Elon Musk Stands to Get Even Richer as Trump Backs $1 Trillion Budget for Pentagon

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman in Muncie, Indiana, at Ball State, and Juan González is in Chicago.

While many federal agencies are facing crippling cuts and being forced to cut essential services, President Trump has announced he would seek a $1 trillion budget for the Pentagon. He made the comment while speaking to reporters alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We also, essentially, approved a budget, which is in the facility — you’ll like to hear this — of a trillion dollars, $1 trillion. And nobody’s seen anything like it. We have to build our military. And we’re very cost-conscious, but the military is something that we have to build.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by William Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new piece for Forbes is headlined “Does America Really Need a $1 Trillion Pentagon Budget?” He’s also co-author of the forthcoming book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, which will be out later this year.

So, Bill Hartung, answer your own question: Does the Pentagon really need a $1 trillion budget? Talk about what’s going on here, as DOGE, as the Trump administration slices and dices and removes and eliminates other agencies.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, the “Do we need a trillion?” is kind of a softball question, because the answer is absolutely no. We’re already spending too much.

And this really gives the lie to the idea that it’s about efficiency. They’ve almost eliminated the Agency for International Development, eliminated Department of Education, cutting the Centers for Disease Control, going after Medicaid, cutting staff at the Social Security Administration. If they’re about efficiency, first of all, they couldn’t do it overnight. They’d have to study what works and what doesn’t. So, basically, they’re decimating our civilian government, which provides needed services here and abroad, and they’re rewarding Pentagon contractors, including Elon Musk, who’s got unprecedented power. You know, the Silicon Valley militarists don’t even need to lobby this administration, because they’re embedded within it. JD Vance was groomed by Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley military person. You’ve got Musk. You’ve got people spread throughout these different agencies.

There was some hope because of Trump’s rhetoric. He said, “Well, if we can, you know, warm up to China and Russia, we could cut the military budget in half. You know, nuclear weapons cost too much.” I was pretty sure that was just a kind of a bone to those in his base, some of whom are sick of endless wars, don’t trust these corporations. But I didn’t expect him to really go along with it. And indeed he has. And he’s going to — he’s talking about building a “Golden Dome,” which is sort of akin to Reagan’s impenetrable Star Wars missile shield, which almost all scientists say is not possible to do. So, that’s a big boondoggle for both the old companies, like Lockheed Martin, and the new companies, like Anduril and Palantir.

And then, of course, this new fighter plane, which he decided to call the F-47 because he’s the 47th president. I mean, you might as well put his name on the side. There’s no indication this is going to work. Andrew Cockburn, a long-standing analyst, has written a piece about this.

So, at the same time they’re saying, you know, they’re going to preserve every penny, spend it wisely, they’re putting money in these new boondoggles. Of course, they’ve never passed an audit. They paid dramatically more than they should for spare parts. They’ve gotten rid of independent inspectors general who could follow whether there’s corruption going on.

So this is really an effort to militarize our society, what Eisenhower warned about, that we didn’t want America to become a garrison state. And getting rid of AID, you know, America’s face to the world now is going to be almost entirely military. Although AID had its problems, it also provided clean water, food, AIDS/HIV prevention services, that helped millions of people around the world.

So, I think this really is bad for America’s influence in the world. It’s bad for large numbers of people. Almost the only beneficiaries are going to be the weapons contractors. And, of course, this is going to be the highest Pentagon budget since World War II, so higher than the peak of Korea and Vietnam, higher than the peak of the Afghan and Iraq wars. And it’s completely unnecessary, and it’s actually going to make us less safe.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Bill, you’ve written other articles questioning even whether the official Defense Department budget is actually much larger, possibly twice as large, the military budget of the United States. Could you talk about this discrepancy between the official budget and the actual expenditures of the U.S.?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yes. Well, it’s not just the Pentagon budget that has a military purpose or is the result of a militarized foreign policy. You know, nuclear warheads are done in the Department of Energy. Some of our military aid is in the international affairs budget instead of the Pentagon budget. Of course, the Veterans Administration has mushroomed to take care of the Iraq and Afghan vets, of whom hundreds of thousands have physical wounds, PTSD and so forth. And then, you know, part of our interest on the debt is attributable to our huge military expenditures, and that interest is soon going to be higher than almost any other government agency.

So, whether you’re concerned about fiscal responsibility or basic services, this is just not the way to go. And the rationale for it is this kind of cover-the-globe strategy, that we need 750 military bases, 11 aircraft carriers, essentially floating airbases, more nuclear weapons.

We need a different strategy. You know, this idea of getting tough and peace through strength has been a disaster in this century, if you look at the outcomes of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were supposed to be won through superior technology, but then, because the opposition knew the local terrain, local culture, come up with cheap countermeasures like improvised explosive devices, all the technology in the world was not going to win those wars. So the idea that we’re going to take the same approach against a large, powerful country like China could be a recipe for disaster. The lead kind of arguments in that front are coming from Silicon Valley militarists, like Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey and so forth, that, you know, if we —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, Bill, I wanted to ask you about that particularly. You recently wrote for Monthly Review a review of a book by Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir. And you say in there — about these Silicon Valley militarists, you say, “All of them are convinced that, at some future moment, by supplanting old-school corporate weapons makers like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, they will usher in a golden age of American global primacy grounded in ever better technology.” Can you talk about this rise of the Silicon Valley militarists?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Sure. I originally wrote that for TomDispatch, which allows people to write this kind of thing, which is not easy to do anywhere.

But Karp has a book, and it’s essentially kind of like, you know, 19th-century ideology with 21st-century technology. He says America has lost its way, we don’t believe in the concept of the West, we’re not patriotic, and we need a unifying national mission. His idea of that mission is a new Manhattan Project to militarize artificial intelligence. To me, that’s a pretty impoverished view of what our mission should be as a nation. You know, our mission is supposed to be tolerance, democracy, prosperity, diversity — all the things that are under attack at the moment. So this is completely backwards.

And the thing is, you know, Palantir, for example, was one of the few companies to actually cheerlead the war on Gaza. Some of their technology was used for targeting. Karp decided to actually have their board meeting in Israel during the Gaza war. And they also are — you know, once we master AI, we’ll be able to beat China in a war, and so forth.

So, they’re a different breed. You know, the head of Lockheed Martin, he’ll fund think tanks that make, you know, a sympathetic case, but he’s not with a bullhorn saying, “Let’s dominate the world,” because he feels like that’s a bad look for somebody who’s profiting from this, whereas these Silicon Valley folks are shameless. They really think that they’re our saviors, that they can do things better than the government. And they’ve got some wild ideas, like Peter Thiel is researching how to live forever, and Elon Musk wants mass colonization of space, and Palmer Luckey is basically a gamer who decided to make weapons. These are not the people you want shaping your foreign policy. I mean, if they had a project that was worthwhile for defense, buy the product. They should be vendors. They shouldn’t be trying to shape our policy, our worldview, our government. And they shouldn’t be allowed to do that.

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Hartung, if you can talk more about Elon Musk and his conflicts of interest as he goes after these other agencies? It’s not just that they’re increasing, and Hegseth has announced this $1 trillion Pentagon budget. It’s that Elon Musk has multimillion-dollar [sic] contracts with the Pentagon. If you could discuss that, and then also the Pentagon repeatedly citing China as its principal adversary? Now there’s a trade war looming. How do you see this playing out?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Well, Musk has more power than the entire Cabinet combined. He’s almost co-president. And he owns a [company], SpaceX, that is going to make a version of Starlink for the military, launches a lot of our military satellites. He has a new product called the Starship, that supposedly will be able to put more payload in space than any other weapon. And the Pentagon looks to this as a way to beat China in the space race. So his Pentagon contracts are only going to grow. And he may well shift, try to shift money towards his Silicon Valley allies. He’s trashed the F-35, which is reasonable, but he said, “Let’s replace it with unpiloted drones.”

So, it’s kind of an unprecedented situation to kind of anoint an unelected billionaire to have this kind of power, and especially since the Pentagon — he has, you know, a very obvious conflict of interest. I’ve never seen anything like this. I mean, these folks were vetting people during the transition of who could work at the Pentagon. And, of course, Musk — they sort of made this sound like this was advisory, but they’re actually, basically, dismantling government, laying off scientists and experts who we need for things like fighting pandemics. So, he’s a walking conflict of interest.

AMY GOODMAN: Bill, just to be really clear, I want to correct myself. I said “millions of dollars.” The U.S. Space Force announced Friday it would award SpaceX contracts — SpaceX is Elon Musk’s company, privately held company — it would award SpaceX contracts worth approximately $5.9 billion, $6 billion.

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yes, and it’ll only grow in the future. In fact, Bloomberg has said this is kind of the weapons contractor of the years to come. Whether they can, you know, outplay Lockheed Martin, that gets $40 billion or $50 billion a year, is yet to be seen.

But there’s going to be a battle. You know, Silicon Valley is embedded in the executive branch. Lockheed Martin has huge influence in Congress because they put facilities in most of the states, they hire former government officials to lobby for them, they fund think tanks, they serve on government commissions that make policy. So, this is either a clash of the titans, or, as often happens, they’ll just push the budget high enough to fund both of them. And so —

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 30 seconds. If you could respond on China?

WILLIAM HARTUNG: Yes, well, China is the gift that keeps on giving. Exaggerating the threat from China is a way to fund these companies. I mean, it’s basically, in Washington, if we say “China,” you know, that’s another billion dollars for weapons contractors. In fact, we should have accommodation with China, not be preparing for a war with China.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there, and I want to thank you so much for joining us, Bill Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. We’ll link to your piece at Forbes, “Does America Really Need a $1 Trillion Pentagon Budget?”

Special thanks to our local production crew here at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. I want to thank Elvin Cesareo, Ben Caldwell and Teagan Chandler. And special thanks to Corey Ohlenkamp, to Dean Kristen McCauliff and to Kim McClure, as well as Denis Moynihan.

Democracy Now! is produced with Mike Burke, Renée Feltz, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud, Anjali Kamat, Safwat Nazzal. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, in Chicago and here in Muncie, Indiana.