Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen chainsawed a mini Pentagon on Capitol Hill Tuesday to advocate military budget “accountability.”
Cohen spoke alongside retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson and Josephine Guilbeau, a former US Army All Source Intelligence Analyst, where they highlighted the “wasteful” spending coming from the Pentagon.
The Department of Pentagon Excess, a website created by Up In Arms, a campaign launched by Cohen to reduce military spending, is calling for cutting Pentagon spending by 30%, or $303 billion a year. The D.O.P.E. campaign aims to take spending from the Pentagon and put it into the “pockets of Americans.”
“This isn’t monopoly money, it’s your money,” Cohen said after chainsawing the mini Pentagon outside the Capitol. “Each year we could return just about $2,000 to every single tax payer in America just by cutting Pentagon waste.”
The political stunt took place on the eve of a likely government shutdown that would have military and civilian personnel working unpaid, and on the same day that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth pledged to root out “decades of decay” at the department.
Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Jerry Greenfield split from the company earlier this month, claiming the company is being “silenced” by its parent company.
DEPARTMENT OF WAR’S DOGE EFFORTS DON’T REDUCE EXPECTED SPENDING, REALLOCATE FUNDING
There are currently about a dozen Department of Government Efficiency staffers who are based out of the Pentagon, “dedicated to helping Secretary Hegseth execute on his priorities to make the Department a more efficient steward of taxpayer dollars since the team was established in February,” Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson told the Washington Examiner. The DOGE staffers have identified and eliminated roughly $15 billion of what they believe are wasteful contracts since February, according to a Pentagon official.
As the funding fight unfolds with a looming government shutdown and a possible seven-week continuing resolution, the Trump administration is looking for Congress to pass the U.S.’s first-ever trillion-dollar defense budget. The bump amounts to a roughly 13% increase in defense spending for Fiscal Year 2026.
Mike Brest contributed to this article.
