Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says that he believes Elon Musk and his so-called government efficiency team can find "billions of dollars" in savings within the military and he is hopeful that the billionaire will come to the Department of Defense.
"We welcome DOGE to the Pentagon, and I hope to welcome Elon to the Pentagon very soon," Hegseth said Tuesday in Germany, raising concerns that Musk's ongoing and potentially illegal effort to slash and burn the federal government is now taking aim at the country's largest agency and the armed services.
Musk's companies earn billions from Pentagon contracts, and his Department of Government Efficiency staffers -- who have been slapped with court orders after breaching the U.S. Treasury Department and dismantling other agencies -- reportedly include young adults with no government experience and histories of racism and data breaches. A federal judge on Saturday warned that the DOGE Treasury operations risk the disclosure of Americans' sensitive and confidential information.
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Even Democratic lawmakers who are eager to slash the defense budget are leery of giving Musk's team access to the Pentagon. The effort by Musk, the world's richest man who is attempting to eliminate large swathes of the federal government with President Donald Trump's approval, has raised grave concerns of a constitutional crisis.
Speaking to a small group of handpicked reporters on Tuesday while in Germany, Hegseth didn't answer the question of whether he would put any limits or supervision on Musk and his team.
Instead, Hegseth said that he had no doubts that the team would find places to make cuts and, while "there's plenty of places where we want the keen eye of DOGE," the defense secretary noted that "we'll do it in coordination."
"There are waste redundancies and head counts in headquarters that need to be addressed," he said, adding that he thought "a lot of the climate programs that have been pursued at the Defense Department" were also wasteful.
Hegseth's invitation to DOGE comes after staffers for the office have run roughshod over several other government agencies since the start of the Trump administration last month.
DOGE -- a reference to a cryptocurrency Musk supports -- was officially created by an executive order Trump signed on his first day in office. Contrary to the name, it is an office within the White House and not a separate department.
Earlier this month, the Treasury Department gave DOGE staffers access to the system it uses to pay the government's bills, which in turn meant those staffers had access to taxpayer data such as Social Security numbers for nearly every American. The system also includes data on veterans benefits payments, such as disability, retirement and education benefits.
On Saturday, a federal judge issued an order to cut off DOGE's access to the Treasury system and limit entry to only career civil servants while courts consider a lawsuit filed by 19 state attorneys general arguing DOGE's access is illegal and creates major cybersecurity risks.
The order prompted Vice President JD Vance, Musk and other Trump allies to openly muse about defying the court, while the Justice Department filed a motion Monday seeking to limit the scope of the order.
A DOGE aide was also granted access to the Department of Veterans Affairs, but a VA spokesperson insisted that the aide would not have access to veterans' personal data.
In a news conference on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, several progressive Democrats and left-leaning organizations slammed Republicans for proposing a $150 billion increase to the defense budget at the same time that DOGE is unilaterally slashing humanitarian aid, education funding, medical research grants and consumer protections.
But they also expressed little faith that DOGE is the answer to cutting the Pentagon budget.
"It's very clear that all of these weapons systems that have been on the drawing board with blueprints for a generation with defense contractors around the country are going to be given a green light to receive federal funding," Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., told Military.com after the news conference.
Markey also expressed concern about DOGE employees accessing classified information at the Pentagon.
"DOGE should not be given access to our nuclear secrets," he said. "They haven't been vetted, they don't have top secret clearance, and they should just keep their hands off of the nuclear weapons programs."
The prospect of Musk and his team combing through the Pentagon budget will present a new challenge for government officials since this will be the first agency DOGE would be tackling that is explicitly connected to Musk and his companies.
Specifically, the U.S. government has paid Musk's company SpaceX billions in federal contracts -- around $17 billion since 2015 -- according to a government website that tracks federal spending.
Musk's space launch company has earned more than $5 billion in contracts just from the Defense Department since 2008, with a huge majority being spent by the Air Force on launch services.
In his remarks to reporters, Hegseth seemed unfazed by the criticism of Musk and the fact that his cost-cutting efforts were more akin to a total gutting of agencies like the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID.
"USAID has got a lot of problems that I talked about with the troops -- pursuing globalist agendas that don't have a connection to America first," said Hegseth, citing a slogan used by Trump and his followers. "The Defense Department is not USAID."
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