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The head of one of the biggest US defense contractors is making an appeal to Trump’s budgetary hatchet men, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Chris Kubasik, CEO of L3Harris, said the military needs to streamline and centralize its purchasing and reduce accounting standards for contractors.
Kubasik’s letter to the new Department of Government Efficiency, the quasi-official group tasked with cutting federal spending, is a model for corporate executives seeking policy changes from the incoming administration. It blends praise for Trump with specific deregulatory requests and language designed to appeal: “Make America’s national defense ecosystem great again,” Kubasik writes.
“It feels like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here for change,” Kubasik told Semafor in an interview. “With the openness and the transparency of the [incoming] administration and the desire for change and reform, it didn’t take long internally for us to say, ‘We have to get to the DOGE.’”
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L3Harris, which makes sensors and satellites, has also aligned itself with Silicon Valley defense-tech industrialists looking to upend the Pentagon establishment. That camp has Trump’s ear: Musk wants to jettison the F-35 fighter plane, and Ramaswamy has urged more spending on drones. Kubasik said in the interview that the Pentagon should be “more commercial” and “open up the aperture and allow more innovative companies to participate.”
At one-sixth of the federal budget, the military is an obvious place for DOGE to seek savings, though Trump’s controversial nominee for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at his confirmation hearing that he supports spending at least 3% of GDP on defense, which implies no major cuts.
Kubasik said he hasn’t met Hegseth, but “look[s] forward to meeting and working with him and his team.”