, all
of that’s true before Republican hawks in Congress like Senate Armed Services
Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS), who is seeking $100 billion more in
Pentagon spending than its officials have asked for, even act.
What’s at
stake, however, goes well beyond how the government spends its money. After
all, such decisions are being accompanied by an assault on basic constitutional
rights like freedom of speech and a campaign of mass deportations that already
includes people with the legal right to remain in the United States. And that’s
not to mention the bullying and financial blackmailing of universities, law
firms, and major media outlets in an attempt to force them to bow down to the
administration’s political preferences.
In fact, the
first two months of the Trump/Musk administration undoubtedly represent the
most blatant power grab by the executive branch in the history of this
republic, a move that undermines our ability to preserve, no less expand, the
fundamental rights that are supposed to be the guiding lights of American
democracy. Those rights have, of course, been violated to one degree or another
throughout this country’s history, but never like this. The current crackdown
threatens to erase the hard-won victories of the civil rights, women’s rights,
labor rights, immigrant rights, and LGBTQ rights movements that had brought
this country closer to living up to its professed commitments to freedom,
tolerance, and equality.
Back in 2019,
right-wing populist and Trump buddy Steve Bannon told PBS Frontline that the
key to a future victory was to increase the “muzzle velocity” of extremist
policy changes, so that opponents of the MAGA movement wouldn’t even know what
hit them. “All we have to do,” he said then, “is flood the zone. Every day we
hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff
done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover.
But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”
The Trump/Musk
administration is now implementing just such a strategy in a staggering
fashion.
Sparing the
Pentagon
Despite a
certain amount of noise about DOGE-driven efficiencies at the Pentagon, the
department has indeed been spared the fate of civilian outfits like the Agency
for International Development and the Department of Education, which have been
either decimated or are slated for elimination altogether.
A proposal to
lay off 60,000 civilian employees at the Pentagon will have harsh consequences
for those expecting to lose their jobs, but it is only 5% of the department’s
workforce of 700,000 government employees and another more than half a million
individuals under contract. By contrast, the workforce of USAID, which offered
a peaceful helping hand to countries around the world, was rapidly reduced from
10,000 to less than 300.
In addition,
the layoffs of research scientists and public-health experts may prove to have
disastrous consequences down the road by reducing the government’s ability to
prevent or respond to infectious diseases and possible pandemics like new
variants of Covid or the bird flu. To compound the problem, the administration
has ordered the firing of one in five employees at the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC), and is now pressing that agency to terminate more
than one-third of its outside contracts.
In addition,
the almost instant firing of independent government inspectors general, who
were charged with overseeing government waste, fraud, and abuse, at the start
of Trump’s second term in office bodes anything but well for policing an
administration already awash in conflicts of interest. Worse yet, the freezing
of actions by the civil rights division of the Justice Department will allow
racial injustice to flourish without the slightest meaningful legal pushback.
Then there are
the plans of both the Trump administration and House Republicans to slash
programs from Medicaid to Social Security to the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program that serve tens of millions of Americans. In addition, there
have already been staff cuts at the Social Security Administration, as well as
steps taken to make it harder to apply for benefits there, and that’s
undoubtedly just the beginning. In the future, there could be devastating
direct benefit cuts to a program that serves more than 70 million Americans.
And such crucial programs may, in their own fashion, end up on the chopping
block, in part to make way for a planned multi-trillion-dollar tax cut geared
mainly — you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn — to helping individuals
at the high end of the income scale.
In short, the
goal is to Make America Unequal Again with an expansive program that could
leave current levels of inequality, which already exceed those reached during
the “Gilded Age” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in the
proverbial dust.
The Pentagon
Exception
While most
government agencies are either under siege or fear that they will be so in
relatively short order, one agency has largely escaped the budget cutter’s
knife: the Pentagon. In 2024, that agency (including nuclear warhead work done
at the Department of Energy) already received an astonishing $915 billion,
accounting for more than half of the federal government’s discretionary budget
that year.
Meanwhile, as a
New York Times analysis recently showed, the revenues of major weapons
contractors have barely been touched. So far, General Dynamics (with a loss of
less than 1%) and Leidos (with a loss of 7%) are the only firms among the top
10 weapons contractors to experience any kind of reduction in revenues from
DOGE’s efforts.
One possible
tradeoff within the Pentagon could be a move away from big platforms like
aircraft carriers and piloted combat aircraft toward faster, nimbler, more
easily produced systems based on applications of artificial intelligence,
including swarms of drones. Elon Musk is already a longtime critic of Lockheed
Martin’s F-35 fighter jet, which he’s slammed as “the worst military value for
money” in the history of Pentagon procurement. His solution, however, is ever
more advanced drones, presumably produced by his Silicon Valley allies.
But there is
another possibility: the Pentagon might further boost its budget so that it can
fund systems large and small, simultaneously feeding both the big contractors
and the emerging military tech firms. After all, despite Musk’s critique, the
president only recently announced that Boeing will produce a new plane, the
F-47 (that “47” being — you guessed it! — in honor of America’s 47th
president).
If there is a
move toward tradeoffs between existing systems and new tech, both sides will
have ample lobbying clout at their disposal. After all, the Silicon Valley
crowd is literally embedded in the Trump administration from Musk to Vice
President J.D. Vance, a protégé of Peter Thiel, the founder of the
military-tech firm Palantir. Shortly after graduating from Yale Law School,
Vance took a job at Mithril, a venture capital firm owned by Thiel. When Vance
left that firm in 2019 to run for the Senate in Ohio, he did so with $15
million in backing from Thiel.
And Thiel is
just one of the tech moguls backing Vance. An analysis by CBS News found that:
“Vance, a
relative newcomer to national politics, has assiduously courted billionaires
and Silicon Valley titans to bankroll his unlikely rise from bestselling
memoirist of despair, drugs and generational poverty in Appalachia to a ticket
that could seat him a heartbeat away from the presidency.”The
conservative New York Post summarized the state of play in an article headline
in July 2024: “Silicon Valley Cheers Vance Pick as More Tech Billionaires Back
Trump.” And keep in mind that Musk and Vance are not the only advocates for the
military-tech sector embedded in the Trump administration. Stephen Feinberg,
second-in-charge at the Pentagon, worked for Cerberus Capital, an investment
firm that has a history of investing in the handgun and defense industries. And
Michael Obadal, a senior director at Anduril, has been selected to serve as the
deputy secretary of the Army. A recent analysis by Bloomberg, in fact, found
that “more than a dozen people with ties to Thiel — including current and
former employees of his companies, as well as people who have helped manage his
fortune or benefited from his investments and charitable giving — have been
folded into the Trump administration.”
For their part,
the Big Five arms contractors, led by Lockheed Martin, still have a firm
foothold in Congress, having made millions in campaign contributions, employed
hundreds of lobbyists serving on commissions that influence military spending
and strategy, and placed their facilities in a majority of the states and
districts in the country. Even if some in the Pentagon tried to phase out the
F-35, Congress might well add funds to that institution’s budget request to
save the program.
Recent
procurement decisions suggest that there may be a desire in both Congress and
the Trump administration to finance traditional contractors and emerging tech
firms alike. The two largest recent program announcements — Boeing’s selection
as the prime contractor for that F-47 next generation combat aircraft and
President Trump’s commitment to a “Golden Dome” defense system supposedly
geared to protecting the entire United States from incoming missiles — will
offer ample opportunities to both traditional arms firms and emerging military
tech companies. The procurement phase of the F-47 program could cost up to $20
billion, but as Dan Grazier of the Stimson Center has noted, that $20 billion
will be “just seed money. The total costs coming down the road will be hundreds
of billions of dollars.” Meanwhile, General Atomics and Anduril are competing
to build drone “wingmen” that would work in coordination with those future
F-47s in battle situations.
At this point,
President Trump’s Golden Dome isn’t a fully fleshed out concept, but count on
one thing: attempting to meet his goal of a comprehensive, leakproof defense
against missiles would require building large numbers of interceptors and new
military satellites woven together with advanced communications and targeting
systems, at a potential cost over time of hundreds of billions of dollars. And
while the big weapons firms may have an inside track on building the hardware
for the Golden Dome, emerging tech firms are better positioned to produce the
software, targeting, surveillance, and communications components of the system.
Golden Dome is
poised to go forward despite the fact that, as Laura Grego of the Union of
Concerned Scientists has asserted, “It has been long understood that defending
against a sophisticated nuclear arsenal is technically and economically
unfeasible.” But that reality won’t stem the flow of massive quantities of tax
dollars into the project, no matter how unrealistic it may be, since profits
from producing it will be all too realistic.
Resistance
Rising?
There are signs
of growing resistance to the Musk/Trump agenda from lawsuits, to rallies
against the oligarchy led by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), to a boycott of Musk’s Tesla automobiles. Such
efforts will need to be supplemented by the involvement of millions more
people, including Trump supporters hurt by his cuts to essential programs that
had helped them stay above water financially. The outcome of all this may be
uncertain, but the stakes simply couldn’t be higher.
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