Republicans shouldn’t be trying to slash government spending in a weak economy with low interest rates in the first place, but given that they are, they should be looking at the 20% of the federal budget that goes to the Pentagon. So it’s encouraging that a few Republicans have been willing to say that defence cuts should be on the table. In an op-ed in last week’s Washington Examiner, Tom Coburn, a Senator from Oklahoma, wrote that Congress should take “common sense steps like freezing defense spending until the Pentagon can pass an audit and remove all nondefense spending from the Pentagon’s budget.”