Incoming Senate GOP Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said on Thursday he discussed “general“ spending with Department of Government Efficiency co-chair Elon Musk during a meeting on Capitol Hill.
Thune offered the brief insight into his meeting with Musk in response to a question from Defense Daily
on whether the two discussed defense spending.
Musk, CEO of Tesla [TSLA] and SpaceX, and his DOGE co-chair and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy were on Capitol Hill for a series of meetings with House and Senate Republican lawmakers on Thursday.
“I think we just need to make sure we spend the public’s money well,” Musk told reporters after leaving his meeting with Thune.
Republicans last month elected Thune as Senate majority leader for the next Congress, succeeding Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who is now set to take over as the upper chamber’s top defense appropriator (Defense Daily, Nov. 21).
President-elect Trump has tapped Musk and Ramaswamy to lead the non-governmental DOGE commission, which is set to advise his administration on potential cuts to government spending.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), a member of the Armed Services Committee, has led the founding of a DOGE Caucus in the upper chamber, while Reps. Aaron Bean (R-Fla.) and Pete Sessions (R-Texas) are co-chairs of the House DOGE Caucus and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) will chair a new Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) Subcommittee.
Ramaswamy on Wednesday offered insight into how the DOGE may approach defense spending, calling for the debate over the Pentagon’s budget topline to focus on ensuring the department pursues the “right kind” of spending and citing a need to invest more in technologies like drones and hypersonic missiles (Defense Daily, Dec. 4).
“But, again, [there’s] this historical lazy debate about whether or not does that mean [there should be] more or less defense spending versus asking the question of actually are we deploying the right kind of federal spending,” Ramaswamy said during an Aspen Security Forum discussion in Washington, D.C.
While the DOGE itself won’t be able to make direct cuts, Ramaswamy did offer insight into how the executive branch could implement the commission’s recommendations without requiring congressional action.
Ramaswamy also cited how the next administration could use “existing executive authority” to implement the DOGE’s recommendations without requiring congressional approval, adding that “if Congress has authorized [spending] and yet it’s being spent in a wasteful or in an unethical or in a fraudulent or even in an error-prone manner, that’s a one-way ratchet to be able to turn that down.”
Musk, meanwhile, has made specific comments recently on the F-35 program, stating the fighter jet’s design “was broken at the requirements level because it was required to be too many things to too many people” (Defense Daily, Nov. 25).
“This made it an expensive & complex jack of all trades, master of none. Success was never in the set of possible outcomes,” Musk wrote in a recent post on X, the social media site he owns. “And manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway. Will just get pilots killed.”