Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth announced that his department will end "unnecessary spending", including subsidies for two prestigious universities in the United States, reported Agence France-Presse, BTA reported.
"At this point, we are signing a memorandum that orders the cancellation of Defense Department contracts worth a total of $ 5.1 billion," Hegseth said in a video posted on the social network “Ex“.
He announced this as part of a federal program for large-scale cost cutting, undertaken by Elon Musk, who heads a special department tasked with this task.
Among the expenses subject to reduction, which has so far been The Pentagon has made $500 million in grants to Northwestern University and Cornell University, which it describes as "university institutions that tolerate anti-Semitism and support diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that actually divide people," Hegseth said.
Cornell said today that it had received 75 orders from the Department of Defense to terminate contracts with the department related to research that is "very important to national defense, cybersecurity, and U.S. health care." According to the university’s statement, one of the suspended grants is for cancer research.
However, Hegseth said that the 11 contracts that will be terminated and were related to diversity, equity and inclusion programs are for climate, coronavirus response and related activities deemed non-essential.
"We need this money to improve the health care of our military and their families, not to pay consultants $500 an hour," Hegseth said.
The Pentagon’s budget for 2025 is about $850 billion. In February, a document from Hegseth, which was obtained by The Washington Post, ordered the development of measures to reduce that budget by 8 percent.