Trump names his picks for top Pentagon roles

WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump plans to nominate four men for top leadership roles at the Pentagon, including two who served in his first administration, he announced on social media Sunday.

Trump named Stephen A. Feinberg as his choice for deputy secretary of defense, Elbridge Colby to be undersecretary for policy, Michael Duffey for undersecretary for acquisitions and sustainment, and Emil Michael as undersecretary for research and engineering. All should face Senate confirmation hearings.

Feinberg, the billionaire co-founder of the private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, was a major funder of Trump’s presidential campaigns and was considered for a top intelligence post in the first Trump administration.

A firearms enthusiast, he invested in businesses that were in bad shape financially, including Cerberus’ 2007 acquisition of the gunmaker Remington, which declared bankruptcy in 2018 and again in 2020.

Colby, whose grandfather William Colby served as CIA director under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, served in the Pentagon during the first Trump administration. In October, he said in an interview with a New York Times opinion writer that China presented the greatest military threat to the United States, and he praised Trump for what he called a “mix of flexibility and pragmatism” for his willingness to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea.

Regarding Ukraine, Colby said the country needed sufficient arms for its war with Russia, adding that he would support “an intensification of sanctions” against Moscow. He also said he did not believe that Ukraine should become a member of NATO.

Duffey served in the Office of Management and Budget in the first Trump administration and was at the center of a major episode. It was Duffey who asked the Pentagon to freeze $250 million in scheduled military aid to Ukraine after a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which Trump asked Zelenskyy to investigate his political rival Joe Biden. That call between the two presidents led to Trump’s first impeachment.

Michael served as an executive at ride-sharing company Uber, where he supported hiring investigators to pursue journalists who wrote articles critical of the company. He left Uber in 2017 after a report that he had visited an escort bar in South Korea as part of a business trip, which made some co-workers uncomfortable and led to a complaint to the company’s human resources department.

Michael is not Trump’s only prospective defense nominee with a cloud of scandal hanging over him. Trump’s choice for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has been accused of sexual assault, alcohol abuse and mismanagement of a nonprofit. He has denied the accusations. Hegseth has also vocally defended war criminals and spoken out about his opposition to women serving in combat roles in the U.S. military, even though a number of women have qualified in nearly all combat jobs the Pentagon has to offer since a policy banning women from those roles was lifted in 2015.

The once-tenuous candidacy of Hegseth, a former major in the Army National Guard and a former weekend host of “Fox & Friends,” appears more plausible after he secured the support of some key senators in recent weeks.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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