At the end of April April 2026, Secretary of the Navy John Phelan spent the day talking to lawmakers about the Navy’s plans for new ships and about the Pentagon’s huge budget request only to get a call from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asking him to resign. Phelan is a billionaire businessman who had no previous military experience but who raised millions of dollars for Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
Haley Britzky, Zachary Cohen, Kristen Holmes, Natasha Bertrand, and Kaitlan Collins of CNN report that Phelan’s close relationship with President Donald J. Trump has irked Hegseth, who saw Phelan’s direct communications with the president as an attempt to go around him. And Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, a close ally of Hegseth’s, wanted to take over shipbuilding and Navy acquisitions, jobs that normally fall to the secretary of the Navy.
As the title of an article by Drew FitzGerald, Lara Seligman, and Marcus Weisgerber of the Wall Street Journal noted earlier this month (May 2026), Feinberg is a billionaire thanks to his career in private equity and now is mounting “his biggest takeover yet : the Pentagon.” Feinberg is pushing Congress to pass the $1.5 trillion military budget President Donald Trump wants while at the same time overseeing the newly created Economic Defense Unit (EDU) in the Defense Department. The EDU is directing government investment in private sector defense contractors and has cut deals for the government to start taking equity stakes in those businesses.
Greg Jaffe and Helene Cooper of the New York Times reported that President Donald Trump has been frustrated by Phelan’s inability to fulfill his demand for the first of his new battleships by 2028, an inability caused by the fact that the U.S. shipbuilding industry doesn’t have the capacity to do it. At a Wednesday 22th of April 2026 meeting with President Donald Trump, Hegseth and Feinberg convinced the president that Phelan had to go.
According to the CNN reporters, President Donald Trump told Hegseth to “take care of it,” prompting his phone call to ask for Phelan’s resignation. But Phelan didn’t believe President Donald Trump knew of the request, so he called officials at the White House to ask if they had heard he had been asked to resign and whether President Donald Trump knew. At about 5 :30 of the 23th of April 2026,Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell posted on social media that “Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan is departing the administration, effective immediately.”
Still unconvinced, Phelan finally went to the White House to meet with President Donald Trump, who did not see him but later confirmed in a phone call that Phelan was out.
On social media on the 23th of April 2026, President Donald Trump posted two different New York Times pieces about the 2004 ratings for the television reality show The Apprentice,in which he starred as a business executive whose famous line was “You’re fired !” On the 24th of April 2026, on social media, Trump’s account posted : “John Phelan is a long time friend, and very successful businessman, who did an outstanding job serving as my Secretary Of The Navy for the last year. I very much appreciate the job that he has done, and would certainly like to have him back within the Trump Administration sometime in the future.”
Lara Seligman, Josh Dawsey, Alexander Ward, and Natalie Andrews of the Wall Street Journal noted at the end of April 2026 that President Donald Trump sided with Hegseth over Phelan, who was his friend and neighbor and raised millions of dollars for him. Phelan’s firing shows that President Donald Trump still supports Hegseth despite his missteps and high-level firings as Hegseth seeks to remake the Pentagon.
Dan Lamothe, Tara Copp, and Noah Robertson of the Washington Post note that Hegseth has purged the military of its most senior ranks, including “the top generals and admirals of every branch of service except for the Marine Corps and Space Force, several military lawyers and even the head of the Army’s chaplain corps.”
Today the Pentagon cracked down on the independence of Stars and Stripes, the newspaper charged with providing “independent news and information to the U.S. military community.” Stars and Stripes operates out of the Department of Defense. In order to make sure the paper protects freedom of the press and remains independent of the Pentagon rather than becoming a propaganda outlet, Congress provided for it to be overseen by an ombudsman who regularly reports to Congress. At the begining of May 2026, the current ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith, reported that she has been fired.
Smith has publicly criticized Hegseth’s crackdown on press freedom, and noted in a farewell column at the end of April 2026, that “[n]o one should be surprised that they’re kicking out the one person charged by Congress with protecting Stars and Stripes’ editorial independence. For nearly a year, Pentagon leadership has placed more and more restrictions on the mainstream media.” She said she “knew there would be perils for speaking out against Pentagon attempts to control the news” and urged Americans not to let Stars and Stripes “be controlled by Pentagon brass.”
While Hegseth is shaping the military to his own specifications and Feinberg is working to tie the government and an expanded military more tightly together, Republicans in Congress are trying to strengthen the power of the president over the American people for the next three years.
