Congressman Jeff Crank (R-Colorado Springs) said on conservative talk radio last month that he supports Trump’s efforts, led by billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to cut the budget of the Department of Defense.
That’s notable because Crank’s district is anchored around El Paso County, where defense development and the defense industry account for over 40% of the economy, including aerospace, cybersecurity, and other defense companies.
“I love what DOGE is doing,” Crank told KOA radio’s Mandy Connell February 11 (here at 15 minutes). “They need to double down on it, and it shouldn’t just be USAID; it should be, you know, the Department of Education, the Department of Defense, for goodness sake. There is waste all over this government. We need to do everything we can to root it out. And I’m thrilled.”
In response to an email asking Crank to specify the cuts he’d like to see at the Education and Defense Departments, Crank responded with a generic statement in support of cutting federal spending.
“I support President Trump’s efforts to reduce federal spending and eliminate fraud. The national debt is well over $36 trillion and increases by over $1.8 trillion every year,” Crank wrote. “The national debt has grown to the point where we now spend more simply paying off interest on the debt than we spend on national defense. This is unsustainable… There is no way to save these programs [like Social Security] without serious cuts to federal spending.”
In terms of an area of waste and fraud, the Department of Defense is widely seen as among the chief offenders in this regard. DOD, which makes up more than 13% of the overall federal budget and over 46% of discretionary spending, has never passed an audit. In a 2023 audit of the Pentagon, the DOD was only able to account for half of its $3.8 trillion in assets, meaning that $1.9 trillion was unaccounted for.
According to a report from the Institute of Policy Studies, the average American taxpayer spent $2,974 per month on the DOD. Of that, $1,748 went to corporate military contractors. For a comparison, taxpayers spent $110 on the Child Tax Credit, $11 on renewable energy, and so on.
In addition, SpaceX and Tesla, both companies owned by Elon Musk, have been granted over $18 billion in federal government contracts to his companies, partially through the DOD.
In his radio interview with Connell, Crank said all federal budget cuts should be made responsibly, but he brushed away criticism that Musk’s DOGE has been given access to potentially sensitive personal information.
“I love what DOGE is doing, and you can tell how much the American people love it by the reaction from the Left,” Crank said on air. “When the left goes crazy over Elon Musk and they go, ‘Oh, he’s got access to personal data. We need to have protections so that people’s personal data is protected from the government.’ I’m actually concerned about have it just as much as Big Tech or anybody like that and so those protections need to be there, but isn’t it interesting how the same people who are concerned about that, they don’t seem to be brothered by the fact that we were wasting billions of dollars on these things that were being pulled out of their pockets and given to foreign countries through this web of organizations.”
Foreign aid through USAID makes up less 1% of the U.S. federal budget.
