Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered that Pentagon personnel be required to coordinate all interactions with Congress through the building’s central legislative affairs office, significantly altering how military officials will speak with lawmakers.
Hegseth along with his deputy, Steve Feinberg, in an Oct. 15 memo ordered Defense Department officials to obtain permission from the department’s main legislative affairs office before they communicate with lawmakers or congressional aides, Breaking Defense 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 in 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 major shift from previous policy — which allowed individual military branches and Pentagon agencies to handle their own communications with Congress — and appears to be part of a broader move by Hegseth to tighten control over what information 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 said in a statement. “This review is for processes internal to the Department and does not change how or from whom Congress receives information.”
The new rules apply to senior department leaders, including the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, service secretaries and chiefs, and combatant command heads, with the lone exceptions seeming to be the Pentagon’s comptroller and general counsel, according to Breaking Defense.
Military personnel still have whistleblower protections and other rights granted by law to speak with Congress, the first memo states.
The department “relies on a collaborative and close partnership with Congress to achieve our legislative goals. This requires coordination and alignment of Department messaging when engaging with Congress to ensure consistency and support for the Department’s priorities to re-establish deterrence, rebuild our military, and revive the warrior ethos,” Hegseth and Feinberg write.
The Oct. 15 directive came the same day as nearly all Pentagon beat reporters turned in their access badges and left the building rather than agree to new restrictions on how they gather information for reporting.
News organizations have vowed to continue their coverage of the military even without access to the Pentagon.
