Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that $5.1 billion in federal defense contracts will be cut as the Defense Department works with the Department of Government Efficiency to eliminate waste in the federal government.
Hegseth said the cuts, which the DOD announced Thursday evening, will bring the total number of cut spending to “nearly $6 billion.” The new cuts include various consulting contracts specifically regarding IT services.
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New @DOGE findings, this time it’s $5.1 billion. pic.twitter.com/vHRnDHZSUS
— Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (@SecDef) April 10, 2025
“We’re signing a memo, right now, directing the termination of $5.1 billion in DOD contracts, not million. That’s with a B, $5.1 billion in DOD contracts for ancillary things like consulting and other nonessential services,” Hegseth said in a video posted on X.
The memo includes terminating a “Defense Health Agency contract for consulting services from Accenture, Deloitte, Booz Allen, and other firms,” which Hegseth said could be done with the DOD civilian workforce, an Air Force contract with Accenture “to resell third-party Enterprise Cloud IT
Services, a Navy contract for “business process consulting services for administrative offices,” and a “DARPA contract for IT Helpdesk Services,” which Hegseth argued duplicative of existing services.
Booz Allen was among the government contractors that met with Trump administration officials last month to maintain their agreements with the government as various federal agencies examined the current arrangements.
Accenture, Deloitte, and Booz Allen have robust workforces that work with the federal government. Accenture’s federal services have more than 15,000 employees, while Deloitte and Booz Allen have an estimated 8,000 and 15,000 employees, respectively, in the Washington, D.C., area.
The consultants have been hit by government cuts before, including when the Trump administration rolled out cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs in recent months before reversing some of them.
“These contracts represent non-essential spending on third-party consultants to perform
services more efficiently performed by the highly skilled members of our DOD workforce using
existing resources,” Hegseth said in the memo.
He also ordered the termination of 11 other DOD contracts, which he argued “support diversity, equity and inclusion, climate, COVID-19 response, and nonessential activities.”
In the video posted to X, Hegseth also thanked DOGE for its partnership with the DOD to cut wasteful spending.
“Their job is to go out and find the stuff that we can get rid of, and then flow back into, drive back into warfighting capabilities here at the Department of Defense,” Hegseth said.