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WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, R-Miss., Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, today led a hearing to consider the qualifications of four senior Department of Defense nominees.

Mr. Alexander J. Velez-Green, nominated to be Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Mr. Michael D. Payne, nominated to be Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, Mr. Timothy D. Dill, nominated to be Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, and Mr. Maurice L. Todd, nominated to be Assistant Secretary of Defense for Readiness, all appeared before the committee.

During his opening remarks, Chairman Wicker underscored the significance of each role and emphasized the statutory requirement mandating the department consult with the committee on policy matters, rather than simply informing its members after action is taken.

Read Chairman Wicker’s hearing opening statement as delivered.

I welcome our witnesses and their families, and I thank them for being here this morning.? We face a threat environment more dangerous than any since World War II and we face it together and the members of this panel will be very much involved in answering that call and I do appreciate them for standing forward and doing that.

Mr. Timothy Dill has been nominated to serve as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. If confirmed, he will oversee nearly all of the department’s policies affecting careers and quality of life for our military and civilian workforce. He would play a key role in ensuring the department fosters a culture rooted in merit, a culture that recognizes excellence, supports families, and remains competitive with the civilian sector.  President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have refocused the Pentagon on readiness and warfighting, eliminating policies such as DEI above merit and performance. I look forward to hearing Mr. Dill’s vision for strengthening the ways the department manages military and civilian personnel, rewards top performers, and sustains the positive momentum our administration has generated in recruitment.

Mr. Maurice Todd has been nominated to serve as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Readiness. The department faces significant hurdles including maintenance backlogs on our aircraft and naval fleet, supply chain disruptions, and a lack of flying hours. If confirmed, Mr. Todd must accelerate reforms in his office.  These reforms should help build better tools for senior leaders, equipping them to fix readiness challenges.  Then, they must ensure that readiness is measured and reported to Congress in a way that is transparent and fosters accountability. Today, we hope to hear Mr. Todd’s perspectives on how we can improve joint force readiness, leverage emerging technologies and predict readiness gaps, and ensure that our industrial base can sustain operations in a protracted conflict.

Mr. Michael Payne has been nominated to serve as the Director of Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, or CAPE. If confirmed, he would be responsible for the critical work of providing independent cost analysis for the department’s acquisition programs.  However, he would also be inheriting a fractured relationship with Congress, and we need to talk about that today. Congress previously considered actually fully disestablishing CAPE. Instead, Section 902 of the Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act was passed into law to reform the office. Unfortunately, there has been limited reform to date. Now, the House defense appropriators have contributed their voice to the mix, adding a provision to shrink CAPE, a provision which I support.

The congressional defense committees routinely ask the department to justify massive decisions about DOD weapons programs. In response, we often hear that CAPE analyses and advocacy played a determinative role in these decisions and resulting setbacks.

We need a strong centralized civilian analytic group to support the secretary and the deputy secretary.  But that group needs to be honest about its biases, willing to revisit assumptions, and mindful of that fact that simple modeling analysis cannot possibly capture the complexity of the decisions the Pentagon must face. And that is not what we have right now.

And finally, Mr. Velez-Green has been nominated for the position of Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for the Policy. If confirmed, he would serve as the principal advisor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. He would have the full power and authority to execute the duties of Under Secretary Colby and would be heavily involved the managing the Policy enterprise, including its relationship with other executive branch actors. Sound judgment is the principal attribute required of the individual serving in this position. He must also bring deep experience in defense policy and in managing large organizations.

Mr. Velez-Green no doubt watched this committee’s hearing on Tuesday. He saw that many of this committee have serious concerns about the Pentagon’s policy office and how it is serving the President of the United States and the Congress.

On Tuesday, several members reviewed a number of actions taken by the Pentagon’s policy office. We discussed Ukraine security assistance, force posture moves, AUKUS, Japan policy, the National Defense Strategy and where it stands and more.  I want to be clear from the outset of this hearing. We ask these questions based on extensive discussion with other administration personnel and with U.S. allies. We do not simply rely on articles from the press. No one at this dais takes everything in the press as gospel truth. Certainly, the president has been treated terribly by the media since he walked down that escalator. To put it simply: We are not asking about any of this simply because we read it in the papers or hear it on the airwaves.

Members of this committee are in regular contact with people inside the executive branch, both career civilians and political appointees. We talk to the Japanese, the Taiwanese, the Koreans, and the Baltic nations. In many of these conversations, we hear that the Pentagon’s policy office seems to be doing what it pleases, without coordinating even inside the U.S. executive branch.

Some might hope to chalk up such accusations to faulty news reporting. But as I’ve said it is not that simple. Either all these other administration officials and senior foreign officials are deliberately misleading us, or we have a problem coming from this office at the Pentagon, and that problem needs to be cleared up. One way to clean this up is for the Policy shop to meet its statutory requirement to consult with this committee. It is a statutory requirement to consult with this committee, rather than simply informing us of a decision after the fact.

I say this at the outset because I think we are going to have more questions today. And as I said on Tuesday, I am under no illusion that everyone involved in U.S. foreign policy agrees on everything. But we need a process that works for the president and the Article One Branch of the government. Unfortunately, we do not have such a process at the moment. That makes it more difficult for the president and the Congress to align our national security against Xi Jinping and all the other junior partner dictators.

During today’s hearing, I hope to hear how Mr. Velez-Green would improve the Policy office’s performance, so it aligns more closely with the president on these consequential matters and so that the office works in consult with Congress in a productive way.