“Total Chaos” at the Pentagon
Pete Hegseth under fire.
During Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s confirmation, a significant amount of attention was devoted to allegations about his drinking habits and his treatment of women, including a last-minute affidavit by his ex-sister-in-law that expounded on both.
Less attention was paid to claims that he mismanaged the two organizations he had previously led, a pair of veterans groups named Vets for Freedom (VFF) and Concerned Veterans for America (CVA).
According to the New Yorker, under Hegseth’s leadership, VFF “ran up enormous debt,” eventually becoming “unable to pay its creditors.” The future Defense Secretary was forced to send a letter admitting to donors that “the group had less than a thousand dollars in the bank and $434,833 in unpaid bills,” as well as “credit-card debts of as much as seventy-five thousand dollars.”
The group’s donors, worried about “inappropriate expenses” and rumors of alcohol-infused parties that “could politely be called trysts,” reportedly “hatched a plan to take control away from Hegseth.” VFF ended up merging with another organization; Hegseth was eased away from leadership.
The next year, after a brief Senate campaign in Minnesota, Hegseth became the head of CVA. It was a similar group, and his tenure led to a strikingly similar end. According to CBS News, at CVA — like at VFF — expenses began to outstrip revenue after Hegseth took the helm; soon, he was once again the subject of a campaign to remove him, over complaints about “frequent public intoxication, poor leadership, and the toxic work climate he fostered within the organization.” He eventually resigned under pressure.
After leaving CVA, Hegseth became a Fox News host, the job he held until Trump tapped him to lead the Pentagon this year. His tenures at VFF and CVA were his only significant experiences as a manager before becoming head of the Defense Department, the second-largest employer in the world.
Three months into his tenure at the Pentagon, Hegseth is once again facing allegations of mismanagement.
On Friday, three of the top officials in the department — Hegseth’s senior adviser Dan Caldwell, his deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick, and the Deputy Defense Secretary’s chief of staff Colin Carroll — were fired, apparently as part of a leak investigation.
A fourth official, Hegseth’s chief of staff Joe Kasper, is set to be reassigned, while a fifth, top spokesperson John Ullyot, was either asked to step down or resigned of his own accord, depending who you ask.
In a joint statement, Caldwell, Selnick, and Carroll called their dismissals “unconscionable,” protesting that they “still have not been told what exactly we were investigated for, if there is still an active investigation, or if there was even a real investigation of ‘leaks’ to begin with.”
Last night, Ullyot published an op-ed in Politico Magazine claiming that the Pentagon has been mired in “total chaos,” “dysfunction,” “a full-blown meltdown,” and “disarray under Hegseth’s leadership.”
“Hegseth is now presiding over a strange and baffling purge that will leave him without his two closest advisers of over a decade — Caldwell and Selnick — and without chiefs of staff for him and his deputy,” Ullyot added. “More firings may be coming, according to rumors in the building.”
Ullyot pushed back against the suggestions that Caldwell, Selnick, and Carroll were fired for leaking sensitive information. “In fact, at least one of them has told former colleagues that investigators advised him he was about to be cleared officially of any wrongdoing,” Ullyot wrote. “Unfortunately, Hegseth’s team has developed a habit of spreading flat-out, easily debunked falsehoods anonymously about their colleagues on their way out the door.”
Of course, Ullyot himself is one of those officials “on their way out the door,” so take anything he has to say with that context in mind. He says that he was only hired to stand up Hegseth’s public affairs operation, and declined the secretary’s offer of a new role; the Pentagon has said he was asked to resign, without giving any reason why.
But, whatever the reason for any of their departures, it’s never a good thing in Washington to have a group of people out there who have a) a lot of information about you and b) a motive to share it. (As Lyndon Johnson famously said, “Better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.”)
Now that several ex-Hegseth aides are free agents with axes to grind, expect more stories about him to dribble out in the next few days. The first has already come: a New York Times report last night that Hegseth shared detailed information about strikes targeting the Houthis in Yemen not just in the Signal chat that accidentally included Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg (the one we already knew about), but also in another Signal chat.
What’s more, this one purposely included several people that had no “apparent reason to be briefed on operational details of a military operation,” including Hegseth’s brother and personal lawyer, both of whom now have lower-level jobs at the Pentagon, and his wife, who is not a Defense Department employee and may not even have security clearance.
According to the Times, the Signal chat was created by Hegseth before his confirmation to communicate with “about a dozen other people from his personal and professional inner circle.” Hegseth apparently continued using the chat as Defense Secretary, sharing sensitive attack plans with the group (using a personal phone) even though not everyone in the chat was a government official (or an official with a need to know the information).
The Times reported that Hegseth was warned “a day or two before the Yemen strikes not to discuss such sensitive operational details in his Signal group chat,” advice he apparently ignored. The Times did not reveal its sources for the story, although the article does note that both Caldwell and Selnick were included in the chat.
The Times story combines two of the other embarrassing news stories from Hegseth’s first months at the Pentagon: the revelation in the Atlantic that Hegseth shared the same attack plans in the other Signal chat, and reporting in the Wall Street Journal that Hegseth had brought his wife to “two meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed” and hired his brother as the Pentagon’s liaison to the Department of Homeland Security.
(It’s worth noting that Hegseth also hired his brother at Concerned Veterans for America, even though the brother was then in college and the organization was in financial trouble, an interesting coda connecting Hegseth’s past management experiences with his current one.)
The Pentagon’s acting inspector general is already investigating Hegseth’s use of the first Signal chat, so don’t be surprised if we soon start hearing revelations from that probe, as well as other leaks from ex-officials.
In the meantime, one comment in Ullyot’s op-ed didn’t quite ring true. “President Donald Trump has a strong record of holding his top officials to account,” he wrote. “Given that, it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer.”
That line reads more like wishcasting than anything: Trump may have played a character on “The Apprentice” with a “strong record” of holding underlings to account, but in real life, he reportedly “hates interpersonal conflict” and doesn’t like to fire people if he can avoid it. In his first administration, he kept on several top officials long after they were either engulfed in scandal or after he had grown tired of them.
Trump II has already contained similar personnel struggles as Trump I: Wiles vs. Musk, Musk vs. Navarro, Navarro vs. Bessent, and so on. This has always been Trump’s preferred operating style, dating back to his days at the Trump Organization; in Hegseth’s case, he is likely to be even less willing to fire him, since it would be seen as backing down and giving into media pressure, something else Trump is loath to do.
“The president stands strongly behind Secretary Hegseth, who is doing a phenomenal job leading the Pentagon,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this morning on Fox News. “This is what happens when the entire Pentagon is working against you and against the monumental change that you are trying to implement,” she added, although the top ranks of the department are, by now, populated by Hegseth’s own appointees. (That includes all of the people recently fired, many of whom were longtime friends and advisers of Hegseth’s.)
For his part, Hegseth has remained defiant. In response to a post by the official Democratic Party account on X last night calling for his firing, Hegseth wrote: “Your agenda is illegals, trans & DEI — all of which are no longer allowed @ DoD.”
Hegseth’s retort was at least partially inaccurate. A federal judge blocked the Pentagon from enforcing a ban on transgender troops last month, which means thousands of trans service members continue to work at the department.
More news to know
Breaking this morning: Pope Francis, who implemented progressive reforms in the Catholic Church and made history as the first Latin American pontiff, died at age 88. One of his final meetings was with Vice President JD Vance, with whom he exchanged Easter greetings during a brief meeting at the Vatican on Sunday morning.
More headlines to know:
The Hill: Supreme Court halts latest wave of Alien Enemies Act deportations, for now
Reuters: El Salvador proposes swapping US-deported Venezuelans for Venezuelan ‘political prisoners’
WaPo: The federal ‘5 things’ emails have fallen apart, as Elon Musk readies exit
NYT: White House Assesses Ways to Persuade Women to Have More Children
WaPo: Sensitive documents, including White House floor plans, improperly shared with thousands
The day ahead
President Trump will participate in the White House Easter Egg Roll, a tradition dating back to 1878. In a first, the White House solicited corporate sponsorships for the event; companies including Amazon, YouTube, and Meta. All proceeds will go to the White House Historical Association.
The House and Senate are on recess.
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, a challenge to the legality of a government panel that decides which preventive care services that insurance companies are required to cover under the Affordable Care Act. The case will put the Trump administration in the unusual position of defending Obamacare — although, as CNN notes, a victory for the government could end up giving Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. more power over the requirements.
Good write-up. What's most interesting to me about this is how completely predictable it all is. Any objective evaluation of Hegseth's experience, skills, demeanor, and past accomplishments and failures would lead one to seriously question whether he's fit to lead the local Dairy Queen, nevermind the Pentagon. Immediately after he was stunningly confirmed, his odds of directly being responsible for a scandal or embarrassment were highest amongst all the confirmed, even RFK. It took all of 2 months to shit the bed with such craven recklessness and stupidity.
Now it's the first instance of what we saw so much of in Donnie I, which roughly follows the following cycle: deny, deny, deny in public while expressing ample grievance in private; hope for another news-story to take the attention of our ADHD-addled folk within the next 48-72 hours; get angry at the media when subsequent revelations are worse than the current one; privately begin to look for a replacement; post some social media announcement regarding the new person before a public or leaked announcement, which surprises everyone (this is 50/50). I'd say this cycle will finish up by Friday.
Kash Patel is next by the way. My money is on that train crashing by no later than October.
So sick of these dude bros failing upward—to the detriment of the country, no less.