The Pentagon Secretly Put MAGA Social-Media Influencers — Retired Colonels With Hundreds of Thousands of Followers Who Spend Their Days Praising Defense Secretary Hegseth and Attacking the Reporters Who Scrutinize Him — on the Government Payroll as "Special Government Employees," in Undisclosed Roles With Official Email Addresses but No Stated Duties, and the Pentagon Won't Say What They Do or Whether Taxpayers Are Paying Them

The armed forces belong to the nation, not to a party or a person. That principle — an apolitical military, serving whoever the voters elect — is one of the load-bearing walls of American democracy. The reporting here describes the Defense Secretary quietly converting part of his department into something else: a taxpayer-funded amplification network for himself, staffed by partisan influencers whose job appears to be praising him and attacking his critics.

What the Post found

According to a Washington Post investigation published August 30, 2026, the Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large social-media followings into government roles, declining to disclose their assignments, where they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the administration. The named figures include:

• Rob Maness — a retired Air Force colonel with roughly 130,000 followers on X
• Kurt Schlichter — a retired Army colonel and columnist with nearly 620,000 followers
• Thomas Anderson — a retired colonel who regularly defends the embattled Hegseth to his 320,000-plus followers

They were reportedly brought aboard as "special government employees" (SGEs) or "highly qualified experts," hold official Pentagon email addresses, and at least Maness and Schlichter report to the office of Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness — positions the Post notes could shape policy, not just messaging.

The secrecy

What elevates this from ordinary political hiring is the deliberate opacity. When the Post asked the basic questions — what do these people do, how long are they employed, are they drawing a taxpayer-funded salary — Pentagon spokesman Joel Valdez declined to answer any of them. Official email addresses, a reporting line to a senior undersecretary, undisclosed duties, and a department that will not say whether the public is paying for it. A government job that cannot be described to the public is a government job the public was not meant to know about. The concealment is not incidental to the story; it is the story's core, because a legitimate government role does not need to be hidden.

The "special government employee" designation compounds the problem. SGEs are a category meant for genuine outside experts brought in for limited, specialized work — the law caps them at 130 days over a 365-day period. Using that classification to embed full-time-adjacent partisan messengers, with official access and undisclosed portfolios, looks less like tapping expertise than like smuggling political operatives onto the payroll through a side door built for something else.

A propaganda arm aimed inward

Consider what these influencers are reported to do: amplify the Secretary and attack the journalists and critics who scrutinize the administration. That is a domestic political-messaging operation — and it is being run, on this account, from inside the Department of Defense, with public resources. The military's information capabilities are supposed to be trained outward, at foreign adversaries, under strict prohibitions against propagandizing the American people. Repurposing any of that toward boosting one official and punishing his domestic critics inverts the rule. It also fits a documented pattern with Hegseth specifically: this is the Secretary who dismissed accurate reporting on the stranded USS Abraham Lincoln as "completely misrepresented," whose department has moved to evict the independent press corps from the Pentagon, and who treats scrutiny as an enemy to be countered. Now, per the Post, he has countered it with a payroll.

Why it belongs here

Strip it down: the Defense Department secretly hired partisan influencers, gave them official standing and undisclosed roles under a classification meant for expert consultants, pointed them at the Secretary's critics, and refused to tell the public what they do or whether tax dollars fund them. Every piece of that is a small betrayal of the norm that the military is not a partisan instrument. Together they describe a Pentagon being bent toward the personal and political benefit of the man who runs it — the nation's war-fighting department moonlighting as a Secretary's image-management shop. A government confident that its actions are proper explains them when a reporter asks. This one, asked the simplest questions, said nothing at all.