The Pentagon is preparing for its in-house DOGE team to examine almost half a million contracts and grants in a bid to trim waste.
More than 400,000 open contracts and grants will be scrutinized for “additional savings” in fiscal 2026 and later, and as “efficiencies are identified,” officials will submit formal requests to Congress to shift purported savings to other programs, according to the recently posted 2026 Budget Highlights document.
Department of Government Efficiency efforts “are multi-layered and will be enacted over multiple budget cycles” as the Pentagon is “focused on immediately eliminating spending in conflict with Presidential priorities through a detailed review of every contract in the Department,” according to the document.
The Pentagon’s published plans are a sign that DOGE is still embedded in the fabric of government operations even months after the controversial unit lost its architect and de facto leader, Elon Musk. Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson told reporters earlier this month that the in-house DOGE team continues to have about a dozen people and that “DOGE’s work at the department is not going to stop — that is absolutely for certain.”
The Pentagon hasn’t disclosed how many contracts or grants DOGE already has reviewed, making it impossible to calculate what share has resulted in adjustments. The Department’s budget book does cite 390 contracts or grants “terminated or adjusted by DOGE efforts.”
An accounting via the DOGE.gov database shows about 600 canceled or adjusted defense contracts totaling more than $20 billion in claimed savings. The Department’s DOGE team has slashed “over $15 billion in total contract spending to-date,” according to a Pentagon statement provided to Bloomberg.
An outside review of DOGE defense savings conducted for the publication Breaking Defense by Todd Harrison, an analyst at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, tallied $11 billion.
All three contract termination savings estimates — $20 billion, $15 billion and $11 billion — could be dwarfed by the value of future claimed savings from adjustments to the 400,000 contracts and grants now said to be under scrutiny.
“Reforming the antiquated defense acquisition processes is a long-recognized problem that has received bipartisan support, and we are taking swift action to fix it at the President’s direction,” Wilson told Bloomberg.
To be sure, DOGE’s work across the government has drawn criticism for a slash-and-burn approach that lacks full transparency of methods and results. Lawsuits allege DOGE employees illegally accessed government data at the Treasury Department, the Social Security Administration and other agencies.
Read More: What Is DOGE Without Elon Musk?: QuickTake
Since more than half of the Pentagon’s budget is for labor — military and civilian personnel as well as contract workers — “the main way they are likely to save money is by cutting people,” said AEI’s Harrison.
The mountain of contracts and grants to be scrutinized also begs the question of how long such a review could take, and what tools will be used to execute it.
“The only way they will be able to get through reviewing 400,000 contracts over the next year is to use some sort of automated generic algorithm” to assist analysis, Harrison said. “A thoughtful review of each contract, the work it supports, and the alternatives available would require hours or days of work for each individual contract, and DOGE is not staffed for that.”
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