Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley says he looks forward to Elon Musk’s review of the military’s budget.
“I think that he is looking at it from the standpoint of a business person,” Grassley said this morning, “and any conflict of interest he isn’t going to get away with.”
President Trump said this weekend during an interview with Fox News that he expects Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency effort to find hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse in the military. Musk’s Space X was awarded about $5 billion in Defense Department contracts last year, much of it to launch satellites for military intelligence and communications.
During his weekly conference call with Iowa radio reporters, Grassley said a recent case involving Amazon’s disputed and rejected bid for a military contract sends an important message about conflicts of interest.
“I expect if we can do it for Amazon, we can do it with anything Elon Musk might be trying to pull,” Grassley said, “but I think he wouldn’t be dumb enough to do that in the first place.”
The Department of Defense is the largest agency in the federal budget and has an annual budget of $800 billion. Grassley has been a critic of Pentagon spending since he joined the Senate in the early 1980s, raising concerns then about the price the military had paid for common items, like a $400 hammer and a $600 toilet seat.
In 2018, Grassley called attention to the $10,000 the Pentagon paid for toilet set lids.