HEGSETH’S OVERHAUL: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is set to announce a 20 percent cut to positions at the Pentagon for admirals and generals in his latest push to overhaul the Department of Defense (DOD), two Pentagon officials confirmed to The Hill’s Filip Timotija.
The cuts will affect senior leadership positions across the Army, Navy and Air Force, Timotija reported.
Hegseth will discuss the workforce reductions, along with his other priorities in the coming months, during his State of the Force address today at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va., where he will speak before junior officers and enlisted leaders.
In another move to shake up the status quo at DOD, Hegseth yesterday directed departments to halt appointments of civilian staff to tenured positions at U.S. military service academies (MSAs) and develop hiring plans that prioritize “institutional flexibility and faculty contribution to the warfighting mission.”
In a one-page memo titled “Refocusing the Military Service Academies on Warfighter Education,” Hegseth said the institutions’ chief purpose is to prepare young officers to eventually lead the U.S. military, and he said granting tenure undermines that goal.
“To ensure our educational institutions remain firmly focused on this warfighting mission, we must address the structural mechanisms that have allowed civilian academic norms to dilute our focus on lethality,” Hegseth wrote in the memo.
Granting tenure to civilian faculty, he added, “contributes to curriculum that drifts from the mission of educating our warfighters to the research priorities of the tenured academics.”
It was not immediately clear what would happen to faculty currently tenured.
Hegseth said last year his goal was to replace “woke” civilian professors with military personnel.
▪ The Hill: Tom Cotton presses Hegseth for review after F-35 parts end up in China.
▪ Semafor: Republicans fuming at Hegseth as war costs build.
IN THE HOTSEAT: Former special counsel Jack Smith parried questions and insults from GOP lawmakers as he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday about his decisionmaking overseeing investigations into the president.
Smith strongly defended his work in the cases investigating Trump’s retention of classified and sensitive documents at Mar-a-Lago and his conduct related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, saying they were a result of the president’s own actions.
But the panel’s Republicans tore into Smith, accusing him of pursuing partisan prosecutions against Trump.
“You will go down as a total dirtbag,” said Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.).
One of the most contentious issues was Smith’s obtaining of the call logs of a dozen Republican senators as part of his Jan. 6 investigation. Tuesday was the first time that they had a chance to challenge him directly on the subpoenas.
Smith defended the subpoenas as necessary to map out communication, while Republicans accused him of violating their privacy and the Speech and Debate Clause of the Constitution, which protects lawmakers from legal scrutiny for official legislative acts.
The Hill’s Rebecca Beitsch reports on the takeaways from the testy hearing. Read more here.
▪ The Hill: Smith emphasizes strength of Trump cases.
‘MORALLY BINDING’: Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced that key artificial intelligence industry leaders signed on to a pledge to build “robust” internal controls and layers of auditing in an effort to appease the public’s concerns about AI development.
The agreement lays out a series of voluntary commitments for AI developers, according to Johnson, but Trump described “The White House Accord on Super Intelligence Joint Commitment on Frontier SI Responsibilities,” as “morally binding” and “almost like a constitution.”
“There’s going to be a tremendous self-policing aspect,” Trump said in a rare White House North Lawn appearance, joined by tech executives including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk.
Zuckerberg described the commitments as “good steps forward” and “a start” for the industry, saying, “The basic idea is that we want to give the American people and our customers confidence that the technology works in the way that we intend.”
While the agreement marks a point of collaboration between Trump and several AI leaders, as The Hill's Miranda Nazzaro and Julia Shapero report for Insider, Huang is one of the few standing behind the president's full-steam-ahead approach to AI.
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Earlier in the day, Trump launched a website, America.gov, that uses AI to help Americans navigate federal government websites and find information and services they need.
▪ The Hill: Trump renames AI ‘super intelligence’: ‘It is the biggest thing there is.’
▪ The Hill: Trump’s AI website confirms he lost 2020 election.
▪ The Hill Insider: Trump, GOP leaders look to reclaim narrative over AI.
GO AHEAD, FOR NOW: The Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration can resume its policy of deporting migrants to countries that they have no ties to for the time being as the court considers the policy’s legality.
The emergency ruling Tuesday lifts the restrictions imposed by a district court judge, who found the individuals affected don’t have a sufficient opportunity to raise claims that they would face torture if deported to a third country. The high court announced it would hear arguments in the case in December before issuing a final decision.
The court’s three liberal justices said they would’ve kept the limits in place while they consider the case. None of the justices explained their reasoning.
Third-country removals have been a key part of Trump’s strict crackdown on illegal immigration. His administration has signed many agreements with countries around the world to accept deportees, many of them in Africa.
▪ The Hill: Court blocks Trump bid to withhold counterterrorism funds from some states.
▪ The Hill: News outlets ask judge to extend block on White House ban.
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