Pecohub U.S. President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday to rename the Department of Defense the “Department of War,” a White House official said on Thursday, a move that would put Trump’s stamp on the government’s biggest organization.
The order would authorize Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Defense Department and subordinate officials to use secondary titles such as “Secretary of War,” “Department of War,” and “Deputy Secretary of War” in official correspondence and public communications, according to a White House fact sheet.
The move would instruct Hegseth to recommend legislative and executive actions required to make the renaming permanent.
Since taking office in January, Trump has set out to rename a range of places and institutions, including the Gulf of Mexico, and to restore the original names of military bases that were changed after racial justice protests.
Department name changes are rare and require congressional approval, but Trump’s fellow Republicans hold slim majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives, and the party’s congressional leaders have shown little appetite for opposing any of Trump’s initiatives.
The U.S. Department of Defense was called the War Department until 1949, when Congress consolidated the Army, Navy and Air Force in the wake of World War Two. The name was chosen in part to signal that in the nuclear age, the U.S. was focused on preventing wars, according to historians.
Changing the name again will be costly and require updating signs and letterheads used not only by officials at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., but also military installations around the world.
An effort by former President Joe Biden to rename nine bases that honored the Confederacy and Confederate leaders was set to cost the Army $39 million. That effort was reversed by Hegseth earlier this year.
The Trump administration’s government downsizing team, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, has sought to carry out cuts at the Pentagon in a bid to save money.
“Why not put this money toward supporting military families or toward employing diplomats that help prevent conflicts from starting in the first place?” said Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth, a military veteran and member of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee.
