By attacking the Department of Education and the United States Agency for International Development, President Trump and special government employee Elon Musk are simply hitting fungos at spring training — like a crack baseball team, anxiously awaiting the first pitch of the season. Their batting practice will be quite useful in taking on the Pentagon.
The value added by the Department of Education has been questioned for decades, certainly since the Reagan Administration. At issue is whether its responsibilities would be better executed by the states, with parents and teachers having a greater say than unelected bureaucrats.
Further, the U.S industrial base is far from where it should be to sustain a major high-intensity conflict.
The Department of Education also carries with it a perceived woke culture, sponsoring programs that enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) — an approach viewed by many as discriminatory and that is now being eliminated in government, academia, and corporate America. The Department of Education is the smallest cabinet-level department, with 4,100 employees and an FY 2024 budget of about $270 billion representing four percent of the federal budget.
USAID is much smaller, with FY 2023 annual appropriations of over $40 billion, with a workforce of more than 10,000 in dozens of countries. The issue with USAID is that it resembles a parallel Department of State, not consistently aligned with U.S. foreign policy objectives. Recently confirmed Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that USAID has committed insubordination and is not responsive or cooperative, thinking it works for the world and not for the U.S. Rubio envisions appropriate programs continuing, but under the aegis of the Department of State.
The Department of Education and USAID are easy to pick on. Trump and Musk are warming up for a much bigger target: the Department of Defense. Rightsizing the Pentagon and improving its efficiency would be the dream of leading consultancy firms of the world. There are several issues for Trump and Musk to face at the Pentagon, a massive structure with six zip codes, nearly 18 miles of corridors, and 6.5 million square feet of office space — and an annual budget of over $800 billion and a global workforce of nearly 3 million.
Culture of the Pentagon
The Pentagon has several cultural and strategic issues to be addressed, not just by Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but also by recently named Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Part of Hegseth’s mandate is to eliminate a woke culture that allegedly benefitted the careerism of top brass, to the perceived detriment of maintaining and enhancing a fighting machine that can win wars. Accountability for the Afghan withdrawal debacle and protracted U.S. deployment will be another area of inquiry for Hegseth and a way for him to punish failure.
The Pentagon’s financial travails are well known: It has been unable to obtain a clean (unqualified) audit opinion for seven consecutive years, with the possibility of one by only 2028. Accounting may be seen as a dull subject by the American people, relatively uninterested in balance sheets, P&L statements, fund flow statements, and copious footnotes.
Fiscal Mismanagement
However, this is strongly suggestive of fiscal mismanagement, with due disregard for the American taxpayer and the safety and soundness of a major institution. Anyone with private sector experience knows that such display of financial insouciance would result in boards of directors and management being fired, perhaps after one year, and certainly after two — shareholders would initiate class actions and federal regulators would swoop in with forensic accounting firms in tow.
Looking to the future, the Pentagon commits expense and capital resources to maintain legacy platforms. For example, there are carrier strike groups, long range bombers such as the B-52, and some mechanized assets — at a time when adversaries are investing heavily in drones, hypersonic missiles, and in space, cyber, and electromagnetic warfare. Again, there is the question of the right balance of resource allocation and moderating what has been of benefit in the past, recognizing that quantity is still important.
Further, the U.S industrial base is far from where it should be to sustain a major high intensity conflict. U.S. stocks of artillery shells and battlefield systems have been depleted by the Russia-Ukraine war. It takes 32 months by one estimate to deliver the highly successful Javelin anti-tank system, manufactured by a joint a venture of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, to replenish our inventory to an appropriate readiness level.
With respect to relatively low-tech 155-millimeter artillery shells, the current manufacturing infrastructure of the U.S. has been deemed inadequate. Prior to the Russia-Ukraine war, U.S. production was 14,400 per month, yet the future target is a rate of 100,000. Army sources advised that 55,000 was the expectation by 2024 year-end.
The Future Industrial Base
Shipbuilding is another part of the industrial base where the U.S. has fallen short. In recent years, the country has built 1.2 Virginia class submarines per year; a 30-year shipbuilding plan approved in 2022 called for five per year by 2028, an exceptionally aggressive target, particularly noting that the shipbuilding workforce at General Dynamics and Huntington Ingalls is believed too small. China’s shipbuilding capacity is stunningly greater than that of the U.S. — one shipyard alone, Jiangnan, has more capacity than all U.S. shipyards combined.
Restructuring the Pentagon to make it more efficient and accountable, achieving the right balance of high-tech and legacy platforms, and building America’s industrial base to prepare for a possible conflict with China will take years — and time is a constraint, not a resource.
This is no time for partisanship. However, it would be naïve to think that restructuring or terminating ineffective government programs unaligned with our national interest, eliminating inefficient or duplicative efforts in government, and redirecting resources of the Pentagon to maintain and strengthen the best fighting machine in the world should appeal equally to both our political parties.
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Frank Schell is a business strategy consultant and former senior vice president of the First National Bank of Chicago. He was a Lecturer at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, and is a contributor of opinion pieces to various journals.
