Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is putting common sense into the Pentagon budget process, correcting the record about what that means. Many in the media called it an 8% cut in the defense budget, but that was wrong. Since Congress has been talking about as much as a $150 billion increase in defense spending, the notion of a “cut” did not make much sense.
The truth is that common sense has prevailed, and Hegseth has explained what is really happening.
The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) did visit the Pentagon with the mission of finding wasteful spending, inefficiencies, and energy expended on purposes other than “doing right by the warfighter,” as Hegseth explained in a recent video message to the American taxpayers.
To that end, DOGE and Hegseth intend to find 8% of the FY2026 defense budget that will be used for new priorities to support readiness and lethality.
To be clear, the money identified as currently allocated in the budget left by the Biden administration will be redesignated to fund President Donald Trump’s effort to build a more effective warfighting national security capability. The budget will not be reduced. Hegseth welcomed DOGE into the Pentagon “to find the redundancies and identify the last vestiges of Biden priorities. The DEI [diversity, equity, inclusion], the woke, the climate change B.S. That’s not core to our mission, and we’re going to get rid of it all.”
Additionally, he asserted that the reallocation of the budget priorities was in the planning stage and asked the military services to do the planning.