Sexual assault allegation, women in combat: 5 controversies at Pete Hegseth's confirmation hearing
Experience questions
Multiple senators expressed doubt about Hegseth having sufficient experience, among them Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., herself a combat veteran who had lost both legs in the Iraq War.
During her line of questioning, Duckworth stated that “the American people need a SecDef who’s ready to lead on day one. You are not that person.”
“You’ve only led [something] as large as a 200-person organization,” she continued. “You so badly mangled a budget that after you left they had to bring in a forensic accountant to figure out what went wrong.”
Duckworth charged that Hegseth had never been in charge of an audit, adding that while “nobody expects you to be an accountant,” people do expect “you to understand the complexity of this Pentagon budget process that is absolutely necessary to outfit our warfighters.”
Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., also brought up the experience issue, saying that Hegseth had never been in charge of anything that was “remotely near even a medium-sized company in America, let alone a big company in America.”
“We need strong management at the Department of Defense first and foremost,” the senator stated. “We’re hiring you to be the CEO of one of the most complex, largest organizations in the world. We’re the board of directors here. I don’t know of any board of directors [that would] hire a CEO for a major company if they came and said, ‘you know, I supervised a hundred people before.’”
When asked to give an example of innovation, Hegseth cited the work he did with Concerned Veterans for America and their efforts to help healthcare reform for combat veterans on Capitol Hill.
Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., came to the defense of Hegseth, telling him that “it seems to me that you’ve supervised far more people than the average United States senator.”