Entrepreneur Elon Musk, his White House Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and his staff in key management agencies have effectively taken control of domestic agencies’ agenda — reviewing them for elimination, cuts, or reforms, mostly supported by President Donald Trump’s base voters.

With exceptions for easy targets like border protection and foreign aid, most such reviews have been of domestic agencies. For these, his base knows most do stupid things because they have free (taxpayer) money and think they know how to use bureaucratic methods to make things work the way they want — although not necessarily how most people want. Musk has already achieved its main purpose of letting domestic bureaucrats know that the president is in charge and will exercise his power to reform their agencies.

It gets a bit tougher when it comes to functions that the national government really must perform and do well such as national defense, foreign policy, and intelligence. These are truly important and, in many ways, more complex and more in need of reform than domestic agencies. As noted here earlier, Musk, with his Space X background, actually has expertise in defense policy. Back at a 2020 air warfare symposium attended by top military officials, he challenged the Air Force’s reliance upon manned aircraft like the F-35 jet, then being redesigned for its next adaptation. (RELATED: New Ways of War and Meeting the Human Challenge)

Almost five years ago, Musk told attendees, “Locally autonomous drone warfare is where the future will be,” not manned aircraft. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, because this is dangerous, but it’s simply what will occur.” The audience was dismissive but a month later the Air Force combat commander told another group that earlier comments had forced him to reconsider whether to replace the F-35 or “start cutting in something else, like Elon talked about.” But it would take time.

The problem in the military is not necessarily incompetence, but it has a complex bureaucratic decision process that has a bias toward yesterday’s solutions. Like its Air brother, the Navy is also hooked on manned aircraft. But it is even more committed to outmoded, vulnerable, and extraordinarily expensive aircraft carriers, taking funds from everything else.

The Army’s glory is the World War II battlefield of tanks and field maneuvers. But its chief has publicly noted that the new Ukraine-type battlefield is now all trench lines — more like WWI than recent warfare — enforced by massed artillery which the U.S. basically eliminated in Iraq and Afghanistan. Field command posts are now basically “unsurvivable.” But traditional U.S. naval, air, and field operations have changed little since what Trump called our “unwinnable wars.”

The President’s Defense and Intelligence “Generals”

That is what led the president to choose Pete Hegseth as defense secretary. Although a combat veteran with a Bronze Star, Hegseth had a mere Major army officer background, well below a general’s status. This outsider — like Ulysses S. Grant and George S. Patton before him — was not part of the military elite establishment committed to the status quo. He was not even of high flag-grade general or admiral status, whose entry tests favor bureaucratic social skills over fighting ones. He would not even think of telling his Chinese opposite that he would warn him if his President became too warlike.

No, Hegseth said things like we should rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War. He argued not for continuity but that the “next commander in chief will need to clean house.” So Trump chose him and on his first trip abroad Hegseth undiplomatically told the world that any troops to defend Ukraine must come from Europe rather than the U.S. and he immediately redirected $50 billion of the defense budget to be used for war rather than for goodwill.

This difference shows throughout Trump’s appointments to national security positions. In many ways, the intelligence world is even more bureaucratized than defense, as longtime conservative Senate expert on the subject Angelo Codevilla demonstrated in a score of books.

While intelligence is important, daily ego trips to the commander-in-chief unrelated to defense operations are not. The whole history of the OSS, CIA, and DNI has been of failure based on machines and personnel easily permeated by double agents — including the CIA’s own top executive for Soviet affairs. Field agents were revealed by a defector to be overwhelmingly KGB. Just last year, a former CIA agent confessed he and his brother spied for China’s State Security Bureau.

No wonder that Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is even more of an outsider than Hegseth, as a former Democratic Congresswoman. She served in the Army for nearly 22 years, with two tours in the Middle East and one in Africa; but only as a lieutenant colonel. She had blamed a Republican president for Russia invading Ukraine and had met with Bashar al-Assad of Syria. She bluntly said that she believed today’s intelligence community is politically corrupt, pointing to the FBI spying on a Trump adviser in 2016 and the intelligence community suppressing facts on Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020.

Today she plans to make intelligence agencies more transparent, to shut down programs that she calls unconstitutional, and to allow agency dissenters to express their disagreements with their bosses’ conclusions.

As far as the FBI, its own inspector general publicly exposed that its top staff had improperly influenced the 2020 election, lied to its surveillance court, and generally biased its findings. FBI’s boss — former attorney general and Trump critic, William Barr — was asked if a Praetorian Guard mentality existed at the FBI, and in intelligence agencies generally. He replied this needs to be “carefully looked at because the use of foreign intelligence capabilities and counterintelligence capabilities against an American political campaign to me is unprecedented and it’s a serious red line that’s been crossed.”

That is why Kash Patel was picked as the new FBI leader. Unlike all previous FBI directors, he did not rise through Bureau ranks or other police agencies. He, however, was a federal prosecutor and a Trump defense secretary’s chief of staff. He even once said that he might fire “corrupt” FBI agents who worked on Jan. 6 cases. He told his Senate selection committee that he would be tough but ignore politics and follow the law. Democrats were concerned that he might ruin the FBI’s image — rather than being concerned with the FBI’s violations of its own procedures.

Like his solutions or not, it is clear that President Trump has appointed leaders in the defense and intel fields who know their agencies do not work well and seem to be willing to upset the status quo applecart to fix them. We shall see how well they perform in the months ahead. The odds probably favor bureaucracy but at least these three and their boss have the courage to try.

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Donald Devine is a senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C. He served as President Ronald Reagan’s civil service director during his first term in office. A former professor, he is the author of 11 books, including his most recent, The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order, and Ronald Reagan’s Enduring Principles.