In a tweet late Monday night, President Donald Trump squashed rumors that the Pentagon planned to cut military health care by $2.2 billion.

“A proposal by Pentagon officials to slash Military Healthcare by $2.2 billion dollars has been firmly and totally rejected by me. We will do nothing to hurt our great Military professionals & heroes as long as I am your President. Thank you!” Trump tweeted.

The day before Trump’s tweet, Politico reported that Pentagon officials were working with Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s “to eliminate inefficiencies within the Pentagon’s coffers” by slashing military health care, reports Politico. The cost-cutting measures are part of “a sweeping effort” that was to be rolled out over the next five years.

Approximately 9.5 million active-duty military personnel, retirees and dependents rely on the military health system currently.

Two senior defense officials said the cuts would endanger the health of millions of military personnel and their families, even as the nation is in the midst of fighting COVID-19. As recently as April, the Department of Defense deployed over 500 military medical personnel to New York City  to support the city’s hospitals, yet the plans to cut the military health system seemed to have been made without any thought to the ongoing pandemic.

“A lot of the decisions were made in dark, smoky rooms, and it was driven by arbitrary numbers of cuts,” said one senior defense official. “They wanted to book the savings to be able to report it.”

Cutting military health care “imperils the ability to support our combat forces overseas,” a second senior official told Politico, arguing that Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s moves would weaken the military’s ability to protect the health of active-duty troops abroad. “They’re actively pushing very skilled medical people out the door.”

The report of planned military health care cuts is even more mystifying given that the Pentagon’s coffers have swelled every year Trump has been president.

For fiscal year 2020,  Trump approved a colossal defense bill that gave the military $738 billion to spend, including $12.2 billion for 90 brand-new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets, $1 billion for 48 AH-64E attack helicopters, $2 billion for 24 Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fighters, $1.1 billion for 8 Boeing F-15EX jets, and $3 billion for the U.S. Air Force’s new long-range stealth B-21 bomber. The budget also approved $34.7 billion spending on the Navy, including line items for the construction of three DDG-51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, a frigate, two amphibious ships, three unmanned surface vessels, and 10 Virginia-class attack submarines. The bill also authorized the Pentagon to buy 165 Abrams tanks for a price of over $2 billion.

On top of all that, the Defense Department will get another $29.4 billion for new defense spending, including over $8 billion for defense procurement and acquisition, if Senate Republicans succeed in passing their coronavirus stimulus package.

In the midst of a record-setting defense budget and hundreds of billions spent on shiny new jets and ships, it’s truly puzzling how the Pentagon could have decided that “cost-cutting” was needed and the place to start was with military health care. The move would be perplexing in the best of times, but it would be downright disastrous as the US battles the coronavirus pandemic and sets records for numbers of people infected with COVID-19.

It’s easy to see why Trump nixed this.