Hegseth Locks Virtually Every Media Organization Out Of The Pentagon

Pete Hegseth was tired of being embarrassed with media stories detailing his incompetent leadership of the Defense Department, so he came up with a new policy. He demanded that all news organizations sign an agreement to report only Pentagon-approved stories, including unclassified stories. Failure to sign the agreement meant the media organization would have their press passes revoked and they would be locked out of the Pentagon.

That meant the media could only report Pentagon propaganda - not real stories about what was happening in the nation's largest and most expensive government department. The media rebelled, and all but one (the Trump-loving MAGA outlet One America News) refused to sign the ridiculous agreement.

On Wednesday, the media outlets turned in their press passes and removed their equipment from the Pentagon. They will continue to report all the stories about the Defense Department they want. They just won't have the normal access to sources within the building. And Hegseth can expect the embarrassing stories about his incompetence to continue.

Hegseth failed in his attempt to censor the media. Even right-wing media outlets (like Fox News and the Washington Times) refused to sign the agreement. 

Listed below are the media outlets that signed and refused to sign the agreement:

Pentagon Hid Study Showing $125 Billion In Waste

The following is part of an article in The Washington Post written by Bob Woodward and Craig Whitlock:

The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post.

Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.

The report, issued in January 2015, identified “a clear path” for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.

The study was produced last year by the Defense Business Board, a federal advisory panel of corporate executives, and consultants from McKinsey and Company. Based on reams of personnel and cost data, their report revealed for the first time that the Pentagon was spending almost a quarter of its $580 billion budget on overhead and core business operations such as accounting, human resources, logistics and property management.

The data showed that the Defense Department was paying a staggering number of people — 1,014,000 contractors, civilians and uniformed personnel — to fill back-office jobs far from the front lines. That workforce supports 1.3 million troops on active duty, the fewest since 1940. . . .

For the military, the major allure of the study was that it called for reallocating the $125 billion for troops and weapons. Among other options, the savings could have paid a large portion of the bill to rebuild the nation’s aging nuclear arsenal, or the operating expenses for 50 Army brigades.

But some Pentagon leaders said they fretted that by spotlighting so much waste, the study would undermine their repeated public assertions that years of budget austerity had left the armed forces starved of funds. Instead of providing more money, they said, they worried Congress and the White House might decide to cut deeper.

So the plan was killed. The Pentagon imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings. A 77-page summary report that had been made public was removed from a Pentagon website. . . .