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Hegseth Personally Removed Female and Black Officers From the Navy Promotion List.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blocked the promotions of at least seven Navy officers already selected by a board of senior admirals, disproportionately targeting women and Black officers, while simultaneously pushing to promote a Navy SEAL from his own inner circle who had been passed over multiple times.
DoW photo by U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Alexander Kubitza
A board of senior Navy admirals reviewed their officers, ran them through the system and submitted a promotion list.
Pete Hegseth looked at it and started crossing names off.
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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently blocked the promotions of at least seven Navy officers who had been selected by a board of senior Navy admirals to the one-star admiral rank.
At least two of the officers removed from the list are women and two are Black men. An additional three are white men.
The result was a final slate of 22 nominees that looked nothing like the force those admirals will lead.
Twenty-one percent of active duty Navy officers are women. The promotion list Hegseth approved included none.
But removing qualified officers was only half of what happened.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Hegseth simultaneously pushed to add Captain William Francis Jr., a Navy SEAL currently serving as Hegseth's own special military assistant, to the promotion list. Francis had previously been passed over for promotion several times by earlier promotion boards.
The people who earned it got removed. The person in Hegseth's inner circle got pushed forward.
The Navy officers removed from the list were taken off for a variety of reasons including their participation or involvement in military Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives, sources told ABC News.
Their performance was not in question. Their personnel files were.
According to Pentagon rules, the Defense Secretary is only supposed to pull officers from a promotion list for moral, mental, physical or professional failings that raise questions about fitness to lead.
None of that applied here.
If you have followed this far, here is why this is bigger than one promotion list.
This is not the first time Hegseth has done this. He blocked Army officer promotions in March and has reportedly thwarted the advancements of more than a dozen female and Black officers across the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines.
Each intervention quietly reshapes who leads the American military for years ahead.
Hegseth's actions are the latest in a series of firings and personnel interventions that appear driven by his anti-diversity politics rather than the officers' performance. Taken together, they could reshape the military's top ranks for years to come.
The Pentagon was asked directly why these officers were removed.
Chief spokesman Sean Parnell declined to say. "Military promotions are given to those who have earned them," he said.
The officers who earned them are the ones who got removed.
The Pentagon added that the department will never consider the color of a servicemember's skin or their gender as a factor in promotions and that under Trump and Hegseth, meritocracy reigns supreme.
That statement was issued the same week Hegseth removed four women and two Black men from a merit-based promotion list approved by a board of senior admirals.
The admirals chose them. Hegseth overruled the admirals.
And the man he wanted to add instead had been passed over for promotion by three separate boards before his boss at the Pentagon decided the system had been wrong every time.
Editor's Note: The pattern of Defense Secretary Hegseth's promotion interventions is now documented across multiple military branches. When a defense secretary overrules the military's own merit-based promotion boards without stated cause, the question is no longer about diversity policy. It is about who actually controls the professional advancement of America's military leadership and what criteria they are applying behind closed doors.
