Cutting 8 Percent
Say what you will about Defense Secretary/former Fox News guy Pete Hegseth, but dude’s interested in cutting the Pentagon’s budget. Libertarians, this is what we asked for!
Hegseth has ordered top officials to draw up a plan to cut $50 billion, or roughly 8 percent, from his department’s budget—8 percent each year for the next five years. Since it’s the Trump administration and we can’t just fully have nice things, border enforcement is one area that Hegseth has already designated as exempt from possible trims. (That said, getting the border under control and making immigration more orderly is possibly a defensible, and certainly a predictable, priority for President Donald Trump.)
It’s not clear whether Hegseth is aiming for full cuts, or whether he wants certain line items cut in order to allocate the funds elsewhere within his department. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that Hegseth has instructed his people “to find offsets—programs that can be cut to achieve spending elsewhere—for fiscal year 2026, which starts Oct. 1.” This may well be in addition to the spending cuts; we just don’t know yet.
Reason has long been critical of wasteful Pentagon spending. “In 2023, the Government Accountability Office revealed that a government contractor had lost 2 million spare parts for the F-35 fighter jet, together worth tens of millions of dollars, since 2018,” writes Matthew Petti in the February 2025 issue. “The Department of Defense followed up on only 20,000 of those parts. Military officials don’t know how many F-35 spare parts exist in total, paid for by American taxpayers but spread out at contractor warehouses around the world.” And “in 2018, the U.S. Navy found a warehouse in Jacksonville, Florida, full of parts for the F-14 Tomcat, the now-obsolete fighter jet made famous in Top Gun, and for the P-8 Poseidon and P-3 Orion, two submarine-hunting aircraft”—parts worth $126 million. Fear not, this isn’t a recent trend. The federal government’s been extraordinarily consistent on this front: Between 1984 and 1985 alone, Petti writes, the Navy had lost track of $394 million in parts.
One encouraging tidbit: In his piece, Petti cites a policy wonk named Dan Caldwell, who argues that “we have a defense budget that is disconnected from a coherent grand strategy. A lot of policymakers and a lot of individuals in the national security think tank community think that a topline spending number—whether it’s a total spending number or a percentage of GDP—they think that in and of itself is a strategy.” Caldwell was just plucked out of his think tank role and tapped by Hegseth to serve as a senior adviser.
What’s happening at the border? The month Trump got elected, illegal border crossings noticeably slowed. “Though overall crossings ticked up slightly in December, the daily averages were the lowest since summer 2020, according to a senior U.S. Customs and Border Protection official who spoke on the condition of anonymity” to The New York Tim
Article from Reason.com
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