As part of our core mission to secure the nation and spend taxpayer dollars wisely, we're executing President Trump's priorities: peace through strength, restoring the warrior ethos, rebuilding our military, and reestablishing deterrence. We're welcoming Doge to help find fraud, waste, and abuse, and eliminate non-essential Biden priorities.
We're reorienting our budget away from those priorities to build a lethal fighting force. This involves pulling funds from non-lethal programs and reinvesting in Trump's America-first priorities. Key programs like border activities, nuclear modernization, and cybersecurity are protected.
Finally, we're reevaluating our probationary workforce to ensure mission-critical contributions and accountability. We'll identify and eliminate redundancies, focusing on retaining the best and brightest employees based on merit. We're committed to communicating directly with you about these decisions.
Speaker 0: Greetings once again from the Defense Department. You, the American people, work really hard to support the men and women in uniform who keep our country safe. We, in turn, owe you transparency on what we're doing to accomplish our core mission, which is securing the nation and spending your taxpayer dollars, ours, wisely. We're gonna shoot straight with you. We want you, the American people, the taxpayers, to understand why we're making the decisions that we're making here.
First and foremost, as we're executing as quickly as possible the priorities of President Donald Trump, achieving peace through strength, restoring the warrior ethos, rebuilding our military, and reestablishing deterrence. Those are no brainers, and the American people gave a mandate to President Trump, and through him to us, to double down on those priorities, and that's exactly what we're doing. Now, the legacy media has, of course, a different agenda. You see the same clickbait headlines that I do. Time after time, the media distorts good news stories or often just gets them flat wrong.
In many cases, well, in most cases, they have an agenda. Other times, they are just lazy, as they often are, and they don't take time to actually understand the facts. I encourage you to take that media, those negative reports about important decisions that we're making at the department with a gigantic grain of salt, please. Ever since I've taken this position, the only thing I care about is doing right by the war fighters, by the troops. In short, we want the biggest, most badass military on the planet, on God's green earth.
I'm in this room right now, but I'm not alone. Behind the camera are lots of vets and military family members, along with other people who, like you, are invested in exactly what that core mission is. So when we make decisions that are misreported in the media, we're gonna try to get to you as quickly as possible. And not just me, it'll be other people as well, so you understand the real thought process behind them, and then how they relate to our core mission of fighting and winning war hopefully deterring them, but fighting and winning wars and then how we spend your taxpayer dollars wisely to accomplish that mission. So to that end, we have three stories that have come out.
Stay with me. Three stories over the past couple of days that I want to update you on. The first is Doge. They're here, and we're welcoming them. In fact, right over there, about twenty minutes ago, just met with them.
And we're going to be incorporating into what we're doing at DOD, everything they're doing to find fraud, waste, and abuse, in the largest discretionary budget in the federal government. They're going to have broad access, obviously with all the safeguards on classification, they know that, many of them are vets, they care just like we do, To find the redundancies and identify the last vestiges of Biden priorities, the DEI, the woke, the climate change BS, that's not core to our mission, and we're gonna get rid of it all. With Doge, we're focusing as much as we can on headquarters and fat and redundancies and top line stuff that allows us to reinvest elsewhere. We welcome Doge, and finding those efficiencies is how we save taxpayer dollars. That is a good thing that of course is being distorted through the media, their hyperventilation, and it just goes entirely unreported for the most part.
Now the second story in the news is our work reorienting the budget that we inherited. We inherited that budget one month ago from the Biden administration. We are refocusing, that's a keyword, our existing budget away from the Biden priorities that frankly were all over the map to president Trump's priorities of building a lethal fighting force. The media wants to call these exclusively cuts, but it's the opposite, of course, as always is the case. I've got the memo right here.
It's clear as a bell. Now beginning right away, we are pulling around 8% or $50,000,000,000 from the Biden budget. We're planning. This is planning for this year that we will move away from woke Biden era nonlethal programs and instead spend that money on president Trump's America first peace through strength priorities for our national budget. First of all, remember, this is all planning.
We're asking the services to plan. So it's not a cut. It's refocusing and reinvesting existing funds into building a force that protects you, the American people. We also list on page two, which I've marked up here in our memo, what is not part of the 8% refocusing of funds. It's stated very clearly here.
Southwest border activities, combating transnational criminal organizations, an audit, nuclear modernization, Virginia class submarines, the Golden Dome or Iron Dome, one way attack drones, UAVs, cyber security, core readiness, training, the defense industrial base, and it goes on. They and other key programs are off the table under this program. They're too important, as are many other things. So this is great news for taxpayers and for our national security. That's a full stop.
We'll just put a period on that one. And third, and the third and final bogus story, that is out there is around our reevaluation of our probationary workforce. Now this is part of something that was mandated by an executive order from the president. Remember, president Trump was elected. He has the positive the prerogative to to advance executive orders.
Our job is to follow them, and we're doing that. This reevaluation of probationary employees is being done across government, not just at the defense department, but we believe in the goals of the program and our leaders are carrying out that review carefully and swiftly. Now bottom line, it is simply not in the public interest to retain individuals whose contributions are not mission critical and to restore accountability within the federal workforce. Taxpayers deserve to have us take a really thorough look at our workforce top to bottom, and it will be top to bottom, to see where we can find and eliminate redundancies. Now common sense would tell us where we should start.
Right? We start with poor performers amongst our probationary employees because that is common sense and you want the best and brightest. So when you look at head count, we're gonna be thoughtful, but we're also gonna be aggressive up and down the chain to find the places where we can ensure the best and brightest are promoted based on merit. And then we're going go out and put out a hiring freeze and take more time to identify on a performance based standard who we're gonna hire and reward hard working employees who are central to the core war fighting mission. So we're gonna take a little bit more time, make sure top to bottom we're doing a review, those who we need, who are the best and brightest are gonna stay, those who are underperformers won't.
We'll continue to shoot straight with you. We've got your back. We're motivated to rebuild the most capable military in the world. That's why I'm here. That's what the president has asked me to do.
But doing so does require tough decisions, and we are prepared to make them. But in the process, we want to communicate with you directly rather than through the filter of media outlets. And it's not just gonna be me. You're gonna see Sean Parnell and Graham Allen and others here in the department aggressively ensuring you got you get the the real info in real time, helping you understand what's really going on at the department. So our warfighters and taxpayers deserve, of course, no less than that.
And we'll, you know, we'll keep reporting back to you from time to time what we're seeing, and we appreciate your support. We're not gonna get everything perfect, but we're gonna do it earnestly. And we're gonna do it on behalf of president Trump's leadership in making our military once again the most lethal, badass fighting force on the planet to keep our country safe. God bless you, and we're gonna keep fighting.
