Hegseth reportedly cuts two Black men and two women from military promotion list

Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, is reportedly attempting to block the military promotion of four officers – two women and two Black men – to become one-star generals.

The remaining promotion list includes about three dozen officers, most of whom are white men, though a few women and Black officers are still included, according to the New York Times.

Hegseth has asked army leaders, including Dan Driscoll, the secretary of the army, to remove the officers’ names, the report said. After Driscoll reportedly refused to do so, citing the officers’ decades-long, exemplary records, Hegseth removed the four officers’ names himself, though it is unclear whether he has the authority to do so. Per military policy, according to the Times, the defense secretary is technically only supposed to approve or reject the entire list – to keep the military’s officer corps from being politicized.

The resulting list, with Hegseth’s exclusions, is being reviewed by the White House before being sent to the Senate for final approval. The names of officers on one-star lists are supposed to remain confidential until Senate approval.

The chief Pentagon spokesperson, Sean Parnell, told the Guardian in an email that the New York Times’s reporting was “full of fake news”.

“Under Secretary Hegseth, military promotions are given to those who have earned them. Meritocracy, which reigns in this Department, is apolitical and unbiased,” he said.

Ricky Buria, Hegseth’s chief of staff, also called the report “completely false”.

Hegseth’s tenure as head of the Pentagon has been marked by his crusade against a culture that he describes as having been shaped by “foolish” and “woke” leaders from previous administrations. Though in September he said that promotions would no longer be based on “immutable characteristics or quotas”, he himself has seemingly highly scrutinized the merits of non-white, non-male officers.

“For too long, we’ve promoted too many uniform leaders for the wrong reasons – based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts,” he said in a speech last November.

Last year, he reassigned Vice Admiral Yvette Davids, the first woman to lead the US naval academy, and dismissed another navy vice admiral, Shoshana Chatfield, as the US military representative to the Nato military committee and dismissed the navy admiral Linda Fagan as chief of naval operations. He pledged to remove female officers from combat and banned trans people from serving in the military.

This is not the first promotion that has caused friction since the new administration took office in 2025. Last summer, Maj Gen Antoinette R Gant was selected to command the Military District of Washington. Reportedly, Buria told Driscoll that Trump would not want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events. Driscoll pushed back, insisting that the “president is not a racist or sexist”, according to the Times. Buria denied the account of the interaction, the Times reported.

“This is completely false. Whoever placed this made up story is clearly trying to sow division among our ranks in the Department and the administration,” Buria wrote via email in a statement to the Guardian. “It’s not going to work, and it will never work when this Department is led by clear-eyed, mission driven leaders unfazed by Washington gossip.”

In Hegseth’s 2024 book, The War on Warriors, he wrote: “The Left captured the military quickly, and we must reclaim it at a faster pace. We must wage a frontal assault. A swift counterattack in broad daylight.”