President-elect Donald Trump announced his choices to fill out the top positions on his Pentagon team Dec. 22, but the next Secretary of the Air Force remains a notable vacancy.
Trump announced his nominees for a half-dozen key roles in the office of the Secretary of Defense.
Deputy Secretary of Defense
Stephen Feinberg is slated to take on the Pentagon’s No. 2 job, akin to its chief operating officer. Feinberg, 64, is a career financier and the billionaire cofounder of the investment firm Cerberus Capital Management. A donor to all three of Trump’s presidential campaigns, he chaired Trump’s Intelligence Advisory Board from 2018-2020. Like Trump’s nominees for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, he is a graduate of Princeton University.
Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
Elbridge “Bridge” Colby has been tapped to lead the Pentagon’s policy shop. Colby authored Trump’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which identified China as the principal threat to U.S. global power and remained largely intact under the Biden administration. A notable China hawk, Colby, 45, was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development from 2017-2019 during the first Trump administration. He is an Ivy Leaguer like Feinberg and Hegseth—Colby graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School—and is a political centrist, having spent eight years as an analyst and senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a bipartisan thank tank with historic ties to the Obama administration, and founded the Marathon Institute, a think tank created to developing “strategic insights and frameworks needed to deal with the deep and difficult problems of great power competition.”
Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition & Sustainment
Michael Duffey will be nominated for DOD’s top acquisition job. Duffey held positions in the Pentagon and at the Office of Management and Budget during Trump’s first administration. He is not an Ivy Leaguer, having graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. A past executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party, he leveraged that role into a series of jobs within the first Trump administration, finishing as program associate director for national security in the Office of Management & Budget. He spent the past few years as a consultant, cofounding Equinox Global Solutions, which describes itself as a market intelligence firm advising businesses with “expertise in defense, energy, the environment, science, technology, intelligence, foreign assistance, and international finance.”
Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering
Emil Michael is set to be the Pentagon’s top technologist. Michael, 51, helped lead Uber as its Chief Business Officer from 2013-2017. Prior to that, he was special assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates during the Obama administration. Harvard educated as an undergrad, Michael earned a law degree from Stanford.
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs
Retired Navy Cmdr. Keith Bass will serve as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. Bass has led medical departments in the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the White House Medical Unit. Keith will be leading the charge to ensure troops are healthy and receiving the best medical care possible.
Trump’s nominee for Defense Secretary remains Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host and Army National Guard major whose nomination initially looked troubled due to widely published allegations of sexual impropriety, alcohol abuse, and overspending during his time with a pair of non-profit veterans organizations. But Trump has stuck with Hegseth, and resistance in Congress, while still possible, has become more muted in recent weeks.
Trump also said Joe Kasper will Chief of Staff for the Secretary of Defense. Kasper, a Navy veteran, was special assistant to Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson and Acting Secretary Matt Donovan in 2019-2020. He has a decade of experience as a staff member on Capitol Hill, much of it with former Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter.
Trump previously named John Phelan, a businessman donor with an MBA from Harvard, to be Navy Secretary and Daniel P. Driscoll, an Army veteran and Yale Law School graduate, to lead the Army. Driscoll has been a senior advisor to fellow Yale Law grad Vice President-elect J.D. Vance.
Among the names floated for Air Force Secretary, the most frequently named in media reports has been Andrew McKenna, CEO of investment firm McKenna & Associates and a licensed pilot. He owns and operates a vintage P-51 Mustang and a T-6 Texan, and has flown with the Air Force Heritage Flight Foundation.