{"id":214379,"date":"2026-06-19T15:22:27","date_gmt":"2026-06-19T15:22:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/the-billionaire-hidden-behind-the-curtain-inside-trumps-pentagon-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-06-19T15:22:27","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T15:22:27","slug":"the-billionaire-hidden-behind-the-curtain-inside-trumps-pentagon-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/the-billionaire-hidden-behind-the-curtain-inside-trumps-pentagon-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"The billionaire hidden behind the curtain inside Trump\u2019s Pentagon – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

Media-shy financier Stephen Feinberg has quietly amassed extraordinary influence over US military spending
T<\/span>he only available video over the last 15 months of the official who really wields power in Donald Trump<\/a>\u2019s Pentagon is a cartoon animation. Released in May on X<\/a> by the US government, it shows a silver haired figure in a grey suit lighting up a cigar and sitting at a massive wooden desk with a nameplate: DEPSECWAR FEINBERG.
Stephen Feinberg, the 66-year-old billionaire founder of the private equity giant Cerberus Capital Management, has served as the deputy secretary of defense since March 2025. His boss, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth<\/a>, makes frequent appearances working out<\/a> with troops or insulting reporters at press conferences, and posts often on social media. But Feinberg does not show his face. He has been obsessively media shy for decades, and is so reclusive that since his confirmation hearing he has not testified to a single committee on Capitol Hill, has held no press conferences and given no interviews. His press spokesperson left the government months into his tenure and has not been replaced.
Still, 10 people across Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the defense contracting community say Feinberg has far eclipsed Hegseth in actual influence and impact.
\u201c<\/strong>Everything is centered around Feinberg,\u201d one veteran Pentagon bureaucrat said.
\u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s anything that goes on that he doesn\u2019t have a stake in,\u201d said a financier familiar with his operations at the department.
There is no evidence that Feinberg is engaged in Hegseth\u2019s ideological crusades inside the building \u2013 scratching women or Black people from promotion lists for example, or negotiating with the scouts about its policies towards trans children. \u201cHe\u2019s perfectly happy to let Hegseth do that horseshit so long as Hegseth stays out of his hair and he can do what he wants,\u201d said Winslow Wheeler, a defense analyst and former Government Accountability Office official .
Feinberg has unprecedented control over the Pentagon\u2019s vast procurement network, and a remarkable new ability to invest in defense companies with taxpayer dollars, all to remake the so-called industrial base of the military contracting world.
Both his critics and his supporters say Feinberg shredded the old cumbersome rules of government weapons acquisition and seems to have turned the Pentagon into its own private equity powerhouse.
To help him, he has seeded the department with his loyalists \u2013 current or former executives of Cerberus \u2013 he is empowering to change the military-industrial complex.
A Pentagon official <\/strong>who worked with Feinberg told the Guardian: \u201cIn his mind the most qualified people are the people who have been working for him for 10 years. Their whole thing is shaking up the way government works.\u201d
Feinberg briefly was the center of unwanted attention this month, when a CIA official faced federal charges for allegedly lying about his background. Federal agents wrote David Rush<\/a> had stashed millions of dollars worth of gold in his house. Feinberg, officials said, supported Rush in a phone call to the agency before learning of the scandal. A Pentagon spokesperson said Rush and Feinberg didn\u2019t have a \u201cclose personal relationship of any kind\u201d.
One Cerberus alumnus who joined Feinberg is George Kollitides, a senior executive adviser to Feinberg who, SEC filings show<\/a>, maintains his seat on an investment company\u2019s board of directors. Another is Tomas Rakusan, whose work at Cerberus followed a tenure at the CIA as a case officer and is another senior adviser to Feinberg at the Pentagon. A third is David Lorch, a Cerberus managing director running a multibillion-dollar office to invest in critical minerals and strategic industries. John Gallagher, a Cerberus managing director, was also brought in by Feinberg and his Linkedin<\/a> profile describes him as Feinberg\u2019s \u201cSenior Advisor & Deputy Chief of Staff\u201d, though two sources say he has moved to other duties at the Pentagon.
Even at an agency where generals and CEOs stroll through revolving doors in a predictable pattern, Feinberg\u2019s Cerberus crew at DOD has achieved an extraordinary amount of influence.
Feinberg and Cerberus have had a breadth of investments that run parallel to Pentagon priorities.
For example, Cerberus owns Stratolaunch, a hypersonic flight test company it purchased in 2019<\/a> that announced a new $90.8<\/a>m Pentagon contract in January. Hypersonics \u2013 high-speed manoeuvrable missiles \u2013 have been a key item on the DOD shopping list.
Months before Trump won the 2024 election, Cerberus bought control of a federal contracting company called M1 Support Services, which supplies training and operations to the US military. This year, it launched a Saudi Arabian subsidiary.
Feinberg said<\/a> in early 2025 that once he joined the government he would fully divest holdings<\/a> in Cerberus and its affiliates. Perhaps, he said, he would donate them to trusts owned by his adult children. In March 2025, he certified that he did divest.
A Cerberus spokesperson told the Guardian that \u201cMr. Feinberg divested his stake in Cerberus and any funds that it manages, and is not involved with the operations of Cerberus or any of its portfolio companies in any way.\u201d
But some critics, like Elizabeth Warren, the senator, say the DOD giving contracts to a company Feinberg founded and ran for 34 years is an inherent problem even if he is not personally profiting. She wrote in a letter<\/a> to Feinberg in April that some companies affiliated with Cerberus have been awarded contracts related to the \u201cGolden Dome\u201d missile defense system. \u201cThe award of contracts to Cerberus-linked companies raises serious conflicts of interest concerns,\u201d she wrote.
Warren has been bird-dogging Feinberg since he was nominated for the Pentagon post.
\u201cI am concerned that your track record as a private equity executive shows you lack the skills and demonstrated experience needed to manage and execute the scale of reforms necessary at the Department of Defense,\u201d she wrote in February 2025.
The Pentagon strongly disputed that any conflicts of interest exist. \u201cThe Deputy Secretary is a man of integrity who has conducted himself ethically throughout his entire career and has had a generational impact on the Department of War,\u201d said Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson.
After Feinberg brought his team in, in February this year, a newly formed \u201cblank check\u201d company in the British Virgin Islands launched an effort to raise a quarter of a billion dollars. The company, D Boral Acquisition I,<\/a> was sponsored by Boral Capital, a boutique firm that has underwritten<\/a> ventures of the Trump family, including Trump\u2019s media company.
The new BVI firm raising the money listed its directors on 12 February 2026. One was Kevin McGurn, who was an adviser to Trump Media and Technology Group at the time and is now the interim CEO<\/a>.
Another board member was Kollitides, who was already working for Feinberg at the DOD. In the SEC filing, Boral described former Cerberus partner Kollitides as \u201cSenior Executive Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of War\u201d. Kollitides, the filing says, was also a senior adviser to an investment advisory firm called \u201cAlvarez and Marsal\u201d.
Kollitidies, two sources say, is a \u201cspecial government employee\u201d, which means that for a limited time period he is allowed to both work for the federal government and continue his private sector employment.
Kollitides\u2019s dual employment and connections to Boral haven\u2019t been previously reported. Feinberg installed Kollitides as director of the \u201cEconomy Defense Unit\u201d and vice chairman of the investment committee of the office of strategic capital. The law creating the \u201cEconomic Defense Unit\u201d said<\/a> that it would \u201creport directly to the Deputy Secretary of Defense\u201d.
Parnell, in a statement to the Guardian, said: \u201cThe Economic Defense Unit is a critical component that is catalyzing these key reforms and will ensure America maintains the strongest and most lethal military in the world.\u201d
The Pentagon\u2019s budget writeup has a lot of euphemisms about what the EDU will do. It will \u201cproactively build national economic power\u201d and \u201cserve as the central nervous system for the DOW\u2019s economic statecraft\u201d.
But what that translates to is this: Feinberg and Kollitides \u2013 overseeing the EDU, and the office of strategic capital \u2013 can spend billions in so-called critical infrastructure and critical minerals deals, not as contracts but as actual equity investments and loans.
Kollitides\u2019s job oversees all of those investments. Last year, the office of strategic capital approved a $620m loan to Vulcan Elements, which is partially owned by Donald Trump Jr. Another Pentagon fund put $15m<\/a> into a company called Kopin Corp, a display company which is associated with Unusual Machines, a company partially owned by Don Trump Jr.
In January, apparently using another pot of money, the DOD even put $1bn<\/a> into L3Harris<\/a>, in the form of preferred shares, so it could form a new company, though it is still unclear which part of the Pentagon actually owns the shares. That makes the US the partial equity owner of a firm that will make solid rocket motors.
As a former Pentagon official says: \u201cIt\u2019s all subject to Feinberg\u2019s whim.\u201d
There is no evidence that Feinberg and his fellow Cerberus alumni are personally lining their own pockets. \u201cHe\u2019s a patriot,\u201d said one executive who worked for him. And the sources all say Feinberg is working diligently to fix the Pentagon problems identified by both Democratic and Republican administrations.
\u201cThere are no conflicts of interest with Cerberus,\u201d the Pentagon\u2019s Parnell told the Guardian. \u201cThe Department of War maintains a rigorous, multi-layered ethics framework that includes financial disclosure reviews, divestitures where appropriate, and screening to prevent conflicts of interest.\u201d
But critics say no matter how well-meaning Feinberg may be, the conflicts are so integral to what Feinberg\u2019s team is doing that they can\u2019t be unwoven.
In a statement to the Guardian, Warren said: \u201cIn the latest Trump Administration giveaway to Wall Street, the Department of Defense appears to be setting up a unit staffed almost entirely by employees of one private equity firm, which could make our nation\u2019s defense industrial base Wall Street\u2019s latest playground. I have serious concerns about how this might impact our national security and what it might cost taxpayers.\u201d
A retired military officer who works with the Pentagon said people outside the building were simply not aware how influential Cerberus now is inside the department. \u201cThere have been revolving doors before. Frequently. But we haven\u2019t ever had a concentration like this in the hands of one company. This is different. It\u2019s one\u2019s organization\u2019s core team.\u201d
He said the Cerberus influence is evident on a daily basis.
\u201cUltimately it\u2019s the unusual concentration of the single entity; with an outsized role of reinventing the Pentagon. Sure: maybe just having these people from one company could bring efficiencies. But it can concentrate all these inherent biases or ulterior motives.\u201d
Moreover, the revolving door conflicts at the Pentagon perhaps don\u2019t stand out as much in an administration rife with allegations of personal profiteering.
\u201cConflicts of interest?\u201d said a former Pentagon official who knows Feinberg. \u201cThat would have been a thing in previous administrations but not in this one.\u201d
Feinberg graduated in 1982 with a bachelor\u2019s degree from Princeton University, where he was the captain of the tennis team. Hegseth graduated from the same school 21 years later. Hegseth announced last year that the alma mater he and his deputy share was now too \u201cwoke\u201d and military officers can\u2019t go to Princeton any more for their education.
Feinberg dove into finance, landing his first job at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the firm made famous by the junk bond exploits of Michael Milken, and then founded Cerberus in 1992. He quickly became known as a vulture investor, and in 1999 at the age of 39 he made the ranks of Fortune Magazine\u2019s richest 40 millionaires under 40.
It\u2019s unclear if Feinberg knew Donald Trump<\/a> personally back then, but in 1995 the New York Times reported that Cerberus Partners was one of Trump\u2019s investors in the Atlantic City Taj Mahal, which Trump had billed at the time as \u201cthe eighth wonder of the world\u201d.
Cerberus specialized in troubled assets. Cerberus once lent $10m to the cash-desperate publisher of Penthouse magazine, using Sandro Botticelli<\/a>\u2019s Birth of Venus as collateral. When payment was late, Cerberus sued, the New York Daily News reported in 1997.
Feinberg was obsessively secretive from the start. In a rare disclosure in 2006, a Portfolio magazine reporter quoted Feinberg from a shareholder meeting as joking that \u201cWe try to hide religiously. If anyone at Cerberus has his picture in the paper and a picture of his apartment, we will do more than fire that person, we will kill him.\u201d
In spite of his aversion to the <\/strong>press, Feinberg knew how to pay for top political talent, adding Dan Quayle to his international board, and bringing onboard the former Canadian PM Brian Mulroney. Likewise in 2006, he installed John Snow, freshly departed as George W Bush\u2019s treasury secretary, as the company chairman.
His penchant for secrecy didn\u2019t keep away the scandals. Cerberus dove into enterprises accused of exploiting regular Americans. For example, Cerberus bought a company called FirstKey, whose business was buying up single family homes. Cerberus quickly became the third largest private equity company in that industry, with an estimated 22,000 homes. In 2018, a Washington Post review<\/a> of Cerberus homes in Memphis found the company \u201cfiles for eviction at twice the rate of other rental home property managers in the Memphis area and threatens renters with removal at the highest rate among the area\u2019s large management firms\u201d.
Feinberg had launched a campaign to buy renowned US gun manufacturers, and stacked them under an umbrella company called Freedom Arms. The effort was omnivorous; they bought military-type weapons companies, like Bushmaster, which made the AR-15, as well as firms like Marlin, best known for its cowboy style lever-action rifles, or H and R, which produced solid hunting shotguns. Kollitides became the CEO of Freedom Arms in April 2012<\/a>. Eight months later, a gunman killed 26 people including 20 children in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, with a Remington firearm. Remington was in the Cerberus portfolio, and the company decided to sell off its stake in Freedom Group.
Critics say another debacle Cerberus presided over was the purchase, from Boston\u2019s Catholic archdiocese, of hospitals that then became part of a for-profit healthcare system called Steward. Cerberus sold its stake in 2020 and four years later Steward declared bankruptcy. Feinberg has insisted, in his Senate confirmation hearings, the company did nothing wrong.
During the US splurging on the global war on terror, Cerberus made the plunge into national security contracting \u2013 ultimately the most important of all its ventures. One effort was setting up a company called Tier 1 Global, a competitor with the private security firm Blackwater.
A source who has been to the Tier 1 Global facilities said they are arranged with bulletproof partitions to teach Swat teams and special forces soldiers how to clear rooms. A businessman who worked with Feinberg at the time said Feinberg would sometimes come by to fire weapons. He said Feinberg was a \u201cspecial-forces jockstrap sniffer\u201d, using an ugly phrase used to describe admirers of high school sports heroes.
Cerberus, starting in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq, <\/strong>went on a buying spree in the defense industry: AI, aviation, intelligence. Cerberus even became a major player during Joe Biden\u2019s presidency, in the global geopolitical game with China, buying up Subic Bay port in the Philippines, as the US was trying to thwart Chinese expansion.
So by the time Feinberg stepped into his fifth-floor office at the Pentagon in March of 2025, the company had substantial investments in US national security.
There\u2019s nothing new about demands for change and reform and speed at the Pentagon. \u201cPeople have been saying for decades you need to reform it,\u201d Stacie Pettyjohn, of the Center for New American Security, told the Guardian.
What\u2019s new, she says, is something else: in the Trump administration<\/a> it\u2019s harder than ever before to follow what\u2019s actually happening behind the walls of the Pentagon. \u201cIt\u2019s really hard to keep track of where the money\u2019s going with the way they\u2019re doing their budgeting process. I\u2019d like to see where the money\u2019s going and how it\u2019s being used.\u201d<\/p>\n

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