President Donald Trump’s campaign to rebrand the Pentagon as the Department of War won another victory on Wednesday when Republicans on the panel that controls military funding voted to formally endorse the renaming.
The House Appropriations Committee adopted the change during deliberations on its $1.1 trillion defense funding bill. The vote marks the third panel to agree to permanently ditch the existing nearly 80-year-old Department of Defense name.
Appropriators voted 32-25 along party lines to adopt a Republican-only slate of amendments to the Pentagon funding bill that also targeted diversity and inclusion efforts, abortion and other wedge issues that have spurred partisan rancor on the influential spending panel in recent years.
The vote sets the stage for yet another partisan brawl in the coming months, with lawmakers already split over Trump’s record-shattering $1.5 trillion defense budget request. The House and Senate Armed Services Committees separately voted along party lines to include the name change in their drafts of the annual defense authorization bill. A final version of that legislation must be adopted by both chambers before becoming law.
The sponsor of the appropriations panel’s renaming proposal, conservative Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), echoed the Trump administration’s argument that reverting to the military bureaucracy’s pre-Cold War moniker signals a stronger armed forces.
"The best defense is a good offense. And names communicate priorities,” Clyde said. “The historic title 'Department of War' more directly reflects the warrior ethos."
Democratic appropriators panned the move as out of step with longstanding U.S. aims to deter war and argued it would waste millions of taxpayer dollars.
“I think the Americans who settled on the Department of Defense in 1947, they knew what they were talking about,” said Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota, the top Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations subpanel. “They knew we should want to deter war, not advertise we want war."
But the repeated panel endorsements signal strong Republican support for making the name change official this year.
Trump signed an executive order last September authorizing the use of the Department of War in place of the Department of Defense.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has adopted the title Secretary of War, has already moved to change numerous signs and stationery within the Pentagon to reflect the preferred Department of War name, despite the lack of official congressional approval.
The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that changing the name of the department could cost up to $125 million.
During the marathon markup, GOP appropriators stiff-armed a variety of Democratic proposals to rein in Trump. The panel’s Republican majority voted down amendments to block Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Washington, D.C., limit troop withdrawals from Europe, force Hegseth to justify withholding certain senior officers’ promotions, and slash funding for the Trump-class battleship.
The broader partisan amendment package ultimately approved by Republicans included language that would block funds for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, gender affirming surgeries and hormone therapies for transgender individuals. It also blocks money for a Biden-era policy that reimbursed troops who travel across state lines to seek abortions, a regulation that was already rolled back by the Trump administration last year.
Democrats, who had previously credited top GOP appropriators with avoiding contentious social policy riders despite their opposition to the wider bill, slammed the move and argued it would weigh down the effort to secure a full-year funding bill.
"If all the things in this amendment are enacted, we would be wasting precious time with negotiating over positions that will not be [en]acted into law," McCollum said.
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