Summer's Full of Unfinished Budget Business

Aaron Mehta:
You can't insource it while also cutting your workforce. Something has to give there. And probably what will end up happening is somewhere along the Patagonia bureaucracy, well, people in uniform will go, "I can't get my needs met." And they're going to end up going out and putting new contracts out.
Roman Schweizer:
From DoD to Congress and from the White House to Wall Street, the NatSec Need to Know podcast. An unrehearsed podcast presenting insightful discussion and forecasts of the major national security and defense issues of the day. Welcome to the NatSec Need to Know. We're leading off with our reporters Roundtable to discuss top national security issues in Washington. Joining me is a murderer's row of experienced Washington editors and reporters. Tony Bertuca from Inside Defense, Joe Gould from Politico, and Aaron Mehta from Breaking Defense. They've each covered Washington and the Pentagon for decades and are as well sourced as anyone in town. Thank you all for joining. Let's get after it.
All right, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining me for another installment of the NatSec Need to Know. It has been a while since we have done this and that is literally a lifetime in Washington and in the Trump 2.0 administration. There is already a lot of water under the bridge and you never stand in the same stream twice. So we will probably ask on some things that have already happened and try to look a little bit into the future. So I guess the first thing I want to touch on, and I guess we're on the verge, on the cusp perhaps, of real budget season. We're not quite sure at the time of this recording, there are grumblings of a fiscal year '26 budget being released, rumors at least. But it seems like house appropriators are eager to start markups next week. They're not waiting even though OMB may be waiting. What are your expectations for budget and how do we think markup starts out on the Hill? And maybe I'll kick that to Tony first.
Tony Bertuca:
I would say at the moment it is unclear to me if we're going to get any type of sort of middleweight budget. We've already had the skinny budget. And if it's not a full budget rollout, like a middleweight budget type drop today, I know that the department isn't planning for anything formally. Normally they do a budget rollout and there's a brief for reporters and a pre-brief. None of that has been set up yet. That doesn't mean they're not going to do, it's just that there's nobody at DOD right now sort of getting the binders ready with all of our information. I had heard that the budget maybe only was just locked at the department, which means there's often a lot of paperwork that accompanies that after it's done that OMB has got to put together. So I don't know. I'm a little skeptical and if it comes out today, I'll be very, very busy. But otherwise I think maybe we're maybe looking at another couple of days or a week.
But regardless, you're right, the appropriators sure do want it. And they've made it very, very clear in their posture hearings that they've had so far, same with your authorizers that we're having all these hearings and there's no budget. We don't know quite what to even ask you guys about, so you can't tell us your plans. It's very hard to do oversight without the budget. It's not the first time it's happened, but it always annoys lawmakers.
Roman Schweizer:
Joe, that's sort of your bailiwick as well. What are you hearing up from the Hill?
Joe Gould:
Yeah, I would say I'm in the same boat with Tony in that we're hearing rumors that something might come as soon as day, that some details, but what is it? It's not likely to be a full budget rollout. If we'll ever see a budget rollout from this administration like we saw in previous administrations. That said House Appropriations committee has markups scheduled next week, there's like a Mil con VA markup next week, there's a defense bill markup the week after that. I'm at a loss as to how they hold those markups without a budget. I'm hearing just to kind of foot stamp what Tony said is that, HECF was had a closed door meeting on the Hill with who they call the big eight, the top appropriators and top authorizers. And we reported at that meeting that he was getting quizzed on when was the budget going to come and folks were expressing their frustration to him directly. But it's likely in the hands of the White House and OMB director Russ Mott. Apparently he said, "I haven't seen this clip myself."
But apparently something he said was that the budget was not going to come out until after they had finalized the reconciliation bill, which isn't expected until deep in the summer. And I think that would throw a real monkey wrench in the normal process. But they already thrown a monkey wrench in the process, we're on a year long CR. So if they do that, it really kind of throws things out the window. We're already in uncharted territory, and I feel like if we went that deep and in the summer we'd be even further in uncharted territory.
Roman Schweizer:
Aaron, you're up.
Aaron Mehta:
Yeah, so Joe's obviously right that this is uncharted territory. But if we're going to be cynical for a second, and we're reporters so that's kind of professionally what we do, Joe and I worked together for many years and when the budget would roll out what would happen is I'd be at the Pentagon along with most of our team and we'd write 10, 12 stories breaking down the budget in great detail and all these things. And then Joe would end the day with putting a story up which says, "Congress Says this Budget is Trash and It's Ripping it Up and Starting Over." At a certain level we're talking about it's weird to be marking up a budget that doesn't exist, which is true, but if Congress is going to do that anyway, and we know from congressional leadership that they're mad about the fact that the top line budget is, to their mind, too low because of course the Trump administration says it's a trillion dollar defense budget, but that includes most of the reconciliation money.
We've heard from the Senate leaders that they thought the reconciliation was going to be on top of a budget increase in the base budget. So if we know that the members are going to just do their own thing anyway, to a certain extent this can work. And then regarding the timing, if let's say the budget doesn't officially drop until reconciliation is done, well, shoot. If the budget doesn't really get worked on until September, is that any different than what normally has been happening in recent years? We know they're never going to get it done by October 1st. We know there's going to be a CR for a couple of months [inaudible 00:06:49] the details. So ultimately this is not normal. This is not good governance, this is not how you want things to operate. But functionally, we've had such a broken schedule for years now that I don't actually know if there's that much functional difference.
Roman Schweizer:
I'm trying to think of the right phrase in terms of holistically poo pooing, what we've come to learn and love about the appropriation cycle.
Aaron Mehta:
It's nihilism. I'm just a nihilist when it comes to the budget now.
Roman Schweizer:
There you go. I would just point out a couple of things. So one, if you are a staffer on one of those appropriations committees, you can look at last year's [inaudible 00:07:25] the Biden budget. And you can see what all of those programs were supposed to get in fiscal year '26. So you have a template, even if it's not a Trump budget, but you have what each program was going to get. Theoretically that would be the request. But that all has to be cut back because as you've pointed out, there's no growth in the base budget. So you're going to have to trim that back to the O51 level. So you've already got that.
If you are a skeptic or a cynic, you could say this is a very good setup for another continuing resolution of which we just had. And again, the rest of the entire federal government, DOD what I call modified CR. So it's just you want to have some authority for new starts and some of the other stuff that they need. The other thing that I would say, which this is really where it's going to hit the road, is take for example the Army which has proposed canceling a whole bunch of programs and things like that. Now ironically, and I expected this, but we didn't see it, there were no real negative adjustments in DOD's homework assignment. They had to deliver a FY25 baseline to Congress. They did that. And so the only program that really got a major reduction was the Sentinel program. But so they fully fund all the things, Shadow or Humvee or all these things at the Army. So why would you spend that money in fiscal '25 if you're going to cancel it in '26?
And then why the hell are appropriators going to cancel these programs that obviously have some parochial interest or were taken by surprise? So yes, all of those things, I'm kind of just amplifying a little bit that it is pure chaos, I think just points to another CR, but we shall see.
Aaron Mehta:
And the other thing with all of this of course, is it got a lot of play early and the Trump administration has been quiet since. But this whole idea of, and I forget the technical term, but basically what if we just don't have appropriations in Congress and the White House controls it all. And how the decision to roll this budget out may or may not be impacted by that particular push. And again, that was something that got a lot of attention early. It's kind of been quiet since I'm not an expert in that front, but I think that's kind of a background to a lot of this stuff.
Roman Schweizer:
And part of that is the impoundment issue, is that the administration is going to spend dollars where it wants and that maybe not where Congress wants on some of this stuff. And that is a fight that we'll probably have at some point up to the Supreme Court later on this year, in terms of the departments and agencies withholding funds for they wish they'd been appropriate. Now, and the other thing we can throw in there as a little bit of a wrinkle and perhaps it's somewhat ironic on Elon's last day as a special government employee with DOGE, but OMB is supposed to send a list of Rescissions to Congress theoretically at some point, I guess Russ Vought had said it may be next week, which again, I just find, I guess hilarious in some ways that we're talking about $9.3 billion in Rescissions and 1.7 trillion in federal spending, and the Republicans are balking at that.
So again, you've sort of got those issues as well on the rescission front. So maybe if you want to talk Rescissions and we also want to pick up reconciliation. We've got one big beautiful bill that we've got to get done here. So Joe, you want to go first?
Joe Gould:
Yeah, just to piggyback as long as we're talking wrinkles, something we didn't touch on is the debt limit date. So if we're worried about Congress being able to get anything done, that may wind up taking up a lot of oxygen on regular appropriations. But where are we on reconciliation right now? The House has passed its bill finally by, I want to say about a one vote margin. The Senate is supposed to take up this bill. It's a major package with tax cuts and a host of other priorities, but the thing we're focused on is the $150 billion for defense. And so in there is early stage money for Golden Dome, shipbuilding money. The interesting thing is that at one time I think that the thinking on the Senate side was that maybe some parts of that bill would get marked up and maybe not others.
The more contentious parts of the bill might not get marked up, and then maybe SASC would take up the defense bill because it's sort of less controversial. Well, now the idea that the Senate could possibly make any tweaks to this bill and then kick it back to the house so that the house can accept those tweaks. It's passed by such a narrow margin in the house that this could change, caveat, but I don't think at this point we think that SASC is going to do its own markup, which would've been fun because SASC for the NDAA every year, we don't get to see them mark up their policy bill. And this would be a kind of fun departure, but I'm not holding my breath.
Tony Bertuca:
I think the thing to watch for also because reconciliation looks like it's so tight, and the so-called defense hawks are displeased with the fact that the FYI-'26s budget relies on reconciliation and not real growth below reconciliation, is we should look for them to try to increase the budget for defense. I think they're going to come back for more money as soon as they get the chance. And I think you should look for Roger Wicker to kind of lead the charge on that. Roger's also over on the SASC side, they've both been very clear that they think defense is underfunded. They don't trust that reconciliation is enough. So when they go through their process, that's where we're going to see the very first boost for defense show up. And then yeah, good luck with the politics of that, with the Freedom Caucus and the fiscal hawks later on in the year, which again sets you up for just gridlock and another year-long CR.
Roman Schweizer:
I have heard, and I think without a doubt, authorizers are going to go well above the pres-bud request and they're going to get votes on the record to do that. I don't see how the appropriators are going to be able to do that. And at least for right now, nobody seems to run afoul of Trump and OMB, but we'll see. And maybe that's changes later in the year after reconciliation gets done. Threading the needle on reconciliation is going to be nuts because already Rand Paul is a hard no because there's a debt ceiling increase in it, and so the margin's going to be tight in the Senate and Ron Johnson's going to Ron Johnson and all those things. So we'll have to see how that goes. Changing gears, as I alluded at the time of this recording, Elon Musk it is his last day. DOGE shall live on without him and endure, but there have been some more recent actions. It does seem like Sec Def Hegseth is all in on DOGE and letting it run Buck wild in the Pentagon.
And also in terms of cutting services contracts and reducing organizational streamlining, basically chopping the DOT&E office in half. I think you all have done some reporting on that. So where does that kind of stand in the mix?
Tony Bertuca:
At present, I would say the claim is $10 billion in savings. I haven't seen any of that substantiated. The wall of receipts which isn't super reliable, has started to put some cancel defense contracts on it. The multi-billion dollar, one with Accenture was one of the ones that first got announced. So we kind of have to wait and see what their canceling. His ex-video yesterday promoting the cancellations of these programs didn't name the contracts or the contractors, was a little vague. So we've got to see that substantiated. And whether or not DOGE keeps Doging like this memo that he just signed is to implement its presence at the department. And it gives DOGE the right to review most of the unclassified contracts at DoD. There is one thing that I had a question about that no one's been able to answer at the Pentagon. So if you read Hegseth's memo, it gives DOGE two days to respond to anything that's been submitted to review.
I don't know how many people are on the DOGE team at DoD, but I think that's a really heavy workload. And the memo says, "If you don't hear back from DOGE, proceed business as usual." So it's quite possible that the cost cutters are going to be overwhelmed with what is submitted to them by the largest agency in government that awards the most contracts in all government. So I don't know if they're looking to maybe expand that team or if DOGE if it sticks around as sort of a messaging apparatus. So once in a while the Sec Def can go on X and say, "Hey, we found another contract here. We're cutting this one." I don't know how meaningful that is in the big picture, but they would say every dollar they can redirect toward readiness or war fighting is good. I don't know how much institutional strength this will have. But the other point I wanted to bring up is one of the things you're seeing with the Army, you've got Secretary Driscoll talking about making these cuts. That's him.
That's very much his own mandate that he got to start changing the army. So it might not be DOGE that's doing the transformation and the cutting. It might just sort of be people picking up the spirit of the thing and you'll see it in the army. And I think though how long it lasts, it'll be interesting because they're going to run into maybe a different congress once midterms change. And then it might get harder to make a lot of these changes, which is why I think the Army's trying to move very quickly.
Roman Schweizer:
Aaron, you had your hand up.
Aaron Mehta:
Yeah. I think to Tony's point, a lot of the stuff that DOGE has claimed both at DoD and elsewhere is unsubstantiated. The big contracts, IT contracts, I think except previously in a memo announced it was 4.9 billion that was saved. Well, we don't really know what that is still. And that includes were these savings or is it a two billion dollar contract that was nine years into 10 year options and they just aren't pitching up the 10th year option, which is really 100,000. We just don't know. There's a lot of smoke and a lot of mirrors going on with the DOGE announcements. Again, across government, not just in DoD. One thing that's really struck out to me, which is again, not a necessarily DOGE quote-unquote saying. But in the spirit of it is going after a lot of these services contracts because it's kind of a two pronged thing where they are cutting people inside the building, cutting civilians who would do a lot of this work and then cutting the outsourcing a lot of this work. You can't do both.
You cannot say we're going to insource. In a previous memo, Hegseth specifically said he wants to insource this. You can't insource it while also cutting your workforce. Something has to give there. And probably what will end up happening is somewhere along the Pentagon bureaucracy, well, the people in uniform will go, "I can't get my needs met." And they're going to end up going out and putting new contracts out to replace the ones that they canceled. And to fill those contracts, probably what it will be, companies will hire the people who were kicked out of the DoD to do it. So you can easily see a path where DoD ends up spending more because of these countervailing ideas. You can insource, you can cut people, you can't do both and get the same capability.
Joe Gould:
Yeah, I would just say Aaron's right. Something we've kind of all seen is there are these cycles where civilians get cut, and then ultimately it's contractors that wind up filling in the gaps. It's like the pendulum shifts the workload, unless you decide that the Pentagon is going to do less things, strategically making a decision. And these guys don't appear to be making strategic decisions. Another truism about this stuff is that the easy stuff all got cut, all the low hanging fruit already disappeared. If I can just kind of segue into the DOT&E space, one thing that dawned on me, it's interesting to see a few different moves inside of this Pentagon. DOT&E getting cut, that's one oversight body. The Trump administration taking a hatchet to the IG offices, that's another oversight body. They're pushing back on the attorneys, that's another body that might second guess Pentagon leadership.
And then lastly, they're restricting press access inside the Pentagon. So there are all these interesting moves to carve away any of the folks that might want to second guess Pete Hegseth and his team, or be able to weigh in and provide an independent voice. But DOT&E strikes me as a pretty glaring one when you're talking about cutting waste fraud and abuse at the Pentagon, and then you cut the agency that does the deep dives into whether the stuff that you're buying actually does what it's supposed to do. All those things together are kind of mind-blowing. But yeah, I kind of defer to Aaron and Tony who follow the work of DOT&E more closely.
Tony Bertuca:
So on DOT&E, one of the things that has come up in recent years is the agency for a while was just so sacrosanct because it had such a direct line to Congress. And it exposed all the problems with the F35, and it really was considered it's a third rail if you mess with DOT&E. Some of that maybe though, was due to the different directors we've had. Like Gilmore when he was at DOT&E, he was a very public facing DOT&E. He was a robust DOT&E. We haven't had anybody like that since him. And since then, the military services have been making a very loud public case that testing should be compressed because technology is moving so fast, this agency is old and creaky and we don't need all these people telling us what to do. And by all these, I guess it was what, 84 or 94, they're getting cut down now to 30 and nothing in the memo cutting those jobs... It says that they're going to return DOT&E to its statutory responsibility.
Nothing in the memo says what DOT&E is doing that goes beyond its statutory responsibilities that it will now stop doing. I would be interested to know what that is and how the secretary is going to enforce that. But then also what analysis was behind this that said you can cut half of the people in this very important office and not do any damage. Why did you see such redundancy? And one of the things he did say in his ex video is that the services especially want this. And so I think one of the things you've seen is that maybe after years of not a really big public DOT&E presence, the services may have succeeded in blunting the influence of this independent organization.
Roman Schweizer:
Yeah, I would just make two sort of more general points. I don't know how successful they'll be in terms of cutting existing contracts, but I do think one of the things is sort of appetite suppression going forward. So if you are a service or a PEO or someone that you want to put out a big contract, you're going to have to justify that up through the chain. And whether that's at the service secretary level, I think Def Sec Feinberg has been leaned on expressively as well with some of this stuff. So really on a go-forward basis, I think it's going to be harder to maybe pass the sniff test with some of this stuff. So I view that more as a forward-looking a sect. And then the second thing I would say is, this is really the, I don't want to say first but I mean this is the real significant look at DOGE into DOD.
And I think as we've seen with other departments and agencies, whether that's USAID or SAA or elsewhere, stuff is going to break when you run amok and make unevaluated or unjustified changes. And that's going to be a big problem. And I think that'll be a big problem for Congress. And it obviously can have massively consequential effects with DoD's mission. So I think we'll have to see how that plays out over time. And also again, I think, Tony, as you mentioned, a lot of this is in the details of the implementation. And is this kind of giving window dressing to DOGE, but putting a 48-hour review limit on it that might impact some of it as well. So let's shift gears a little bit. I do want to focus on something, I put out a note just talking about Golden Dome. We had the president's announcement.
He has I guess, appointed, I'm going to use the word appointed but not nominated, General Michael Guetlein, the vice commander of Space Force to be the head of that. Named but not appointed because or he has not been rather nominated because I don't know if there's going to be a Senate confirmation. I have heard from folks that would say, "Hey, if you're going to have a four-star, you're going to give him these roles and responsibility on requirements and spending and acquisition. Theoretically, the Senate might want to confirm that person and give him additional powers that you get as a congressionally confirmed appointee." So we'll see where that goes. But everybody has said Trump detailed Iron Dome. But in that announcement, he just basically said, we're going to spend a ton of money and field it by the end of my term.
Again, I'll use the joke that I've always used, I assume he means his second term and not his third term, which is again, something we all might want to think about. Where do we think Golden Dome's headed either with a spending piece of it or Missile Defense agency with an industry day? Aaron, why don't you take that first?
Aaron Mehta:
Can you guys remember a little thing called JADC2? This is a thing that was driving everything in the department and nobody really knew what it was. And so everyone just put all of their stuff under it to be able to say, "Oh, well no, this is part of JADC-11. And so it has to be protected in the budget and actually we need more money." You haven't heard anyone say JADC2 since the word Golden Dome appeared in writing. It's gone. It's dead. No one is saying anything. It's all Golden Dome this, Golden Dome that. Partly that's because all of the stuff about JADC2 and networked architectures and sensors and everything fits into Golden Dome. It's in a lot of ways similar concept of networking everything together. So it works underpinned by I guess AI and yada, yada, yada. The point is just, it's a buzzword right now because nobody knows what it is.
We've not seen a single sign that anybody in the Trump administration knows what it is, aside from broadly missile defense for the Homeland. And we want stuff in space that may or may not ever be possible, and we want that in the next three years. So right now in the Pentagon's, everyone's just throwing everything into Golden Dome and saying, "Hey, I got a Golden Dome piece." I think you're going to very clearly see that reflected in the budget, and it's going to be Guetlein's job to figure out one what is and is not applicable to be called Golden Dome, presumably to have that fight. But as Roman pointed out, he's not actually empowered to make decisions like that right now. It's all just a big beautiful mess. And I think it's going to be that way for a while because if you can say, "My aim nine sidewinder that goes on an F16 could technically be used for missile defense." Congrats, sidewinder are now Golden Dome and they get extra money.
Tony Bertuca:
Yeah, a couple of things. By the time they had the press briefing in the Oval Office, they were supposed to have the architecture ready to go. We were supposed to know. That's what that whole announcement was supposed to be. The Defense Department just hasn't done its homework. Maybe it's because it took so long to put Guetlein in place. But the news that came out of that was you got Guetlein, you had the president saying put a number on it, 175 billion. And then he said, "It'll be operational within my term." That was it. Kind of a lettuce sandwich. If you had been watching for Golden Dome news like us, we were ready to figure out, all right, what's the architecture going to look like? The ground piece, the space piece, they don't know any of that yet still. And it might take a long time before they're willing to publicly commit to something and say what that is.
The other big piece that came out of it in the Oval was you did have some senators there going... Senator Banks from Indiana in particular, I think the quote was something along the lines of, "Hey, look, this is going to be so much money for everybody. It's going to be great for contractors and be great for America." You did have them all sort of rubbing their hands together and the Oval going, this is going to be great. We're behind this and it's going to have a lot of money thrown at it. Keep an eye out for a Gilded Dome headlines in the future.
Aaron Mehta:
Yeah. And just to the money portion, we've had Republican senators, big pro-Trump people and members Congress saying, 'Yeah, this is probably like a trillion dollar thing over 10 years." The 175 over three years is by far the lowest number that anybody has put out there and the quickest timeline anybody's put out there. Is there a surprise that would come out of Trump who is always an optimist with these things? I think we can say. But to Tony's point, nobody in the industry is looking at us and saying, "Oh, it's 175 billion." They're looking at it and saying, "This is the single biggest driver of our business for the next decade."
Joe Gould:
The comparison to JADC2 is an interesting one, the thing that came to mind for me was FCS, Future Combat Systems. When was the last time the department had an idea to make everything work together? What happened to that? It didn't work. It got canceled. I did a little bit of digging into SDI, the Reagan Missile Defense idea that was making Star Wars, and I think at that time a lot of this technology was a lot less mature. And so what he was talking about was a major research effort and that received a lot of blow back. I don't know, it just kind of interesting to think about this, how far missile defense technology has come. And that some of the things that they're talking about now actually exist, but whether it all works together and is successful is another story. And in the meantime, Congress is willing to just throw billions of dollars at it.
When is the reckoning going to happen? There was a reckoning for Star Wars. Is there going to be a reckoning like Trump wants to be able to do this within his term? Is he going to have a Congress that's willing to apply this amount of money after the midterms? I doubt it.
Tony Bertuca:
And one thing that's certain is that we're going to have fewer independent testers to actually test it.
Roman Schweizer:
Right. Here's my hot take and I'm going to throw my tinfoil hat on, but I want you guys to keep this in the hopper for the future. I'm willing to walk out on this ledge. One, it is a big deal because we are talking about the unabashed, sanctioned weaponization of space. So this is space-based interceptors and or boost phase intercept which has to require space. It also relies heavily on more space-based sensors. So clearly if there was any doubt that the sort of next area of growth or next area of warfighting is space. And I think some people have talked about, somebody has said, "Well, the next war is going to be fought in space." The next war may actually start in space. Two, this is curious, I'm just going to throw this out there, but Trump has talked about getting China and Russia into strategic arms reduction talks.
And one way you do that is you throw Iron Dome on the table and you say, "We're going to build this big shield, unless you guys talk about nuclear arms reductions and stuff like that." That's what happened in the '80s with the Russians. That's part of the drill behind the Strategic Defense Initiative, a lot of that stuff. So maybe part of this is just a big negotiating ploy, or there's some element to get the Chinese and Russians to the table on sort of trilateral talks on strategic arms. Three, when you talk about all of the different things, intercepting cruise missiles, drones, ICBM, submarine launch, ballistic missiles, the whole range of things, you can't afford a system to do all of that. But we have had things about fractional bombardment systems, hypersonic cruise missiles, freaking nuclear torpedoes that the Russians are working on. And then Chairman Mike Rogers scared the hell out of everybody, was it a year, a year and a half ago? When he talked about the Russians popping a nuke in space.
So there could be some piece of this that is actually in a super secret squirrel classified realm that this is targeted at a particular threat set that the Chinese and Russians have developed, that the US is freaked out about. And so you're going to pitch it as this giant Golden Dome, but you're actually going to in the classified world develop a countermeasure for one system. And then the last point which I'll throw out there, which I've gotten this question as well, is that this is just a grandiose way to get SpaceX, Palantir and some of the big sexy privates into the mix and doing something meaningful. So I'll pause there. Aaron, I think you wanted to piggyback on something there.
Aaron Mehta:
Yeah, I think to your third point, well, let me touch fourth point first, which is yeah, absolutely SpaceX is going to be getting some chunk of this somehow. Obviously there's any way that doesn't happen given even though Elon is apparently on the outs now, there's been reports about him and Troy Mink, the Air Force secretary. And certainly while Elon might be gone, DOGE exists and most of those DOGE people are people from Elon's companies. I think we can safely assume he is still in control of them even if he's not actively technically in charge. So I think SpaceX, and there's been some reporting to this extent, I don't see any way that SpaceX doesn't get a big chunk of this in some way. To your point about super squirrel stuff that's trying to go after key issues, I think I'm going to flip that.
I absolutely do not believe that this is something that, hey, we got to put this out there because of this concern, because that is just not something that happens in the first two weeks of President Trump's term. I think the flip is with somebody like Guetlein in charge, this is where I think if there are major concerns about Russian mobility, nukes in space, the kind of really classified scary things, he's now in a position to funnel a lot of money towards those particular challenges of which he would be highly aware. So I think it's a great point. I think it's just I would flip the order of operations there.
Roman Schweizer:
And I will respectfully reclaim my time and redirect a question to you because if you just track some of the lineage, Iron Dome for America goes back to the GOP platform that was agreed to in Wisconsin that Trump drafted last summer. And I just will say Space Force came about because he played golf with Mike Rogers. And this was around the time that they were talking about all these threats in space, that again, you talk about with Trump it's like the movie Inception. How did these ideas get put into his head? And there could be some legacy on that going back to some of that stuff from a year or two ago. And don't forget drones over New Jersey that was going to be War of the Worlds.
Aaron Mehta:
Yeah, I'm sure that there is a tie to, oh, there's a lot of scary stuff in space. I just don't believe that this was put fierce in the GOP document because the project 2025 guys had super secret insights. And this is a way to Trojan Horse in something to counter a super secret Russian capability.
Roman Schweizer:
Fair. Well, we'll see.
Aaron Mehta:
We won't.
Roman Schweizer:
Or we won't or we'll never know. But I also do just agree and I will say from tracking the companies and company managements who talk to investors, Golden Dome has become the JADC2 to bumper sticker because it's going to drive everybody's revenue and earnings over the next five years. So everybody's getting a piece. We touched on some of the new tech companies, and I think each of your publications has published on this. It looks like Anduril, which took over the IVAS contract from Microsoft, is now going to be working with Meta, to which Meta bought Palmer Luckey's company on the Oculus goggles. And then I guess unceremoniously fired him somewhat after, are going to be working together to develop the next iteration of IVAS. Interesting. Don't know what it means. Don't know if it'll happen. Any thoughts on where you guys see that headed?
Tony Bertuca:
Now that we've got Facebook getting into the defense business, I think back to when Ash Carter sort of started going to Silicon Valley and all the pushback that Project Maven got from Google and the culture of tech at the time, the culture in Silicon Valley. And I think you can look at this and see that that's really changed. I really think that's just gone out the window. Palmer Luckey was seen as very much a contrarian, sort of a libertarian conservative figure. Mark Zuckerberg was seen as not any of those things, and now he's sort of moving politically in a different direction. And I think you're seeing with these companies, they want to be part of the first breakfast. I think a lot has changed since Ash Carter was there trying to get companies to come play in the government's pool.
Aaron Mehta:
A lot of that's also outside of defense and it's just a broader change in tech. If you look back at the first Trump term, there was all these tech companies leadership coming and saying, "We support immigrants, we support people of color and LGBTQ, and we're standing up to the government and we're going to support our people." And how many of those companies, CEOs were at Trump's inauguration donating money and buying for his attention? So the whole culture of tech has dramatically changed. Obviously. I think the defense is part of that as well.
Tony Bertuca:
And I think too, China and Russia helped that along. Those threats were not as visible at the time when Carter was going there and Bob work was visiting Google saying, "Hey, we really need this." And now we've got Russia invading Ukraine. The war still goes. You've got China threatening to invade Taiwan. I just think maybe the threat of great power competition has kind of gone more mainstream.
Aaron Mehta:
I also think, and somebody in the tech VC world has said this to me before and it's really stuck to me, is that a lot of these companies did not want to get into it with China because they saw China as this big pot of money. It's now been 15 years, they've been trying to tap into that and it hasn't happened. And at a certain point, I think these companies are going, this is never going to pay off so we don't have to worry about it as much.
Roman Schweizer:
Sure. Yeah, no, certainly some of those companies are never going to do business in China or do business in a significant way. I think the other interesting thing, the complaint that I had heard right before Ash Carter and others started going out to the West coast and look at Silicon Valley, is that they had played a large role in previous defense buildups in the '80s and going back to the space program in Southern California and other areas and things like that. There were some CEOs early that said, "Look, we're American companies and we need to help defend America and more patriotic." And you had that kind of pushback and forth, and I think you kind of see that playing out now. Obviously companies like Palantir are expressly pro-America and pro-Israel and things like that. So I would just also segue that we are going to have to see over the next three to five years, I think these companies are going to get a great opportunity to participate in the defense ecosystem, whether that's through CCAs or IVAS or Iron Dome or whatever, but they're going to have to deliver systems.
And maybe those systems aren't going to get really scrubbed hard by DOT&E because there aren't people to do that work. I'm kidding. The services also do their OT&E stuff, but they're going to have to deliver on those promises and it'll be interesting to see how that happens. Last point I would just mention is Mark Zuckerberg is a jiu-jitsu guy, and I do think that he would've taken Elon Musk had they chosen to have that fight in the coliseum. I'm still hoping they do, but we'll see. So all right, gentlemen, we've gone on a long time. As usual, great discussion. Thank you so much for your insights and time. It's always great to chat with you all.