Mackenzie Eaglen
The Department of Defense’s new business-minded leaders under Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth are channeling a venture capitalist’s mindset with a flurry of broad and deep reviews: cut the fat, scale what works, kill what doesn’t. These methods, foreign to the bureaucracy, will ensure the overhauls are substantial and enduring.
The Pentagon’s tech modernization is being reoriented around mission outcome metrics rather than compliance or procurement throughput. Leaders are taking a hard look at internal inefficiencies, from paper-based processes to bloated and redundant office functions to faster acquisition timelines, especially for software and dual-use systems.
First up was the 8 percent budget scrub to reinvest into higher priority investments within the defense budget. Then there was the major defense weapons program review to identify waste and realign government spending with more shared risk with industry. Now the team is plotting to map the mammoth civilian workforce to warfighter priorities exclusively.
The deep dive into the almost-800,000-strong federal defense civilian workforce is especially welcome. This vast group of employees generally only ever gets larger, no matter the push from various administrations to streamline.
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