He has to find cuts of $4bn every day until then. The sheer numbers mean Pentagon and US military power will be in the frame along with everything else
At the remarkable February Musk-Trump cabinet meeting, President Donald Trump told Musk to be more aggressive – because it was running about $15bn behind at that time.
So, we’re only at the beginning for what lies ahead to September.
The raw numbers of the US budget are $7.028 trillion in spending, with $5.163 trillion in revenue, leaving a $1.865 trillion deficit. Musk’s $1 trillion savings goal is 15 per cent of US government spending.
That scale of cuts can’t be found in diversity programs or ending salaries of dead civil servants still on payrolls – two poster children for the MAGA crowd.
Closing whole agencies such as the Education Department also won’t be enough – they’re blips in $7 trillion. DOGE will have to go to all big-spending areas in the budget and get that chainsaw out that Musk frolicked with at a recent conservative convention.
That means social security ($1.5 trillion) and health, Medicare and Medicaid (at $1.8 trillion), and defence (at $859bn).
Musk is bringing his corporate approach from his corporate world to the cuts – last seen at Twitter.
A core thing here is to “delete any part or process you can”, as Musk says: “You may add them back later. In fact if you do not end up adding back at least 10 per cent of the cuts, you didn’t delete enough.” And move very fast, accelerating everything.
At DOGE this has cut things that turned out to be more than just important – like staff keeping America’s nuclear weapons secure, people in America’s air safety outfit, the FAA, and ebola prevention at the Centres for Disease Control (he’s said he reversed the ebola cut immediately – but that’s not accurate).
As the search for cuts accelerates, there will be plenty more own goals like that.
In other cases, the nasty knock-on consequences of the cuts will take time to emerge. Many will be beyond his window of September this year – probably after he’s declared “Mission Accomplished” like GW Bush did about Iraq on the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003 just as Iraq descended into violence and chaos.
So, Musk may have ridden off with his chainsaw and MAGA cap to other quests before the real consequences of his work dawn on the American people and America’s friends in the wider world (although America’s rivals are already seeing opportunities open up).
An analogy that helps think through what is happening could be this: the US government is obese, living an unhealthy life beyond its means, spending $1.9 trillion every year it just doesn’t have.
But Trump’s war on the “woke” and “deep state” enemies within his own government, together with the DOGE chainsaw, are like treating an obesity problem with a combination of chemotherapy and amputation.
Yes, the patient ends up losing plenty of weight, but they’re sick with key organs or limbs missing when you’re done.
Looking at the Pentagon part alone; it fits that description of an obese patient in need of some difficult interventions – as does our own defence organisation here in Australia.
The new Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, is trying to get ahead of the DOGE wave by running his own efficiency program. Donald Trump has exempted military personnel from cuts imposed on the wider federal workforce, although the Pentagon’s 950,000 civilian workforce is in the frame just like everywhere else.
As DOGE approaches, Hegseth is also trying to redirect 8 per cent of the Pentagon’s budget – about $50bn – towards his own priorities, using a pretty traditional internal offsets approach. He’s talked about cutting “so-called climate change”, “excessive bureaucracy” and ending “woke” programs, but he must know the dollars there won’t touch $50bn. Hegseth’s plan is almost certain to be run over by the DOGE freight train, adding more chaos into the organisation.
Exempting US military personnel from cuts makes everything harder, because at around $180bn they’re about 20 per cent of the budget. Bigger cuts will have to be made elsewhere – to things such as acquisition and maintenance.
We know that other Trump administration figures, such as National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, see waste and fraud in the Pentagon’s ship and submarine-building programs – including the Virginia-class submarines Australia wants under AUKUS. The US Navy is in very bad shape, with unaffordable plans and growing costs pressures both to build ships and submarines and to maintain and operate them. That’s a rich target area for DOGE.
But shipbuilding is only around 4 per cent of the Pentagon’s budget – so spending needs to be better managed but increased to match China’s rapidly growing maritime power.
Moreover, unlike here, where most defence maintenance and services have been outsourced, many of those 950,000 civilian employees are on the tools.
The US Navy’s submarine maintenance yards are government-run and staffed facilities. The navy is already facing a huge maintenance backlog, so the easy option of cutting civilians may lead to another of those unintended consequences – with serious consequences for Australia’s AUKUS ambitions if US submarine availability falls even further.
We can hold on to the hope that Musk and tech bros such as Anduril’s Palmer Luckey will transform the US military and Pentagon into a glittering Swiss watch of autonomous weaponry and AI, but US power now exists in a functioning Cold War institution running large weapons systems based all over the globe. It’s not a small outfit dependent on data servers, code and a relatively tiny number of people, like Twitter was and X still is.
Similarities to SpaceX and Tesla exist but they’re outweighed by the differences. It’s unlikely that Pete Hegseth’s career so far has equipped him to manage the contradictions – and no one is able to “manage” Elon Musk, or Donald Trump
The combined effect of DOGE, the Hegseth funding shift, and parallel pressures for workforce reduction are going to rock the US military and affect everything about how it operates. Even if some of the savings make sense, the disruption and damage will be broad and deep, and last for years.
Right now, the world is full of emboldened, well-armed autocrats and two active wars.
It’s not clear what the actual plan is for American power as these cuts and changes loom. That’s bad news for those interested in American military power being reliable and present in a dangerous time.
Michael Shoebridge is director of Strategic Analysis Australia.
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