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It’s going take some really big balls to change this Department of War (That’s DOW as in the stock prices that are at stake) into a true Department of Defense.
USAID is by no means a perfect organization. It has a long and storied history—some of it good, some of it bad. On the one hand, it provides food for starving people, helps prevent and treat HIV, and provides disaster relief and support. On the other hand, it harms the development of agriculture in client states, acts as a front for the CIA, and meddles in the internal affairs of other countries to the detriment of popular grassroots movements.
There’s waste and inefficiency in any large-scale human undertaking. USAID is no exception. If only we humans were as efficient as ants.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk chose to take a chainsaw and cut down the entire USAID tree rather than prune the dead and diseased wood.
But in relation to the size of the federal discretionary budget, USAID is small potatoes. In the chart above, the entire USAID budget is the skinniest slice of the pie.
The biggest slice—the one that takes up half of the entire pie—is the Pentagon budget. The Pentagon—just the civilians—represents more than one-third of the entire federal civilian workforce.
The Pentagon is America’s biggest spender, biggest waster, and the most corrupt department in the entire federal government. It took 1,700 auditors to conclude that they just can’t find $4.1 trillion in assets.
The Pentagon has never passed an audit, but every year, Congress gives them more money. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that manufacturers of shoddy weapons systems invest tens of millions into congressional members’ reelection campaigns. Then these weapons contractors hire lobbyists, usually former Pentagon employees themselves, to wine, dine, and otherwise schmooze the senators and representatives who sit on defense appropriations committees. In turn, these members vote to keep the gravy train running to the tune of billions. Weapons contractors reap the rewards, which come out to be about a 450,000% return on their investment. Not to mention the 50-plus members of Congress who either directly, or through spouses, hold stock in these companies that continue to price gouge the Pentagon. If the Pentagon were a public company listed on NYSEC, its top executives would all be in jail.
There is some good news to be had. President Trump and Elon Musk say they are gunning for the Pentagon next. No doubt they will not chop down the whole tree, instead choosing to prune, unlike their strategy for minor-spending USAID. Let’s hope they plan to cut the Pentagon budget down to what’s necessary to defend the land we live on, and pull back from our previous strategy of controlling the entire world by military force. Instead of just fiddling around the edges and focusing on thousand-dollar soap dispensers, let’s hope Trump meant it when he talked about cutting hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons systems that have nothing to do with defending the U.S. To get into it at the Pentagon, Elon is touting one of his “top DOGE team members,” a young genius gent who goes by the name of “Big Balls.”
Well, Big Balls, should you choose to take on the Pentagon behemoth, know that you have your work cut out for you. Much of its waste is hidden in plain sight: Thousands of nuclear weapons are already overkill, with thousands more planned. Weapons systems that don’t work and cost American taxpayers billions. Corrupt weapons manufacturers price gouging the government for weapons that spend more time in the shop than available for service. Warplanes that are so needlessly complex that only the contractor who constructed the piece of crap is capable of repairing them. Former Pentagon generals, who take their insider knowledge straight to the source in their retirement, often lining up cushy board seats at these very same weapons manufacturers, fleecing the American people.
Those are some mighty foes and entrenched interests for you to take on, Big Balls. Hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, abuse, and insane, irrational, and immoral policies are at stake. There’s going to be a lot of war profiteers who will attack you. It will be a David and Goliath-esque undertaking. And it’s going take some really big balls to end it and to change this Department of War (That’s DOW as in the stock prices that are at stake) into a true Department of Defense, whose job is defending the land we live on, rather than controlling the entire world through endless wars.
"While the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has been on a rampage to root out 'waste, fraud, and abuse,' they've been ignoring the biggest money pit in the entire federal government," said Rep. Summer Lee.
As billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency makes its way through federal agencies with the aim of cutting spending that goes toward protecting workers' rights, providing disaster assistance and healthcare in the Global South, and defending Americans from corporate greed, Democratic lawmakers are demanding to know why Republicans are pushing to increase the already bloated Pentagon budget.
"While American families struggle with skyrocketing healthcare costs and grocery bills, Republicans are gearing up to fork over another $150 billion to the military-industrial complex," said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) at a press conference titled "Slash the Pentagon" with government watchdog Public Citizen on Tuesday.
The event was held as the Senate Budget Committee prepared to begin a markup Wednesday of Senate Republicans' budget blueprint that was recently released, which could add $150 billion to the Department of Defense (DOD) budget.
The spending would be focused on improving "military readiness," expanding the U.S. Navy, building an air and missile defense system the Trump administration has called the "Iron Dome for America," and investing in nuclear defenses.
The senator said adding to the Pentagon's budget—which already stands at nearly $900 billion—won't make Americans safer, because "the doomsday that Americans fear in the 21st century isn't being vaporized by a nuclear bomb."
"It's the doomsday diagnosis of cancer, it's medical debt, it's housing payments or loan payments, it's grocery bills and heating bills," said Markey. "Let's finally put the people before the Pentagon."
As progressive organizers have noted in recent weeks, despite the fact that President Donald Trump campaigned as a populist—and won the support of a majority of working-class voters while high earners swung toward former Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election—the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has spent the early days of Trump's second term seizing data and pushing for the shutdown of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Education, attempting to take control of a major payment systemat the Department of the Treasury, and looking to cut spending at the Department of Labor.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon—which has failed seven consecutive audits, unable to account for its spending even as it swallows up 14% of the federal budget—has barely registered as a target of DOGE.
"While the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has been on a rampage to root out 'waste, fraud, and abuse,' they've been ignoring the biggest money pit in the entire federal government: the Department of Defense," said Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.). "The people want a more efficient government, quality healthcare, housing costs that don't skyrocket, and affordable eggs and groceries—not a bloated military budget that doesn't make us any safer. Maybe DOGE should take a look at that."
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) added that DOGE's actions so far will leave students with disabilities without resources and threaten senior citizens who rely on Social Security.
"We don't have clean drinking water in our country, but we always have the money for war," said Tlaib. "I'm sick of it. If our government has endless money to bomb people, they have money for clean air and water, guaranteeing healthcare as a human right, and making sure no child goes hungry. Our elected officials are choosing to spend money on endless war instead of the American people."
Trump and Musk have begun answering some questions from the press about whether DOGE will address DOD spending, with the president saying Sunday that DOGE will likely find "hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse."
Musk has criticized the Pentagon's $12 billion F-35 program as "obsolete," and some lawmakers have drawn attention to exorbitant spending at the department on luxury meals, toilet seats, and soap dispensers.
But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday expressed hope that spending cuts would focus on climate programs, saying the Pentagon "is not in the business of climate change, solving the global thermostat. We're in the business of deterring and winning wars."
The DOD is the "single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases in the world," as the Costs of War project at Brown University said in a 2019 report, and Trump's former defense secretary, Jim Mattis, acknowledged that the DOD must "pay attention to potential adverse impacts" of the climate crisis, related to national security.
On Tuesday, Musk was also questioned about DOGE's priorities at the Pentagon, with a reporter asking whether he has a conflict of interest in examining the DOD's spending, given his role of CEO at SpaceX, an aerospace company that receives about $22 billion in defense contracts from the department.
Musk shrugged off the concern, telling the reporter that he isn't personally "the one filing the contract, it's the people at SpaceX," and adding that defense contracts received by his company are "by far the best value for money for the taxpayer."
SpaceX was handed a new $38.85 million contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on Monday.
Meanwhile, said Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman, as Republicans head toward the budget reconciliation process, "money for the Pentagon will come directly cutting spending on human needs. The money that will go to Lockheed Martin or Palantir will come directly from Medicaid and food stamps and other programs for the poor and vulnerable."
"But with the plundering of the human needs budget made plain," he said, "the American people are not going to stand for—and will defeat—the Republicans' Pentagon boondoggle proposal."
Hegseth seems to represent the attitude that security is about being the toughest guy out there, security is about winning, and the pursuit of “peace” is for wimps.
Uh oh, nukes coming in. Should we retaliate?
This strikes me as the stupidest question a human being could ask—and, just possibly, also the last. Our enemy of the moment is loosing hell on us (if warning signals are accurate), so let’s do the same back at them. If we kill more of them than they kill of us, we win! Yes, human life—all life—will likely be destroyed in a nuclear war, but that’s just the way things work. That’s not our concern.
Among the global superpowers, this scenario remains etched into the meaning of self-defense: the ability to retaliate, no matter the consequences of doing so. The marketing slogan, of course, is “deterrence.” As long as the bad guys understand that we have the capability to retaliate, they won’t start a nuclear war. Hence, staying safe as a nation means maintaining our ability to create Armageddon.
It’s certainly the human paradox of the era. Are we stuck with it?
I fear the era of “greatness” the American right is yearning for goes back at least to the Middle Ages, which is to say, far enough back in time so that actual reality is subsumed by legend.
Well, that’s the question I’m asking right now. It’s the question most of humanity is struggling with in one way or another, although not, of course, at the highest levels of power, where wars remain a global certainty and the threat of nuclear war is humanity’s . . . uh, salvation. Apparently.
And thus, as The New York Times explains, “With Russia at war, China escalating regional disputes and nations like North Korea and Iran expanding their nuclear programs, the United States is set to spend an estimated $1.7 trillion over 30 years to revamp its own arsenal.”
“The spending spree, which the government began planning in 2010, is underway in at least 23 states—nearly 50 if you include subcontractors. It follows a decades-long freeze on designing, building or testing new nuclear weapons. Along with the subs, the military is paying for a new fleet of bomber jets, land-based missiles, and thermonuclear warheads. Tally all that spending, and the bill comes to almost $57 billion a year, or $108,000 per minute for three decades.”
And, oh yeah, the U.S. Department of Defense, according to theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists, currently maintains approximately 3,700 nuclear warheads, most of which “are not deployed but rather stored for potential upload onto missiles and aircraft as necessary. We estimate that approximately 1,770 warheads are currently deployed...“
And by the way, the Bulletin currently has its Doomsday Clock set at 90 seconds to midnight. That is to say, the world is trembling at the very edge of MADness, a.k.a., mutually assured destruction. Is there no way beyond this insanity? Shouldn’t addressing this, along with the expanding planetary climate crisis, be the number one priority not simply of ordinary citizens like you and me, but of the politically powerful? As a starting point, how do we create the context for global nuclear disarmament?
Into the midst of this madness comes—at the behest of President-elect Donald Trump—Pete Hegseth, his nominee for secretary of defense... the Fox News Channel host, the guy who has said he wants to give the department its old name back: the Department of War. Maybe the Senate will approve his controversial nomination, maybe it won’t. But the fact that he’s the one currently under consideration illustrates the limited consciousness of those at the peak of American power: Security is about being the toughest guy out there. Security is about winning. And the pursuit of “peace” is for wimps.
Hegseth seems to represent the essence of that attitude—a white Christian nationalist who draws his MAGA certainties from the old days, when the world was neatly divided into two parts, good and evil, and defeating evil was the work of manly men and pretty much all that mattered.
The Associated Press provides a brief snapshot into the Hegseth soul: “Hegseth complains in his latest book that ‘woke’ generals and the leaders of the elite service academies have left the military dangerously weak and ‘effeminate’ by promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. He says rank and file soldiers are undermined by ‘feckless civilian leaders and foolish brass,’ adding that ‘the next commander in chief will need to clean house...’”
“Hegseth’s writing,” the AP story continues, “is contemptuous of the policies, laws, and treaties that constrain warfighters on the battlefield, from restrictive rules of engagement to the Geneva Conventions, which he suggests are outdated against enemies who don’t abide by them.”
“He has little patience for the moral questions surrounding war. Of the Americans who dropped nuclear bombs on Japan to end World War II, he writes, ‘They won. Who cares?’”
His focus, he has said, is making the military more lethal, and to that end, his body is plastered with moralistic tattoos, including a crusader’s cross on his chest and the Latin phrase “Deus Vult” on his bicep, which, according to the Daily Beast, means “God Wills It.” The term dates back to the Christian crusaders of the Middle Ages and “is now associated with right-wing extremism.”
Wow, the Crusades—and nuclear-armed crusaders! How could America, how could the world, be any safer than this?
As I say, the Hegseth nomination may not get approved, but the nomination itself is wearing a MAGA hat. I fear the era of “greatness” the American right is yearning for goes back at least to the Middle Ages, which is to say, far enough back in time so that actual reality is subsumed by legend: valiant good charging forward, conquering groveling evil. Those were definitely the good old days.
But my point here is not simply to denigrate Trump, Hegseth, and the MAGA right. The centrist Dems are equally committed to war, including that multi-trillion-dollar investment in nuclear weapons upgrade. Not to mention genocide in Palestine and a world committed to going MAD.
We can do better. We have no choice.