An unlikely duo has emerged at the intersection of business and politics: Elon Musk and Sen. Bernie Sanders. The Vermont independent, who caucuses with the Democratic Party, on Sunday posted on X he thinks Musk has something right about the U.S. budget.
“Elon Musk is right,” Sanders said in an X post on Dec. 1. “The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions.”
While he identifies as an independent, Sanders, the 83-year-old longtime politician, is a champion of progressive politics—namely universal health care and free college education. He’s also advocated for federal budget reform for years, heavily focusing on tightening the defense budget, which is nearly $850 billion for 2025, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.
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.
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) December 1, 2024
Sanders supports directing federal funding instead toward “enormous crises” like climate change, health care, education, and housing, arguing “more military spending is unnecessary,” he wrote in a 2023 op-ed published by the Guardian.
Musk, on the other hand, also supports taking a look at the defense budget, but for different reasons. The Tesla CEO and X owner has gotten cozy with President-elect Donald Trump and is set to co-lead the Department of Government Efficiently (aptly abbreviated as DOGE), along with entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
Representatives for Sanders and Musk did not immediately respond to Fortune’s requests for comment.
Trump has said DOGE will help his administration “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies Essential to the ‘Save America’ Movement.”
Although the president-elect hasn’t said which specific federal spending areas DOGE will target, the new department plans to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget. And Musk has been vocal about some of the DOD’s downfalls.
“Some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35,” Musk said in an X post on Nov. 24. “Manned fighter jets are outdated in the age of drones and only put pilots’…
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