Pete Hegseth Is About to Slash a Fifth of All Military Leadership

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is doing everything he can to clear the deck of battle-tested leaders as he prepares to drag President Donald Trump’s supposedly “six-week war” into its eighth month.

Hegseth is plotting to cut 20 percent of the Pentagon’s slots for admirals and generals, two officials told The Hill Tuesday. The secretary will formally announce the reductions during his State of the Force address in Quantico, Virginia, on Wednesday.

Hegseth has already overseen a vast reduction in the number of top-ranking military personnel. At the time of his confirmation, there were 10 four-star generals on active duty. Now there are just five—the smallest number to lead the service in years.

In May, Hegseth signed an order directing the U.S. military to slash the number of active-duty four-star generals, as well as general and flag officers, by 10 percent, and reduce the number of general officers in the National Guard by a minimum of 20 percent. At the time, Hegseth claimed the “Less Generals, More GIs” policy would allow for a leaner military structure, but provided no guidance for how these cuts ought to actually be made.  

In April, Hegseth fired Army chief of staff Gen. Randy George, and forced out at least three senior officers who were believed to be in the running to be George’s replacement. All in all, Hegseth has forced out at least half a dozen senior officers, undermining military readiness in the ongoing campaign in the Middle East. 

Hegseth’s leadership has come under increased scrutiny amid mounting reports that he concealed casualties among U.S. service members, depleted the U.S. military weapons stockpile, directed massive, unchecked government spending, and allowed horrific conditions aboard long-deployed U.S. ships that led to a number of attempted suicides. 

There’s also the matters of killing schoolchildren and nearly starting World War III—both tied to his overreliance on artificial intelligence.

Earlier this month, the House announced that it would end its voting session early in order to avoid an impeachment vote on Hegseth. The vote won’t take place until after the midterm elections, but a number of Senate Democrats have already signaled that supporting an impeachment vote against the secretary would be a worthwhile use of political capital, Punchbowl News reported Tuesday. 

The Supreme Court has decided that the Trump administration can resume deporting immigrants to countries other than their place of origin.

The nation’s highest judiciary on Tuesday paused a lower court ruling that blocked the government from deporting people to locations they had no relation to without due process. The decision came by way of an emergency ruling that did not include a vote count, though it did note that Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have denied the request to resume the deportations.

The Supreme Court is expected to pick the issue back up again in December when it will hear oral arguments. A final ruling is expected next year.

The outcome is a major win for the administration, which has spent more than a year and a half shipping people to countries around the world as part of its mass deportation program.

But it isn’t the first time that the court has weighed in on the matter. In June 2025, the court overruled a lower court decision regarding a class action lawsuit, granting the executive branch the ability to deport individuals without objection, even if the deportees are likely to face the risk of death or grave harm in the new locale.

The government has deported nearly a million people since Donald Trump returned to office, according to a CNN report published last week. Some of those individuals have been sent to countries with histories of human rights abuses.

At least 25,000 people have been deported from America to developing countries under the guise of Trump’s “secure the border” agenda, according to a social media post by Homeland Security’s legal chief James Percival last week, who added that “third country removal is an essential public safety tool.”

Such reasons, according to Percival, include the possibility that a home country might reject a person’s return, as well as the inordinate costs associated with actually sending an individual back to their country of origin, particularly if the country is far from the U.S.

“Imagine, for example, that DHS needs to remove a single illegal alien to a remote country halfway across the world. Is DHS supposed to spend a fortune chartering a private plane for one law breaker?” continued Percival.

Percival then echoed Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric, claiming that many of the immigrants facing third country deportations are the “worst of the worst” types of criminals, suggesting that these individuals—who are not tried before they are deported—are “child rapists” and “killers.”

“Before President Trump came along, the U.S. government typically just released these people after six months because they could not or did not care to find a third country,” Percival claimed.

This story has been updated.

It turns out that President Trump took money for his self-adulating ads from the Department of Homeland Security. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House paid for multiple pro-Trump ads specifically with money from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. 

The ads in question praise the president and highlight claims of his achievements in office. One of them plays the JMSN song “Love Me” as President Trump declares “America will never be a Communist country.” Another seemed to copy a 2024 campaign video, where a black-and-white Trump is walking while his voice talks about “the final battle.” Another shows pictures of Mount Rushmore while Trump narrates, “The United States of America is the most successful, most accomplished, most exceptional nation ever to exist in human history.”   

Trump reportedly was involved in the ads’ creation and pushed for them himself. They include a “paid for by the U.S. government” disclaimer, which would seem to violate federal laws, such as the Hatch Act, against the executive branch promoting political causes. The Trump administration claims they are public service announcements. 

In a letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Tuesday, Democratic Senators Patty Murray and Chris Murphy said that “using government funding to create or air political ads like the ones that have been running over the last few days is illegal and a shockingly corrupt misuse of taxpayer dollars.” They reported that Trump has set aside $20 million of DHS funds for the ads.

“The American people deserve answers about how this president is literally stealing their tax dollars to air campaign ads celebrating himself—while doing nothing to help them afford health care or housing. These ads need to immediately come off the air, taxpayers need to be paid back for this theft, and everyone responsible needs to be held accountable for this corrupt and illegal propaganda,” the senators wrote. 

The ads have aired almost 90 times across national television as of Sunday on networks including MS NOW, CBS, Fox, and Newsmax, costing an estimated $337,000. They’ve also aired on local stations 2,311 times at an estimated cost of $1.4 million. 

“These public service announcements are about reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad,” a White House spokesperson said last week. “The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic. We should be proud of our country.”

The State Department offered a government contract to Oxygen Forensics even after federal officials were made aware of the company’s ties to Moscow.

Last week, the Justice Department announced that Oxygen Forensics CEO Lee Reiber (an American) and Russian national Oleg Sergeyevich Davydov had been arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud. They were also accused of orchestrating a scheme to conceal the company’s Russian ownership from the federal agencies to which they supplied phone hacking software.

The government knew of this by at least August 28, when Oxygen Forensics sued a former employee turned whistleblower, Max Weissberg, for making the plot public. Nonetheless, the State Department agreed to a $50,000 contract with Oxygen Forensics that same day, according to federal procurement data obtained by PunchUp.

Reiber advertised that his company, which provides forensic and archival services for electronic data, exclusively sold American-made software and had no foreign ownership.

Yet five Russian nationals, including Davydov, allegedly owned and controlled Oxygen Forensics through a holding company based in Cyprus, according to a criminal complaint released by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. The company’s software, too, was Russian, the complaint alleged.

Several executive agencies were affected by the scheme: the Defense Department and components of the Department of Homeland Security, including the Secret Service, the National Computer Forensics Institute, Homeland Security Investigations, and the DHS Office of Inspector General, according to the complaint. But the federal procurement data would suggest that the State Department—as well as the U.S. Embassy in Zagreb, Croatia, which awarded the contract—could also have been compromised.

The Virginia-based group allegedly concealed its true ownership after the U.S. imposed additional sanctions on Russia in early 2022, following its invasion of Ukraine. Months later, Reiber—of Boise, Idaho—was appointed the company’s CEO, president, and chairman of the board, while mentions of Russian ownership were stripped from the company’s public filings, according to the complaint.

Details released in the affidavit suggest that Reiber was well aware of the conspiracy. In November 2023, Reiber wrote to Davydov and the other alleged Russian accomplices after a reporter asked about Oxygen Forensics’ connection to a Russian company. Reiber noted at the time that the reporting “could destroy” a pending contract with the National Computer Forensics Institute, and that the “current existence of this company hangs in the balance,” according to the criminal complaint.

Kash Patel’s FBI has been fudging the numbers to boost the agency’s success rate on apprehending fugitives from its Top 10 Most Wanted List.

Patel announced the addition of a new name to the agency’s Top 10 Most Wanted List on Tuesday, and bragged about the agency’s rate of successful captures under his leadership.

“This FBI has had historic success manhunting Ten Most Wanted fugitives—since the start of the Trump administration, we’ve captured TEN of the Top Ten Most Wanted, 2.5 times the number of TMW fugitives captured during the previous four years combined,” Patel wrote on X.

However, Patel’s FBI has imposed new policies that manipulate that data by adding the names of fugitives who are expected to be imminently captured, according to MS NOW.

Those aren’t the only statistics that Patel is padding: The director also instructed FBI field offices to include any suspects arrested in the presence of agency personnel to be included in official arrest counts, MS NOW reported.

So when Patel claims that his agency had “forty-five thousand violent offenders arrested last year, twice as many as 2024,” that includes suspects in cases led by local police departments and other federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security.

The double counting didn’t help to remove more alleged criminals from the streets, but it did give Patel a handy statistic to cite when he’s dodging questions about his alleged excessive drinking, unexplained absences, and other erratic behavior.