Show Notes
“Tooth and tail.” That’s the phrase new defense secretary Pete Hegseth uses to describe how money is spent (and wasted) by the Pentagon. It captures the difference between spending money to support warfighters and spending it on the mushrooming support operations that are supposed to keep the troops ready.
A Department of Defense (DOD) inspector general report, released last month, found $500,000 in transactions made at casinos, mobile app stores, bars, nightclubs, and major sporting events, including the Super Bowl. Another 3.9 million transactions, totaling $1.2 billion, were not even reviewed by supervisors, the IG found. Overall, Elon Musk’s DOGE uncovered more than 4 million government credit cards responsible for 90 million transactions.
That “tail” is much bigger than it should be.
“Just like Donald Trump in his conversation with Zelensky, the military is holding all the cards,” says Peter Schweizer, host of The Drill Down podcast. “They’re holding a lot of credit cards. And we’re going to dissect what they’ve been spending large sums of money on.”
Co-host Eric Eggers has the details. “The miliary did an audit 10 years ago in 2015 and found that some department of defense personnel were improperly using these credit cards for personal use at, among other places, casinos and adult entertainment establishments,” he says. “The report found that there were 4,000 transactions totaling a million dollars at ATM machines outside of strip clubs and casinos.”
“From July of 2013 to end of June of 2014, we’re talking about 900 transactions for $100,000 at adult entertainment establishments and a 4,000 transactions outside of casinos,” he reports.
The problem gets worse. The Pentagon has failed every financial audit since 2018. “In 2024, the Open the Books foundation found that 68 percent of Pentagon agencies failed or were issued disclaimers,” Schweizer noted. OpenTheBooks’s CEO, Adam Andrzejewski, was a guest on a previous podcast.
There’s another problem that Hegseth is beginning to address–how the bureaucracy has built up.
Schweizer says: “Think of the numbers of admirals and generals that we have in the United States. Of course, admirals and generals are important because they lead the military, but they’re also the officers that are going to be most resistant to change, right?” He adds that “during World War II, we had one admiral or general for every 6,000 enlisted personnel. Today, that number is one to 1,400. “Here’s an even more stark number. We had 13 million soldiers, Marines, and Navy personnel in World War II. For those 13 million we had 22 four-star admirals or generals. Today, we have 39–44 four-star admirals and generals, and our military is about 10 percent of that size.”
Granted, today’s military is a highly organized, far more complex organization that during World War II, when four-star officer commanded somewhere around a million troops. Now, a four-star officer commands about 30,000 troops,” Eggers explains. “So, they’re far less focused on actually putting people in the battlefield in right places. They’re taking meetings and they’re figuring out what we should buy? And they’re managing contractors.”
“I think Pete Hegseth deserves a lot of credit because he has said he welcomes Elon Musk,” Schweizer says. “He welcomes the oversight because the tail is so big.”
