Driscoll, Army Secretary and Staunch Vance Ally, to Depart Admin
The American Conservative · R · trust 41/100
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Daniel P. Driscoll, President Donald Trump’s Secretary of the Army, is poised to leave the administration by the end of 2026 , several outlets report .
Driscoll is a former Yale Law School student and longtime friend of Vice President J.D. Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance. At the nadir of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s perceived stock in Washington, Driscoll was widely tipped as a possible — if not likely — successor.
The Hill claimed Driscoll had been in a “months-long turf war” with Hegseth. But if anything, the palace politics at the Pentagon had seemingly cooled for much of 2026.
Hegseth’s position has been largely bolstered by frontline television appearances during the administration’s crusade against what it deems narcoterrorists in the Atlantic and Pacific, the tactically successful rendition of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and Rumsfeldesque appearances during the Iran War. Indeed, chatter that Hegseth might run for president has recently become headlines, with the secretary visiting Iowa this week.
Meanwhile, Stephen Feinberg, Hegseth’s principal deputy, has been ensnared in the “CIA gold bars” imbroglio that captured viral headlines. Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of policy, continues to attract scorn from Capitol Hill hawks, while at the same time disappointing hardline realists and restrainers with his putative support for the Iran War. In other words: The well has seemingly run dry of possible Hegseth replacements, at least over in Arlington .
That was, simply, not the political state of play in 2025.
In addition, Driscoll’s looming exit comes in parallel with off-ramps for other close allies of the vice president. Jacob Reses (Vance’s longtime chief of staff), Andy Baker (his longtime national security advisor), and James Braid (the White House’s director of legislative affairs and a former policy aide to then-Sen. Vance) have all left or are leaving in 2026.
Whether this turnover is part of an embryonic Vance presidential campaign, or a purge of Vance allies internally — or some combination thereof — was not immediately clear.
Curt Mills is the Executive Director of The American Conservative in Washington, DC. He previously served as Senior Reporter and Contributing Editor. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Politico, UnHerd, Newsweek and the Critic . Mills specializes in foreign policy and campaign coverage; he has worked at The National Interest , U.S. News & World Report , Washington Examiner and the Spectator . Mills has previously been awarded a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship, in which he focused on Donald Trump’s foreign policy. From 2022 to 2024, he was an advisor at a global macro hedge fund in Los Angeles.
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