Order directs Pete Hegseth to seek congressional approval for permanent change from Department of Defense
Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War, a callback to the department’s original name used from 1789 to 1947.
The directive will make Department of War the secondary title, and is a way to get around the need for congressional approval to formally rename a federal agency, an administration official said.
“We won the first world war, we won the second world war, we won everything before that and in between,” Trump said at the signing. “And then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to the Department of Defense.”
The administration has already begun implementing the symbolic changes: visitors to the Pentagon’s defense.gov website are now automatically redirected to war.gov.
