Politics can create strange bedfellows, and they don’t come much stranger than the United States’ most prominent democratic socialist and the world’s richest man.
Elon Musk has been appointed as the head of the quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency for the upcoming term of President-elect Donald Trump. He’s called for a massive drawdown in government spending as part of a wider GOP push to hobble the administrative state. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders agreed with Elon Musk’s hypothetical slash-and-burn approach to government spending in part in a post to X on Sunday.
Sanders hoped that Musk’s cost-cutting will also include a massive reduction in defense spending.
“Elon Musk is right. The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row,” he said. “It’s lost track of billions. Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud. That must change.”
The Pentagon has been unable to balance its budget for years. In 2022, the Department of Defense was unable to account for 60 percent of its assets, and recent audits have fared no better, even as the Pentagon’s annual budget has crept toward a trillion dollars.
Sanders has made a career-long enemy of the uber-wealthy, but he’s found himself agreeing with Musk on more than one occasion this year. In September, Sanders sided with the Tesla CEO after he railed against the high cost of appetite-inhibiting drugs in the United States.
“Elon Musk, not one of my usual allies, recently tweeted that solving obesity reduces the risk of diseases like diabetes and improves quality of life,” Sanders shared in the Senate. “He’s right—we need to make appetite inhibitors available to anyone who wants them.”
Elon replied to a clip of Sanders’ speech on X, reiterating his agreement with the senator.
“I really am with Bernie on this one,” he wrote.
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