Bernie Sanders and Elon Musk are on the same page about auditing the Pentagon and slashing the defense budget
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images; Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
- Bernie Sanders says Elon Musk is right about the Defense Department's wasteful spending.
- The DOGE co-leader criticized the Pentagon's F-35 program and $841 billion budget last month.
- "Cool," Musk said in response to Sanders' remarks.
Elon Musk has a new supporter in his push to rein in government spending — Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
"Elon Musk is right," Sanders said of Musk's criticisms of the Defense Department's spending in an X post published Sunday.
"The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It's lost track of billions," Sanders wrote.
In November, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO was tapped to co-lead President-elect Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
To be sure, Musk has yet to outline any specific cuts that the commission plans to make. But he did criticize the Pentagon's F-35 program in a series of X posts published on November 24.
Meanwhile, some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35 ????️ ????
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 24, 2024
pic.twitter.com/4JX27qcxz1
Musk also referenced the Defense Department's $841 billion budget in an op-ed he wrote with his DOGE co-leader, Vivek Ramaswamy, for The Wall Street Journal on November 20.
"The Pentagon recently failed its seventh consecutive audit, suggesting that the agency's leadership has little idea how its annual budget of more than $800 billion is spent," Musk and Ramaswamy wrote.
Sanders echoed the pair's views on Sunday.
"Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud," Sanders wrote in his X post.
"That must change," he added.
When reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Defense Department pointed Business Insider to a press briefing given by the department's CFO, Michael J. McCord, on November 15. During the briefing, McCord said the Pentagon has "a lot of work to do" on its audit performance but is "making progress."
Common ground on military spending aside, Sanders and Musk do have their political differences.
The 83-year-old is the longest-serving independent in Congress, though the progressive politician did run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020.
On Saturday, Sanders released a statement saying that America needed to "defeat the oligarchs and create an economy and government that works for all, not just the few."
"Today, in America, we have a political system that is increasingly controlled by the billionaire class. In the recent elections, just 150 billionaire families spent nearly $2 billion to get their candidates elected," Sanders said in the statement.
Musk, on the other hand, was a major contributor to Trump's 2024 campaign. The billionaire spent just under $119 million on his pro-Trump political action committee, America PAC.
"Cool," Musk said in an X post in response to a New York Post story about Sanders' remarks on defense spending.
Representatives for Sanders and Musk didn't respond to requests for comment from BI.