Science

President Donald Trump has directed Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to audit the Pentagon, after the Defense Department failed its seventh audit in a row.

During an interview with Fox News‘ Bret Baier set to air before the Super Bowl, Trump said he was directing DOGE to investigate both the Department of Education and the Pentagon.

“We’re going to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse,” Trump said.

Trump tells @BretBaier he will direct @elonmusk and DOGE to investigate Department of Education and Pentagon for fraud and abuse. pic.twitter.com/uw1i5ZlKML

— CAPITAL (@capitalnewshq) February 9, 2025

On Friday, Trump said during a press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba that he was directing DOGE to investigate “Pentgon, education, just about everything,” adding that he thinks Musk will find “a lot” of waste, fraud and abuse.

“Sadly, you’ll find some things that are pretty bad, but I don’t think proportionally you’ll see anything like we just saw,” Trump said, referring to USAID – where the new administration has placed 97% of the staff on leave. Last week, Trump said that billions of dollars have been stolen by USAID.

Reviewing the Pentagon will be no small task for an agency which sees roughly $800 billion flow through it, and has never managed to pass its own financial audits with the exception of the Marine Corps.

The Pentagon employs nearly 3.3 million service members and civilians.

Musk, who has been appointed as a “special government employee,” is one of Trump’s key advisers, who has set a goal for DOGE to cut up to $2 trillion in federal expenses by July 2026.

This is what we’re dealing with everywhere in government
pic.twitter.com/ObsfvINEQ2

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 9, 2025

Last week, DOGE claimed that it had managed to save over $1 billion by slashing contracts related to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), through halting “the hiring of people into unnecessary positions, the deletion of DEI, and stopping improper payments to foreign organizations,” as The Burning Platform noted on Sunday.

On Saturday, Musk said that DOGE and the US Treasury Department have agreed to new anti-fraud measures aimed at preventing tens of billions of dollars in fraudulent government entitlement payments each year, including the following:

– Require that all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. This is frequently left blank, making audits almost impossible.

– All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!

– The DO-NOT-PAY list of entities known to be fraudulent or people who are dead or are probable fronts for terrorist organizations or do not match Congressional appropriations must actually be implemented and not ignored. Also, it can currently take up to a year to get on this list, which is far too long. This list should be updated at least weekly, if not daily.

The above super obvious and necessary changes are being implemented by existing, long-time career government employees, not anyone from @DOGE. It is ridiculous that these changes didn’t exist already!

Yesterday, I was told that there are currently over $100B/year of entitlements payments to individuals with no SSN or even a temporary ID number. If accurate, this is extremely suspicious.

When I asked if anyone at Treasury had a rough guess for what percentage of that number is unequivocal and obvious fraud, the consensus in the room was about half, so $50B/year or $1B/week!!

This is utterly insane and must be addressed immediately.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently defended DOGE’s actions at Treasury – telling Bloomberg in an interview with Bloomberg that the DOGE team is made up of highly trained professionals and “not some roving band running around doing things,” possibly in reference to claims by critics that DOGE has embraced and is applying the adage “move fast and break things,” which is part of the Silicon Valley start-up culture of being innovative, nimble, and disruptive.

Authored by Casey Carlisle via AntiWar.com,

Paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, the natural progress of things is for prices to yield and for quality to gain ground.  Technology is what enables this natural progress.  Do televisions cost more now than they did in the early ‘90s?  What about mobile phones?  Same answer for both questions: both are better and less expensive today than they were in the early ‘90s, which is why one will conclude that something is awry when reading headlines like “Global Military Spending Has Almost Doubled Since the Early ‘90s.”

Why has military spending almost doubled since the early ‘90s?  Arguably for the same reason hospital services have: government intervention.  Those who ‘serve’ in government endlessly tax the present because they arrogantly claim to know what the future should be rather than allow the future to unfold via voluntary exchange between producers and consumers.  Against all reason and historical precedent, they claim that, in order to stay safe, ‘defense’ spending must increase.  But that’s like claiming that, in order for eggs to contain yolks, the cost of raising chickens must necessarily outpace the rate of inflation.

“But but but” the unthinking screech, “the world is much more dangerous today!”  Perhaps, but is warfare immune from technological advance?  No, as Jefferson’s actual quote helps explain: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”  The world’s danger stems from governments’ interventions.  Wars aren’t cheap; governments don’t engage in them for fun.  The people would rather not fight, but instead of consulting with the people, governments conscript them.  Increased military spending is inversely proportional to market forces – the will of the people.

Military spending has almost doubled because the government that allegedly serves us trades our present liberty for its imagined, grotesque future.  Weapons manufacturing is one of the most regulated – if not the most regulated – industries in the “land of the free,” and that regulation paves the way for the most perverse incentive imaginable: though the maiming, killing, and destruction of “them” and their cities equates to the decimation of their economy, “our” business relies on it.Y

But work divided – not obliterated – is what enables the natural progress of things.  And when the number and duration of wars are unknown, and when that uncertainty is combined with the fact that war – at least its initial phase – is entirely devoid of market forces, weapons manufacturers can charge whatever they like, considering the governments that purchase their products spend their citizens’ money and not their own.  Governments have only what they’ve taken from the people they claim to serve, and they spend that money in the same way they obtained it: without consent.

There’s nothing natural about military spending nearly doubling; it’s a choice, just like inflation.  But these are not choices freely made by citizens; they’re choices imposed on citizens by those who claim to serve citizens.  Where citizens do have a choice, however, is whether to enlist, but increasingly more patriots have decided to abstain from military enlistment.  Why, then, would military spending increase while the number of those ‘serving’ decreases?  Because, again, military spending is not the product of billions of freely transacting individuals but of a handful who claim with a straight face that they know better than the billions engaging in voluntary exchange (the global economy).

“That’s just the way things are” is what the parasites hope you’ll keep chanting, but that song is better ascribed to things subjected to market forces.  “This is the way things will be” is why global military spending has doubled and will continue to increase.  As long as the government—not the people – decides which weapons will be purchased and which wars will be funded, the people will continue to fund the increasingly expensive suffering of others worldwide for the benefit of their governments.

Casey Carlisle writes in the Pacific Northwest.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Nearly 100 people were sickened by an outbreak of an unknown gastrointestinal illness this week on the Royal Caribbean cruise ship Radiance of the Seas, according to a report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC said on Feb. 5 that about 89 of the 2,164 passengers on the ship were affected by the outbreak, or about 4 percent of the passengers. Two out of 910 crew members reported symptoms, the agency said.

The primary symptoms, according to the CDC, are vomiting and diarrhea. The “causative agent” was listed as “unknown,” the agency also said.

The Radiance of the Seas trip started on Feb. 1 and is scheduled to end on Feb. 8, while the outbreak was first reported on Feb. 5.

Sick passengers and crew members were isolated from the rest of the individuals on the cruise ship, the CDC said. The ship also has stepped up “cleaning and disinfection procedures” and collected samples for testing to determine the nature of the outbreak, the agency said.

Officials with the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program are now “remotely monitoring the situation, including review of the ship’s outbreak response and sanitation procedures,” it added.

While the cause of the outbreak wasn’t disclosed, the CDC noted that norovirus is generally the cause of outbreaks on cruise ships and that “finding the agent that caused an outbreak … can take time.”

“When an outbreak occurs, people whose symptoms met the case definition are asked to provide stool or vomitus samples. These samples are tested to determine the causative agent,” the CDC said.

Since the start of 2025, the CDC has reported six outbreaks on cruise ships, including the Radiance of the Seas trip. Three of the outbreaks were caused by norovirus, while one was caused by E. coli and other was “presumed” to have been caused by ciguatera fish poisoning, according to the agency.

Cruise ships are required to report cases where individuals report diarrhea or vomiting, along with other symptoms, to the CDC, the agency has said.

Norovirus Case Updates

Cases of norovirus started surging in parts of the United States over the winter, according to government data.

The most recent numbers from the CDC show there were 97 outbreaks of norovirus reported during the week of Jan.9, although that was down from the 128 outbreaks reported a week earlier. Numbers from the past few years show a maximum of 65 outbreaks reported during that first week of December 2024.

A norovirus infection is characterized by sudden vomiting and diarrhea. Outbreaks are often seen on cruise ships, in congregate living situations such as nursing homes and jails, and in schools and places where people are close together.

In a normal year, according to the CDC, norovirus causes between 19 million and 21 million cases of vomiting and diarrhea, 109,000 hospitalizations, and 900 deaths across the United States. The virus also is associated with about 495,000 emergency department visits, mostly in younger children, the CDC says. Most outbreaks occur between November and April.

If there is a new strain of the virus, there can be upward of 50 percent more norovirus illness. the agency said. Norovirus outbreaks often occur in health care facilities, long-term care facilities, restaurants, child care centers, schools, and cruise ships.

The Epoch Times contacted Royal Caribbean for comment on Friday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.