Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered senior military leaders to plan on cutting 8% from the department's budget for each of the next five years, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
According to a memo obtained by the outlet, Hegseth ordered that the proposed cuts be identified by Feb. 24. The memo also includes a list of 17 areas that the Trump administration wants exempted from the plans, with southern U.S. border operations, nuclear weapons modernization and missile defense, and acquisition of one-way attack drones among them.
The 2025 Pentagon budget is approximately $850 billion and the general view on Capitol Hill is reportedly that massive spending is needed to defend against Chinese and Russian threats. The Post reported that if the budget cuts are adopted in full, tens of billions of dollars would be cut from each of the next five years' spending plans.
"President Trump's charge to DoD is clear: achieve Peace through Strength," Hegseth wrote in the memo, dated Tuesday. "The time for preparation is over — we must act urgently to revive the warrior ethos, rebuild our military, and reestablish deterrence. Our budget will resource the fighting force we need, cease unnecessary defense spending, reject excessive bureaucracy, and drive actionable reform including progress on the audit."
While continued "support agency" funding for Indo-Pacific Command, Northern Command and Space Command are outlined in the memo, conspicuously absent from the list is European Command, which has played a central role in implementing U.S. strategy during the war between Russian and Ukraine. Also missing from the list, according to the Post, are Central Command, which oversees Middle Eastern operations, and Africa Command, which manages several thousand troops across the entire continent.
Hegseth's spokesman, John Ullyot, said the Pentagon was putting together a statement in response to questions about the secretary's memo and it would be available soon.
If enacted, the proposed cuts would be the most substantial effort to draw down Pentagon spending since 2013, when sequestration, or across-the-board budget cuts authorized by Congress, went into effect. At the time, those cuts were seen as a crisis within the Pentagon and they became steadily unpopular among both Republicans and Democrats due to their effect on the military's conflict readiness.