DOGE Should Take a Look at Wasteful Pentagon Spending | Opinion

What do a progressive ice cream mogul and a leader at a libertarian-leaning government watchdog have in common? Aside from being two Jewish kids from Long Island, we’ve both spent years criticizing waste, fraud, and abuse at the Department of Defense (DOD).

There’s serious cause for alarm. Last year, the Pentagon flunked its seventh audit in a row, once again failing to track how it spends its nearly trillion-dollar (that’s 12 zeros) taxpayer-funded budget.

Cleaning up the DOD’s waste is an issue that has united folks across the political spectrum, presenting a rare opportunity for bipartisanship within President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

For instance, last year, White Coat Waste Project exposed how the DOD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) flushed over $10 million down the toilet for constipation experiments on cats. In the testing, researchers inserted marbles into cats’ rectums and then electro-shocked the animals to make them poop the marbles out. The project is so egregious that it ended up featured in Senator Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) annual report highlighting outrageous government waste. Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), the first Democrat to join the DOGE Caucus, also called for the cat experiment to be cut.

In another 2024 DOD-funded study that cost taxpayers nearly a million dollars, dozens of beagles were injected with large doses of experimental drugs in completely unnecessary tests. The dog testing was performed for the alleged purpose of winning Food and Drug Administration approval even though the FDA has stated clearly that it “does not mandate that human drugs be studied in dogs.” DARPA likewise admits, “animal models have limited relevance to humans and poorly predict effects in humans.”

The Pentagon’s expensive, needless, and inhumane testing on pets drew the ire of dozens of lawmakers in both parties—from GOP firebrand Matt Gaetz to former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.)—who united and urged their colleagues to support legislation to defund the experiments in order to “eliminate wasteful spending on unnecessary and outdated research, make DOD more efficient and effective, and protect pets from abuse.” Animal advocates, veterans, veterinarians, and limited government champions supported the proposal. Even world champion wrestler Kane (aka Glenn Jacobs), now the Republican mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, joined the cause.

In another publicly funded boondoggle, the U.S. Navy wastes $40 million a year to confine dolphins and sea lions and train them to complete mine sweeps and other military missions. The animals are sleep deprived, blasted with loud noises though headphones, force-fed gallons of seawater, and trained to play video games.

Here’s the kicker: The Navy planned to retire this expensive and outdated marine mammal program and utilize high-tech aquatic drones instead, but Congress foolishly enacted legislation that forced it to continue the program.

Similarly, Mr. DOGE himself, Elon Musk, posted on X that “SpaceX was forced by the government to kidnap seals, put earphones on them and play sonic boom sounds to see if they seemed upset.”

It might also shock people that the Pentagon’s nuclear weapons experiments on animals didn’t end at Bikini Atoll during the Cold War. The DOD still spends millions every year blasting monkeys and other innocent animals with lethal doses of radiation to observe the biological devastation caused by nukes.

The DOD’s waste spans the globe, and not just for war. In a 2024 report, the DOD’s Office of the Inspector General found that the agency shipped $1.4 billion in taxpayer money to foreign research laboratories between 2014 and 2023. An audit requested by Senate DOGE Caucus Chair Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), an Army veteran, determined that the DOD couldn’t account for this spending.

The Office of the Inspector General cited “significant limitations with the adequacy of data” and wrote that “DoD did not track funding at the level of detail necessary to determine whether the DoD provided funding to Chinese research laboratories or other foreign countries for research related to enhancement of pathogens of pandemic potential.” Not tracking whether U.S. tax dollars were used to engineer superviruses in adversarial nations seems like a pretty egregious and dangerous oversight failure.

In 2023, comedian Jon Stewart accused the DOD of corruption in a conversation about its repeated audit failures with a defensive and condescending Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks. The interview went viral. He wasn’t wrong, and government agencies should be held accountable for corruption by the public, press, and lawmakers.

If DOGE is serious about cutting waste, it needs to look first at the Pentagon. The Department of Defense is the biggest spender—and the biggest waster—of taxpayers’ hard-earned money.

Ben Cohen co-founded Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Holdings and recently launched the “DOGE vs. Blob” contest to expose wasteful Pentagon spending. Justin Goodman is the Senior Vice President at the nonprofit White Coat Waste Project.

The views expressed in this article are the writers’ own.