WASHINGTON – The Senate Armed Services Committee has voted in favor of Pete Hegseth, President Donald Trump’spick to lead the Pentagon.
Hegseth, 44, is a combat veteran and former Fox News host. The committee voted along party lines, 14-13, to advance his nomination to the full Senate for approval. A vote in the full Senate is expected later in the week.
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., chair of the Armed Services Committee, said after the hearing that he hoped the Senate could expedite a vote on Hegseth on the Senate floor.
Wicker said he wasn’t concerned about Hegseth’s relative inexperience compared with former Secretaries of Defense, most of whom had decades of experience in the military, Congress or the defense industry. “I think he’s got a lot of knowledge – and frankly, we need to shake things up in the Pentagon.”
“There’s too much red tape, there are too many stumbling blocks, there are too many boxes to check and the bureaucracy has become creaky over time,” Wicker said. “So this is part of the Trump Administration’s mandate to shake things up and do things differently.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and a member of the Armed Services Committee, contends Republicans failed to vet Hegseth sufficiently.
“Senate Republicans are rushing through the most unqualified nominee for U.S. secretary of Defense in modern history,” Warren said in a statement. “This confirmation process has made a mockery of the Senate’s constitutional responsibility with profound national security consequences.”
Democrats on the committee assailed Hegseth during a hearing last week over allegations of sexual assault, public drunkenness and financial mismanagement of the nonprofit veterans’ organizations he ran. Republicans accepted his statement that his religious beliefs had changed him and that he had been the victim of an anonymous smear campaign.
Not all of the allegations were anonymous. Hegseth’s mother, Penelope – in an email to him in 2018 obtained by the New York Times – called him “an abuser of women,” and said that she had “no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.” After Trump picked Hegseth, his mother recanted, saying her son was a changed man.
Some senators also criticized Hegseth’s past statements opposing women in combat, which he more recently recanted. Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, a military veteran, had been considered a possible GOP holdout against Hegseth, but she said she would support him after his confirmation hearing.
If confirmed, Hegseth would take command of the Pentagon’s 3 million troops and civilians, an $850 billion budget and forces arrayed around the globe confronting terrorist organizations, increasingly bold adversaries in China and Russia and emerging nuclear threats from North Korea and Iran.
On Monday, Trump maned Robert Salesses as acting secretary of Defense. Salesses, a former Pentagon official, is a retired Marine Corps officer.
Hegseth has described himself as a change agent who will rid the Pentagon of “woke” policies that he says have made U.S. forces less ready to fight. He acknowledged during his confirmation hearing that the largest organization he has overseen had a few hundred employees.
