US defense stocks faced pressure in late afternoon trading after The Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had directed senior Pentagon leaders to prepare for an 8% budget cut over the next five years.
Here's more from WaPo's report:
Hegseth ordered the proposed cuts to be drawn up by Feb. 24, according to the memo, which includes a list of 17 categories that the Trump administration wants exempted. Among them: operations at the southern US border, modernization of nuclear weapons and missile defense, and acquisition of one-way attack drones and other munitions.
. . .
The memo calls for continued "support agency" funding for several major regional headquarters, including Indo-Pacific Command, Northern Command and Space Command. Notably absent from that list is European Command, which has had a leading role in executing US strategy during the war in Ukraine; Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East; and Africa Command, which manages the several thousand troops the Pentagon has spread across that continent.
"President Trump's charge to DoD is clear: achieve Peace through Strength," Hegseth wrote in the memo, dated Tuesday. "The time for preparation is over — we must act urgently to revive the warrior ethos, rebuild our military, and reestablish deterrence. Our budget will resource the fighting force we need, cease unnecessary defense spending, reject excessive bureaucracy, and drive actionable reform including progress on the audit."
WaPo's report was enough to erase early morning gains in major defense stocks.
The most notable price action was Palantir Technologies' multi-month parabolic move halted, and abruptly reversed, down 12% in late afternoon trading.
"The Pentagon has failed 7 audits in a row. Its size & decentralization of $4 trillion in assets, dispersed across fifty states & +4,500 locations worldwide, is blamed for its accounting failure. Time to start shrinking this behemoth," bond expert Cate Long wrote on X.
WaPo continued:
The proposed cuts, if adopted, would mark the largest effort to rein in Pentagon spending since 2013, when congressionally mandated budget reductions known as sequestration took effect. Those cuts were perceived as a crisis in the Pentagon at the time, and grew increasingly unpopular with Republicans and Democrats alike as their effects on the military's ability to train and be ready for war became clear.
In recent weeks, President Trump told Fox News' Bret Baier that he was directing DOGE to investigate the Pentagon.
"We're going to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse," Trump said.