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Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHATZ. Mr. President, Pete Hegseth is just not qualified to be in charge of the Department of Defense. He would oversee almost 3 million employees around the world and an annual budget of over $800 billion. But his only management experience today is running two very small veterans' organizations with, let's just say, mixed results.
Even if he had done extraordinarily well in that job, you do not put a person in charge of a small shop suddenly in charge of 3 million employees. He ran organizations with just a few dozen employees and tiny little budgets and neither of them were anything like the Defense Department in size and scale. And so on what basis are we supposed to trust that Pete Hegseth can manage not just the largest employer in the country but one of the largest employers on the planet?
Much like the rest of Donald Trump's Cabinet, the main criteria for Hegseth's nomination was his loyalty to Donald Trump. I am not saying loyalty to the President is some sort of disqualifier. You want your Cabinet to be loyal. But it can't be the only thing. You also have to be good at this. It is not like you couldn't have found a MAGA world person that was a three-star or a four-star or someone who had run a big enterprise or someone who had been a Governor or someone who had done big things and demonstrated they could run big complex organizations. That is what this is.
This isn't about woke or not woke or foreign policy. This is about: Gosh, this is a big job; and to the extent that the U.S. Senate is in the personnel business to provide our advice and then our consent to a President providing us with a nominee, it is very hard to get to yes on someone who has just never run anything particularly large or complicated.
In 2017--and this is his main qualification--he says:
I think President Donald Trump is the final defensive line for America.
And as Trump ran for reelection, he said that there would be a ``national divorce'' if Democrats won and that ``the military and police . . . will be forced''--``the military and the police . . . will be forced to make a choice [and] yes, there will be some form of civil war.''
This is the guy we want to run the Defense Department who a couple of years ago suggested if Democrats win, there might be a civil war.
It is not just that Hegseth is a Trump acolyte getting a plum job in the administration. There is plenty of that happening. It is also that he has no real understanding substantively of the job that he would be doing. Leading the Department of the Defense is not just a bureaucratic exercise. Day in and day out, month after month, you are issuing billions of dollars in contracts and making decisions that are not at all obvious and super complex and sensitive. There are tradeoffs and compromises, and you have to know how, as they say, the building works.
So your knowledge and your experience really matter here, which is why it was so alarming that he wasn't able to name a single member of ASEAN when asked by my colleague Senator Tammy Duckworth. It wasn't a ``gotcha'' question. That is pretty basic stuff. ASEAN, which stands for the Association of Southeastern Asian Nations, is an essential part of the strategy in the Indo-Pacific. These are key partners the Defense Secretary directly engages with. Hegseth didn't even know the first thing about them and named a bunch of countries that don't even belong to the organization.
Later, when he was asked by Senator Slotkin whether he would carry out an illegal order from Donald Trump, like using the military against civilians, he refused to give a straight answer. There are a lot of close calls when you are Defense Secretary, but whether or not to turn the military on the public, even if they are Democrats, is not a close call. That is a simple: No, I wouldn't do that. I will not carry out an illegal order. No, the United States military is not in existence for the purpose of carrying out orders against United States citizens exercising their constitutional rights.
Leading our Armed Forces is not a part-time gig. The Pentagon is not a cable news set where you can roll up on a Saturday and say clever things. You can't improv your way out of global conflicts.
The people who lace up and go into battle deserve better than that. They deserve someone who understands the world and all of its complexities and recognizes the weight of their decisions, especially when the chips are down. And Pete Hegseth is not that person.
I urge my colleagues to do the right thing and vote no on his confirmation.
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