Pete Hegseth, the current Defense Secretary, has just dropped a bombshell by essentially banning top military officials, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, from speaking with Congress unless they get permission through a centralized office that reports directly to him. In a move that feels like it’s straight out of an executive playbook on stonewalling, Hegseth and his deputy, Steve Feinberg, announced this wild change in an internal memo dated October 15.
Interactions between federal agencies and congressional offices are supposed to be as common as the sunrise. Lawmakers rely on this information to actually do their jobs and provide oversight to departments like the Pentagon. That’s literally how our system is designed to work. Yet, the Trump regime seems to think the rulebook is purely optional when it comes to keeping Congress, or anyone else, in the loop, per MSNBC.
This latest development isn’t happening in a vacuum, either. The White House already picked a fight back in June by announcing plans to limit how much intelligence it would share with members of Congress. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer pointed out that the administration has “no right to stonewall Congress on matters of national security”. Now, four months later, this new Pentagon memo proves the stonewalling is only getting worse.
Trump’s White House wants to hide things from Congress
The memo itself is pretty wild, too, not least because it refers to the Pentagon with a new, kind of ominous name: the “DoW,” or “Department of War”. They’re even committed to “politicized nomenclature” and seeming like brutes, while changing the fundamental way one of the most powerful departments in the country operates.
The official reason given in the memo is that “Unauthorized engagements with Congress… may undermine Department-wide priorities critical to achieving our legislative objectives”. That phrase “unauthorized engagements” sounds like something a cartoon villain would say. Don’t worry, Hegseth’s next leak will let everyone know what’s happening.
A new memo on communications with Capitol Hill, signed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his deputy, follows restrictions on reporting out of the Pentagon.
— Jose Aguirre (@josesdrink) October 22, 2025
The proposition that officials within the Defense Department should curtail their engagements with elected federal lawmakers isn’t just new; it’s completely at odds with how the system is supposed to work. Think about the practical implications for a second: Congress has constitutional oversight authority over the Department of Defense.
This is just the latest step in a clear pattern from Hegseth and his team. They’ve already been trying to limit what journalists and the public know about developments at the Pentagon, and now they’re applying the same iron curtain to Congress. Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, who is the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, didn’t pull any punches when he talked to NBC News.
He essentially said that Hegseth and his team are acting like they’re “afraid of the truth” and are guided by pure “paranoia”. And honestly, reading the details of this memo, it’s hard to disagree with his personal opinion. This isn’t the behavior of a transparent administration; it’s the action of one that’s running scared.
Sen. Reed went on to give us a look into the apparent mindset of the DOD leadership, commenting: “We don’t want any lawyers, we don’t want any press, we don’t want anybody from Congress… And as a result, I think they’re, they’re positioning themselves—‘we do what we want, no one checks us.’”. That quote is a stark warning. It suggests the goal is complete unchecked authority, where the press doesn’t check them, and Congress doesn’t check them. The only thing that might check them—the courts—will, as Reed notes, be a few years down the line.
