Pentagon’s policy shop is a ‘Pigpen-like mess': Sen. Cotton
Senate Armed Services Committee members from both parties question DOD missteps, actions that contravened president’s foreign-policy positions.
Meghann Myers | November 4, 2025
Pentagon Congress
Updated: 5:42 p.m.
Congress’s simmering discontent with the Pentagon’s recent decision-making and lack of transparency with its lawfully-mandated oversight body boiled over during a routine nomination hearing Tuesday, one of the few venues lawmakers have had to get answers from defense officials since the second Trump administration began in January.
Austin Dahmer was ostensibly before the committee to answer questions about how he would tackle the job of assistant secretary for strategy, plans, and forces—a job whose title and responsibilities have changed in ways that the committee was only told about on Sunday night, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the committee chairman, said during the hearing.
But because Dahmer has already been performing the duties of another high-level Pentagon official—and because Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has restricted communication between the department and Congress, requiring every interaction be cleared through legislative affairs—a bipartisan group of senators took the opportunity to grill him on a host of recent department moves, some of which they contend are in direct opposition to President Trump’s stated foreign-policy positions.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark, listed several: the pause in Ukrainian security assistance, the uncoordinated review of the AUKUS agreement, opposition to deploying more U.S. troops to the Middle East during the Iran-Israel war in June, the cancellation of a meeting among top Japanese and U.S. officials, and the recent cancellation of a rotational Army brigade deployment to Romania.
“I understand that media reports can be wrong, believe me, but it just seems like there's this Pigpen-like mess coming out of the policy shop that you don't see from, say, intel and security and acquisition and sustainment,” Cotton said.
https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2025/11/pentagons-policy-shop-pigpen-mess-sen-cotton/409297/?oref=d1-featured-river-secondary
