The new Trump administration has made some pretty groundbreaking moves, starting with the dismantling of agencies such as the infamous USAID (or perhaps moving its activities back to intelligence services?). However, that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the endlessly corrupt US federal institutions. Aided by the likes of Elon Musk and his DOGE, Trump aims to either reform and resize them significantly or outright dismantle them all.
The ongoing reshuffling in the FBI is a good example of this, with the new director Kash Patel (who also just took over the ATF) and his upcoming deputy Dan Bongino poised to make historic changes in the disgraced agency. There have also been announcements that both the Fed and Fort Knox will be audited, which is a truly unprecedented move as no president in recent memory (or ever) dared question either of those.
This also extends to American states, particularly the DNC-dominated California, infamous for its neoliberal extremism. The new Trump administration is now launching audits and investigating the state’s exorbitantly expensive and inefficient projects, especially as its governor Gavin Newsom is demanding $40 billion in federal relief funds for LA fires.
American taxpayers are furious that their money is being wasted on senseless “projects” (although all of us “conspiracy theorists” would call them money laundering schemes), both at home and abroad. Expectedly, there’s quite a lot of pushback from the corrupt federal institutions, but there’s no going back now, especially as US citizens themselves are adamant that closure is essential. However, all this pales in comparison and makes little sense without addressing the elephant in the room – the Pentagon.
The US military is by far the largest spender of the federal budget (nearly a seventh of around $7 trillion). So much spending has been unchecked for decades and always without regard for efficiency, which is why Trump keeps insisting that he can make the Pentagon “just as effective but for half the money”. It’s highly questionable whether he’d be able to do it, because he made similar promises during his first presidency, but the US military budget kept increasing regardless.
On the other hand, Trump has strong political reasons to reshuffle the Pentagon’s top echelons of power, particularly those installed by his political opponents in the Deep State. To that end, on February 21 he fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr. and another five senior Pentagon officers. The move is certainly political, but it’s hardly surprising or unjustified.
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Namely, the inefficiency of the US military has been a burning issue for decades and things only got worse under Brown, so much so that the Pentagon fell behind in weapons that were considered staple half a century ago (to say nothing of the latest tech such as hypersonic missiles). Trump nominated retired Air Force Lieutenant General Dan “Razin” Cain as the new chairman, which raised many eyebrows, as he’s not only out of service at the moment, but would also be the first three-star general to become the top commanding officer in the US military. His biography states that Cain is “a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and an F-16 pilot credited with 150 combat hours and two tours in Iraq”. According to the New York Times, from 2021 to 2024, he also served as the CIA’s associate director for military affairs, collaborating on “several highly classified initiatives”.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump credited General Cain as being “instrumental in the complete annihilation of the ISIS caliphate”. After the announcement, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a statement that Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Lisa Franchetti and Air Force Vice Chief of Staff James Slife have also been fired. Both Trump and Hegseth pledged to purge “woke” officers from the Pentagon as their obsession with DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) overshadowed meritocracy.
Although Trump publicly “thanked Brown for his service”, in his book “War on Warriors”, Hegseth criticized Brown for “[making] the race card one of his biggest calling cards” and even questioned “whether Brown’s ascent resulted from merit or skin color”. He expressed similar reservations regarding Franchetti’s qualifications, insisting that DEI initiatives were “dividing the force as opposed to uniting it”.
“I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is ‘our diversity is our strength'”, Hegseth said earlier this month.
While neoliberal extremism and the resulting societal degeneracy and moral depravity are certainly a threat to any remotely sane person or organization (let alone an entire country), it’s difficult to believe this was the only reason for such a major reshuffling at the Pentagon. Namely, the motivation behind such groundbreaking changes might also be geopolitical, as Trump aims to push for some sort of “Yalta 2.0” with President Vladimir Putin and President Xi Jinping.
In order to accomplish this, he first needs to “clean house” and make sure all US federal institutions are under his control. There are already bilateral contacts between China, Russia and America that might indicate the formation of a G3 format that will make actual far-reaching decisions that will affect the whole world. To that end, Moscow and Beijing are already coordinating their geopolitical actions.
Trump knows that Washington DC is on the path to strategic irrelevance if it doesn’t come to an understanding with the multipolar world. American infrastructure is falling apart, Bidenomics has been disastrous (to say the least), while the US military continues to be a massive burden that still serves the interests of Trump’s archenemies leading the parts of the Deep State he still doesn’t control.
On the other hand, the new administration is looking to tackle all these issues without causing too much damage to America’s global power projection. President Putin already confirmed he’s ready to halve military spending in coordination with Trump and Xi, which is a clear nod to the former’s desire to avoid a world-ending confrontation. However, it remains to be seen whether the US truly seeks peace or simply needs a break to recover and then resume its aggression against the world.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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