The Pentagon will be the next entity to receive an audit as part of the efforts of US President Donald Trump for increasing government efficiency and cutting the waste, the president himself reported.
The president of the United States, Donald Trump, said he hopes that Elon Musk will find billions of dollars in fraud and abuse in the pentagon during an audit that the billionaire will direct.
“I'm going to tell him very soon, as perhaps in 24 hours, to review the Department of Education. … Then I'm going to go to the military. We're going to check the army,” Trump said in an interview in the Super Bowl with Brett Baier of Fox News, an extract of which it was broadcast on Sunday.
“We are going to find billions, hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud and abuse,” Trump said about the largest Federal Department.
The Pentagon budget is close to 1,000 million dollars annually. In December, then President Joe Biden signed a bill authorizing an expense in defense of 895,000 million dollars for the fiscal year that ends on September 30.
Musk, who according to the White House is a special government employee, has received Trump's commission to lead an effort to drastically reduce the size of the US federal workforce. As part of that initiative, Musk's assistants have sought access to confidential information in computer systems of several government agencies.
The National Security Advisor, Mike Waltz, suggested in a separate interview on Sunday that Pentagon's naval construction processes could be an area of special interest for the government efficiency department, and characterized the pentagon in general as unnecessarily overloaded.
“Everything there seems to cost too much, take too much time and offer very little to the soldiers … We need business leaders who go there and absolutely reform the Pentagon's acquisition process,” Waltz said in an interview in the “Meet the Press” program of the NBC.
“There is much to study in naval construction, which is an absolute disaster,” Waltz added.
Leaders of the entire political spectrum have long criticized the waste and ineffectiveness of the Pentagon. But Democrats and official unions say that the Musk government efficiency department lacks the necessary experience to restructure the pentagon, and their efforts are at risk of bringing classified programs to light.
Musk companies also have important contracts with the Pentagon, which has raised important conflicts of interest.