Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is ‘welcome at the Pentagon,’ telling reporters in Stuttgart, Germany, during his first overseas trip at the helm that the Department of Defense (DoD) will also be reviewing U.S. military posture globally to account for different ‘strategic assumptions’ between President Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden.
Upon arriving at the headquarters of U.S. European Command and Africa Command, Hegseth did push-ups, dead-lifts and other PT exercises with the 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) – a gesture the secretary, a combat veteran himself, said was meant to interact with the troops directly and hear about their missions, rather than solely communicating through four-star generals.
Taking questions from reporters afterward, Hegseth, who has vowed to restore the ‘warrior ethos’ at the Pentagon, addressed how Trump has called on NATO members to spend 5% of their GDPs on defense. Asked if the U.S. should also spend that amount, Hegseth said he and Trump share the view that U.S. defense spending should not go below 3% GDP, adding that the current administration ought to spend more than the Biden administration.
Hegseth accused the Biden administration of having ‘historically underinvested in the capabilities of our military,’ adding that Trump is committed to ‘rebuilding America’s military by investing.’
Asked if he expects Elon Musk to start unilaterally slashing defense programs, Hegseth described the DOGE leader as a ‘great patriot interested in advancing the America First agenda’ who knows ‘Trump got 77 million votes in a mandate from the American people, and part of that is bringing actual businesslike efficiency to government.’ Hegseth spoke of a ‘partnership’ with DOGE to reduce Pentagon waste, agreeing with Musk’s assessment that it could be to the tune of ‘billions’ of dollars.
But the secretary stressed that spending at the Pentagon did not equate to the ‘globalist agendas’ pursued by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
‘As I said on social media, we welcome Doge to the Pentagon,’ Hegseth said. ‘And I hope to welcome Elon to the Pentagon very soon. And his team working in collaboration with us.’
Hegseth said, ‘There are waste redundancies and headcounts in headquarters that need to be addressed. There’s just no doubt. Look at a lot of the climate programs that have been pursued at the Defense Department. The Defense Department is not in the business of climate change, solving the global thermostat. We’re in the business of deterring and winning wars. So things like that.’
‘There’s plenty of places where we want the keen eye of DOGE, but we’ll do it in coordination,’ he added, pointing to potential changes in weapons procurement programs as well. ‘We’re not going to do things that are to the detriment of American operational or tactical capabilities… President Trump is committed to delivering the best possible military.’
‘The Defense Department is not USAID,’ Hegseth said. ‘USAID has got a lot of problems that I talked about with the troops – pursuing globalist agendas that don’t have a connection to America First. That’s not the Defense Department. But we’re also not perfect either. So where we can find billions of dollars, and he’s right to say billions inside the Defense Department, every dollar we save, there is a dollar that goes to warfighters. And that’s good for the American people.’
Hegseth was also asked if there were plans to shift U.S. forces from Europe to the Indo-Pacific to focus on the Chinese threat.
‘There are no plans right now in the making to cut anything,’ Hegseth said. ‘There is an understanding that we’re going to review force posture across the world.’
‘President Trump’s planning assumptions are different in many ways, or at least strategic assumptions, than Joe Biden’s,’ he said. ‘We certainly don’t want a plan on the back of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And what happened on October 7th and the war that was unleashed in Ukraine. You have to manage and mitigate those things by coming alongside your friends in Israel and sharing their defense, and peacefully resolving the conflict in Ukraine. But those shouldn’t define how we orient.’
On his decision to reverse Biden’s 2023 renaming of Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg, Hegseth said, ‘It means Bragg is back. It means the legacy of an institution that generations of Americans have mobilized through and served at is back.’
‘I never called it Fort Liberty because it wasn’t Fort Liberty. It’s Fort Bragg. And so I was honored to be able to put my signature on that,’ Hegseth said. The North Carolina base’s original namesake was Gen. Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general, but Hegseth said it would now be named after Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, a World War II hero who earned the Silver Star and the Purple Heart for his courage during the Battle of the Bulge.