New Pentagon Team Targets Waste

The Pentagon aerial view with surrounding highways and parking lots
Photo: Austin Nooe / Shutterstock

The Pentagon just made its anti-waste drive permanent by creating a new team inside its budget office to root out duplicative programs and bloated red tape.

Story Snapshot

  • The Force Agility and Streamlining Team will sit in the Pentagon comptroller’s office and target waste and duplication.
  • Leaders say the group will identify inefficient spending and recommend fixes across the department.
  • The move follows years of warnings from the Government Accountability Office about weak, short-lived reforms.
  • Officials link the effort to broader pushes to modernize back-office systems and speed funds to troops.

Pentagon Creates Permanent Team To Cut Waste

Deputy Defense leadership established the Force Agility and Streamlining Team as a standing group inside the comptroller’s office. The team’s mission is to find and flag wasteful, inefficient, and duplicative programs and processes across the department. The move makes the anti-waste push part of daily financial management, not a short-term campaign. A contemporaneous report cites a signed memorandum setting this up as a permanent organization under the Pentagon’s comptroller structure.

Defense officials and coverage describe a broad scope. The team will map overlapping efforts, review administrative systems, and recommend changes that save money without hurting readiness. Reporting says the group aims to reduce duplicate programs and unnecessary overhead that slow support to troops. Leaders present it as part of a wider agenda under current defense leadership to streamline how the department budgets, buys, and manages routine tasks while protecting warfighting priorities.

Why This Matters For Taxpayers And Troops

The Government Accountability Office has warned for years that the Defense Department repeats reform cycles without lasting fixes. Auditors called for formal processes, clear baselines, and standard ways to measure savings. They also urged leadership follow-through so gains survive turnover and elections. The new team’s placement in the comptroller’s office could help, since that office manages budgets and can track results. But progress will depend on consistent rules and transparent reporting of savings claims.

Recent steps point to a push to modernize the back office. A Pentagon working group explored moving budget transfers off slow, error-prone portable document formats and into modern financial software. That change could speed funds to units and cut manual work. The new anti-waste team could reinforce those updates by documenting benefits, fixing bottlenecks, and spreading working solutions across services, rather than letting each branch reinvent the same process.

How FAST Could Work And What To Watch Next

Officials say the team will search for overlap, rank fixes by impact, and push changes through budget and policy channels. That means it can spotlight duplicative programs early in the planning cycle and press for consolidation or cancellation. It can also target paperwork loops that add cost but no value. To prove results, the team will need baselines, timelines, and audited numbers that show how much time and money reforms actually save, service by service.

For readers left and right who worry about a government that serves insiders first, this move speaks to a shared concern: waste drains resources from real needs. If the team cuts bloat and speeds dollars to units, families may see faster reimbursements, better parts on shelves, and fewer delays. Watch for three signs of seriousness: public metrics tied to the comptroller’s reports, clear decisions on duplicate programs, and fewer manual steps in routine finance tasks over the next budget cycles.

Sources:

miragenews.com, washingtontimes.com, breakingdefense.com, gao.gov

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