Hegseth Restricts Defense Personnel From Interacting With Congress to Make Oversight Harder
Fresh off an apparently successful plan to dissolve the Pentagon press corps and replace it with a more pliable one, prompted in part by a general paranoia over leaks, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is now plotting to restrict the flow of information to Congress.
Breaking Defense has the scoop:
Defense Department personnel will now have to coordinate all interactions with Congress through the Pentagon’s central legislative affairs office, according to a memo obtained by Breaking Defense—a change in policy that could further curb the flow of information streaming from the department to Capitol Hill.
In the Oct. 15 memo, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg direct Defense Department personnel—with the exception of the Pentagon’s inspector general office—to coordinate with the office of the assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs for all engagements and communication with Congress and state elected officials. …
“Unauthorized engagements with Congress by DoW personnel acting in their official capacity, no matter how well-intentioned, may undermine Department-wide priorities critical to achieving our legislative objectives,” Hegseth and Feinberg wrote later in the memo. …
The directive is a shift from previous policy, which allowed the military services, combatant commands and other Defense Department agencies to manage their own interactions with Congress—with senior leaders for those organizations often driving the level of engagement on Capitol Hill and each service having its own legislative affairs team.
Rep. George Whitesides, D-Calif, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told Breaking Defense that the move is unlikely to be received well on Capitol Hill.
“Congress decides who Congress will talk to, and the continued efforts of the secretary to wall off the department is not consistent with past tradition, and I frankly don’t think it’ll fly with the members or leaders of the committee,” he said.
“Congress decides who Congress will talk to” really sums it up. This is part of a wider attempt to eliminate all outside checks on executive power. A crucial step toward that goal is to restrict Congress’s sources of information about what the Department of Defense is doing.
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