all-purpose thread link will work for everyone: https://wapo.st/4hHV3Yt Trump administration orders Pentagon to plan for sweeping budget cuts The directive, detailed in a memo dated Tuesday, exempts a handful of programs, including the president’s expanded military mission along the U.S.-Mexico border. By Dan Lamothe, Alex Horton and Hannah Natanson Updated February 19, 2025 at 5:52 p.m. EST27 minutes ago Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered senior leaders at the Pentagon and throughout the U.S. military to develop plans for cutting 8 percent from the defense budget in each of the next five years, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post and officials familiar with the matter — a striking proposal certain to face internal resistance and strident bipartisan opposition in Congress. Hegseth ordered the proposed cuts to be drawn up by Feb. 24, according to the memo, which is dated Tuesday and includes a list of 17 categories that the Trump administration wants exempted. Among them: operations at the southern U.S. border, modernization of nuclear weapons and missile defense, and acquisition of submarines, one-way attack drones and other munitions. The Pentagon budget for 2025 is about $850 billion, with broad consensus on Capitol Hill that extensive spending is necessary to deter threats posed by China and Russia, in particular. If adopted in full, the proposed cuts would include tens of billions of dollars in each of the next five years. Hegseth’s budget directive follows a separate order from the Trump administration seeking lists of thousands of probationary Defense Department employees expected to be fired this week. That effort is being overseen by billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service as part of his broader dismantling of the federal bureaucracy. Combined, the two efforts amount to a striking assault on the government’s largest department, which has more than 900,000 civilian employees, many of them military veterans. Probationary employment in the Defense Department can last from one to three years, depending on the position, and can include employees who have shifted from one job to another. On Wednesday, people familiar with DOGE’s activities said the National Security Agency had furnished to the Pentagon a list containing roughly 4,000 identification numbers of employees on probation, accounting for roughly 10 percent of the spy service’s civilian workforce, though managers are expected to have leeway to consider people’s roles and performance in determining who should be dismissed. The Pentagon also oversees about 1.3 million active-duty service members and nearly 800,000 more who are in the National Guard and Reserve, but for now at least the Trump administration has exempted service members from its sweeping budget cuts. long article, more at the link
I've been against big military budgets, but our defense spend is officially 3.4% of GDP, which is considered a bargain for what it does. The bigger issue is that you can't convince voters to cut entitlements without cutting everything else, assuming that they'll sit nicely with the "everything else".
