Three retired military officers with a combined online following in the hundreds of thousands have been quietly working inside the Pentagon office that shapes personnel policy, all while using their platforms to talk up Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth while piling on his critics, according to a Washington Post investigation published Sunday. None of the three has told his audience about the government email address issued in his name.
Civilian titles, a front-row seat to personnel policy
Retired Air Force Col. Rob Maness and retired Army Col. Kurt Schlichter currently hold active government email accounts carrying a ".civ" suffix — marking them as civilian staff rather than uniformed personnel or outside contractors — inside the office of Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, per department files examined by the newspaper. A third man, retired Army Col. Thomas Anderson, who writes online under the pen name Cynical Publius, carried the same designation earlier this year before his name disappeared from department listings within the past several days, sources with direct knowledge of the situation say.
Between them, the three men reach well over a million followers on the social platform X: Schlichter's account approaches 620,000, Anderson's sits near 323,000, and Maness's tops 135,000.
Classifications built for low visibility
Individuals with insight into the hiring say the men were brought on under one of two designations: a "special government employee," a category federal law limits to 130 working days inside any rolling 365-day stretch, or "highly qualified expert," a track that lets agencies bring in outside specialists full time, part time or unpaid, without the disclosure requirements standard hires face. Government listings reviewed by the paper tag Schlichter specifically with the "HQE" label. Pentagon spokesman Joel Valdez would not say whether the men draw taxpayer-funded pay, what work they actually do, or when their assignments are set to end. Tata did not respond to the Post's questions, and Anderson declined to discuss the matter beyond a brief phone call.
More than a desk and an email address
The postings were not purely symbolic. Maness, Schlichter and Anderson made a joint trip that May to the Pennsylvania campus of the Army War College, representing a Pentagon panel — the Senior Service College Task Force — that Hegseth's leadership stood up that spring to hunt for "toxic" or "woke" thinking at the military's senior academies. The three spent several days there interviewing students and faculty, two people briefed on the visit said. That task force has since wrapped its research, though nothing has been made public.
Who the three men are
Maness left active-duty Air Force service in 2011 and, years later, lost a bid for one of Louisiana's Senate seats; these days he chairs GatorPAC, a political committee built around shrinking the federal workforce and pushing more veterans toward elected office. Writing for the Daily Caller on July 30, he demanded the removal of "disloyal" career staff, building his case around a Pentagon employee caught on hidden camera pledging to slow-walk the administration's directives once "the political winds" turned.
Schlichter spent his Army career as an infantry officer before retiring a full colonel, and today practices trial law out of Los Angeles while writing as a senior columnist for the conservative outlet Townhall. His recent columns there oppose any legal pathway for people living in the country without authorization and call for scrapping birthright citizenship entirely — a body of work that leans hard toward restriction. Anderson, an attorney, has used his Cynical Publius persona to defend Hegseth's shake-up of the department, right up until his own listing quietly vanished from Pentagon records.
Part of a wider circle
The three names surfaced days after a separate episode involving Jennica Pounds, the influencer behind the account DataRepublican, who was confirmed as a Pentagon special government employee after she accused a State Department official of trying to entrap her with leaked documents — an allegation the official has denied, saying the paperwork in question carried standard public-records redactions. That dispute renewed scrutiny of active-duty Army Lt. Col. Adam D'Ortona, who has criticized congressional Democrats and defended Hegseth's personnel moves online while still in uniform. Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican-turned-critic of the administration, publicly asked how many other accounts pushing pro-administration talking points might likewise be drawing a government paycheck.
The arrangement is likely to draw particular interest from Latino readers because of the platform it hands Schlichter specifically. His Townhall column archive is built on hardline, restrictionist positions, including recent pieces rejecting any amnesty for immigrants without legal status and pushing to end birthright citizenship outright. A Pentagon posting doesn't hand Schlichter any authority over immigration enforcement, which remains the Department of Homeland Security's territory. But it does mean a commentator with that record now writes under an official government email address inside the office that helps shape military personnel policy, while reaching an audience that has grown to nearly 620,000 people.
Transparency claims meet official silence
Administration officials have repeatedly described Hegseth's Pentagon as unusually open with the public, even as it has narrowed traditional press access and swapped in a friendlier press corps for reporters who long covered the building. Neither the department nor any of the three men named in the Post's reporting answered basic questions about who is funding the arrangements or what the men are doing in return. The people who described the roles to reporters did so only on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of discussing internal personnel matters.
It remains unclear whether other influencers hold similar undisclosed positions, how much money has changed hands, or whether any of the three assignments will continue past the legal limits that govern short-term government service. The Pentagon has not said whether it plans to release records clarifying what the men actually do.
