Bernie Sanders says Musk is right on military spending

“The Pentagon recently failed its seventh consecutive audit, suggesting that the agency’s leadership has little idea how its annual budget of more than $800 billion is spent”

President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency has energized Republicans, but it’s also receiving attention from some liberal lawmakers, including Bernie Sanders.

Sanders, the independent from Vermont, wants to help Trump’s DOGE, which is co-led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.

Sanders has his eye on the U.S. military budget.

“Elon Musk is right,” Sanders wrote on X. “The Pentagon, with a budget of $886 billion, just failed its 7th audit in a row. It’s lost track of billions. Last year, only 13 senators voted against the Military Industrial Complex and a defense budget full of waste and fraud. That must change.”

Sanders comments come before the U.S. House is set to vote on a compromise version of the National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes nearly $900 billion to support U.S. military service members, infrastructure, and defense capabilities during the 2025 fiscal year. The 1,813-page document released Saturday by the Senate and House Armed Services Committees outlines U.S. defense policy priorities and their costs for 2025. Most of the proposed funds, $849.9 billion out of the $895.2 billion topline, would go to programs within the Department of Defense.

Ramaswamy and Musk wrote in a November op-ed that the military is on their list.

“The Pentagon recently failed its seventh consecutive audit, suggesting that the agency’s leadership has little idea how its annual budget of more than $800 billion is spent,” they wrote.

The U.S. Department of Defense’s annual audit once again resulted in a disclaimer opinion. That means the federal government’s largest agency can’t fully explain its spending. The disclaimer this year was expected. And it’s expected again next year. The Pentagon previously said it will be able to accurately account for its spending by 2027.

Musk has gone even farther in his criticism of military spending. He called the military’s most expensive ever project, the F-35 stealth fighter, “obsolete.”

“The F-35 design was broken at the requirements level, because it was required to be too many things to too many people,” Musk wrote on X. “This made it an expensive & complex jack of all trades, master of none. Success was never in the set of possible outcomes. And manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway. Will just get pilots killed.”

TCS - F-35 — U.S. Air Force F-35 Lightning IIs from the 356th Fighter Squadron at Eielson Air Force Base fly side by side with Republic of Korea Air Force F-35s from the 151st and 152nd Combat Flight Squadrons as part of a bilateral exercise over the Yellow Sea, Republic of Korea, July 12, 2022.

*Senior Airman Trevor Gordnier | U.S. Air Force phot*o

In May, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found the cost of the Pentagon’s most expensive weapon system was projected to increase by more than 40% despite plans to use the stealth fighter less, in part because of reliability issues.

The U.S. Department of Defense’s F-35 Lightning II is the most advanced and costly weapon system in the U.S. arsenal. It’s a joint, multinational program that includes the Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, seven international partners and foreign military sales customers.

The Pentagon has about 630 F-35s. It plans to buy about 1,800 more. And it intends to use them through 2088. DOD estimates the F-35 program will cost over $2 trillion to buy, operate, and sustain over its lifetime.

The Pentagon hasn’t responded to Musk’s comments. Late last month, a reporter asked Defense Department Press Secretary Air Force Major General Pat Ryder about Musk’s comments on the F-35.

“Yeah, as I’m sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I’m not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35.”

Trump set lofty goals for the new group.

“It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project,’ of our time,” Trump’s announcement said. “Republican politicians have dreamed about the objectives of ‘DOGE’ for a very long time.”

The original Manhattan Project was a research and development project during the second World War that led to the creation of nuclear weapons.

Ramaswamy and Musk have previously outlined their plans for DOGE, which could include mass federal layoffs and reductions in federal regulations. Musk and Ramaswamy said they won’t rely on action from Congress and will instead “focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws.”

Brett Rowland

Investigative Reporter

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Massive government child-care plan wreaking havoc across Ontario

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Massive government child-care plan wreaking havoc across Ontario

Published on June 30, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

It’s now more than four years since the federal Liberal government pledged $30 billion in spending over five years for $10-per-day national child care, and more than three years since Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government signed a $13.2 billion deal with the federal government to deliver this child-care plan.

Not surprisingly, with massive government funding came massive government control. While demand for child care has increased due to the government subsidies and lower out-of-pocket costs for parents, the plan significantly restricts how child-care centres operate (including what items participating centres may purchase), and crucially, caps the proportion of government funds available to private for-profit providers.

What have families and taxpayers got for this enormous government effort? Widespread child-care shortages across Ontario.

For example, according to the City of Ottawa, the number of children (aged 0 to 5 years) on child-care waitlists has ballooned by more than 300 per cent since 2019, there are significant disparities in affordable child-care access “with nearly half of neighbourhoods underserved, and limited access in suburban and rural areas,” and families face “significantly higher” costs for before-and-after-school care for school-age children.

In addition, Ottawa families find the system “complex and difficult to navigate” and “fewer child care options exist for children with special needs.” And while 42 per cent of surveyed parents need flexible child care (weekends, evenings, part-time care), only one per cent of child-care centres offer these flexible options. These are clearly not encouraging statistics, and show that a government-knows-best approach does not properly anticipate the diverse needs of diverse families.

Moreover, according to the Peel Region’s 2025 pre-budget submission to the federal government (essentially, a list of asks and recommendations), it “has maximized its for-profit allocation, leaving 1,460 for-profit spaces on a waitlist.” In other words, families can’t access $10-per-day child care—the central promise of the plan—because the government has capped the number of for-profit centres.

Similarly, according to Halton Region’s pre-budget submission to the provincial government, “no additional families can be supported with affordable child care” because, under current provincial rules, government funding can only be used to reduce child-care fees for families already in the program.

And according to a March 2025 Oxford County report, the municipality is experiencing a shortage of child-care staff and access challenges for low-income families and children with special needs. The report includes a grim bureaucratic predication that “provincial expansion targets do not reflect anticipated child care demand.”

Child-care access is also a problem provincewide. In Stratford, which has a population of roughly 33,000, the municipal government reports that more than 1,000 children are on a child-care waitlist. Similarly in Port Colborne (population 20,000), the city’s chief administrative officer told city council in April 2025 there were almost 500 children on daycare waitlists at the beginning of the school term. As of the end of last year, Guelph and Wellington County reportedly had a total of 2,569 full-day child-care spaces for children up to age four, versus a waitlist of 4,559 children—in other words, nearly two times as many children on a waitlist compared to the number of child-care spaces.

More examples. In Prince Edward County, population around 26,000, there are more than 400 children waitlisted for licensed daycare. In Kawartha Lakes and Haliburton County, the child-care waitlist is about 1,500 children long and the average wait time is four years. And in St. Mary’s, there are more than 600 children waitlisted for child care, but in recent years town staff have only been able to move 25 to 30 children off the wait list annually.

The numbers speak for themselves. Massive government spending and control over child care has created havoc for Ontario families and made child-care access worse. This cannot be a surprise. Quebec’s child-care system has been largely government controlled for decades, with poor results. Why would Ontario be any different? And how long will Premier Ford allow this debacle to continue before he asks the new prime minister to rethink the child-care policy of his predecessor?

Matthew Lau

Adjunct Scholar, Fraser Institute

Business

Canada Caves: Carney ditches digital services tax after criticism from Trump

Published on June 30, 2025

Todayville

From The Center Square

By Brett Rowland

Canada caved to President Donald Trump demands by pulling its digital services tax hours before it was to go into effect on Monday.

Trump said Friday that he was ending all trade talks with Canada over the digital services tax, which he called a direct attack on the U.S. and American tech firms. The DST required foreign and domestic businesses to pay taxes on some revenue earned from engaging with online users in Canada.

“Based on this egregious Tax, we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately,” the president said. “We will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period.”

By Sunday, Canada relented in an effort to resume trade talks with the U.S., it’s largest trading partner.

“To support those negotiations, the Minister of Finance and National Revenue, the Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, announced today that Canada would rescind the Digital Services Tax (DST) in anticipation of a mutually beneficial comprehensive trade arrangement with the United States,” according to a statement from Canada’s Department of Finance.

Canada’s Department of Finance said that Prime Minister Mark Carney and Trump agreed to resume negotiations, aiming to reach a deal by July 21.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Monday that the digital services tax would hurt the U.S.

“Thank you Canada for removing your Digital Services Tax which was intended to stifle American innovation and would have been a deal breaker for any trade deal with America,” he wrote on X.

Earlier this month, the two nations seemed close to striking a deal.

Trump said he and Carney had different concepts for trade between the two neighboring countries during a meeting at the G7 Summit in Kananaskis, in the Canadian Rockies.

Asked what was holding up a trade deal between the two nations at that time, Trump said they had different concepts for what that would look like.

“It’s not so much holding up, I think we have different concepts, I have a tariff concept, Mark has a different concept, which is something that some people like, but we’re going to see if we can get to the bottom of it today.”

Shortly after taking office in January, Trump hit Canada and Mexico with 25% tariffs for allowing fentanyl and migrants to cross their borders into the U.S. Trump later applied those 25% tariffs only to goods that fall outside the free-trade agreement between the three nations, called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Trump put a 10% tariff on non-USMCA compliant potash and energy products. A 50% tariff on aluminum and steel imports from all countries into the U.S. has been in effect since June 4. Trump also put a 25% tariff on all cars and trucks not built in the U.S.

Economists, businesses and some publicly traded companies have warned that tariffs could raise prices on a wide range of consumer products.

Trump has said he wants to use tariffs to restore manufacturing jobs lost to lower-wage countries in decades past, shift the tax burden away from U.S. families, and pay down the national debt.

A tariff is a tax on imported goods paid by the person or company that imports them. The importer can absorb the cost of the tariffs or try to pass the cost on to consumers through higher prices.

Trump’s tariffs give U.S.-produced goods a price advantage over imported goods, generating revenue for the federal government.