Under Hegseth, chaos prevails at the Pentagon
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 13 hours ago
- 5 min read
By Greg Jaffe and Helene Cooper
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth arrived at the Pentagon in January with almost no government experience and huge ambitions to remake the way the military was being run.
In just three months in office, Hegseth, a former Fox News host, has instead produced a run of chaos that is unmatched in the recent history of the Defense Department.
Hegseth’s inner circle of close advisers — military veterans who, like him, had little experience running large, complex organizations — is in a shambles. Three members of the team he brought with him into the Pentagon were accused last week of leaking unauthorized information and escorted from the building.
A fourth recently departed member of Hegseth’s team, John Ullyot, who had been his top spokesperson, accused Hegseth of disloyalty and incompetence in an opinion essay in Politico on Sunday. “The building is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership,” Ullyot wrote.
The discord, according to current and former defense officials, includes: screaming matches in his inner office among aides; a growing distrust of the thousands of military and civilian personnel who staff the building; and bureaucratic logjams that have slowed down progress on some of President Donald Trump’s key priorities, such as an “Iron Dome for America” missile-defense shield. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal business.
Adding to the dysfunction, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has set a loose target of slashing as many as 200,000 jobs from the Pentagon’s civilian workforce of 750,000, a level of cuts Hegseth has warned would cripple some critical functions within the department, three current and former defense officials said.
Meanwhile, recent media reports that Hegseth disclosed sensitive military information about upcoming strikes in Yemen in two private Signal group chats have led some in Congress to call for him to resign.
Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, blamed reports of dysfunction in Hegseth’s office on “disgruntled former DoD employees with an axe to grind.”
The missteps so far haven’t seemed to shake Trump’s support for Hegseth, whom the Senate narrowly confirmed amid concerns about his lack of experience and his drinking.
“This is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you and working against the monumental change you are trying to implement,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told Fox News.
Trump on Monday praised Hegseth’s work. “He’s doing a great job — ask the Houthis how he’s doing,” the president said, referring to the rebel group in Yemen that the United States has been targeting in military strikes.
Hegseth similarly defended his brief tenure. Speaking to reporters at the White House Easter Egg Roll on Monday, he accused the news media of using “disgruntled former employees” to smear him and vowed to keep working to put the Pentagon “back into the hands of war fighters.”
Hegseth has focused much of his energy on restoring a “warrior ethos” to the department, which he said had been taken over by “woke,” diversity-obsessed ideologues. He has dispatched thousands of troops as part of an effort to stem the flow of migrants at the southern border and vowed to better equip the U.S. military to counter a rising China.
The battles that have roiled Hegseth’s inner office, though, have focused more on often petty bureaucratic disputes than policy issues, said current and former defense officials. Staff members have complained that meetings overseen by Hegseth’s hand-picked chief of staff, Joe Kasper, meander or take pointlessly bawdy turns.
One meeting Kasper led this month, with a group that works with veterans that was offering its services to the Pentagon, devolved into a recounting of an evening Kasper and a representative of the group spent at a Washington strip club, said a person who took part in the session.
Other officials said that Hegseth and Kasper had been unable to establish a process to ensure that basic, but essential, matters move swiftly through Hegseth’s office. In late January, Trump issued an executive order calling for the fielding and deployment of a missile shield to protect the United States from attacks by adversaries such as North Korea and Iran. At the White House’s urging, Pentagon officials scrambled over the course of a few days to put together a “package” directing the Pentagon’s vast bureaucracy to begin moving forward on the complex project.
The document sat unsigned in the defense secretary’s office for nearly three weeks while White House officials called almost daily to check on its status, current and former defense officials said.
Another big challenge for Hegseth will be learning how to run the Defense Department, the federal government’s largest bureaucracy, while also defending its civilian workforce from potentially paralyzing cuts.
Trump has vowed to ramp military spending up to $1 trillion, a significant rise from the current $850 billion budget. Despite the promised increase in spending from the president, Musk has not relented from his vow to find tens of billions of dollars in savings in the Defense Department.
Publicly, Hegseth has welcomed Musk and his team to the Pentagon and even promoted some of the savings that they have said they have found.
In private, he and Musk’s team have sparred over cuts to civilians who work in military hospitals, shipyards, munitions factories and schools. A senior official representing Musk’s effort in the Pentagon was recently replaced because Musk believed he wasn’t willing to make deep enough cuts, defense officials said. This month, Musk and Hegseth met at the White House to try to hash out their differences, according to current and former defense officials.
It wasn’t clear whether the two had come to an agreement.
On Capitol Hill, cracks in GOP support for Hegseth are appearing.
The defense secretary is under an inspector general review over the disclosure by The Atlantic of a Signal chat in which Hegseth revealed the flight sequencing for the Yemen strikes.
Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the committee’s senior Democrat, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, requested the review.
News of the second Signal chat, in which Hegseth shared the same information about the Yemen strikes with his wife and Pentagon officials, prompted Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska to become the first Republican lawmaker to openly suggest that Hegseth should be fired.
In an interview with Politico on Monday, Bacon, a former Air Force general, said of Hegseth’s Signal disclosures: “I find it unacceptable, and I wouldn’t tolerate it if I was in charge.”