Department of Defense

The Department of Defense affirm that its DOGE staff will be hired directly to the agency and will not be detailed from elsewhere in the government.

An unidentified DOGE team holds a kickoff meeting with DoD staff at the Pentagon.

DoD agencies are ordered to provide lists of probationary employees to DOGE. Previously, defense, security and intelligence agencies have been exempted from many of the executive orders that constrained staffing or contracting.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth releases a video stating that he met with DOGE about cuts to the agency. He states that many of them are veterans. [The attendees aren’t listed, but I am inferring this is Yinon Weiss, Mike Slagh, Jim Hickey and Patrick George]

A Forbes article identifies Justin Fulcher as one of the DOGE staffers in the Pentagon and questions the veracity of his entrepeneurial background.

Elon Musk visits the National Security Agency (NSA) to meet with its top administrator, General Timothy Haugh

During a discussion on how to strip grants from the University of Pennsylvania and San Jose State, GSA FAS Commissioner Josh Gruenbaum sends an email to coordinate grant freezes from DOD, DHS and the EPA. He includes DOGE staffers Kyle Schutt, Adam Hoffman and Kathryn Armstrong Loving as the recipients of these requests.

Elon Musk arrives at the Pentagon for a meeting with leadership, reportedly to discuss DOGE’s involvement at the agency.

Federal staff at the DOD are sent an email offering them another chance for a deferred resignation if they enroll within the next week or so from the email.

The head and deputy leader of the NSA are both relieved of their command by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly lashed out at Yinon Weiss for seeming to overstep his authority. The altercation was apparently triggered by Justin Fulcher storming out of a meeting with Weiss because he thought that Weiss has reported him to the Pentagon’s police service. (fuzz: date given as just early April)

DOGE staff are reportedly examining Navy’s enterprise software licenses under the direction of the Departmeny of Defense CIO.

Luke Farritor uses his admin access to lock out all government officials at multiple agencies from using grants.gov to issue new grants. Instead, all grants must now be sent to a new email address which will be reviewed by DOGE staffers before grants can be posted.

All 14 current members of the Pentagon’s pre-existing Defense Digital Service team announce a mass resignation after weeks of being sidelined and frustrated with DOGE’s efforts at the agency.

In a retaliation against the university coordinated by GSA, grants for Harvard University from DOD, HUD, the Department of Energy and the Department of Education are all terminated. There were 200 grants from DOD alone. The stated reasons varied but included that they no longer effectuated the administration’s priorities or directly accusing Harvard of fostering antisemitism on campus.

Pentagon staff are told they now no longer have to submit the Five Things email, but they are now tasked with a mandatory exercise to submit one thing that improves efficiency or reduces waste.

The Department of Defense announced that it would immediately stop ingesting and sharing data from 3 microwave-imaging satellites with NOAA’s National Hurricane Center. This imaging is used to prevent “sunrise surprises” by allowing forecasters to monitor hurricanes at night. The change is expected to degrade the quality of hurricane forecasts.

In an email to agency partners, the operators of grants.gov declare that the revised mechanism added in April that routed all Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) through a DOGE email address has been reversed. Instead, agencies are to return to using the tool like that did previously. This doesn’t necessarily mean that DOGE or political appointees will not be reviewing grants, but they have no longer locked other users out of the system.

The head of acquisition for the Department of Defense orders that all new contract and task orders for IT consulting, management services, and advisory and assistance support must be approved by the DOGE team embedded within the DOD before they will be granted.

The Pentagon releases a memo calling for “drone dominance,” including increasing manufacturing, embedding drones within armed units and assuming more risk in developing new technologies. The memo is signed by Pete Hegseth, but it was disributed with a DOGE Controlled tag and revealed the appointment of Owen West as the chief point of contact. This is a marked departure from DOGE’s spending control and personnel reduction efforts at the agency.

The Air Force contacts media to report that it has cut $10.4 billion in costs after DOGE reviewed over 500 contracts and 50 business systems. The bulk of this savings came from cancelling the Department Air Force Strategic Transformation Support (DAFSTS) Contract for $4.8 billion in avoided costs. This however was an umbrella contract for a wide variety of IT modernization and consulting services, for which money had not been allocated, meaning that this tally might be affected by the same fuzzy double-counting and hypothetical savings that were an issue on the DOGE’s own tally of cost recovery.