BREAKING: Senate Republicans Move to Freeze Hegseth’s Travel Budget Over Secrecy
A Republican-led Senate committee is taking direct aim at Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, threatening to cut off the majority of his travel funding unless the Pentagon finally hands over information lawmakers have been demanding for months.
The Senate Armed Services Committee’s newly filed defense policy bill states that no more than 25 percent of Hegseth’s travel budget can be touched until he turns over unredacted civilian harm investigations and other key documents tied to military strikes across the Middle East and Latin America.
Committee leaders, led by Republican Senator Roger Wicker, specifically pointed to two devastating incidents demanding answers for: the April 2025 strikes in Yemen that killed dozens, and the February 2026 bombing of a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, that left at least 150 students and staff dead.
Lawmakers are also demanding the Pentagon release unedited footage of strikes carried out by U.S. Southern Command, a direct reference to the controversial boat strikes in the Caribbean that have been ongoing since last September.
Democratic Senator Jack Reed, the committee’s ranking member, said the legislation strengthens national defense while improving oversight and accountability, adding that it will force the Secretary to answer to Congress and help prevent past mistakes from repeating.
Frustration with Hegseth’s Pentagon has been building across party lines for months. Back in March, House Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican, publicly complained that the administration wasn’t giving Congress nearly enough information about its plans in the Middle East, saying lawmakers simply weren’t getting the answers they needed.
The tension boiled over again in November, when Wicker had to pause a committee hearing after a defense official appeared to falsely claim lawmakers had already been briefed on plans to reduce troop levels in Romania, prompting sharp pushback from senators on both sides of the aisle who said they were never informed at all.
