Petition: Media Must Cover Hegseth as Breaking the Law

Pete Hegseth has gutted the Pentagon's civilian harm mitigation program by roughly 90% — a program mandated by Congress in 2022 and supported by military leaders across party lines. The consequences are not theoretical. U.S. strikes have killed dozens of civilians in Yemen and Somalia. On the first day of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, a U.S. missile struck a girls' elementary school, killing over 150 students and teachers. Nearly five months later, the Pentagon has yet to explain what happened. A Defense Department inspector general report described civilian protection efforts as largely "inactive," and ten members of Congress — including three military veterans — have now written to Hegseth warning that the administration is potentially violating federal law.

Yet too much media coverage frames this as a management or culture story — Hegseth's "lethality" doctrine clashing with Pentagon bureaucracy. It is not. When a Defense Secretary defunds a congressionally mandated program, withholds access from inspectors general, and presides over a surge in civilian casualties, that is a legal and moral crisis — one that puts American service members in greater danger and hands adversaries a powerful recruitment tool.

We call on the media to cover Pete Hegseth's dismantling of civilian protections not as a Pentagon culture war, but as what lawmakers, military experts, and the law itself say it is: a violation of federal statute, a breach of international rules of war, and a threat to American lives. The public deserves reporting that names the law being broken and demands answers.