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Former DoD insider says DOGE is ‘sending shockwaves’ through Pentagon, but is badly needed

February 25, 2025 | | Print Article

Dishing on examples of waste, a former Defense Department insider revealed DOGE’s efforts at the Pentagon were already “sending shockwaves” through the agency.

As the Elon Musk-led effort to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse throughout the federal government continued amid establishment pushback, savings wasn’t the only way the Department of Government Efficiency stood to make an impact. While warning of China’s position regarding the “war of the future,” Allen Control Systems CEO Steve Simoni called out a better use for funds previously geared toward “$10,000 HDMI cables.”

Joining Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, the former U.S. Navy nuclear engineer who’d worked with the Department of Defense began with a pointed anecdote on the kind of resource waste prevalent at the Pentagon.

“When I was at the Department of Defense, we were spending $10,000 on HDMI cables that were ‘ruggedized’ when we could have purchased them for $20 or $30 at Best Buy,” said Simoni. “And we’re gonna find all kinds of wasteful spending in the department. And it’s actually sending shockwaves through the department right now.”

“We need to get more efficient with our spending, because there’s a massive threat of drones that are proliferating on the battlefield right now, and the new administration, Secretary [Pete] Hegseth knows this,” he went on as he pushed for resources to be reallocated toward new technologies to defend against drones.

“We’re actually very vulnerable right now, and we need to have solutions to be able to take these drone threats out,” he told Bartiromo, who emphasized China’s 90% share of drone production.

Simoni pegged the dominance of the drone market as the “primary issue of our time” and encouraged President Donald Trump to go a step further than his recently introduced America First Investment Policy.

“We need to get ahead of this now and ban stuff like,” Chinese companies advanced technologies to U.S. companies like drones and humanoid robots. “Things that are gonna be the primary weapons of war for the war of the future…I wanna make sure we’re not investing and propping them up. We’ve been propping them up for the last 20 years on this stuff and the problem’s only gonna become greater and exacerbated if we don’t do something about it now.”

Previously, DOGE had boasted on X, “Great kickoff with @DeptofDefense. Looking forward to working together to safely save taxpayer dollars and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse.”

As of Tuesday, the DoD ranked 16 on a list of 22 executive branch agencies that comprised a newly launched Agency Efficiency Leaderboard accounting for a combined savings of roughly $65 billion to date.

While the Department of Education, General Services Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Labor and Office of Personnel Management comprised the top 5, the State Department, National Institutes of Health, Departments of Transportation, Energy and Commerce represented the bottom of the list.

Kevin Haggerty
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