Prime Minister Justin Trudeau makes his way through the foyer outside the House of Commons prior to Question Period in Ottawa on Dec. 4.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
What we’re going to do, said Vivek Ramaswamy, is “strike the leviathan at its core.” The former Republican presidential candidate was speaking of the plans of his eager self and wunderkind Elon Musk to blowtorch the bloated deep state.
Under the guise of the newly concocted Department of Government Efficiency, they want to save hundreds of billions in spending by drastically reducing the size of the federal work force, and going after sacred cows – even the military-industrial complex.
The government in Washington has around 428 federal agencies, noted Mr. Musk. “I think we should be able to get away with 99.”
Ridiculous, one might say. Who is he trying to kid? But because it’s America’s Superman talking, the ambition is not to be reflexively dismissed. The lesson of the election was that the status quo must go. Mr. Musk, in combination with a president with extreme powers, is determined to make it happen.
Canada need take note. It has a pandemic-fuelled bloated government that, under Justin Trudeau, has grown three times as fast as the population. It has a bloated debt level as well, and a much-mocked level of defence spending.
On the latter, Mr. Musk may be of help by redirecting some of the defence spending embarrassment toward America’s own backyard. The Pentagon, with its monstrous military outlays, is the great American untouchable. But not for outside-the-box thinker Mr. Musk. In his massive government-reduction plan, it will be a prime target.
The country, he posted a few days ago, is wrongheaded in its military planning. To wit, “some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.”
“Manned fighter jets,” he continued, “are obsolete in the age of drones.” As he stated in an earlier post: “Future wars are drone wars.”
Crikey! To relegate F-35s to the dustbin is to undermine the centrepiece of the American and Canadian air forces. The jets are being built in each country in large numbers at astronomical costs.
If Mr. Musk gets his way, their production will be dramatically reduced. But if he gets his way in a major downsizing of military expenditures, it will also be a harder sell for Donald Trump to demand major defence-spending increases from NATO allies like Canada.
Under continual bombardment for its lack of spending – everybody drinks from the same firehose on this issue – Ottawa will take comfort in that. While it hasn’t reached the NATO target of spending 2 per cent of GDP, the Trudeau government has a not-so-terrible story to tell. Crunching some numbers, it has increased defence spending more than any Canadian government going back to the Second World War.
Since 2016, says Defence Minister Bill Blair, the government has almost doubled its military spending while the previous Conservative government decreased it.
As for the Pentagon, Mr. Musk’s take was applauded, no surprise, by Senator Bernie Sanders. ”Elon Musk is right,” he wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “The Pentagon, with a budget of US$886-billion, just failed its seventh audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions.”
Mr. Sanders has noted before that American military spending is larger than that of the next seven biggest defence-spending countries combined. As for the combined outlays of the U.S. and NATO allies, statistics show they exceed that of hostile powers, despite complaints from defence lobbyists of shortages, in the neighbourhood of a gargantuan US$1-trillion.
For the South Africa-born Mr. Musk, it’s not so much budgetary totals that are important but rather how efficiently the money is spent. If he changes the thinking on F-35s, billions could be saved or redirected for better usage.
But while he is right about the Pentagon, he has a big problem on his hands: Mr. Trump vowed in the election campaign to “provide record funding” for the U.S. military.
Moreover, the track record for past attempts at striking the Leviathan at its core is dismal. Too many vested interests. Too many jobs at stake. Too many congressional hurdles.
Mr. Musk did cut 80 per cent of the work force at Twitter when he took over there and has made huge cuts at Tesla. He has become a major power in manufacturing, in space exploration, in media, in AI and now, so it appears, in government.
He is a megaforce, as is Mr. Trump, and many are right to wonder how long they can co-exist. The difference is that Mr. Trump will be gone in four years while Mr. Musk, 53, will be around for decades.
Ipso facto, as Pierre Poilievre and Mr. Trudeau go about arranging dinners, America’s Superman should be at the top of their lists.