The Defense Department is significantly changing its policy of interacting with Congress, according to a new, five-page memo obtained by NBC News.
The memo, whose authenticity was confirmed by a Defense Department official, instructs all Pentagon personnel, except for the inspector general’s office, to seek approval before they communicate with lawmakers and staff members on Capitol Hill and other elected officials.
Dated Oct. 15, the memo, which is signed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, appears to order Pentagon officials — including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — to obtain permission from the department’s legislative affairs office for any communication with Capitol Hill.
The memo says that “effective immediately,” personnel “must coordinate all legislative affairs activities” through the office of legislative affairs.
It's a departure from current practice; previously, Defense Department agencies were free to manage their own interactions with Capitol Hill.
But under Hegseth, the department has sought stricter control over messaging coming out of the Pentagon. Dozens of reporters turned in their badges and left the building last week, when most news agencies refused to sign unprecedented restrictions Hegseth imposed that threatened consequences for journalists who reported information he had not approved for release, even if it was unclassified.
The new directive, which would further curb information flow from the Pentagon to Congress, is designed “to achieve our legislative goals,” Hegseth and his deputy wrote in the memo.
“Unauthorized engagements with Congress by DoW personnel acting in their official capacity, no matter how well-intentioned, may undermine Department-wide priorities critical to achieving our legislative objectives,” the memo says, using the initialism for the "Department of War," the Defense Department's secondary but unofficial name used by the Trump administration.
Breaking Defense first reported news of the memo.
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell called the new guidelines, following a review of the department’s communications process with Congress, “a pragmatic step” aimed at improving that process. “This review is for processes internal to the department and does not change how or from whom Congress receives information,” Parnell said in a statement.
The highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, accused Hegseth and his team of being “afraid of the truth."
Reed called the memo "symptomatic" of "the paranoia that is emanating from the Defense Department."
"We don’t want any lawyers, we don’t want any press, we don’t want anybody from Congress,” he said. “And you know, and as a result, I think they’re, they’re positioning themselves— we do what we want, no one checks us. The press doesn’t, Congress doesn’t, the courts, well, that’ll be a few years from now. So it’s a disparaging development.”
Meanwhile, the committee’s chairman, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., said he “wouldn’t be able to comment about” the memo. In recent weeks, Wicker has repeatedly told reporters he would not answer questions in the hallways of the Capitol.
