Hegseth Marks Pride With Plan to Rename Ship Named for Harvey Milk
The names of USNS Harvey Milk and other ships honoring prominent civil rights leaders are on the chopping block.

The Navy is considering renaming multiple ships dubbed for prominent Americans who apparently don’t align with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s anti-woke “warrior” ethos. And one of those ships—just in time for Pride Month—is named after assassinated LGBTQ rights leader and Navy veteran Harvey Milk.
CBS News reported Tuesday it had obtained official documents to brief the Navy’s secretary on proposed timelines for revealing the new name for USNS Harvey Milk. The documents do not indicate what the ship’s new name could be.
The Navy documents also list other ships that are being considered for renaming. They include USNS Thurgood Marshall, USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, USNS Harriet Tubman, USNS Dolores Huerta, USNS Lucy Stone, USNS Cesar Chavez, and USNS Medgar Evars. All of the eponymous figures are prominent people of color, women, and/or civil rights leaders from American history.
Since Hegseth was sworn in, he has made it his personal mission to scrub all traces of diversity from the Department of Defense. This has included dismantling DEI hiring and recruitment initiatives and temporarily erasing posts about racial history from the department website.
He announced that the military would no longer recognize Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and other heritage months, declaring the observations “dead” on January 31. He also has happily carried out Trump’s executive order to ban transgender people from serving in the armed forces.