Michael Campbell MD Joins ECVA

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blocked the promotions of at least seven Navy officers hand-picked by a board of senior admirals, removing all women and most minority candidates from the list of nominees for promotions.

The intervention left a slate of 22 one-star admiral nominees that includes no women, despite females making up roughly 21 percent of the active-duty Navy, and only two nonwhite officers, despite racial minorities accounting for approximately 38 percent of the force, reported the New York Times.

At least two of the removed officers are women, two are Black men, and three are white men.

Four current and former defense officials, speaking anonymously to discuss sensitive personnel matters, said Hegseth's actions are highly unusual and appear to breach Pentagon rules, which permit the defense secretary to remove officers from promotion lists only when new information raises specific questions about their fitness to serve — not on ideological grounds.

Internal records suggest some officers were targeted because their names appeared on a website devoted to identifying "woke" military personnel, with infractions as minor as having served as a diversity liaison officer two decades ago. One highly regarded officer — a nuclear-trained surface warfare officer and former aide to a four-star admiral — was pulled from the list shortly after her name surfaced on the site for that decades-old role.

Hegseth also pushed senior Navy officials to place Capt. William Francis Jr., a Navy SEAL who serves as Hegseth’s special assistant, on the one-star list, but his lack of command experience made him ineligible for promotion and he was not selected, according to current and former Navy officials.

Since taking office, Hegseth has fired or sidelined nearly three dozen senior officers. Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, noted in recent Senate testimony that nearly 60 percent of the senior officers Hegseth has dismissed are female or Black — a group that currently makes up fewer than 20 percent of all generals and admirals.

Among those previously pushed out were General Charles Q. Brown Jr., the second African American to chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman ever to lead the Navy.

Hegseth has repeatedly declined to explain individual dismissals or removals, telling lawmakers he does not discuss such matters "out of respect for those officers" while speaking broadly of correcting years of what he called "gender and demographic engineering."

The Pentagon denied that race or gender played any role in promotion decisions, and the Navy declined to comment.

President Donald Trump scrapped a rare trip to Camp David on Tuesday after returning from a three-hour medical exam at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, with bad weather cited as the reason for the last-minute change.

Trump was scheduled to travel to the presidential retreat in rural Maryland on Wednesday to hold his 12th cabinet meeting since taking office, but the White House announced the gathering would instead be held at the White House. Trump typically flies to Camp David by helicopter, making heavy rain a potential factor in grounding.

The cancellation came hours after Trump posted on Truth Social that he had "just finished" his "6-month physical" at Walter Reed, adding that "Everything checked out PERFECTLY."

The 79-year-old president — who turns 80 next month — spent more than three hours at the military medical center for what the White House described as preventive medical and dental checkups. It was his fourth publicly disclosed exam since returning to office.

The White House did not release detailed results. Spokesperson Davis Ingle said Trump "remains in excellent health" and called him "the sharpest and most accessible President in American history."

Wednesday's cabinet meeting had been expected to cover economic wins, fraud task force updates, and foreign policy — but Iran was likely to dominate the agenda. The U.S. conducted strikes on targets in southern Iran late Monday, prompting Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to threaten American military bases in the Middle East.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday that nuclear talks with Tehran were still ongoing but could take "a few days" to finalize.

"The president expressed his desire to make sure he's either going to make a good deal or no deal," Rubio told reporters in India.