As Musk exits government, Hegseth gives DOGE team more influence on Pentagon contracting

Billionaire tech titan Elon Musk’s time as a “special government employee” is coming to an end, but the DOGE team at the Defense Department will soon have greater influence on Pentagon contracting. Since President Donald Trump began his second term in January, Musk has spearheaded the Department of Government Efficiency’s push across the federal government to find “waste, fraud and abuse,” slash certain types of spending and cut the workforce. A DOGE team was set up at the Pentagon — as well as other federal agencies — to implement those efforts. Musk wrote Wednesday night in a post on X that his time as a special government employee was coming to an end but: “The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.” In a sign that DOGE’s influence will continue at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a new directive this week giving those personnel more oversight of contracting efforts. Hegseth wrote in a May 27 memo to senior Pentagon leadership, combatant commanders, and DOD agency and field activity directors that: “The Department of Defense (DoD) Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team will have the opportunity to provide input on all unclassified contracts. The Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment (USD(A&S)), or its designee, will coordinate with DOGE to ensure that the opportunity for review of the Performance Work Statement/Statement of Work, accompanying estimates, deliverable descriptions, and requirements approval/validation documents, occurs when the requirements package is provided to a DoD contracting office to initiate a procurement or prior to the package being provided to a non-DoD assisting agency (e.g., General Services Administration).” In a video released Wednesday on X, Hegseth said the Pentagon had already saved more than $10 billion working with DOGE on previous efforts to review spending, including from a “line-by-line audit of over 50 contract vehicles.” Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced Thursday that the government would build a new supercomputer powered by NVIDIA chips and based at a department user facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Officials said the supercomputer will be named Doudna after UC Berkeley scientist Jennifer Doudna, who co-invented CRISPR gene editing technology and won the Nobel Prize back in 2020. The Doudna supercomputer, which is geared toward high-performance computing and training artificial intelligence technology, will be based at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. It is only the latest Energy Department project designed for the AI age: El Capitan, a supercomputer based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and currently the world’s fastest, is also designed with machine learning in mind, as is Frontier, a DOE supercomputer housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. A spokesperson would not comment further on how the Doudna supercomputer’s speeds might compare to other systems. Government supercomputing projects, including those focused on AI, are now supported by the same national laboratory system that incubated the Manhattan Project, which produced the world’s first atomic weapons. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.