Cutting 8 Percent
Plus: Border update, a shift in U.S. policy on Taiwan (Beijing is pissed), and more...
Say what you will about Defense Secretary/former Fox News guy Pete Hegseth, but dude's interested in cutting the Pentagon's budget. Libertarians, this is what we asked for!
Hegseth has ordered top officials to draw up a plan to cut $50 billion, or roughly 8 percent, from his department's budget—8 percent each year for the next five years. Since it's the Trump administration and we can't just fully have nice things, border enforcement is one area that Hegseth has already designated as exempt from possible trims. (That said, getting the border under control and making immigration more orderly is possibly a defensible, and certainly a predictable, priority for President Donald Trump.)
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It's not clear whether Hegseth is aiming for full cuts, or whether he wants certain line items cut in order to allocate the funds elsewhere within his department. Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that Hegseth has instructed his people "to find offsets—programs that can be cut to achieve spending elsewhere—for fiscal year 2026, which starts Oct. 1." This may well be in addition to the spending cuts; we just don't know yet.
Reason has long been critical of wasteful Pentagon spending. "In 2023, the Government Accountability Office revealed that a government contractor had lost 2 million spare parts for the F-35 fighter jet, together worth tens of millions of dollars, since 2018," writes Matthew Petti in the February 2025 issue. "The Department of Defense followed up on only 20,000 of those parts. Military officials don't know how many F-35 spare parts exist in total, paid for by American taxpayers but spread out at contractor warehouses around the world." And "in 2018, the U.S. Navy found a warehouse in Jacksonville, Florida, full of parts for the F-14 Tomcat, the now-obsolete fighter jet made famous in Top Gun, and for the P-8 Poseidon and P-3 Orion, two submarine-hunting aircraft"—parts worth $126 million. Fear not, this isn't a recent trend. The federal government's been extraordinarily consistent on this front: Between 1984 and 1985 alone, Petti writes, the Navy had lost track of $394 million in parts.
One encouraging tidbit: In his piece, Petti cites a policy wonk named Dan Caldwell, who argues that "we have a defense budget that is disconnected from a coherent grand strategy. A lot of policymakers and a lot of individuals in the national security think tank community think that a topline spending number—whether it's a total spending number or a percentage of GDP—they think that in and of itself is a strategy." Caldwell was just plucked out of his think tank role and tapped by Hegseth to serve as a senior adviser.
What's happening at the border? The month Trump got elected, illegal border crossings noticeably slowed. "Though overall crossings ticked up slightly in December, the daily averages were the lowest since summer 2020, according to a senior U.S. Customs and Border Protection official who spoke on the condition of anonymity" to The New York Times. In January, Border Patrol made 29,000 arrests, compared with the prior month's 47,000. (Reuters is reporting that number, whereas the Associated Press is reporting 21,000.) There's early evidence that the Trump administration is changing the asylum-seeking process—including closing down CBP One, the app by which migrants were able to schedule appointments with immigration officials—and increasing the number of deportation flights, as well with deals with countries like Panama, Costa Rica, and Venezuela to take returned or ejected migrants in, has had a real impact on people's attempts to enter the country illegally. When those actions have still not deterred all would-be border-crossers, law enforcement is seemingly catching the remainder.
The White House, meanwhile, is touting apprehensions (different than arrests) as more evidence of their success: "According to newly released data from Customs and Border Protection (CBP), just 61,465 illegal aliens were apprehended at the southern border during the entire month of January—a 36% decline from the previous month. That number includes 29,116 apprehended along the border—the lowest since May 2020—and 32,349 at ports of entry."
This is all a marked change from what was happening during prior administrations. The Biden administration averaged 311 arrests per day from September 2023 to September 2024 (a time with high border-crossing volume). The Obama administration averaged 636 daily arrests in 2013 (a time with low border-crossing volume). Now, Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump is averaging 710 daily arrests. That number will surely go down once total crossings fall even further as more would-be illegal immigrants and asylum-seekers receive the message that their claims won't be processed and that the risk of deportation is higher than before.
Regardless of which metric you use, there's a lot of evidence to indicate that chaos at the border is easing.
Scenes from New York: Ding dong, the congestion pricing is dead! Or at least being duked out in court. The policy, which had charged car commuters $9 per day to enter Manhattan below 60th St., is apparently being ended by President Donald Trump, who has instructed the Department of Transportation (DOT) to rescind the agreement with the city that authorizes the tolling structure (and, since he's so very himself, Trump followed that up with "LONG LIVE THE KING!"):
"CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!"
–President Donald J. Trump pic.twitter.com/IMr4tq0sMB— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 19, 2025
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wrote in a letter to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul that "New York State's congestion pricing plan is a slap in the face to working class Americans and small business owners," and that "every American should be able to access New York City regardless of their economic means. It shouldn't be reserved for an elite few."
The increased toll revenues, per the design of the program, are supposed to pay for subway system improvements. But "commuters using the highway system to enter New York City have already financed the construction and improvement of these highways through the payment of gas taxes and other taxes," writes Duffy. "Now the toll program leaves drivers without any free highway alternative, and instead, takes more money from working people to pay for a transit system and not highways."
Perhaps the most confusing part about this is that the feds apparently have authority over New York's tolling system, or at least believe themselves to have authority over it. The Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) has, of course, immediately sued the DOT; courts will decide who has the ultimate say here. Janno Lieber, the MTA's chair and chief executive, told The New York Times the pricing would "continue notwithstanding this baseless effort to snatch those benefits away." Meanwhile, I'm being a naughty libertarian by being kinda jazzed about my household budget possibly returning to normal. Sorry!
QUICK HITS
- On Just Asking Questions, we spoke with Aaron Sibarium and talked through the new executive orders that end diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives within the federal government. "A nonpartisan, logical assessment of the topic, is this allowed?" praises one viewer. Check it out for yourself:
- Major scoop from Pirate Wires on the pro-Palestine astroturfing of Reddit:
MAJOR REDDIT SCOOP: Investigation reveals an extraordinary degree of astroturfed anti-capitalism, radical Marxist, Islamist propaganda on some of the biggest subreddits, including r/Documentaries
A Discord group has hijacked hundreds of subreddits, many of them with millions of… pic.twitter.com/yruOAw0zbt
— Pirate Wires (@PirateWires) February 19, 2025
- The word for this is based: "China has accused the Trump administration of 'serious regression' in its position on Taiwan, after the State Department removed a line from its website stating that the US does not support Taiwan independence," reports CNN. The State Department has long included boilerplate language on U.S. government websites to placate China; the removal is quite a provocation!
- "The Internal Revenue Service will begin laying off roughly 6,000 employees on Thursday as part of the Trump administration's push to downsize the federal work force," per The New York Times.
- What's going on with Trump's Russia/Ukraine war stance?
- Inside the gun-for-hire industry, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal.
