Cutting costs or adding cash? Pentagon looks to have it both ways

Welcome back. We're talking about the White House's dream of a $1 trillion budget for the military with our defense news reporters, Noah Robertson and Steve Losey

Now, Noah, I thought the Defense Department was talking about spending cuts here, not necessarily increasing the budget

The last couple of months, we've been talking about trying to find reductions, 8% for each of the services and redirecting that money

What's the contradictory message here? How is this working if we're cutting civilian personnel, cutting staff over here, but also we want to increase the rest of the budget

If you could figure out, do let me know, because we are in the budgeting vortex of a century here

I mean, you have budgeting cuts that are coming in the form of the Department of Government Efficiency

Elon Musk's advisory group called DOGE. They're embedded in the Pentagon. Secretary Hegseth says that he wants to cut 5% to 8% of the Pentagon's civilian workforce

and is already doing so by buying employees out. You have around a $50 billion a year reshuffle in budgetary priorities for the Pentagon that he's doing internally

And then not to mention the $150 billion or so extra that Congress wants to add, which could feed to a $1 trillion base budget for the Pentagon

So we are in the middle of a lot of contradictory forces right now in the Pentagon budget

Steve I know you talked to some Air Force officials already who are looking at an 8 cut and then maybe money after they done that cut But what does the 8 cut mean And then how does that reset some of the longer term goals if they get that extra money

So for the U.S. Air Force, not even including the Space Force, but if they did cut 8%

that would be about $15 billion in funding for the Air Force that they'd have to cut down

And Secretary Hegseth was talking about finding that by getting rid of DEI programs, climate change

there's not enough money in the budget to get $15 billion for that. So what the Air Force is looking at, they've been wanting to retire older planes like the A-10

older F-15s. There's almost two dozen F-22 Raptors that aren't combat capable

These are older aircraft that would not be suitable for a war against a high-end adversary

such as China. So the Air Force is trying to retire them. If they had to cut $15 billion up to, they would try to accelerate the retirements of those aircraft

That's, you know, with things like the B-21, the Sentinel CCAs, those would be exempted from these cuts

So that doesn't leave a lot of space for the Air Force to find savings elsewhere

But simple personnel guy over here trying to figure out all the equipment stuff If you got those aircraft retiring and you got money then to modernize and to bring everything else in don we end up with a gap in there where we don have aircraft Maybe we got enough aircraft five years down the line but if we got missions in the next two

years here, do we have what we need? That is a big concern from some lawmakers

On things like retiring, say, the AWACS, the airborne battle management planes, you might

recognize them for those big iconic domes on top of the fuselage. There's concern that as the AWACS

the JSTARS, retire, there wouldn't be enough capability while the E7 is coming on board

So yeah, for certain areas, that's a big concern. Okay. All right. So now that I've dodged your

question for long enough, let's go into whether or not this is realistic. So from the Pentagon aspect, if there's a $1 trillion budget, are we getting any objection from Pentagon planners here

I've never heard the Pentagon complain about getting more money. There is not an acting, there's not a confirmed cop troller yet, but I don't think you can hear that from anyone inside Arlington

So then the question becomes whether or not Congress can pass this. And that's where we're getting some interesting issues with the budget and with how the defense budget gets out here

You know, I don't think just in the conversations that I've been having on Capitol Hill

there plenty of support from conservative lawmakers and plenty of concern from Democrats who say look you want to spend a billion dollars on defense that fine But are you going to try and balance the budget and cut everything out of the other side And the other side gets really interesting because you do have State Department over there You do have

Department of Veterans Affairs over there. And there is some interesting accounting going on

where those departments could take pretty big hits to fund stuff that maybe five years in the future

is good, but isn't really helping us fill those gaps now. So be some pretty interesting political

fights in the months ahead here. I think we should say, too, it's not just Republicans versus

Democrats on the trillion dollar defense budget question, but also Republicans versus Republicans

You have the Doge effort, which is being led ostensibly by somebody who's Republican aligned

in Elon Musk, and they've been calling for a much smaller defense budget. And for now

it seems that they've lost. But that doesn't mean there won't still be cuts going forward

Well, and I have they lost because we're, you know, we're still good. We're just getting into

the budget discussions now. I know the White House has said they want this trillion dollar

the budget. We haven't seen the actual proposals from the administration yet. I don't think you

guys have seen any specific budget proposals from the services at this point. So let's wait and see

We'll see what happens in the next couple of months here. All right, let's take one more

pause for a break here. When we come back, we'll get predictions on whether or not defense planners

will actually see this money roll in this year, or if this is another year where we're going to keep

rolling from temporary budget to temporary budget. So we'll be right back