Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered staff cuts at the congressionally mandated Pentagon office that oversees tests of major weapons systems, to ensure they’re effective and maintainable, before billions of dollars are spent on them.

Hegseth framed the decision to scale back the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation as a cost-cutting move that would save $300 million each year. An internal review identified redundant and nonessential functions that affect the department’s “ability to rapidly and effectively deploy the best systems to the warfighter,” he said in a memo on Wednesday.

The office will be reduced to 30 civilians and 15 on assignment from the military, Hegseth added. The rest will go to other departments or be fired.

That’s roughly half of the current staff of 94 people, according to a Pentagon statement.

The office doesn’t conduct testing but reviews the adequacy of service test plans and results. Its findings are widely read by lawmakers and the public and provide a reality check on systems’ combat effectiveness and weaknesses that the Pentagon and services are loath to acknowledge.

“The Trump administration is threatening the lives of our service members and hurting our national security,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement later Wednesday. “How is it ‘efficient’ to gut the office responsible for testing our equipment and making sure it’s safe for service members to use? This dangerous decision should be immediately reversed,” she said.

Most recently, the test office disputed an Army claim that its long-delayed hypersonic weapon would be ready for fielding by Sept. 30. And it has consistently provided unvarnished assessments of the F-35 jet’s underwhelming mission readiness and chronic reliability and software shortcomings.

The testing office “is the key link between an idea for a weapon and it’s being effective on any battlefield,” said Winslow Wheeler, a former Government Accountability Office weapons analyst and Senate aide. “The acquisition bureaucracy in the Pentagon and advocates in industry and Congress have long tried to defang rigorous testing and honest reporting under the false claim that it delays fielding good weapons.”

Hegseth’s action comes about a month after acting-test Director Raymond O’Toole sent a memo to the Pentagon leadership, including the Missile Defense Agency, outlining his office’s plans to oversee testing of the administration’s Golden Dome missile defense program.

According to the the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. may have to spend as much as $542 billion over 20 years to develop and launch space-based interceptors as part of the program. Much of the technology around such a nationwide missile-defense system remains unproven.

“Secretary Hegseth’s memo signals a fundamental misunderstanding — or rejection — of why Congress created an independent operational testing office in the first place,” said Greg Williams, a spokesman for the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group. “The law was designed to ensure weapons systems are evaluated outside the chain of command that develops and promotes them.”

©2025 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.