The Pentagon's Budget Priority? Maintaining Golf Courses

 The Pentagon owns 145 golf courses. As Trump cuts key government services, we found it aims to spend on sand traps and clubhouses.

By Nick Turse, The Intercept

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says he has a singular mission. “Your job [as secretary] is to make sure that it’s lethality, lethality, lethality. Everything else is gone. Everything else that distracts from that shouldn’t be happening,” he said during his confirmation process. Since taking the helm at the Pentagon, Hegseth has doubled down. “We do warfighting here at the Department of Defense,” he said at a Pentagon town hall, demanding a “laser focus on readiness, lethality, and warfighting.”

Not everyone at the Defense Department seems to have gotten the message. Right now, the U.S. military is looking to pour money into the renovation of 35 golf course sand traps at the Woodlawn Golf Course at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Contracting documents show that Air Force Special Operations Command also wants to purchase sterile mushroom compost for the golf course greens at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico. It is also looking into hydroseeding at that same course. The Army, for its part, plans to issue a service contract that will cover maintenance in the golf course clubhouse at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York.

What golf has to do with lethality is a question that the Defense Department failed to answer. Nor would the Pentagon weigh in on the hundreds of millions of dollars wrapped up in, or swallowed up by, military golf courses over decades. The Pentagon did not provide a full tally of its current inventory of golf courses, which The Intercept put at around 145. What is clear is that critics have been raising alarms about the military’s golf obsession for at least 60 years, and, despite claims of a new dawn at the Pentagon, putting-green pork is still par for the course.

“The military shouldn’t be in the golf resort business,” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending.

The courses instead tend to serve a clientele of military retirees and dependents. Some are open to public membership. Service members, he said, are seldom primary beneficiaries. “They don’t have the spare time to go golfing for hours during the week,” Murphy said.

Even at a time of rampant cost-cutting across the federal government — including calls from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency to cut as many as 80,000 jobs from the Department of Veterans Affairs — the U.S military’s golf habit is not on chopping block.