The bureaucratic behemoth awaiting Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon
By
Mike Brest
November 17, 2024 7:00 am
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Pete Hegseth may have been nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to weed the woke out of the Department of Defense, but he has a far bigger bureaucratic task on his hands than just scrubbing the Pentagon of DEI.
Hegseth, a Princeton and Harvard graduate, served for about two decades in the U.S. Army Reserve and the National Guard in New Jersey, New York, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia from May 2001 to March 2021. He deployed to Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and then Afghanistan in that order, according to a spokesperson with the National Guard Bureau.
Almost immediately following Trump’s announcement that he picked Hegseth to be his nominee to lead the Pentagon, critics quickly highlighted the Fox News host’s lack of experience when it comes to managing bureaucracy, let alone one the size of the Pentagon.
The secretary of defense leads more than 1.4 million active-duty service personnel and more than 700,000 National Guard and reservists. About the same number of civilians who work in the Pentagon, bringing the number of people within the department to nearly 3 million with a budget believed to be approaching a trillion dollars annually in the near future.
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https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense/3230599/pete-hegseth-pentagon-bureaucratic-behemoth/
