Breaking the Iceberg

DOGE, Savings vs. Publicity, and the Pentagon’s Hidden Motherlode of Waste

As I mentioned in a recent piece about DOGE, Musk’s government-whipping crusade is actually showing results. Just take a look—the U.S. Debt Clock recently added a DOGE tracker, and it’s already ticking up $137 billion in savings.

If the current rate of cuts continues for a full year, it would add up to $1.4 trillion by January 2026—one year into Trump’s presidency. That’s about 70% of the $2 trillion in annual savings Elon Musk boldly promised through DOGE.

But you know what’s more important than any potential savings from DOGE? Publicity.

I say that because I understand the “chart” below.

Yes, that’s the notorious “corruption iceberg”—and therein lies the real problem.

Massive savings might look good on paper, but they won’t mean much if the deeper, systemic corruption remains hidden. Without exposure, even the most aggressive cost-cutting efforts—DOGE included—can be undermined or quietly reversed in bureaucratic darkness.

My point is, publicity is the silver bullet. Once people see where their money is really going, there’s no unseeing it.

We’re barely a month into DOGE, and already Musk’s team has exposed more corruption than the entire crony media complex has in years.

Give it four years of this, and the system may finally run out of excuses. The waste, the fraud, the backroom deals—all of it may become too big to hide, too obvious to justify. Only then might the iceberg finally crack.

Fortunately, Elon Musk gets this—which is why DOGE has been reasonably successful so far:

The Ultimate Can of Worms

But let’s say the savings matter to you just as much as the publicity—where should DOGE go next?

The Pentagon. In fact, one could easily argue—and I’ll get to that—that cutting anywhere else without tackling military spending is just trimming around the edges… not a serious move if you actually want real savings.

And it seems Trump agrees. He recently directed Elon Musk and the DOGE to review spending and operations across various federal agencies—which, yes, includes the Pentagon.

It didn’t stop there.

Trump’s Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, last week ordered senior military leaders to plan for an 8% budget cut at the Department of Defense (DoD) for each of the next five years. He followed up with a video, saying he’s looking forward to eliminating “fraud, waste, and abuse”:

We're incorporating everything they're doing to find fraud, waste, and abuse into our work at the DoD—especially within the largest discretionary budget in the federal government. They're going to have broad access, with all necessary safeguards on classification in place. They understand that, and many of them are veterans who care just as much as we do about identifying redundancies and eliminating the last vestiges of Biden-era priorities—DEI, the woke agenda, and climate change nonsense that has nothing to do with our mission.

We're going to get rid of it all.

Music to my ears. The Pentagon is truly the ultimate can of worms, where a motherlode of waste and corruption is just waiting to be uncovered. I’m sure it will dwarf anything we’ve seen so far.

Remember, the DoD holds the largest discretionary budget in the government—it towers over everything else. Just take a look at the chart below.

And despite its exorbitant budget, many soldiers are still living in moldy barracks. This is just one example from X—the internet is littered with images like these.

You don’t have to be a genius to see it—something is seriously broken at the DoD.

And don’t just take my word for it—this might come as a shock, but in November 2024, just months ago, the Pentagon failed its annual audit. That means it couldn’t fully account for how its massive budget was spent.

Even more shocking, this was the Pentagon’s 7th consecutive failed audit—ever since the DoD was first required to undergo yearly audits in 2018.

In other words, failing financial audits isn’t an anomaly for the Pentagon—it’s the norm.

I recently spoke with a big-time auditor acquaintance who has worked on countless audits of publicly traded companies. He told me you will not find a single publicly traded company in the United States as incapable as the Pentagon when it comes to transparent and honest financial reporting. His words, not mine.

So yeah, I’m expecting a motherlode of waste and corruption to be uncovered.

Regards,

Lau Vegys

P.S. It remains to be seen whether the cuts President Trump and DOGE are pursuing will be actual spending reductions—aligned with Trump’s recent proposal to negotiate a 50% mutual military spending cut with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping—or just a reshuffling of Pentagon funds into programs favored by the Trump administration. Either way, I’ll be watching this part of the DOGE story unfold with a big bucket of popcorn in my lap—and so should you.