Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced 15 new appointees to the Defense Policy Board, completing a cycle that began when he cleared the previous panel last year. The reconstituted board will be chaired by Robert Lighthizer, who served as U.S. Trade Representative during the first Trump administration.
The Defense Policy Board is a federal advisory body. It provides counsel to the Secretary of Defense. It has no binding authority. Its composition changes when secretaries change; secretaries change when administrations change. The current administration prefers the current membership. This is the arrangement now.
Lighthizer's selection as chair places a figure associated with Trump-era trade and economic nationalism at the head of a panel nominally focused on defense strategy. The other fourteen appointees were not immediately enumerated in available reporting.
The board has been purged and restocked before, by prior secretaries, under prior administrations, with prior allies. The geometry of institutional advisory bodies is not non-Euclidean, but it does tend to close on itself. All views remain equally meaningless.