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26 Feb 26. Deputy Defense Secretary Nominee Talks DOD Audit, Strengthening Industrial Base. A war room may serve as a nerve center for Defense Department efforts to pass an audit, said Stephen A. Feinberg, who testified yesterday before the Senate Armed Services Committee after he was nominated by President Donald J. Trump to the position of deputy defense secretary. If confirmed, Feinberg would be responsible for the Defense Department’s day-to-day business and would have primary responsibility for managing the defense budget and executing the defense secretary’s priorities. With current budget challenges threatening the ability of military services to meet current and future needs, Feinberg said he thinks there is a lot of room for improvement in how the department conducts business.
“There is great opportunity to improve our cost structure, our efficiency, our operations to really save a lot of money that could be plowed into mission,” he said.
Noting that DOD does not currently have good financial accountability or financial metrics, Feinberg said it also has too many poor financial systems in place.
” awful lot of low-hanging fruit there, so we can improve our cost structure,” he said. “This is in my wheelhouse … I spent a career helping organizations improve.”
Lawmakers asked Feinberg, who has more than 40 years of experience in private sector financial markets, how he would go about helping the department pass an audit.
He said those responsible for the Pentagon budget are often not as involved in the details as he thinks they should be, and he said he would change that.
“In my humble opinion, at times, some of the people in the operational execution jobs are not involved in detail,” Feinberg said. “We’re going to set up a war room if I’m fortunate enough to be confirmed and we’re going to go over every program, every cost, line by line, with an army of people, until it’s done.”
In an effort to pass an audit, Feinberg said, there will be a focus on details that result in DOD knowing exactly where it spends its money.
“We’re going to understand where our costs are, why we don’t have our audit, where the financial problems are, and everyone’s come up with a plan to fix it,” he said.
For strengthening and growing the defense industrial base — the American companies who build hardware for the nation’s military — Feinberg said there need to be people within DOD who are far more familiar with how private sector companies work and what needs to be done to make it easier to develop and manufacture weapons and munitions.
“Our supply chain is definitely weak. Our workforce needs to be improved,” he said. “A big piece of improving our supply chain is working more closely with our private sector. We need people inside of government understand their issues, understand what drives their boards, what drives the pressure they get from shareholders.”
He said that knowledge will enable the Defense Department to work with more companies willing to enter the defense industrial base.
We certainly have the manufacturing capability to meet the shortages in our supply chain, and we’ve got to encourage those companies to do it, Feinberg said.
Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said DOD would refocus about 8% of its budget away from nonlethal programs and inefficiencies and put that money instead toward the president’s “America First” priorities for national defense. Feinberg cited for lawmakers an inefficiency in DOD program requirements that drives up the cost of programs like aircraft, helicopters and ships. It’s something he thinks needs to change. Our program requirements are very rigid and expensive, he said. “We can get the job done with the simplification of many of those requirements.” (Source: U.S. DoD)
26 Feb 26. The US House of Representatives has passed a budget resolution that calls for trillions of dollars in tax and spending cuts, in a significant victory for President Donald Trump as he seeks to enact sweeping changes in fiscal policy. The resolution passed by 217 votes to 215 after a campaign by House Speaker Mike Johnson to push Republican holdouts to back Trump’s “big beautiful bill”. The bill, which will kick off another round of budget talks in the Senate, proposes $4.5tn in tax cuts, about $2tn in spending cuts and allocating hundreds of bns of dollars more for the military and border security over a decade. “Today, House Republicans moved Congress closer to delivering on President Trump’s full America First agenda — not just parts of it,” House Republican leaders said. Since Republicans hold a razor-thin majority in the House, even a small number of dissenting votes from within the party would have jeopardised the passage of the bill. Three House Republicans — Tim Burchett, Victoria Spartz and Warren Davidson — had indicated they would vote against it, but all fell in line behind the Speaker. Thomas Massie was the only Republican to vote against it. Before the vote, Massie posted on X: “If the Republican budget passes, the deficit gets worse, not better.” Budgets are non-binding resolutions that outline fiscal goals. They signal to congressional committees how much to increase or reduce spending but do not lay out specific programmes that should be targeted. Once the Senate passes the budget, Republicans in Congress can start a process known as “reconciliation” and ultimately pass legislation without Democratic support extending tax cuts enacted during Trump’s first term in 2017. The bill instructs the House energy and commerce committee to slash $880bn in spending, a move widely seen as targeting the Medicaid health insurance programme for low-income Americans. Similarly, a call for the agriculture committee to reduce spending by $230bn is aimed at a food aid scheme called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. According to the non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the new measures would add at least $2.8tn to the deficit by 2034. “It’s truly unfathomable that when confronted with multitrillion-dollar deficits and debt climbing towards record highs, lawmakers’ response is to pass a budget allowing themselves to add trillions more in debt over the next decade,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the committee. But Joshua Bolten, the chief executive of the Business Roundtable lobby group, applauded “the House for advancing an FY 2025 budget resolution. The House’s vote marks a pivotal moment in Congress’s work to protect and boost the economic benefits that tax reform delivered for American businesses, workers and families”. The House budget would also raise the debt ceiling by $4tn, something that would temporarily remove the threat of a debt default. Democrats described the budget as a “disgrace”. Leaders of the New Democrat Coalition, a group of moderate Democratic lawmakers, said: “It betrays working families by slashing funding for critical programmes they rely on to help pay their bills and keep food on the table, all while lining the pockets of Republican megabnaire donors like Elon Musk with trillions of dollars in deficit-raising tax cuts.” (Source: FT.com)
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Founded in 1987, Exensor Technology is a world leading supplier of Networked Unattended Ground Sensor (UGS) Systems providing tailored sensor solutions to customers all over the world. From our Headquarters in Lund Sweden, our centre of expertise in Network Communications at Communications Research Lab in Kalmar Sweden and our Production site outside of Basingstoke UK, we design, develop and produce latest state of the art rugged UGS solutions at the highest quality to meet the most stringent demands of our customers. Our systems are in operation and used in a wide number of Military as well as Homeland Security applications worldwide. The modular nature of the system ensures any external sensor can be integrated, providing the user with a fully meshed “silent” network capable of self-healing. Exensor Technology will continue to lead the field in UGS technology, provide our customers with excellent customer service and a bespoke package able to meet every need.
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