With more members of Congress willing to cooperate with President-elect Donald Trump and the incoming Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), one area of government spending sure to be prickly is defense spending, which was part of the discussion during Representative Cory Mills' (R-FL) recent appearance on Fox Business's Bottom Line, saying it demonstrated the need for banning stock trading between Congressmen and moratoriums on going into lobbying.
Co-host Dagen McDowell suggested many Republicans would be in for a "rude awakening," as their support of DOGE was only lip service, because defense spending is going to be a target of DOGE heads Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, as the Pentagon has failed seven audits in a row.
As a result, McDowell said Rep. Mills and similar members of Congress will need to "publicly embarrass members of your own party" because of the "sacred cow" status of the Defense Department, and many of those Republicans go into lobbying for the defense contractors.
Hence, Rep. Mills said, "One, we need to ban stock trading for every member of Congress and their spouse. We have to put a moratorium in place that says you cannot lobby or try to go to a business or corporation that you actually oversaw within your committee of jurisdiction. We have to cut the conflicts of interest, but we also have to understand that we need procurement reform. We need to guarantee that we are able to have a strong and robust military, but at the same time, we need efficiencies in place that actually treat the warfighter."
The Florida Congressman expressed support for increasing soldiers' salaries, quality of life, and family care, "but what I am not about is building the coffers of these defense industries that continue to try and overspend and over cost and basically not deliver," pointing to the F-35 program condemned by former Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) in October as an example.
"These are the things that we need to be auditing and holding them accountable for because this is the issue. [It] is that we have generals who oversee these programs, they can go sit on the boards of the very companies they oversee after a one year cooldown period. We need to go ahead and get a 10-year moratorium in place and guarantee that we can cut the conflicts of interest," Mills concluded.
