Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hadn’t run a large organization before he assumed leadership at the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s string of missteps has spurred infighting inside the Pentagon and raised concerns among some Republicans on Capitol Hill about his ability to run the department.

The problems are rooted in Hegseth’s lack of managerial experience in overseeing an entity anywhere near as large as the Pentagon, which employs around 3.4 million people on a budget now approaching $1 trillion, according to current and former officials.

White House officials were frustrated by Hegseth’s refusal to part with his acting chief of staff despite their misgivings about the aide’s qualifications, according to current and former administration officials. Some blame poor Pentagon staffwork for leaving Trump in the dark about a pause in some weapons deliveries for Ukraine, some of these people said. Hegseth has feuded with top generals and fired three senior aides that were well-liked at the White House.

On Thursday, Senate Republicans led by Mitch McConnell attempted to rescue the Pentagon from what they considered an insufficient budget request that they blame, in part, on Hegseth. Some Republican lawmakers are concerned that Hegseth’s loss of top aides has left him especially ill-equipped to run the Defense Department.

“If you just look at the broader turnover and the lack of consistency there in terms of executive management, I think it’s a red flag,” said Sen. Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican who cast the decisive 50th vote to confirm Hegseth in January and recently announced he wouldn’t run for re-election.

There is no indication Hegseth’s job is in jeopardy. Trump and Vice President JD Vance have stuck by him after expending immense personal energy and political capital to see him confirmed. The president likes Hegseth personally and was particularly pleased by the successful U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, officials said.

Pete Hegseth, despite a few missteps and controversies, apparently has retained the backing of President Trump.

“President Trump has full confidence in Secretary Hegseth, who is doing an incredible job leading the DOD,” said White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said, “These anonymous sources have no idea what they’re talking about and are just plain wrong.”

No room on Air Force One

Hegseth stepped into the role of defense secretary after a grueling confirmation process, and he quickly surrounded himself with a small group of trusted advisers. They include Ricky Buria, a retired Marine Corps colonel who Hegseth promoted to acting chief of staff; Tim Parlatore, Hegseth’s personal lawyer and a naval reservist; and Justin Fulcher, a member of the Department of Government Efficiency team at the Pentagon whom Hegseth promoted to senior adviser. Fulcher left his post in July, the latest in a series of recent departures from Hegseth’s inner circle.

From the start, Hegseth didn’t keep the schedule of a typical defense secretary. He did away with the regular “stand up” touchpoint with top Pentagon officials, preferring to meet daily with his inner circle and delegate to them, according to former and current officials. Hegseth and his wife, Jennifer Hegseth, became particularly close with Buria, who served as the junior military aide to Hegseth’s predecessor Lloyd Austin.

Once on the job at the Pentagon, Hegseth’s troubles began in March, when then-national security adviser Mike Waltz inadvertently included journalist Jeffrey Goldberg in a group Signal chat with the Pentagon chief, Vance and other top national security advisers to discuss the military campaign against the Yemen-based Houthi rebels. Buria, using Hegseth’s personal phone, shared sensitive information about the operation on the chat and another with Jennifer Hegseth and Parlatore, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

That incident is now the subject of a Pentagon watchdog review that is likely to conclude in the next few weeks.

In April, Hegseth abruptly suspended three senior advisers suspected of leaking: Dan Caldwell, a senior policy adviser; Darin Selnick, a senior Veterans Affairs official during Trump’s first administration and Hegseth’s deputy chief of staff; and Colin Carroll, chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg. To date, no evidence has become public to support the leaking claims.

Around the same time, Hegseth sought to elevate Buria to chief of staff after his first chief of staff stepped down. But the White House has pushed back against keeping Buria in the role on a permanent basis, according to current and former officials. Some White House officials are suspicious of Buria because of his ties to Austin and media reports that he has bad-mouthed Trump and Vance, the people said. They also see him as abrasive and think he is too junior—a newly minted Colonel when he retired this spring—for the chief-of-staff job.

The White House tried to oust Buria, but struggled to find a replacement who wanted the job and would be the right fit for Hegseth, according to current and former officials. Buria’s detractors eventually gave up trying to replace him as chief of staff. The White House didn’t make space for him to accompany Hegseth on two separate trips with Trump on Air Force One: for the February North Atlantic Treaty Organization visit, and the president’s Middle East trip in May, according to current and former officials.

Kelly praised Buria as “playing a critical role” in Hegseth’s team, and some officials said that more recently, tensions over Buria have eased.

Ricky Buria, in business suit, is among Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s small circle of trusted advisers.

Hegseth became increasingly distrustful of top military leadership over the course of the spring, blaming the Pentagon’s top brass for media leaks, according to current and former officials. After reports emerged that Hegseth had invited Elon Musk to a meeting with the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon, Hegseth shifted the meeting to a small sit-down in his office, but deliberately didn’t inform the top brass of the change, two former officials said.

While the Joint Chiefs filed into the secure “tank” for what they thought was a briefing with Musk, the tech billionaire rode in Hegseth’s private elevator to his office. The officers didn’t realize Musk wasn’t coming until halfway through their gathering in the tank.

More recently, Hegseth blocked the promotion to four-star of Gen. Douglas Sims, the director of the Joint Staff, current and former officials said. Sims declined to comment. He retired Friday at the three-star rank, according to a U.S. official.

Billions lost in defense spending

Hegseth’s battles with the generals extended to retired Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the former chief of U.S. European Command and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander.

Hegseth’s dislike of Cavoli dates to February, when he blamed the general for not preventing demonstrations by military families, who opposed the secretary’s anti-diversity initiatives, at a base in Germany that Hegseth was visiting, according to current and former officials.

Then in April, Hegseth became incensed with Cavoli’s comments to the Senate Armed Services Committee about Russia and Ukraine, which he thought were at odds with the Trump administration’s goal at the time of making a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the people said.

Shortly after the hearing, Hegseth ordered his staff to let Cavoli know he was fired, one of the people said. Ultimately, Hegseth was persuaded to allow Cavoli to keep his job, as he was scheduled to retire this summer. Cavoli didn’t comment.

Pete Hegseth has blamed top Pentagon brass for leaks to the media.

Hegseth’s management of the Pentagon’s trillion-dollar budget request to Congress has also come under scrutiny. In May, Republican members of Congress and staff were irked when the Trump administration unveiled a fiscal 2026 budget proposal that would maintain military spending at current budget levels of $892.6 billion—a number that GOP defense hawks decried as inadequate. They thought they had received assurances from Hegseth that the total would be larger.

McConnell, the Kentucky senator and former Senate Republican leader who now chairs the subcommittee that funds the defense department, complained—along with other top Republicans—that the request would effectively be a cut. It didn’t account for inflation, and factored in nearly $120 billion passed by a separate process known as budget reconciliation to claim an increase in military spending by 13% to $1.01 trillion.

On Thursday, the Republican-led Senate Appropriations Committee voted to advance its own version of the military-spending bill, which would allocate $21.7 billion over the Trump administration’s request.

By June, Hegseth still hadn’t replaced the senior advisers Caldwell or Selnick, so the immense work of managing the Pentagon was being done by Buria and a handful of staffers. Some administration officials and lawmakers think poor staffwork by the Pentagon’s front office was responsible for leaving the president in the dark about a temporary halt in some weapons deliveries for Ukraine, according to current and former officials. Trump later reversed the pause.

“Making that decision without telling the president? said Rep. Don Bacon (R., Neb.). “That wasn’t smart.”

Bacon, a member of the House Armed Services Committee and a retired Air Force brigadier general, said he stands by his original assessment of Hegseth after the Yemen strikes Signal chat: “If I was his boss, I would have fired him.”

Other Republicans vigorously defend Hegseth’s record so far.

“I think Secretary Hegseth has done a great job,” said Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.), who sits on the Senate Armed Services panel. “You can see the direction we’re moving. It’s in the right direction. So if he needs a front office filled, he’ll fill it as he needs it.”

Write to Lara Seligman at [email protected], Alexander Ward at [email protected] and Lindsay Wise at [email protected]