Jesse Watters Uses Jon Stewart Interview to Rip ‘Corrupt’ Defense Spending

Fox News host Jesse Watters and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) had a conversation about U.S. defense spending that is extremely rare on mainstream news shows.

“The Pentagon’s budget is more than China, India, Russia, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Germany, France, Japan, and South Korea combined,” Watters said on Monday’s Jesse Watters Primetime. “We give our military almost a trillion dollars a year. So where does the money go?”

The host aired clips of Jon Stewart interviewing Deputy Secretary Defense Kathleen Hicks last week about the Pentagon’s $858 billion budget.

Watters noted the Pentagon has failed the only five audits it’s ever had. He then showed video of Hicks telling Stewart, “The ability to pass an audit or, the fact that the DoD has not passed an audit is not suggestive of waste, fraud, and abuse.”

“If I give you a billion dollars and you can’t tell me what happened to it, that to me is wasteful,” Stewart responded.

Watters noted that the Department of Defense cannot account for more than 60% of its $3.5 trillion in assets.

“Someone’s getting rich,” he said before welcoming Rubio to the program.

“Senator, do you have any idea where the money goes?” he asked.

“We have a big problem in this country, and it’s not just how the money’s being spent,” Rubio replied. “We actually are struggling to make these things. So, it tells you that in addition to all this money that’s being poured into all the military, we have a military-industrial base that’s completely broken. I mean, it’s one of the things they haven’t even told you. It’s become so concentrated in the hands of four or five providers. There’s really only three or four companies in the world that do this stuff.”

The senator lamented, “There’s very little competition on these contracts, so they can virtually almost charge us anything they want.”

Watters referenced the Chinese surveillance balloon the U.S. military shot down earlier this year.

“So, if the Chinese float like a $100 balloon that’s spying on us and we can’t pop it, but we have a trillion-dollar F-35 plane that doesn’t ever get off the ground, like, what good is that weapon system doing?” Watters asked. “Is it just making the defense contractors rich and not keeping us safe?”

“Yeah,” Rubio responded, explaining that sometimes only one or two companies will bid for a Pentagon contract. “And oftentimes in the process of developing it, they’ll come back and say, ‘Hey, this is gonna cost more than we thought when we put that bid out, when we offered that bid. So we’re gonna have to increase the price.’ And then if you don’t fund it or you don’t pay for it, then it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re against national security or national defense.'”

“It’s corrupt,” Watters replied.

While Rubio may be concerned about waste at the Pentagon, he was one of 83 senators to vote for the $858 billion National Defense Authorization Act in December.

Watch above via Fox News.