Bernie Sanders Offers Support for Elon Musk's Plans to Cut Pentagon Spending

Strange bedfellows.

Broken Clock

Bernie Sanders may be on the opposite end of the left-right spectrum from freshly-minted politico Elon Musk — but on the issue of military spending, they have one big take in common.

"Elon Musk is right," the Vermont senator tweeted. "The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions."

Indeed, the Department of Defense regularly reports to its supposed overseers in Congress that it doesn't know where portions of its ginormous budgets have gone. At the end of 2023, for instance, it admitted in an audit progress update that it couldn't account for 61 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets.

"Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud," Sanders continued. "That must change."

The communique seems to reference recent remarks from Musk on X-formerly-Twitter that saw the billionaire and forthcoming head of the Department of Government Efficiency — acronymed, ludicrously, as DOGE — criticizing the DOD's multi-trillion dollar fighter jet program.

Fighting Pilot

In the caption of a post last week featuring a video of a synchronized drone swarm, the Tesla and SpaceX owner took potshots at the Pentagon's "manned fighter jets like the F-35," which cost between $82.5 and $109 million per individual plane.

"Crewed fighter jets are an inefficient way to extend the range of missiles or drop bombs," Musk said later in the thread after another user defended their use. "A reusable drone can do so without all the overhead of a human pilot. And fighter jets will be shot down very quickly if the opposing force has sophisticated SAM or drones, as shown by the Russia-Ukraine conflict."

"Fighter jets do have the advantage of helping Air Force officers get laid," he quipped. "Drones are much less effective in this regard."

While the South African-born business magnate hasn't proffered any specific military spending cuts, coming out against F-35s in favor of drones is a relatively surprising stance considering that SpaceX has multiple Pentagon contracts and has become a key supplier for the intelligence community to boot.

All the same, Sanders was correct to point out that on the topic of expensive fighter jets, Musk is technically right — though of course, the billionaire seems mostly to oppose them only because he loves drones.

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