Pete Hegseth confirmed as US defence secretary after JD Vance breaks tie

Pete Hegseth will be the US secretary of defence after his appointment was confirmed in the Senate on Friday thanks to the casting vote of the vice-president, JD Vance.

The vote was tied at 50-50 after a bruising confirmation process during which allegations of rape, abusive behaviour and excessive drinking had threatened to derail Hegseth’s bid to lead the Pentagon.

Three Republican senators — Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell — broke ranks to join 47 Democrats in voting against Hegseth’s nomination.

Summoned from the White House to break the 50-50 tie, Vance told the chamber: “The Senate being divided, the vice-president votes in the affirmative and the nomination is confirmed.”

Hegseth’s confirmation represents a victory for President Trump’s efforts to rid the military of “wokeness” and restore its “warrior ethos”.

Hegseth, 44, an Iraq war veteran and former Fox News presenter, was chosen by Trump in November. His nomination was controversial due to allegations about his personal conduct but he won over several sceptical Republican senators with private meetings and a pressure campaign from Trump allies.

In the days before the final vote, damaging allegations about his past conduct continued to surface. On Wednesday it emerged that Hegseth’s former sister-in-law, Danielle Diettrich Hegseth, had accused him of “erratic and aggressive” behaviour towards his second wife, Samantha. Ms Hegseth alleged in an affidavit that his wife had feared for her safety and had a code word if she needed help to get away from her husband.

She said she “did not personally witness physical or sexual abuse”, but described multiple instances of belligerent and drunken behaviour. It was also revealed that Hegseth had paid $50,000 to a woman who had accused him of rape in a hotel room in California in 2017 as part of a non-disclosure settlement. Hegseth was not charged over the incident. He has denied all the claims and insisted they were part of a “smear campaign” against him.

After Hegseth was confirmed Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic senator for Connecticut on the armed services committee, told CNN that he was “deeply saddened and outraged” by his Republican colleagues, condemning them as “spineless” for submitting to pressure from the White House over Hegseth’s nomination.

Blumenthal denounced Hegseth as a “chaos agent” who was “totally unqualified” and would “dumb down the Pentagon”. He lamented that Hegseth was poised to assume control of the world’s most powerful military, an $850 billion budget and “powers that are so hugely determinative of the future of our nation”. He predicted that Americans would not tolerate the Trump administration “playing politics with our military”.

Defence secretaries are typically supported by wide bipartisan majorities. Lloyd Austin, the previous Pentagon chief, was confirmed by a vote of 93-2 in 2021.

At a heated confirmation hearing this month, Hegseth was pressed by Democratic senators about his alleged excessive drinking, womanising and financial mismanagement at two veterans charities he used to run.

Hegseth acknowledged he had made mistakes and was an unconventional choice to lead the Pentagon, but dismissed questions about his character and lack of qualifications to run an enormous bureaucracy, telling senators it was “time to give someone with dust on his boots the helm”.

The military is expected to play a central role in Trump’s plans to carry out mass deportations of undocumented migrants. This week, the president sent thousands of active-duty troops to the southern border.

Trump has designated cartels and international gangs “global terrorists”, expanding his powers to use military force to target human traffickers and drug smuggling, and to seize their assets.

He also revoked a provision that allowed transgender troops to serve in the military, and has said that the military would no longer be “subjected to radical political theories and social experiments while on duty”.

Late on Friday night, McConnell issued a scathing statement criticising Hegseth’s appointment to lead the US military. “Mere desire to be a ‘change agent’ is not enough to fill these shoes,” the Republican from Kentucky said. “And ‘dust on boots’ fails even to distinguish this nominee from multiple predecessors of the last decade. Nor is it a precondition for success. Secretaries with distinguished combat experience and time in the trenches have failed at the job.”

He added that Hegseth had “failed, as yet, to demonstrate that he will pass this test. But as he assumes office, the consequences of failure are as high as they have ever been.”