Pentagon officials are bracing for Musk's DOGE
SecDef hints at pushback, but others worry about the team's record of breaking into databases and making hasty cuts.
Patrick Tucker | February 14, 2025
Few would deny that the Defense Department, with its $886 billion budget and byzantine ways, could be run more efficiently. Many have called for sweeping reforms of one sort of another. But if billionaire defense contractor Elon Musk and his DOGE team disrupt Pentagon data systems, contracts, and employees as they’ve done at other federal agencies, the results could expose critical national-security data, endanger personnel, and create unprecedented conflicts of interest, say current and former officials and outside experts.
The danger posed by young, inexperienced software engineers with an overly broad mandate to access information, and who may not have received the usual background checks for top-secret clearances, “should be raising alarms all over Congress,” said one defense information-security official, one of several discussions we had with defense officials that were fearful in tone.
Even Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appears wary, though he said on Wednesday that he had been in touch with Musk and that he looks forward to “welcoming” the DOGE team to the Pentagon “very soon.”
Hegseth told reporters in Germany that Musk’s team has been “working in collaboration with us. There are waste redundancies and head counts in headquarters that need to be addressed,” he said, suggesting that there may be “billions” of dollars to be saved.
https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2025/02/pentagon-officials-are-bracing-musks-doge/403037/?oref=d1-homepage-top-story
