Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth at the White House on Tuesday
Ahead of his confirmation hearing earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s very public biography was the leading topic of discussion. Major media outlets and Democratic senators seized on a police report detailing a violent allegation of sexual assault, a $50,000 settlement, allegations of public intoxication, Christian crusader tattoos, and the now-secretary’s long-standing support of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL accused of committing a war crime.
But left mostly unexamined in the deluge of details about his sordid background was any scrutiny of the potential conflicts of interest hiding in plain sight, which offer insight into how he might approach key policy issues before the Pentagon.
Hegseth’s Venmo profile, left on public, reveals a digital Rolodex stocked with C-suite executives who have serious financial stakes in befriending the top dog at DOD. Despite the depiction of Hegseth by both Trump acolytes and Democrats alike as an anti-establishment crusader, his contacts are stocked with consummate Washington insiders from the political, media, and donor class.
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The individual transactions on Hegseth’s Venmo account are private, but what remains public is his list of friends; at most, that can indicate accounts he’s repeatedly transacted with. At the very least, this list represents phone contacts that were transported into his account as Venmo friends. As Joe Biden found out the hard way, a publicly available network of associates of the head of the Pentagon could be a national-security risk.
The Defense Department did not return a request for comment.
Heavily featured in the list are a new generation of tech-centric defense contractors hailing from Silicon Valley, a break with the old-guard citadel in Northern Virginia. These include officials with GOP mega-donor Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril. While this cohort already receives billions of dollars’ worth of defense technology–related contracts, they’re hungry for more. They recently announced their intent to form a joint cartel to compete against legacy contractors like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon for a wide array of government procurement and services.
Former Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher, who recently cashed in on his political connections as the new head of defense for Palantir, is on the list, as is Christian Brose, the chief strategy officer for Anduril. Brose was a former congressional staffer on the Armed Services Committee for Sen. John McCain.
Former Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown (who is musing about running again for a New Hampshire seat in the U.S. Senate in 2026) also appears to be friends with Hegseth. He now chairs a lobbying front group for the tech industry called the Competitiveness Coalition. In 2022, the coalition helped to kill an antitrust bill in Congress that would have more aggressively regulated the e-commerce business of Amazon, another major budding defense contractor. Amazon currently holds a multibillion-dollar contract with DOD for cloud services through its AWS operation.
The secretary of defense has been a long-standing proponent of privatizing the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Evan Bahr, a former adviser to Peter Thiel’s hedge fund who now works in venture capital, is also on the contact list.
Defense is not the only industry group well represented in Hegseth’s Rolodex with business decisions sitting before the Pentagon. Spread out across Hegseth’s Venmo are senior members of UnitedHealth Group, which is based in Minnesota, where Hegseth unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in 2012. A UHG vice president, product director, and a public affairs consultant who has represented the health giant all show up as well.
The secretary of defense has been a long-standing proponent of privatizing the Department of Veterans Affairs, even advising the Trump White House during its first term to take steps to outsource more VA health operations, because government health care, in his words, “doesn’t work.” UnitedHealth is already the largest private administrator of Medicare Advantage, the private Medicare option, and would be uniquely well positioned to move into the veterans market should the opportunity present itself. In fact, it already has.
Optum, a subsidiary owned by UnitedHealth, currently serves as a third-party administrator for managing the VA’s Veterans Community Care Program (VCCP). The costs of this privatized expansion of VA care rose from $14.8 billion in 2018 to $28.5 billion in 2023. Year-over-year referrals to providers outside of the VA are expanding by double digits, including privately provided emergency care services for veterans, which make up more than a third of VCCP spending.
As Wendell Potter, the health executive turned industry whistleblower, put it succinctly, “For veterans enrolled in private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans run by UnitedHealth, Optum effectively double dips—collecting full payments from Medicare for the expected medical costs of that enrollee for the entire year while simultaneously charging the VA for coordinating private care for the same patient. According to a recent study from Harvard, as much as $1.3 billion in excess funding went to Medicare Advantage plans for veterans who, by and large, relied on VA care instead.”
Because the private sector is incentivized to wring as many reimbursements out of the federal government as possible, reporting shows that veterans are getting ill-advised prostate surgeries, marked-up chemo drugs, and unnecessary joint replacements, all on the taxpayer dime.
Meanwhile, Hegseth is on the record urging further privatization of the VA. Veterans groups “encourage veterans to apply for every government benefit they can ever get after they leave the service,” he told Fox News in 2019. “To me, the ethos of service is, I served my country because I love my country and I’m gonna come home and start the next chapter of my life. If I’ve got a chronic condition—mental, physical, otherwise—the government better be there for me, but otherwise I don’t want to be dependent on that.”
As defense secretary, Hegseth does not have direct control over the policy decisions of the Veterans Health Administration; that is part of a different cabinet agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs. However, the Pentagon does run TRICARE, the health care program for uniformed military, and Hegseth’s clear support for privatization, backed by contacts throughout the largest health care leviathan in America, could play a role there.
UnitedHealth has a division called Optum Serve, which runs a variety of programs for the military. These include the Military Health System Global Nurse Advice Line, which provides assistance on emergencies, scheduling, and other services; Military Entrance Processing Command Medical Referral Services, which provides referrals to outside specialty physicians; and a joint program with the VA and DOD that provides technical support for clinical practice guidelines.
Little attention was paid during Hegseth’s confirmation hearing to his former role as CEO of Concerned Veterans for America, a Koch-backed initiative that supports privatizing vast swaths of the VA. Numerous individuals with ties to the Koch network appear in Hegseth’s contacts, mainly for the Stand Together group, an umbrella organization that directs funding to various free-market causes.
Talking heads from right-wing outlets like the Daily Wire, The Washington Free Beacon, and Hegseth’s former employer Fox News are the most well represented in Hegseth’s Venmo friends, but the contacts also include a handful of mainstream-outlet reporters at Politico and The New York Times. Only one major Democratic politician is Venmo friends with Hegseth: Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA). Make of that what you will.
As one would expect, Hegseth is well connected across the Trump world. But his Venmo friends actually reflect deeper ties to the old guard of Conservatism Inc. Bush administration alumni are peppered throughout his contacts, such as former national security adviser Mark Pfeifle. Laura Loomer, retired UFC fighter Nik Lentz, and Robert O’Neill, one of the members of SEAL Team Six who killed Osama bin Laden, also appear to have a direct line to the secretary of defense.
UPDATE: A previous version of this article identified Richard Salgado, who served as Google’s director of law enforcement and information security until 2022 and now runs a private consultancy, as someone in Defense Secretary Hegseth’s contacts. The person in the contacts was a different Richard Salgado. The Prospect regrets the error.
