Chief of staff to the secretary of defense is usually a prestigious and sought-after job, but under Pete Hegseth, the White House is reportedly having trouble filling it.
At least three people have turned down top Defense Department jobs—including chief of staff and several senior adviser roles—since Hegseth abruptly fired three of his top aides in April and accused them of leaking information to the press, NBC News reported.
Hegseth’s former chief of staff Joe Kasper was also pushed out of the Pentagon following what insiders described as a vicious “turf war.”
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Even with Vice President JD Vance and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles taking an active interest in helping Hegseth recover from earlier missteps that raised questions about his leadership, the positions have remained vacant for more than six weeks, according to NBC.
Wiles and Vance have looked for candidates inside the White House and on Capitol Hill, but Hegseth—a former Army National Guard officer turned Fox News weekend host—has reportedly rejected the White House’s choices. The White House personnel office has also deemed some of the candidates insufficiently MAGA.
In a statement to the Daily Beast, chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said, “The anonymous sources cited in this article have no idea what they’re talking about. Since November 5, 2024, the US military has seen the highest recruiting percentage of mission achieved in 30 years. There has never been more enthusiasm to serve under Secretary Hegseth’s leadership at the DoD.”
White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly also said in a statement that Hegseth had the White House’s “full support.”
“Thanks to Secretary Hegseth’s leadership, military recruitment is up, terrorists are eliminated, and warfighters are prioritized,” she said.
Hegseth, who remains largely isolated since firing his own inner circle, relies heavily on an aide named Ricky Buria, who left the military in April in hopes of replacing Hegseth’s former chief of staff.
The White House, however, refused to give Buria the green light because he’s a Biden administration holdover who once called Vance’s isolationist views “wackamamie crazy.”
The career Marine was particularly critical of the vice president’s opposition to the administration’s March airstrikes on Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis, the New York Post reported.
Those strikes were the subject of the now-infamous Signal group chat in which Hegseth shared war plans with The Atlantic’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who was accidentally added to the group by former National Security Adviser Mike Waltz.
A Pentagon inspector general report is expected to conclude that Hegseth shared classified information on the chat, according to NBC. The defense secretary has also reportedly shared sensitive information about the Yemen operation in yet another Signal chat with his wife, his personal attorney, and his brother.
Hegseth accused his fired aides Dan Caldwell, Colin Carroll, and Darin Selnick of leaking the details of the second chat, a claim the three men deny. They’ve slammed their dismissals as “unconscionable” and said no evidence was ever presented to them.
Originally Hegseth and his personal attorney Tim Parlatore were responsible for overseeing the investigation into the fired aides, but in May, White House officials instructed the deputy defense secretary to handle the probe instead.
The investigation has not revealed any evidence the men were leaking, leading administration officials to question if the firings had been premature, according to NBC.
Carroll told SiriusXM host Megyn Kelly in late April that Hegseth spent at least half of his time investigating leaks and had created a culture of “fear and toxicity.”
Given the recruitment problems the White House is now having, word seems to have gotten around.
