During a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) confronted Anthony J. Tata, nominee to be Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, about his past tweets.
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00:00Senator Cotton. Senator Shaheen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Tata, I appreciate the service that you and your family have provided to this country. I think you are rightly proud of that. I'm proud of the service that I and my family, my father, my husband, my son-in-law, have provided to the country, the service that we've provided to our communities.
00:25But while I appreciate your service, I don't appreciate your partisan tweets, your partisan statements on Fox News and other outlets. I don't think that's helpful to heal the divide in this country.
00:40I don't appreciate that because I'm a Democrat, you say that I would support Hamas or Hezbollah or Iran.
00:50I've spent my whole career in the Senate doing everything I can to fight Hezbollah and Hamas and Iran.
00:57And while we may disagree on how best to do that, I don't think we should question people's motives who are trying to serve this country.
01:07So I hope that Senator Tillis is correct, that you've learned from those past statements and how inappropriate and divisive they are,
01:17and that you're going to take a different approach if you're confirmed for this position.
01:23Senator, those were out-of-character comments. I regret making those comments.
01:29Five years ago, I submitted an apology letter to this committee about those comments.
01:35I have 45 years of solutions-oriented leadership. That was out-of-character. I regret it.
01:42And I can guarantee you that I will be, if confirmed, an apolitical leader that is trying to take care of the men and women in uniform and their families and the DOD civilians.
01:54In February, Secretary Hegseth announced a reduction in force at DOD to cut up to 75,000 workers.
02:07And on March 18, the acting Undersecretary of Defense for PNR issued guidance directing that, and I quote,
02:13positions at depots, shipyards, arsenals, and maintenance facilities would be exempt from the current civilian hiring freeze.
02:21I visited the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, along with Senator King, last month and with the new Secretary of the Navy.
02:30And we were informed that nearly 150 personnel have received initial job offers from the shipyard,
02:36but they haven't been able to begin their hirings because they've not been fully processed.
02:41So that means we have critical roles that are open.
02:46One of the suggestions for the delay was because of the work of OPM, the Office of Personnel Management.
02:55So if confirmed, you will oversee civilian hiring for DOD.
02:59How will you work with your counterparts and other agencies to eliminate those kinds of bureaucratic holdups?
03:06How do we move those hires that are in the pipeline?
03:09Senator, I share your concern, particularly when this body and the president have all said they want to build more ships.
03:17If we have welders, for example, off-ramping through the deferred resignation program, we've got a hiring freeze,
03:25we've got other cuts of probationary personnel.
03:30If confirmed, and I get into the position, one of my priorities will be aligning national security and national defense priorities like shipbuilding with personnel policy to see where the gaps are.
03:47How can we accelerate, for example, shipbuilding if we don't have welders to weld the ships, to use a very simple example?
03:56But I imagine that there are several different examples such as this.
04:01And if confirmed, I look forward to immediately figuring out where those gaps are and aligning them with the national security priorities of this body and of the president.
04:12Well, I appreciate that, and I certainly agree that we need to look at all of our policies if we're going to address shipbuilding.
04:20Our public shipyards, of course, do maintenance and repair on our ships as opposed to shipbuilding.
04:25But it's the same challenge, and I think we need to better align what we're trying to accomplish with the policies that we put in place.
04:33Ms. Sutton, thank you for being here and for your service to this committee.
04:39We've seen, as other questioners have said, an increase in cyber attacks over the last few years.
04:47They've affected our infrastructure.
04:50Do you think it's important to maintain our forward posture in offensive cyber operations against Russia
04:55and that that, among our other adversaries, that that's important to our national defense?
05:02Senator, I couldn't agree with you more.
05:05One of the unique challenges in the cyber domain is the threats that we face every day, and it's not just from a single adversary.
05:13It ranges from highly capable nation states like China, Russia, and Iran, down to criminals engaging in ransomware for financial motives.
05:21And to be successful, we're going to have to counter all of those and keep our focus on all of the threats that we face.
05:28Thank you, Senator Shaheen.