Daily Caller
‘A Tremendous Boon’: Trump’s Sec Def Pick Will Give Pentagon Its First Real Wake Up Call In Decades

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Jake Smith
President-elect Donald Trump’s decision to tap Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense has sent corporate media and the wider defense establishment into a tailspin, with critics taking aim at the veteran’s lack of policy-making experience. Yet, national security experts argue that Hegseth could bring much-needed change to a Pentagon that has lost its way.
Trump announced Tuesday evening that Hegseth would be taking over the nation’s top defense role, touting him as “tough, smart and a true believer in America First.” Hegseth will face a series of challenges that started under the Biden-Harris administration’s tenure, including a recruiting and retention crisis, weapons stockpile shortages, hot-button left-wing policies and two global wars that have dragged in the U.S.
“He wasn’t on my bingo card, but I just finished his book and was incredibly impressed by what he had to say,” Morgan Murphy, former Pentagon press secretary and national security adviser to Sen. Tommy Tuberville, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “I think it’s a really good pick by the president.”
Hegseth is in lockstep with Trump’s “America First” approach, having vocalized his rejection of neoconservatism while also not appearing to be in favor of isolationism, either. Hegseth also spoke on the Shawn Ryan show in an interview published on Nov. 7 about the need to strip the Pentagon and military of left-wing policies that some argue have hindered the military’s readiness.
Many corporate media outlets reacted with shock at Hegseth being tapped to head the Pentagon. A number of officials and defense insiders who spoke to some outlets expressed outrage at the choice, arguing that Trump should have picked a Washington establishment figure for the role.
“Who the fuck is this guy?” a defense lobbyist, who has hoping for “someone who actually has an extensive background in defense,” told Politico.
“Folks are shocked,” one current DOD official told the outlet. “He’s just a Fox News personality that’s never worked in the government.”
Democratic lawmakers, too, have raced to cast doubt on Hegseth, voicing similar criticism.
“There is reason for concern that this is not a person who is a serious enough policymaker, serious enough policy implementer, to do a successful job,” Democratic Washington Rep. Adam Smith told The Associated Press.
Yet some people well versed in the national security and foreign affairs world feel differently; though Hegseth’s appointment was a surprise, it could be just what the Pentagon needs right now.
“Hegseth understands the needs of our service members and is committed to refocusing on readiness and core defense priorities, which will help address some recent challenges within the Department of Defense,” former senior Pentagon official Simone Ledeen told the DCNF.
A Princeton graduate, Hegseth joined the military in the early 2000s, serving in Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan, and was an infantry platoon leader. He has also been active in veterans affairs, having worked for Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America in the late 2000s through the mid-2010s.
“He has personally fought in the wars that Washington has signed the nation up for, in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Murphy said. “When I look at his resume, that’s what jumps out at me … when you have been a guest of your government in our foreign interventions, I think it gives a perspective that we have not had from a secretary of defense in a long time.”
The ultimate cost for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is estimated to be between $4 and $6 trillion, with both conflicts resulting in over 7,000 U.S. servicemember deaths and countless others wounded. Further, 13 U.S. servicemembers died during the botched Biden-Harris Afghanistan withdrawal, which initially left thousands of Americans stranded. Around $7 billion in U.S. military equipment was also left behind, ending up in the hands of the Taliban.
Hegseth joined Fox News in 2014 and has been with the network since. He was interviewed by Trump at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Tuesday and was chosen for the role on the same day, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.
Hegseth has publicly voiced his strong belief in conservatism, especially when it comes to national security affairs.
“[Hegseth]” will be an amazing leader,” former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell wrote in a postto X on Tuesday. “He loves America and wants to protect her.”
The incoming defense secretary will inherit a number of challenges plaguing the Biden-Harris administration, including the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and Middle East conflicts. He will also deal with the growing threat from China, which has become increasingly hostile to the U.S. and is rapidly expanding its military.
During an interview with Shawn Ryan last week, Hegseth also raised the issue of the ongoing recruiting and retention crisis in the military. Several branches of the military under the Biden administration have missed their recruiting goals in recent years, prompting the Pentagon to lower some standards to boost enlistment.
That’s an area where Hegseth is likely to fare better than Austin, Murphy told the DCNF.
“It’s going to be, I think, a tremendous boon to recruiting to have a secretary who has served,” Murphy said.
This is my next Secretary of Defense and he’s going to start by firing everyone responsible for pushing woke ideology in the military — and I cannot wait.pic.twitter.com/6uXV3kbySv
— Marina Medvin
(@MarinaMedvin) November 13, 2024
Hegseth is also likely to address a number of policies that the Biden administration and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin have embraced in recent years.
Austin has overseen the implementation of several left-wing initiatives at the Pentagon. For example, the military has established diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) quotas for recruiting and retention. In another example, the DCNF previously learned that the Air Force set a “goal” to reduce the white population in a key recruiting program while setting specific targets for other races.
Austin also established a policy where the Pentagon reimburses servicemembers for travel fees if they have to go to another state to get an abortion.
Trump is already quickly filling spots in his cabinet and administration. The president-elect has selected Tulsi Gabbard to head national intelligence, Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general, adviser Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff, Florida Rep. Mike Waltz to serve as his national security adviser, Tom Homan as “border czar,” North Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as Department of Homeland Security secretary and John Ratcliffe as Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director.
Republican Florida Sen. Marco was also confirmed Wednesday to be Trump’s pick for secretary of state.
Those picks are a major shift from Biden’s current officials. Hegseth will replace Austin; Wiles will take over from Jeff Zients; Waltz is set to take over from Jake Sullivan; Noem will replace Alejandro Mayorkas; Stefanik will take over from Linda Thomas-Greenfield, and Ratcliffe will fill Bill Burns’ role. Rubio is slated to replace Antony Blinken.
Business
FEMA Quietly Slid $59 Million Out The Door For Illegal Migrants To Put Their Feet Up At ‘Luxury Hotels’: Musk

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Jason Hopkins
“That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!” he continued. “A clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) handed out $59 million to “luxury” hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants, Elon Musk said Monday.
Musk — who leads the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a temporary agency within the Trump administration tasked with weeding out frivolous spending by the federal government — said it was his DOGE team that made the discovery. The top White House official said the payment was in violation of President Donald Trump’s executive order and efforts would be made to recover the funds.
“The @DOGE team just discovered that FEMA sent $59M LAST WEEK to luxury hotels in New York City to house illegal migrants,” Musk posted on X. “Sending this money violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order.”
“That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!” he continued. “A clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.”
The details around the alleged payout are not completely clear. FEMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation, nor did a spokesperson for DOGE.
Former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in October denied the Biden administration was using FEMA funds for migrant accommodations, but in 2022 she suggested that the agency was assisting cities with the migrant crisis.
On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order that placed a temporary suspension on refugee resettlement into the United States. The president additionally noted how some major cities, like New York City and Chicago, have requested federal aid to help manage the massive influx of migrants entering their jurisdictions.
The president additionally signed an executive order placing a freeze on federal grants and loans as it conducts a review of the government’s spending, but that order has since been blocked by the courts.
However, New York City officials have a long history of placing illegal migrants into four-star hotels as they’ve struggled to find accommodations for the sheer number of asylum seekers flocking to the Big Apple.
New York City began housing migrants in the four-star Collective Paper Factory hotel around August 2023 after it was reorganized into a Department of Homeless Services emergency shelter. The five-story Collective Paper Factory itself is equipped with a restaurant, a gym, a bar, meeting rooms for guests and communal spaces.
The “chic” Square Hotel was converted into housing for migrants. Other “upscale” hotels in the Big Apple have also been converted into migrant housing in the past as city officials continue to deal with the migrant crisis, including The Row, which has also been described as a “four-star hotel.”
“A 4-star hotel is considered luxury lodging,” according to Kayak, a company that provides hotel booking services. “Guest rooms are noticeably more spacious, with top-quality linens, pillowtop mattresses, bathrobes, slippers, minibars, and upscale toiletries, plus equipped kitchens.”
NYC’s Department of Homeless Services was reportedly seeking a contract with local hotels to provide roughly 14,000 rooms in order to shelter migrants through 2025. City officials anticipated spending on migrants in need of housing for the current fiscal year and the past two years combined will exceed $2.3 billion, with a significant amount of these costs going toward hotel rent.
The Big Apple — a sanctuary city jurisdiction with strict laws restricting cooperation between local law enforcement and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — has become a major destination for the massive number of illegal migrants who’ve flocked into the United States. Roughly 230,000 migrants have arrived in NYC since the spring of 2022, according to data provided by the mayor’s office.
FEMA underwent an internal investigation in November after it was uncovered that a supervisor reportedly instructed disaster relief workers deployed in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton to avoid houses with Trump signs.
Business
‘The DNA Of Our Foreign Policy’: How USAID Hid Behind Humanitarianism To Export Radical Left-Wing Priorities Abroad

From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Thomas English
Behind the veil of humanitarian aid, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) doled out billions in taxpayer dollars to engage in left-wing social engineering abroad — from rampant LGBT advocacy to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and tech censorship.
President John F. Kennedy established USAID in 1961 to, in his words, “provide generously of our skills, and our capital and our food to assist the peoples of the less-developed nations to reach their goals in freedom.” The agency, though, has reinterpreted Kennedy’s mission statement to mean that Ecuador suffers from a lack of drag shows, that Peruvian comic books are too light on transgender representation, that the Serbian workplace is insufficiently welcoming to the homosexual community — while also offering social media platforms a host of creative tactics to suppress those who disagree with USAID’s social agenda.
“It’s probably one out of every three grants is totally insane left-wing nonsense … USAID has always been somewhat left, but when the Biden administration started, you can clearly see a huge uptick in spending,” Parker Thayer, who researches federal spending at Capital Research Center, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The amount of lunatic, fringe grants goes up dramatically. For example, if you go to USAspending[.gov] and search for the keyword ‘transgender,’ the graph is basically a vertical line when you hit 2021. It’s kind of remarkable.”
He also emphasized his discovery of a $13 million grant for an Arabic-language translation of “Sesame Street,” calling it “something else, man.”
Other programs include a $2 million grant for funding sex-change procedures in Guatemala, $500,000 for LGBT inclusion in Serbian workplaces, $70,000 for a DEI-themed musical in Ireland, a transgender clinic in Vietnam, a similar clinic in India, $46,000 in HIV care for transgender South Africans, $1.5 million more for South African children to “learn through play,” $20,000 Bulgarians to enjoy a vaguely-defined “LGBT-related event” — programs for which former USAID Administrator Samantha Power said “a big pot of money” wasn’t enough.
These and other programs were the vehicle through which Power went about “working LGBT rights into the DNA of our foreign policy,” a priority she emphasized to Harvard students in 2015 during her tenure as U.S. Ambassador to the United States.
“One of the most common complaints you will get if you go to embassies around the world — from State Department officials and ambassadors and the like — is that USAID is not only not cooperative; they undermine the work that we’re doing in that country,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who assumed control over USAID on Monday, said. He condemned the agency’s more questionable programs as not only a waste of taxpayer dollars, but a diplomatic liability.
“They are supporting programs that upset the host government for whom we’re trying to work with on a broader scale,” he said.
Beyond pro-LGBT funding, former President Joe Biden’s USAID offered social media platforms a “disinformation primer,” a 100-page document providing guidance for countering “disinformation” through increased fact-checking and censorship — policies it said would make platforms more “democratically accountable.”
The document credits some of its content suppression tactics to the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a now-defunct agency that operated under the State Department. To “counter disinformation,” GEC recommended ginning up “moral outrage” against content that “violates [the] sacred value” of what it considers “the truth.”
Biden seemed to heed GEC’s guidance on moral outrage during the height of the pandemic in 2021, accusing Facebook of “killing people” by insufficiently censoring anti-vaccine content on the platform. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recalled during his Jan. 10 appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” an instance when the Biden administration pressured him to censor a satirical meme about vaccine side effects. Biden later walked back his accusation against Facebook in an interview with CNN.
The USAID-funded primer also recommended “advertiser outreach,” a strategy that would financially throttle agency-disfavored informational outlets by informing advertisers of potential damage to brand reputation.
“[Advertisers] inadvertently are funding and amplifying platforms that disinform. Thus, cutting this financial support found in the ad-tech space would obstruct disinformation actors from spreading messaging online,” the Disinformation Primer reads. “Efforts have been made to inform advertisers of their risks, such as the threat to brand safety by being placed next to objectionable content.”
The document further characterized the legacy media’s recent decline “leading to a loss of information integrity,” which thereby justifies USAID’s efforts to combat those “casting doubt on media.”
“It leads to a loss of information integrity. Online news platforms have disrupted the traditional media landscape. Government officials and journalists are not the sole information gatekeepers anymore … Because traditional information systems are failing, some opinion leaders are casting doubt on media, which, in turn, impacts USAID programming and funding choices,” the document continued.
USAID also faced intense congressional scrutiny in 2023 after allegations emerged that its PREDICT program and subsequent grants to EcoHealth Alliance potentially funneled U.S. taxpayer funds into gain-of-function coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — which raised questions about USAID’s possible role in contributing to the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul complained that USAID refused to hand over documents pertaining to the allegations and the agency’s funding habits.
“The response I got from your agency was: ‘USAID will not be providing any documents at this time.’ They’re just unwilling to give documents on scientific grant proposals — we’re paying for it, they’re asking for $745 million more in money. We get no response,” Rand said. “We’re not asking for classified information. We’re not asking for anything unusual. 20 million people died around the world … and you won’t give us the basic information about what grants you’re funding — should we be funding the Academy of Military Medical Research in China?”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed Rand’s transparency concerns after announcing he was the USAID’s new acting director Monday, calling the agency “completely uncooperative.”
“They’re one of the most suspicious federal agencies that exists,” Thayer told the DCNF, suggesting the agency’s reputation for being opaque is justified. “It’s kind of a character trait for USAID to be less than transparent.”
Thayer explained that, in his research, USAID is selective in its transparency. The grants he called “complete nonsense,” such as the “Sesame Street” translation, “are very specific about what they’re doing. And the ones that are vaguely humanitarian-sounding are usually written like someone put a sociology textbook through a word randomizer then just took whatever it spat out and put it on the page. They are so full of jargon words that they’re basically incomprehensible, even to people who understand what the jargon words are supposed to mean.”
“I got $1.1 million for a study of youth rural migration in Morocco,” he added. “I literally — I cannot help you in understanding what that could possibly mean. I have no idea what that means.”
Elon Musk, the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), claimed that he and President Donald Trump agreed to shutter the agency entirely during an X Spaces conversation early Monday morning. Rubio emphasized in a Tuesday interview with Fox News that he does not intend to “get rid of foreign aid,” but is considering whether USAID ought to be housed under State Department or remain an autonomous agency.
“This is not about getting rid of foreign aid,” Rubio said. “There are things we do through USAID that we should continue to do, that make sense. And we’ll have to decide: Is that better through the State Department, or is that better through a reformed USAID? That’s the process we’re working through … but they’re completely uncooperative. We had no choice but to take dramatic steps to bring this thing under control.”
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