Trump Toady Pete Hegseth Is Quietly Continuing to Refashion the ’Department of War’ in His Boss’s Image

Last year, Pete Hegseth removed every member of the Defense Policy Board. Now he’s reconstituting it with 15 new appointees, and—unsurprisingly—it’s full of ideologues, lackeys, and Trump’s rich pals.

The Hill explains:

The Defense Policy Board is an advisory committee that provides advice and recommendations to the defense secretary, the deputy defense secretary and the Pentagon policy chief on regional defense policies, strategic planning, policy implications of U.S. force structure and modernizations and others. ...

Hegseth announced that venture capitalist Marc Andreessen will serve on the board. He is the general partner at Andressen Horowitz, a firm whose investments include OpenAI, SpaceX, Skydio, Hadrian and Anduril — all companies that have contracts with the Pentagon.

Other members of the board include Blake Masters, a former Senate GOP candidate; and Michael Anton, former director of policy planning at the State Department.

It’s never a good sign for a democracy—particularly one with a strong history of good civilian-military relations—when political leadership starts replacing experienced professionals with incompetent ideological loyalists (like Anton, of “Flight 93 Election” infamy, and Masters, who was such a weak candidate that Trump himself reportedly told him he’d lose a primary to Kari Lake) and self-interested heterodox billionaires like Andreessen.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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