A GOP lawmaker claims he told Pete Hegseth that he would struggle to get confirmed again by the Senate.
“You have a problem, and you need to increase the amount and the quality of the communication” with Congress, the anonymous legislator said to him over the summer, according to their later account to The Washington Post.
The Defense secretary has forged a combative relationship with elected officials on Capitol Hill whilst simultaneously asking them for enormous sums of cash to fund his war in Iran.
The anonymous lawmaker’s brutal snub to the 45-year-old former Fox host came after he asked them what the chances were of getting his $1.5 trillion defense budget passed through Congress.
The National Defense Authorization Act narrowly passed the House in the summer, but is understood to have since stalled in the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The Post said it spoke with more than 30 congressional insiders as part of a broader report on how Hegseth’s chances of getting President Donald Trump’s record-breaking defense budget through Congress were put on the ropes.
Those people discussed the problems with Hegseth as being more personal, according to the paper.
Members of both parties said his adversarial approach to Congress had jeopardized the bipartisan dealmaking that has historically ensured the military gets the support it needs from Capitol Hill.
It comes just days before the midterms next Tuesday.
The election cycle’s narrative has centered on a so-called blue wave, with Democrats expected to make major gains in both chambers.
Trump has seen his popularity plummet to new depths after launching a war with Iran and Americans being forced to pay more for things like gas and groceries.
CNN’s data guru Harry Enton said on Monday that a YouGov/Yahoo poll put Trump’s approval at 37 percent.
Should a blue wave sweep away the GOP’s control of either the House or Senate, the chances of the administration passing legislation like Hegseth’s bill would become even more fanciful.
Democrats are already stalling the bill, claiming their opposition represents a bid to hold Trump and Hegseth to account for a war that never passed Congress.
“The people who have been around for a few days have seen what normal looks like,” Rep. Joe Courtney, a Democrat from Connecticut, told the Post. “We’re not living in normal.”
Both chambers are set to hash out a new version of the bill, which will be voted on later this fall.
The top Democrat in the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Adam Smith, told the Post he was not looking to work together with “this Pentagon.”
“I’m looking for ways to stop the awful things they’re doing with our military,” he said.
Hegseth is “always willing to engage directly with any lawmakers who bring forward their concerns in good faith,” Pentagon spokesperson Joel Valdez told the Post.
“Lawmakers understand exactly how critical the National Defense Authorization Act and defense appropriations are to military readiness,” he added. “We do not expect them to deliberately cripple the force or our warfighting capability simply to score political points.”
Hegseth’s fraught relationship with Congress and the suggestion that it would make another confirmation challenging tracks with his actual confirmation in January last year.
That time around, Vice President JD Vance was called in to cast the deciding vote, as the former National Guardsman scraped into the Cabinet by the smallest possible margin.
That fiasco saw three GOP senators, including former Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, vote against his appointment.
The Daily Beast has contacted the Pentagon for comment.
