Hegseth halves staff of Pentagon’s testing-oversight office

The Pentagon office that oversees weapons testing will shrink by nearly half, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered on Wednesday, which will leave individual service branches to conduct testing with a smaller Defense Department watchdog. 

The Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation, or DOT&E, will cut its workforce from 94 employees to 30 civilians and 15 service members. In a Wednesday memo, Hegseth said that a "comprehensive internal review has identified redundant, non-essential, non-statutory functions within ODOT&E that do not support operational agility or resource efficiency." In a video released the same day, he described the reorganization as one that “will make testing and fielding weapons more efficient so that warfighters get what they need faster,” and said it would save $300 million annually. He did not provide further details about what functions would be cut or how they would save money. 

The office oversees service efforts to test weapons and other systems and for issues independent assessments and policy recommendations.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told Bloomberg the move would “gut the office responsible for testing our equipment and making sure it’s safe for service members to use.”

A former senior defense official, however, noted that the services do the tests and write initial evaluations. DOT&E produces a separate assessment that may differ from the services’ findings or those of other Pentagon offices.the services’ findings or from other Pentagon findings. They also evaluate the services’ testing plans.

The former official said that shrinking DOT&E is unlikely to result in less-safe equipment, given the robust testing infrastructure that exists within the services. A more serious concern, they said, would be any change to the standards for testing and evaluation—something the current move does not appear to involve.