Trump administration orders Pentagon to plan for sweeping budget cuts

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 Monday, 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.

Robert G. Salesses, a senior Pentagon official, said in a statement that the money saved could be “realigned” to pay for new priorities in the Trump administration, including the “Iron Dome for America,” President Donald Trump’s catchphrase for an expansive missile defense system. That sum could amount to $50 billion in next year’s budget, he said.

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 cuts would include tens of billions of dollars in each of the next five years.

The 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.

[More: Trump administration fires thousands for ‘performance’ without evidence, in messy rush]

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.

John Ullyot, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement that Hegseth has directed defense officials to evaluate the probationary workforce, with a determination already made that “some civilian probationary employees will be separated from service in the near future.”

“It is not in the public interest to retain individuals whose contributions are not mission-critical,” Ullyot said.

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, although managers are expected to have leeway to consider people’s roles and performance in determining who should be dismissed. (DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency, although it is not a Cabinet-level agency.)

The Pentagon also oversees about 1.3 million active-duty service members and nearly 800,000 others who are in the National Guard and reserves, but the Trump administration has exempted service members from its sweeping budget cuts for now.

Hegseth, in his Tuesday memo, sought to cast the proposed cuts as an extension of Trump’s “peace through strength” policies, despite a reversal from the president’s past practice of expanding military spending and touting those efforts. Republicans, including Hegseth, have spent years criticizing Democrats as not spending enough on national defense.

“The time for preparation is over — we must act urgently to revive the warrior ethos, rebuild our military, and reestablish deterrence,” Hegseth wrote in the memo. “Our budget will resource the fighting force we need, cease unnecessary defense spending, reject excessive bureaucracy, and drive actionable reform including progress on the audit.”

The proposed cuts, if adopted, would mark the largest effort to rein in Pentagon spending since 2013, when congressionally mandated budget reductions known as sequestration took effect. Those cuts were perceived as a crisis in the Pentagon at the time and grew increasingly unpopular with Republicans and Democrats alike as their effects on the military’s ability to train and be ready for war became clear.

The memo, first reported on by the Post, was labeled “CUI” — controlled unclassified information. It was sent to senior Pentagon officials, top military commanders and the directors of numerous defense agencies. Bloomberg News reported Friday about Hegseth’s intended cuts, before the memo was distributed to Pentagon officials.

In his memo, Hegseth said the request for proposed cuts constitutes a “relook” at the Pentagon budget. The branches of service, he wrote, should fund what they need for a “wartime tempo” and offset that financially by cutting “low-impact items,” such as diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and climate change studies.

Among the 17 categories that may not be affected are operations to combat transnational criminal organizations in the Western Hemisphere, the Pentagon’s audit, and the “collaborative combat aircraft” program, which seeks to pair unmanned aircraft with those that still carry pilots. The building of “executable” warships is a priority, the memo says, although it does not specify what kind of vessels the administration favors. Hegseth’s directive also prioritizes military construction projects in the Pacific, where the Trump administration — as the Biden administration did — sees China as the United States’ chief rival.

The list is notable, too, for what it omits. While it explicitly endorses “support agency funding” for Indo-Pacific Command and Northern Command, which oversees homeland defense, it does not extend similar significance to several other major geographic commands. Those include European Command, which has had a major role in overseeing U.S. support for Ukraine during its three-year war with Russia; Central Command, which manages operations across the Middle East; and Africa Command, which directs a force of several thousand U.S. troops spread out across that continent.

The snubbing of European Command is sure to capture attention overseas, where Hegseth last week repeatedly called for NATO allies to do more to maintain their own defense. Echoing Trump, he said European countries should be spending 5 percent of their gross domestic product on defense. During the trip, he declined to answer directly when asked whether the United States should do the same.

“At a minimum, we should not go below 3 percent,” Hegseth said, speaking in Stuttgart, Germany, on Feb. 12. “That’s a view I know the president shares.” He added that “any defense secretary would be lying if they said they didn’t want more.”

Hegseth added then that “we live in fiscally constrained times,” citing the U.S. national debt of more than $36 trillion. He pledged to work with lawmakers and said Trump will “lead the way on making sure the troops have the resources they need and that we truly rebuild our military just like President Trump did in the first term.”

Initial reaction to the budget cut proposal included both caution and alarm.

On Wall Street, stocks for Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and several other major defense contractors tumbled after the Post published news about Hegseth’s directive.

Sen. Jack Reed (Rhode Island), the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said such budget cuts would be “hasty,” “indiscriminate,” and “betray our military forces and their families and make America less safe.”

“I’m all for cutting programs that don’t work, but this proposal is deeply misguided,” Reed said. “Secretary Hegseth’s rushed, arbitrary strategy would have negative impacts on our security, economy, and industrial base.”

A spokesman for the Armed Services Committee’s chairman, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), did not respond to a request for comment.

Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.