As Elon Musk exits government, Hegseth gives DOGE team more influence on Pentagon contracting

Billionaire tech titan Elon Musk’s time as a “special government employee” is coming to an end, but the DOGE team at the Defense Department will soon have greater influence on Pentagon contracting.

Since President Donald Trump began his second term in January, Musk has spearheaded the Department of Government Efficiency’s push across the federal government to find “waste, fraud and abuse,” slash certain types of spending and cut the workforce. A DOGE team was set up at the Pentagon — as well as other federal agencies — to implement those efforts.

“As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President  @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending,” Musk wrote Wednesday night in a post on X, the social media platform that he owns. “The  @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.”

In a sign that DOGE’s influence will continue at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a new directive this week giving those personnel more oversight of contracting efforts.

“The Department of Defense (DoD) Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team will have the opportunity to provide input on all unclassified contracts. The Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment (USD(A&S)), or its designee, will coordinate with DOGE to ensure that the opportunity for review of the Performance Work Statement/Statement of Work, accompanying estimates, deliverable descriptions, and requirements approval/validation documents, occurs when the requirements package is provided to a DoD contracting office to initiate a procurement or prior to the package being provided to a non-DoD assisting agency (e.g., General Services Administration),” Hegseth wrote in a May 27 memo to senior Pentagon leadership, combatant commanders, and DOD agency and field activity directors.

“DOGE will also have the opportunity to review any requirements packages for change orders or supplemental agreement modifications to unclassified contracts that result in an increase in the contract price, prior to said modifications. Requirements for procurement actions already in process (i.e., accepted by a contracting activity or a non-DoD assisting agency for execution, but a contract has not been awarded), as of the date of this memorandum, shall also be made available for review,” he added.

Perhaps to mitigate delays, Hegseth’s directive notes that if the DOD DOGE team doesn’t provide input within two business days of receiving a review package, the procurement should “proceed as normal.”

It’s not immediately clear exactly what will happen to a procurement effort if DOGE raises concerns during the review process. Hegseth has directed the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment to create a workflow process with DOGE within two weeks of the issuance of his memo.

The SecDef noted that certain types of requirements packages — including those that support emergency and contingency operations, ops with performance outside the U.S. and its territories, and those that have an estimated total contract value of less than $1 million — will initially be exempted from the new review process.

In a video released Wednesday on X, Hegseth said the Pentagon had already saved more than $10 billion working with DOGE on previous efforts to review spending, including from a “line-by-line audit of over 50 contract vehicles.”

“And we’re just getting started,” he added.