Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered that Pentagon personnel be required to coordinate all interactions with Congress via the constructing’s central legislative affairs workplace, considerably altering how army officers will converse with lawmakers.
Hegseth alongside together with his deputy, Steve Feinberg, in an Oct. 15 memo ordered Protection Division officers to acquire permission from the division’s most important legislative affairs workplace earlier than they convey with lawmakers or congressional aides, Breaking Protection first reported.
“Unauthorized engagements with Congress by [Defense Department] 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 within the memo.
A second memo from Hegseth and Feinberg, issued Oct. 17, directed a “working group to further define the guidance on legislative engagements.”
The order is a serious shift from earlier coverage — which allowed particular person army branches and Pentagon businesses to deal with their very own communications with Congress — and seems to be a part of a broader transfer by Hegseth to tighten management over what data the Pentagon shares.
The Pentagon on Wednesday confirmed the memos to The Hill, with chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell calling the change “a pragmatic step to internally review the Department’s processes for communicating with Congress.”
“The Department intends to improve accuracy and responsiveness in communicating with the Congress to facilitate increased transparency,” Parnell mentioned in an announcement. “This review is for processes internal to the Department and does not change how or from whom Congress receives information.”
The brand new guidelines apply to senior division leaders, together with the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Workers, service secretaries and chiefs, and combatant command heads, with the lone exceptions seeming to be the Pentagon’s comptroller and common counsel, based on Breaking Protection.
Army personnel nonetheless have whistleblower protections and different rights granted by regulation to talk with Congress, the primary memo states.
The division “depends on a collaborative and shut partnership with Congress to attain our legislative targets. This requires coordination and alignment of Division messaging when partaking with Congress to make sure consistency and help for the Division’s priorities to re-establish deterrence, rebuild our army, and revive the warrior ethos,” Hegseth and Feinberg write.
The Oct. 15 directive got here the identical day as almost all Pentagon beat reporters turned of their entry badges and left the constructing relatively than conform to new restrictions on how they collect data for reporting.
Information organizations have vowed to proceed their protection of the army even with out entry to the Pentagon.
