Washington, DC (RI) — Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley says he looks forwad to Elon Musk’s review of the military’s budget.
President Trump has said he expects Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency effort to find hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse in the military. Musk’s Space X was awarded about five billion dollars in Defense Department contracts last year, much of it to launch satellites for military intelligence and communications. Grassley says a recent case involving Amazon’s disputed and rejected bid for a military contract sends an important message about conflicts of interest.
The Department of Defense is the largest agency in the federal budget and has an annual budget of 800 billion dollars. Grassley has been a critic of Pentagon spending since he joined the Senate in the early 1980s, raising concerns then about the price the military had paid for common items, like a 400 dollar hammer and a 600 dollar toilet seat. In 2018, Grassley called attention to the 10-thousand dollars the Pentagon paid for toilet set lids.
