Senators Allege Hegseth Slashed Civilian-Protection Staff

Card photograph: ARCHIVE. Pete Hegseth at the Student Action Summit in Tampa, Florida, July 11, 2025. Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped for the card. License. Adaptation shared under the same license. Source photograph.

Senators Chris Van Hollen and Elizabeth Warren opened an April 20 investigation into Pete Hegseth’s cuts to military civilian-harm prevention programs. Their letter alleged combatant-command staffing reductions exceeding 90%, dismissals at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence and removal of specialists from strike-planning teams.

The senators said Central Command’s team had fallen from 10 staff to one full-time employee and the Joint Special Operations Command office had been eliminated. These were allegations in an oversight letter, not completed investigative findings. The letter requested explanations by May 4.

The inquiry cited senior defense officials who supported civilian-harm mitigation, including statements by Elbridge Colby and Dan Caine. The senators sought restoration of authorized staffing and an end to the Iran war. Their demands connected the capacity to assess harm before strikes with the political decision to continue the attacks. The inquiry followed Rubio’s March briefings seeking congressional support for the Iran operation.

Congress sought the underlying investigations

Archive photograph of Pete Hegseth, 2025-01-27. Chad J. McNeeley / Department of Defense / Wikimedia Commons. Public domain, U.S. government work. Source photograph. License.

A separate June 18 Defense News report described an attempt to attach a financial consequence to missing information. The Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the fiscal 2027 defense-authorization bill would withhold 75% of Hegseth’s travel funding until lawmakers received specified civilian-harm investigations and other records.

The requested material included investigations of three 2025 strikes in Yemen and the February 2026 strike on a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, as well as unedited footage of Latin American boat strikes. The committee approved its bill 18–9. That was a committee proposal, not evidence that the travel restriction had become law or that the investigations had been delivered.

The same report described a separate effort to prohibit military spending on unauthorized Iran operations. That amendment failed 13–14. Seeking information about civilian deaths and restricting the war itself were therefore distinct decisions, with different outcomes inside the committee.

Staffing and disclosure are connected

The April letter concerned the people responsible for assessing civilian risks before and after an attack. The June proposal concerned the records Congress would receive afterward. A depleted prevention program and delayed investigations create different obstacles: one affects planning capacity, the other lawmakers’ ability to examine what happened.

That distinction also limits what can be concluded from the senators’ allegations. A staffing reduction alone does not establish who caused a particular strike or whether an individual attack violated the law. The demand for operational records is precisely what connects institutional policy to evidence about an actual event.

By June, the committee had approved pressure on Hegseth’s travel budget while rejecting a prohibition on unauthorized Iran-war spending. Its demand for investigations advanced further than its attempt to stop funding the operations under scrutiny.