Whether Pete Hegseth is urging the public to “take a knee and pray to Jesus for the success of U.S. forces in the Middle East” or personally praying for “wicked souls” to be “delivered to the eternal damnation,” the secretary of defense is using his “bully pulpit” to promote his “combative, controversial brand of Christianity,” said The Hill. But in moving to “inject the military with more explicitly religious sentiments,” Hegseth “threatens to divide America’s forces.” 

By “disrupting the military’s long-standing practice of separating church and state,” the secretary and his remarks have rung “alarm bells among the troops,” said The Daily Beast. Hegseth’s “proselytizing Christian campaign” not only violates the Constitution but also “undermines the bonds of mutual respect between troops that are essential, especially in wartime,” said The Washington Post. 

Over the past year, Hegseth has hosted Pentagon “evangelical worship services that legal experts say are unprecedented” and brought clergy from his “small Christian denomination” to preach at the DOD, including a “prominent pastor who says women shouldn’t have the right to vote,” said the Post. But it’s the U.S.’s recent attacks on Muslim-majority Iran that have made Hegseth’s Christian nationalism “more stark.”

Hegseth has personally “urged prayer ‘in the name of Jesus Christ’ — his Christian God,” said The New Republic. Although “official religious appeals” have “long been commonplace” in the military, it’s “notable” that Hegseth suggests God “actively approves of as much killing as possible.” 

White House officials and Republican lawmakers are looking to potentially cut federal health spending as they float a budget bill “containing as much as $200 billion to fund the Iran war and immigration enforcement” without increasing the deficit, said Axios. The push, which echoes “last year’s debate over the budget law” that resulted in “deep cuts to federal Medicaid spending and imposed first-time work requirements,” is “sure to be controversial.” It also opens the GOP up to “election-year attacks that they are cutting health care to pay for an unpopular war.” 

That Republicans exploring “one unpopular idea (additional cuts to federal health care spending)” to cover “another unpopular idea (the ongoing war with Iran)” is “every bit as extraordinary as it appears,” said MS Now. An assessment by the Congressional Budget Office during a similar attempt to cut Affordable Care Act subsidies last year said efforts to target ACA cost-sharing programs see “300,000 Americans losing health care coverage,” as well as an “increase in out-of-pocket costs for some ACA plan holders,” Rolling Stone said. That would be “on top” of the 14 million Americans “already expected to lose coverage by 2030 as a result of the Big Beautiful Bill.” 

While discussions about potential health care cuts are “in the early stages,” any progress on that front is “likely to face opposition from moderate Republicans” anxious about “health care spending cuts in an election year,” said The New Republic.

Homeland Security and ICE were heavily scrutinized during Kristi Noem’s term