Might 6, 2025
Actions that funnel income to weapons contractors have barely been touched—hardly shocking on condition that Musk himself presides over a major Pentagon contractor.
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Elon Musk showcases his managerial philosophy on the Conservative Political Motion Convention final month
(Saul Loeb / AFP by way of Getty Photos)
This text initially appeared at TomDispatch.com. To remain on high of necessary articles like these, signal as much as obtain the most recent updates from TomDispatch.com.
Beneath the guise of effectivity, the Trump administration is taking a sledgehammer to important packages and companies which might be the spine of America’s civilian authorities. The digital elimination of the US Company for Worldwide Growth (USAID) and plans to shut down the Division of Schooling are simply probably the most seen examples of a marketing campaign that features layoffs of funds specialists, public well being officers, scientists, and different crucial personnel whose work undergirds the every day operations of presidency and gives the fundamental companies wanted by companies, households, and people alike. Lots of these companies could make the distinction between solvency and poverty, well being and sickness, and even, in some instances, life and dying for weak populations.
The velocity with which civilian packages and companies are being slashed within the second Trump period provides away the true goal of the Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE). Within the context of the Musk-Trump regime, “effectivity” is a canopy story for a greed-driven ideological marketing campaign to radically cut back the dimensions of presidency with out regard for the human penalties.
To date, the one company that appears to have escaped the ire of the DOGE is—don’t be shocked!—the Pentagon. After deceptive headlines urged that its topline could be minimize by as a lot as 8% yearly for the subsequent 5 years as a part of that supposed effectivity marketing campaign, the true plan was revealed—discovering financial savings in some elements of the Pentagon solely to speculate no matter cash could be saved in—sure!—different army packages with none precise reductions within the division’s total funds. Then, throughout a White Home assembly with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 7, Trump introduced that “we’re going to be approving a funds, and I’m proud to say, really, the largest one we’ve ever achieved for the army…$1 trillion. No one has seen something prefer it.”
To date, cuts to make room for brand new sorts of army investments have been restricted to the firing of civilian Pentagon workers and the dismantling of plenty of inner technique and analysis departments. Actions that funnel income to weapons contractors have barely been touched—hardly shocking on condition that Musk himself presides over a major Pentagon contractor, SpaceX.
The legitimacy of his position ought to, in fact, be topic to query. In spite of everything, he’s an unelected billionaire with main authorities contracts who, in latest months, appeared to have garnered extra energy than the whole cupboard mixed. However cupboard members are topic to Senate affirmation, in addition to monetary disclosure and conflict-of-interest guidelines. Not Musk, although. Not solely hasn’t he been vetted by Congress, however he’s been allowed to take care of his position in SpaceX.
A Hole Authorities?
The Trump and Musk hollowing out of the civilian authorities, whereas preserving the Pentagon funds at enormously excessive ranges of funding, means the US is effectively on its option to changing into the very “garrison state” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned towards within the early years of the Chilly Conflict. And thoughts you, all of that’s true earlier than Republican hawks in Congress like Senate Armed Companies Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS), who’s searching for $100 billion extra in Pentagon spending than its officers have requested for, even act.
Present Problem
What’s at stake, nonetheless, goes effectively past how the federal government spends its cash. In spite of everything, such selections are being accompanied by an assault on primary constitutional rights like freedom of speech and a marketing campaign of mass deportations that already contains folks with the authorized proper to stay in the US. And that’s to not point out the bullying and monetary blackmailing of universities, regulation companies, and main media shops in an try to power them to bow all the way down to the administration’s political preferences.
In truth, the primary two months of the Trump/Musk administration undoubtedly symbolize probably the most blatant energy seize by the chief department within the historical past of this republic, a transfer that undermines our means to protect, no much less broaden, the basic rights which might be speculated to be the guiding lights of American democracy. These rights have, in fact, been violated to 1 diploma or one other all through this nation’s historical past, however by no means like this. The present crackdown threatens to erase the hard-won victories of the civil rights, girls’s rights, labor rights, immigrant rights, and LGBTQ rights actions that had introduced this nation nearer to dwelling as much as its professed commitments to freedom, tolerance, and equality.
Again in 2019, right-wing populist and Trump buddy Steve Bannon instructed PBS Frontline that the important thing to a future victory was to extend the “muzzle velocity” of extremist coverage adjustments, in order that opponents of the MAGA motion wouldn’t even know what hit them. “All we have now to do,” he stated then, “is flood the zone. Day by day we hit them with three issues. They’ll chew on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff achieved. Bang, bang, bang. These guys won’t ever—won’t ever be capable of get better. However we’ve obtained to begin with muzzle velocity.”
The Trump/Musk administration is now implementing simply such a technique in a staggering style.
Sparing the Pentagon
Regardless of a specific amount of noise about DOGE-driven efficiencies on the Pentagon, the division has certainly been spared the destiny of civilian outfits just like the Company for Worldwide Growth and the Division of Schooling, which have been both decimated or are slated for elimination altogether.
A proposal to put off 60,000 civilian workers on the Pentagon can have harsh penalties for these anticipating to lose their jobs, however it’s solely 5 p.c of the division’s workforce of 700,000 authorities workers and one other greater than half one million people underneath contract. Against this, the workforce of USAID, which provided a peaceable serving to hand to nations world wide, was quickly lowered from 10,000 to lower than 300.
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As well as, the layoffs of analysis scientists and public-health specialists might show to have disastrous penalties down the street by decreasing the federal government’s means to forestall or reply to infectious ailments and attainable pandemics like new variants of Covid or the fowl flu. To compound the issue, the administration has ordered the firing of 1 in 5 workers on the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, and is now urgent that company to terminate greater than one-third of its exterior contracts.
As well as, the just about prompt firing of impartial authorities inspectors basic, who had been charged with overseeing authorities waste, fraud, and abuse, initially of Trump’s second time period in workplace bodes something however effectively for policing an administration already awash in conflicts of curiosity. Worse but, the freezing of actions by the civil rights division of the Justice Division will permit racial injustice to flourish with out the slightest significant authorized pushback.
Then there are the plans of each the Trump administration and Home Republicans to slash packages from Medicaid to Social Safety to the Supplemental Diet Help Program that serve tens of thousands and thousands of People. As well as, there have already been workers cuts on the Social Safety Administration, in addition to steps taken to make it more durable to use for advantages there, and that’s undoubtedly just the start. Sooner or later, there might be devastating direct profit cuts to a program that serves greater than 70 million People. And such essential packages might, in their very own style, find yourself on the chopping block, partly to make method for a deliberate multitrillion-dollar tax minimize geared primarily—you undoubtedly gained’t be shocked to study—to serving to people on the excessive finish of the revenue scale.
Briefly, the purpose is to Make America Unequal Once more with an expansive program that might go away present ranges of inequality, which already exceed these reached throughout the “Gilded Age” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, within the proverbial mud.
The Pentagon Exception
Whereas most authorities companies are both underneath siege or concern that they are going to be so in comparatively brief order, one company has largely escaped the funds cutter’s knife: the Pentagon. In 2024, that company (together with nuclear warhead work achieved on the Division of Vitality) already obtained an astonishing $915 billion, accounting for greater than half of the federal authorities’s discretionary funds that yr.
In the meantime, as a New York Instances evaluation just lately confirmed, the revenues of main weapons contractors have barely been touched. To date, Normal Dynamics (with a lack of lower than 1 p.c) and Leidos (with a lack of 7 p.c) are the one companies among the many high 10 weapons contractors to expertise any form of discount in revenues from DOGE’s efforts.
One attainable tradeoff inside the Pentagon might be a transfer away from massive platforms like plane carriers and piloted fight plane towards sooner, nimbler, extra simply produced techniques based mostly on purposes of synthetic intelligence, together with 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 army worth for cash” within the historical past of Pentagon procurement. His answer, nonetheless, is ever extra superior drones, presumably produced by his Silicon Valley allies.
However there may be one other risk: the Pentagon may additional enhance its funds in order that it might fund techniques giant and small, concurrently feeding each the massive contractors and the rising army tech companies. In spite of everything, regardless of Musk’s critique, the president solely just lately introduced that Boeing will produce a brand new aircraft, the F-47 (that “47” being—you guessed it!—in honor of America’s forty seventh president).
If there’s a transfer towards tradeoffs between current techniques and new tech, each side can have ample lobbying clout at their disposal. In spite of everything, the Silicon Valley crowd is actually embedded within the Trump administration from Musk to Vice President JD Vance, a protégé of Peter Thiel, the founding father of the military-tech agency Palantir. Shortly after graduating from Yale Regulation Faculty, Vance took a job at Mithril, a enterprise capital agency owned by Thiel. When Vance left that agency in 2019 to run for the Senate in Ohio, he did so with $15 million in backing from Thiel.
And Thiel is simply one of many tech moguls backing Vance. An evaluation by CBS Information discovered that “Vance, a relative newcomer to nationwide politics, has assiduously courted billionaires and Silicon Valley titans to bankroll his unlikely rise from bestselling memoirist of despair, medication and generational poverty in Appalachia to a ticket that might seat him a heartbeat away from the presidency.”
The conservative New York Publish summarized the state of play in an article headline in July 2024: “Silicon Valley Cheers Vance Decide as Extra Tech Billionaires Again Trump.” And understand that Musk and Vance should not the one advocates for the military-tech sector embedded within the Trump administration. Stephen Feinberg, second-in-charge on the Pentagon, labored for Cerberus Capital, an funding agency that has a historical past of investing within the handgun and protection industries. And Michael Obadal, a senior director at Anduril, has been chosen to function the deputy secretary of the Military. A latest evaluation by Bloomberg, the truth is, discovered that “greater than a dozen folks with ties to Thiel—together with present and former workers of his corporations, in addition to individuals who have helped handle his fortune or benefited from his investments and charitable giving—have been folded into the Trump administration.”
For his or her half, the Large 5 arms contractors, led by Lockheed Martin, nonetheless have a agency foothold in Congress, having made thousands and thousands in marketing campaign contributions, employed a whole lot of lobbyists serving on commissions that affect army spending and technique, and positioned their amenities in a majority of the states and districts within the nation. Even when some within the Pentagon tried to section out the F-35, Congress may effectively add funds to that establishment’s funds request to avoid wasting this system.
Latest procurement selections recommend that there could also be a want in each Congress and the Trump administration to finance conventional contractors and rising tech companies alike. The 2 largest latest program bulletins—Boeing’s choice because the prime contractor for that F-47 subsequent era fight plane and President Trump’s dedication to a “Golden Dome” protection system supposedly geared to defending the whole United States from incoming missiles—will provide ample alternatives to each conventional arms companies and rising army tech corporations. The procurement section of the F-47 program might value as much as $20 billion, however as Dan Grazier of the Stimson Middle has famous, that $20 billion will likely be “simply seed cash. The whole prices coming down the street will likely be a whole lot of billions of {dollars}.” In the meantime, Normal Atomics and Anduril are competing to construct drone “wingmen” that may work in coordination with these future F-47s in battle conditions.
At this level, President Trump’s Golden Dome isn’t a completely fleshed out idea, however depend on one factor: making an attempt to satisfy his purpose of a complete, leakproof protection towards missiles would require constructing giant numbers of interceptors and new army satellites woven along with superior communications and focusing on techniques, at a possible value over time of a whole lot of billions of {dollars}. And whereas the massive weapons companies might have an inside observe on constructing the {hardware} for the Golden Dome, rising tech companies are higher positioned to supply the software program, focusing on, surveillance, and communications parts of the system.
Golden Dome is poised to go ahead although, as Laura Grego of the Union of Involved Scientists has asserted, “It has been lengthy understood that defending towards a classy nuclear arsenal is technically and economically unfeasible.” However that actuality gained’t stem the stream of large portions of tax {dollars} into the venture, irrespective of how unrealistic it could be, since earnings from producing will probably be all too life like.
Resistance Rising?
There are indicators of rising resistance to the Musk/Trump agenda from lawsuits, to rallies towards the oligarchy led by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Consultant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), to a boycott of Musk’s Tesla vehicles. Such efforts will must be supplemented by the involvement of thousands and thousands extra folks, together with Trump supporters damage by his cuts to important packages that had helped them keep above water financially. The end result of all this can be unsure, however the stakes merely couldn’t be greater.
William D. Hartung
William D. Hartung is a senior analysis fellow on the Quincy Institute for Accountable Statecraft.
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