US Senator Bernie Sanders, who has been a critic of Elon Musk over issues like wealth inequality and foreign relations, has voiced support for President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, surprising some of his followers.
In a post on X, Sanders emphasised DOGE’s potential to tackle excessive Pentagon spending, while expressing concern over the Department of Defense’s growing budget and repeated audit failures.
Elon Musk is right.
The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. 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.
Musk responded to the post with American flag emojis. “Maybe we can find some common ground,” he wrote in a separate post.
What is DOGE and its connection with Elon Musk
President-elect Trump appointed Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the DOGE initiative, which aims to identify and eliminate wasteful spending across federal agencies. Scheduled to conclude by July 4, 2026, DOGE will work with the White House and the Office of Management and Budget, though it is not a formal government department.
Sanders, a long-time critic of U.S. defense spending, has frequently advocated reallocating funds from military budgets to social programs.
The Department of Defense recently failed its seventh consecutive audit, despite receiving $824.3 billion in funding for the 2024 fiscal year. Pentagon officials said that the audit did not reveal significant fraud, as reported by the New York Post.
Sanders’ backing of a Trump-era policy initiative sparked diverse reactions on social media platform X. Elon Musk, Representative Matt Gaetz, and other figures weighed in.