Full-Blown Kleptocracy Comes To America
The big military contractors spent money on both parties, These are the contributions over $50,000 that went to Republicans this cycle from the companies and their executives:
Lockheed Martin—
Trump- $192,429
NRCC- $160,798
NRSC- $160,409
NRC- $149,194
Ken Calvert (R-CA)- $62,000
MAGA Mike (R-LA)- $60,023
Boeing—
NRSC- $240,010
NRCC- $234,374
Trump- $207,449
Raytheon—
RNC- $204,612
Trump- $198,953
NRSC- $59,083
NRCC- $56,567
General Dynamics—
NRCC- $130,831
Trump- $65,798
And, not to be left out of the party, Northrop Grumman contributed $568,954 to 139 Republicans. There were 3 who got over $50,000 each—
NRSC- $231,058
NRCC- $228,253
Trump- 128,016
Will that generosity keep them off the Department of Government Efficiency’s chopping block. Nope, but… the “Department” is not an actual “department” of the government. As Judd Legum and Noel Sims explained yesterday at Popular Information, it is not part of the government at all. It is a non-governmental commission, headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy that will provide advice to the Trump Regime. They wrote that “Musk says he will identify ‘at least $2 trillion’ in savings from the $6.5 trillion federal budget. How will Musk do it? Details are scarce. Musk is recruiting ‘high-IQ revolutionaries’ to work 80-hour weeks for no pay to help him with the task.”
That sounds like hyperbole— nearly a third of the federal budget. Remember Newt Ginrich’s promise to put the government into a bathtub and drown it, something like that? Legum and Sims pointed out that “Cutting $2 trillion is impossible politically. But if Musk is serious about cutting government spending and waste there is only one place to start: the defense budget. About half of the discretionary budget— the spending that Congress approves each year— is spent on defense. For the 2024 budget, the amount allocated for the Department of Defense exceeded $840 billion. About half of the massive defense budget goes to military contractors, with tens of billions directed to ‘Big 5’ firms— Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. These contractors, according to a 60 Minutes investigation last year, ‘overcharge the Pentagon on almost everything the Department of Defense buys.’ The misuse of taxpayer dollars became more acute ‘in the early 2000s when the Pentagon, in another cost-saving move, cut 130,000 employees whose jobs were to negotiate and oversee defense contracts.’ Another factor is the consolidation of the defense industry, resulting in less competition for contracts.”
It will be hard for Musk to take an ax to this spending. Legum and Sims: “First, Musk is the CEO of the company, SpaceX, that actively seeks billions in defense contracts. Second, if Musk is able to overcome his conflict-of-interest, defense industry lobbyists will lobby Congress to reverse any planned cuts. Finally, Trump has pledged to increase military spending during his second term. ‘I will provide record funding for our military,’ Trump said in a video posted on his campaign website. Trump is calling for more defense spending even though defense spending has doubled over the last 20 years. The Department of Defense struggles to accurately account how it spends this gusher of money. For the seventh year in a row, it has failed an independent audit... [T]he scope of the Pentagon’s failure to keep track of its assets is still vast. According to the audit, the 15 agencies that could not properly account for their finances make up 44 percent of the Pentagon’s total assets and 68 percent of its budget. This year, the Pentagon held over $4.1 trillion in assets and had a budget of over $840 billion, meaning that auditors were unable to pin down $1.8 trillion in assets and $571 billion of the budget. Despite these failures, Congress continues to appropriate more money every year to the Department of Defense. The 2024 National Defense Authorization Act requires the Department of Defense to pass its audit by 2028, but has no mechanism for penalizing failure.”
As for Musk’s conflicts of interest, Señor Trumpanzee went down to Texas yesterday to attend a Space X launch with First Buddy. Yesterday, Michael Gold and Theodore Schliefer reported that “Musk has been a ubiquitous presence during the presidential transition, frequently attending meetings with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and sitting in on job interviews for his administration. He traveled with Trump to Washington, accompanying the president-elect at a meeting with House Republicans. He sat ringside with Trump at an Ultimate Fighting Championship in New York over the weekend.” And he was on the plane when Trump humiliated RFK Jr by forcing him to eat deadly McDonald’s garbage— the same way he forced Mitt Romney to eat snails at Jean-Georges before informing him he would not be hired for the first Trump cabinet.
The stakes for Musk go beyond having the president-elect’s admiration.
Delays in the approval of launch licenses by the Federal Aviation Administration and Interior Department, as well as fines for environmental violations imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, have been a great source of frustration for Musk. This is in part what inspired him to push Trump to name him to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency… The newly announced entity— whose acronym, DOGE, can be read as a play on Musk’s cryptocurrency Dogecoin— will look for up to $2 trillion in federal spending to cut by July 2026.
Musk’s roles as government official and entrepreneur have drawn scrutiny over the possibility of conflicts of interest. The federal government has already committed as much as $4.4 billion to SpaceX to pay for Starship missions to the moon, but Musk will almost certainly seek billions of dollars in additional contracts, including with the Pentagon, which is considering using it to rapidly ship cargo across the world and for other military missions.
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