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Elon Musk Set to Win Big With Trump’s Trillion-Dollar Pentagon Budget

2 47
07.05.2025

The White House unveiled a barebones budget blueprint last week that would pump more of the federal budget into the Pentagon while taking a chainsaw to education, foreign aid, health care and public assistance programs.

While some analysts claim that the outline, also known as a “skinny budget,” represents a modest cut to Pentagon spending, that fails to take into account the White House’s call for $119 billion in defense spending to be included in a reconciliation bill currently being debated in Congress. With that added to the base budget proposal, which keeps the Pentagon budget at roughly the same $893 billion level as last year, total defense spending would increase by 13 percent to $1 trillion.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and a personal adviser to the president, claimed that he would cut costs at the Pentagon with his minions at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Instead, experts say that, if approved, Donald Trump’s bloated Pentagon budget will almost certainly benefit Musk and his company SpaceX with huge new projects.

The first is a missile shield, dubbed the Golden Dome, which is reminiscent of the Reagan-era “Star Wars” missile-defense boondoggle. Trump’s budget plan also calls for an undisclosed flood of funding for “U.S. space dominance to strengthen U.S. national security.”

“No matter how you slice it, the Pentagon budget is obscenely high at a time when the fundamentals of our diplomatic infrastructure are being decimated, the social safety net is being shredded, and medical and scientific research are under attack,” William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told The Intercept. “Add to this that the funds for the Pentagon have as much to do with pork barrel politics and techno-fantasies like the Golden Dome as they do with a sound defense strategy, and it becomes clear that current resources going to the Pentagon are not only excessive but are more likely to undermine than promote our security.”

“Current resources going to the Pentagon are not only excessive but are more likely to undermine than promote our security.”

Trump’s Golden Dome appears to be little more than a warmed-over version of the 1980s Strategic Defense Initiative, a fanciful project that hoped to shoot down Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, retitled with a name swiped from Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense. Its ultimate price tag is estimated in the hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars.

Musk’s SpaceX has emerged as a

© The Intercept