Press secretary Sean Parnell said that DEI and climate change programs are ‘not a core function of our military’ and constitute ‘a distraction.’
The Department of Defense (DOD) has identified more than $80 million through Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team that it says is wasteful spending, a spokesperson confirmed on March 3.
In a video release on social media platform X, Pentagon press secretary Sean Parnell said that some of the funding was primarily dedicated to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and climate change programs.
As examples, Parnell said that the U.S. Air Force allocated $1.9 million for “holistic DEI transformation and training,” $6 million went to the University of Montana to “strengthen American democracy,” and $1.6 million went to the University of Florida to study “social and institutional detriment of vulnerability in resilience to climate hazards in African Sahel.”
Parnell said that the DOD is working “hand in glove” with DOGE to identify programs to pare back, with more cuts coming.
Created by President Donald Trump in an executive order in January, DOGE has gone from agency to agency to identify what it considers wasteful or abusive spending and to propose ways to downsize the federal workforce.
Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX and the owner of the social platform X, has delivered regular updates on DOGE’s work as well as warnings to federal employees through his X account, which has tens of millions of followers.
For the State Department, the Pentagon, and several other agencies, “supervisors are gathering the weekly accomplishments on behalf of individual contributors,” Musk wrote in a post on March 1.
Separately, Musk said that “anyone working on classified or other sensitive matters is still required to respond if they receive the email, but can simply reply that their work is sensitive.”
An email that was sent to Pentagon civilian employees over the weekend and seen by The Epoch Times advised employees on how to respond to the “what you did last week” email and directed them to respond within 48 hours.
“A response to this email satisfies all OPM requirements for the past two weeks,” the Pentagon email said.
Democratic lawmakers and labor unions have criticized DOGE, saying that widespread cuts could hamper crucial government functions and services. Unions and groups of federal employees, meanwhile, have filed dozens of lawsuits against DOGE, the Trump administration, the Office of Personnel Management, and Musk, with some seeking to clarify the billionaire’s role in the organization.
In Trump’s first cabinet meeting this past week, Musk told department heads that the email asking what employees did is needed to determine if that person is a real federal employee.
“What we are trying to get to the bottom of is we think there are a number of people on the government payroll who are dead, which is probably why they can’t respond,” he said.
