Hegseth’s War on Leaks Is A War on Accountability

In a recent post on X, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced that a new task force will be run by his department and the Department of Justice (DOJ) to “identify and prosecute leakers.” Claiming that “leaked information risks lives,” Hegseth stated that “new tools and processes” would be used in “protecting our joint force.” Calling access to confidential information a “sacred trust,” he vowed that those caught leaking would be “met with the full force of the law.”

This has drawn ire for several reasons.

For example, Hegseth’s citing risks to the armed forces as a rationale for cracking down on leakers is ironic. Last year he revealed plans for military strikes on Yemen on a Signal chat from his personal cellphone—an action the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General determined not only violated policy but also jeopardized troop safety. He likely will not hold himself to the standard he’s promised for other purveyors of sensitive information.

Seeing a pattern, many have rightly criticized Hegseth’s previous thinly veiled attempts to intimidate members of the press. Indeed, his announcement came days after the DOJ subpoenaed four New York Times reporters to force them to testify before a federal grand jury about a story in which their administration source expressed security concerns regarding President Trump’s Qatari-acquired plane. This most recent attempt to curtail the free press’s ability to check government corruption further illustrates a disturbing trend in which officials in Washington leverage weak federal protections to undermine state laws explicitly intended to protect journalists and their sources, not to mention the First Amendment.

The task force isn’t just relevant for those concerned with press freedom or hypocrisy. It takes direct aim at others who are important for checking governmental misdeeds—namely, whistleblowers.

A whistleblower is an employee or a former employee who reveals information about wrongdoing inside an organization. As my coauthors and I have written, whistleblowers have played a critical role in exposing government abuses in democratic societies.

Ideally, government officials act only to benefit the public. Should they act opportunistically or against the public interest, they would be punished through mechanisms like the voting booth, prosecution, or impeachment. Literature on the economics of politics, or “public choice,” however, illustrates that real democratic institutions deviate from this ideal as a result of information asymmetries, in which some actors have more or better information than others, voter ignorance, and the organizational structures of politics.

These imperfections are amplified in the national security state. Activities conducted in the name of “national security” are cloaked in a secrecy that prevents citizens and even elected representatives from accessing information. As a result, ample room for official opportunism and abuse exists.

Whistleblowers are a sort of fire alarm. Knowledgeable insiders can alert the public to abuse. Whistleblowers inside the national security state have brought some of the worst wrongdoing to light: from waste and cover-ups to war crimes and a smorgasbord of constitutional violations and civil rights abuses ranging from warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance, and political espionage, to unethical medical studies funded by the U.S. government.

Just as the government has worked to discourage journalists from reporting malfeasance, so too have officials worked to circumvent laws intended to protect whistleblowers. The federal government has used an 1875 law related to public money and property, for example, to prosecute whistleblowers. The Espionage Act of 1917 has been expanded. Prior to 2009, prosecutions were rare; whistleblowers were prosecuted three times between 1973 and 2005. Starting in 2009, however, the Obama administration used the Espionage Act to target eight whistleblowers in less than five years.

Hegseth’s announcement is yet another effort to discourage or intimidate would-be whistleblowers. Never mind that the national security state is guilty of routine overclassification and that some information, by its very existence, is “born secret.”

A government committed to democracy and accountability must differentiate between legitimate threats and threats to the careers of wrongdoers. The new task force seems poised to wage war on the latter threats.