Pentagon names new senior staff amid building turmoil

The Pentagon on Friday announced four new senior advisers for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth following front office infighting that saw the exodus of five senior staff in the past several weeks.

The new advisers include Col. Ricky Buria, a former junior military assistant, Patrick Weaver, a former Defense Department “special assistant,” and Justin Fulcher, a top DOGE official placed at the Pentagon.

Sean Parnell, who had been the Pentagon press secretary, has been promoted to assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs and senior adviser. 

“Regular workforce adjustments are a feature of any highly efficient organization,” the Pentagon’s acting press secretary Kingsley Wilson said in a statement announcing the new roles.

“Secretary Hegseth will continue to be proactive with personnel decisions and will work hard to ensure the Department of Defense has the right people in the right positions to execute President Trump’s agenda,” she continued.

The statement belies the recent upheaval at the department, where earlier this month top staffers Dan Caldwell, Colin Carroll, and Darin Selnick were removed after being accused of leaking information, though the three men deny it. 

Another Pentagon spokesperson, John Ullyot, decided to leave the building which he said was in “total chaos” under Hegseth’s leadership.

And Hegseth’s chief of staff Joe Kasper, who was initially set to take another job in the building, chose to leave the Pentagon and return to the private sector, though he will still remain a special government employee.

All the turmoil comes as Hegseth has been under siege after revelations of a second Signal chat group in which he allegedly shared highly sensitive information about U.S. airstrikes against Houthi militants in Yemen with his wife, brother, lawyer, and others in his inner circle. 

The four men named to the new Pentagon positions do not appear to have much experience in government.

Parnell, a former Army Ranger, served in the military for six years before running an unsuccessful 2020 campaign for the U.S. House. He then briefly ran for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, even receiving President Trump’s endorsement ahead of the 2022 primary, but suspended his campaign after it was dogged by domestic abuse allegations.

Buria, a Marine and former aide to President Biden’s Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, has had multiple combat deployments and has quickly earned the trust of Hegseth. But he has come under scrutiny for his role in helping to facilitate Hegseth’s use of Signal inside the Pentagon. 

Fulcher, the founder of a global telehealth startup that went bankrupt, is part of billionaire Elon Musk’s DOGE team. He served in the first Trump administration at the Department of Homeland Security, and later received a master’s degree in nonproliferation and terrorism studies from Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in 2023. 

But Fulcher’s credentials and claims he has made were questioned in a Forbes article last month, with one former business partner saying Fulcher owes him hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Weaver appears to have the most government experience, as the former special assistant to Hegseth who also served in the first Trump administration in DHS and on the National Security Council. Following that, he was the legislative director for two GOP House members. 

Wilson, the new acting press secretary, also has limited experience working in the Pentagon and the government at large. The 26-year-old, whose father Steve Cortes is a former Trump campaign adviser, had been deputy press secretary since February.

Last month, lawmakers and Jewish groups criticized Wilson for her history of antisemitic, bigoted social media posts and public commentary before joining the Trump administration.