A White House official announced Thursday that U.S. President Donald Trump intends to issue an executive order on Friday renaming the Department of Defense the “Department of War,” a move that would give Trump’s name to the largest government agency.
The order would permit Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the Defense Department, and lower-level officials to utilise secondary titles like “Deputy Secretary of War,” “Secretary of War,” and “Department of War” in official correspondence and public talks, according to a White House fact sheet.
In order to make the renaming permanent, the move would direct Hegseth to suggest the necessary executive and parliamentary measures.
Trump has made it his mission since taking office in January to rename a number of locations and organizations, such as the Gulf of Mexico, and to return military bases to their original titles that were altered in response to racial justice demonstrations.
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.
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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.
During Trump’s first term, current FBI Director Kash Patel, who was briefly at the Pentagon, had a sign-off on his emails that read: “Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Defense & the War Department.”
