(DCNF)—Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a trio of memos Wednesday intended to cut wasteful spending and improve efficiency at the Department of Defense (DoD).
Hegseth’s orders halt additional non-DoD IT or consulting contracts without prior review by Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg, heavily restrict the use of executive assistants and streamline weapons testing and review at the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (ODOT&E). The orders were issued in coordination with the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) work to eliminate waste across the entire federal government, with Hegseth claiming in an accompanying Wednesday X post that the Pentagon has already saved $10 billion total “in real savings” from cost-cutting initiatives.
“We’re committed to reducing bloated bureaucracy and wasteful spending in favor of increased lethality,” Hegseth said in the video posted to X. “That’s a trade off I will take every single day. Converting consultants into combat power, that’s what we’re doing here at the Defense Department.”
Hegseth ordered Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment Steven Morani to review current IT and consulting contracts at the Pentagon to identify wasteful or redundant contracts, according to the order’s text. IT contracts under $10 million and consulting services under $1 million will be exempt from the cuts, as well as contracts that deal with critical areas, such as engineering, weapon system programs and major defense acquisition programs, among others.
Agencies within the DOD are prohibited from reclassifying or splitting contracts into smaller pieces to skirt the requirements, according to Hegseth’s order.
“We likely have more contractors than we have civilian employees,” Hegseth noted in the video posted to X.
Executive Assistants (EA) — defined as a person responsible for scheduling, calendar management, travel coordination, communication and other functions — will be heavily limited for various senior personnel at the Pentagon in order to control “EA-related administrative costs,” Hegseth wrote in the accompanying memo. Affected offices will include all undersecretaries of defense and the Inspector General of the DOD, among other offices.
Moreover, the ODOT&E will reduce its civilian workforce to only 30 members, having no more than 15 military personnel and one Senior Executive Service member, Hegseth ordered. Additionally, Hegseth ordered the ODOT&E to “immediately eliminate any non-statutory or redundant functions” in order to reduce “bureaucratic overhead.”
The ODOT&E is responsible for testing weapons programs and reviewing their efficacy in combat, according to the agency’s website. The defense secretary argued in the memo that the cuts to ODOT&E will save an estimated $300 million per year.
Hegseth — who cancelled cancelled $580 million dollars worth of contracts in March — has made “restoring the warrior ethos” a key goal at DoD while cutting initiatives secondary to that core objective, he said in his X video.
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