Hegseth says DOGE welcome at Pentagon as Defense Department reviews military posture globally

Upon arriving at the headquarters of U.S. European Command and Africa Command, Hegseth did push-ups, dead-lifts and other PT exercises with the 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) - a gesture the secretary, a combat veteran himself, said was meant to interact with the troops directly and hear about their missions, rather than solely communicating through four-star generals. 

"The Defense Department is not USAID," Hegseth said. "USAID has got a lot of problems that I talked about with the troops - pursuing globalist agendas that don't have a connection to America First. That's not the Defense Department. But we're also not perfect either. So where we can find billions of dollars, and he's right to say billions inside the Defense Department, every dollar we save, there is a dollar that goes to warfighters. And that's good for the American people." 

Hegseth was also asked if there were plans to shift U.S. forces from Europe to the Indo-Pacific to focus on the Chinese threat. 

"There are no plans right now in the making to cut anything," Hegseth said. "There is an understanding that we're going to review force posture across the world." 

"President Trump's planning assumptions are different in many ways, or at least strategic assumptions, than Joe Biden's," he said. "We certainly don't want a plan on the back of the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And what happened on October 7th and the war that was unleashed in Ukraine. You have to manage and mitigate those things by coming alongside your friends in Israel and sharing their defense, and peacefully resolving the conflict in Ukraine. But those shouldn't define how we orient." 

On his decision to reverse Biden's 2023 renaming of Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg, Hegseth said, "It means Bragg is back. It means the legacy of an institution that generations of Americans have mobilized through and served at is back." 

"I never called it Fort Liberty because it wasn't Fort Liberty. It's Fort Bragg. And so I was honored to be able to put my signature on that," Hegseth said. The North Carolina base's original namesake was Gen. Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general, but Hegseth said it would now be named after Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, a World War II hero who earned the Silver Star and the Purple Heart for his courage during the Battle of the Bulge.