Ordinarily, when there’s talk in Washington about a thorough audit of Defense Department spending, the push is coming from independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. With this in mind, it was all the more notable to see Donald Trump embracing the same line. Reuters reported:
U.S. President Donald Trump said he expects Elon Musk to find hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse at the Pentagon during an audit that the billionaire will lead. “I’m going to tell him very soon, like maybe in 24 hours, to go check the Department of Education. … Then I’m going to go, go to the military. Let’s check the military,” Trump said in a Super Bowl interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, an excerpt of which was aired on Sunday morning.
The Republican added that he expects Musk to find “hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse.”
Why does he assume that the Pentagon is wasting “hundreds of billions of dollars”? He didn’t say. What makes the president think Musk, who has no background in auditing, will uncover systemic “fraud and abuse”? He didn’t say that, either.
Nevertheless, Trump is apparently serious about this, telling reporters at a White House event on Friday that he fully intends to deploy Musk to the Department of Defense to examine the books. “Sadly, you’ll find some things that are pretty bad,” the president said.
To be sure, Trump is not a reliable narrator about his own presidency. Sure, he has now twice said that he’ll have Musk audit the Pentagon, but that doesn’t mean that he’ll actually have Musk audit the Pentagon.
But let’s say the president is telling the truth. Let’s say that Musk and his band of young surrogates really are making plans to thoroughly scrutinize military spending. If so, that leaves us with a different kind of question: The White House wants a defense contractor to do an audit of the Defense Department? The New York Times summarized the obvious conflict of interest:
The Defense Department has billions of dollars in contracts with Mr. Musk through SpaceX and other companies he owns. The Defense Department relies on Mr. Musk to get most of its satellites into orbit and works closely with his companies on a variety of other initiatives. His companies were promised $3 billion across nearly 100 different contracts last year with 17 federal agencies.
Common sense suggests that if officials are going to conduct an audit of the Department of Defense’s finances, they’d send professional auditors. Trump, on the other hand, says he wants an audit of the Department of Defense’s finances, and he’s says he’s sending a defense contractor.
On NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” host Kristen Welker asked White House national security adviser Mike Waltz about this, and after initially dodging the question, Waltz eventually said, “Well, look, all of the appropriate firewalls will be in place.”
That might’ve sounded reassuring, were it not for the fact that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters last week that the administration’s plan to address Musk’s conflicts of interest involves asking Musk to police his own potential conflicts of interest.
Or as we discussed soon after, Team Trump’s plan is to simply trust the highly controversial billionaire megadonor to be responsible — in private and unsupervised, away from scrutiny, while examining highly sensitive government information that he really shouldn’t have access to — and self-determine when there are conflicts involving him and his endeavor.
If the White House is seriously interested in a Pentagon audit, fine. But the president’s plan to ask a billionaire defense contractor to lead the effort, while self-policing his conflicts, is obviously preposterous.
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