"Everybody has to make a sacrifice," she told the Politico Internet journal on US politics. "I think we have to subject every federal dollar to the very harshest scrutiny."
Pelosi said curbing waste among contractors and the vast US military bureaucracy could provide "some room" to cut "five percent" from the defense budget without harming US troops in the field or veterans.
News that makes sense
Your trusted source for staying up-to-date with the world around you. Get free daily news updates and analysis, straight to your inbox.
"I think that if there is going to a spending freeze, it should be across the board," Politico quoted Pelosi as saying.
"That is to say, we all want a strong national defense, and we want to fund it in an appropriate way," she said. "But we are not here to protect defense contractors. And the fact is, if we have to cut spending, we should subject every dollar to that same scrutiny."
Her comments came as Obama was due to defend his election-year spending curbs proposal in his annual State of the Union speech to a joint session of the US Congress, where the measure has drawn a chilly welcome.
Obama's Republican foes, freespenders under Obama's Republican predecessor George W. Bush, have charged that the initiative will be insufficient to reducing the swelling US deficit that feeds the ballooning national debt.
And some the president's Democratic allies have denounced the proposal as targeting much-needed spending on education and other social policy priorities and turning off the government tap when a flood of dollars from Washington is needed to spur growth.
The White House says the freeze on non-security discretionary spending, which exempts the Pentagon and international affairs budgets, would kick in with the 2011 accounts and save 250 billion dollars over a decade.
