Pentagon has reworked signs, email signatures and social media branding to align with the new label, but fully renaming the agency would require the approval of Congress.
By Noah Robertson, The Washington PostThe Pentagon is pictured in Washington, Thursday, June 11, 2026. Congressional Republicans are backing the Trump administration’s effort to rebrand the Pentagon as the Department of War, inserting language into must-pass legislation that would make the name change official.
The House and Senate armed services committees included the measure in their versions of the National Defense Authorization Act, the defense policy bill that authorizes $1.15 trillion in military spending. Both panels advanced their drafts of the legislation over the last week, despite losing far more Democratic support than usual in the normally bipartisan process.
Neither draft has yet passed the full House or Senate, and the two versions will need to be reconciled before final votes, expected later this year. Still, the support of the GOP-led committees is the closest that the rebrand has come to being enshrined in law nearly a year after President Donald Trump ordered the change.
The Pentagon has reworked signs, email signatures and social media branding to align with the new label, which is being used as a “secondary title” in official correspondence. Fully renaming the agency would require the approval of Congress. George Washington established the nation’s military as a department of war during his presidency in 1789. Congress created the modern Department of Defense following World War II in 1949.
Republicans who support the change have asserted that the title better represents the agency’s mission and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s call to foster the military’s “warrior ethos. ”“Restoring the name ‘Department of War,’ sends an unmistakable signal to the world,” said Rep. Ronny Jackson , who led the House’s push to add the name change to the bill during the committee’s marathon voting session last week.
“Potential adversaries like China, Russia, North Korea and Iran evaluate American resolve through both our capabilities and our messaging. ”“I really think this is one of the dumbest things that has been done by this administration,” said Rep. Adam Smith , the House Armed Services Committee’s top Democrat.
“Practically speaking it makes no freaking difference whatsoever. ” Sen. Tim Kaine , who for the first time ever voted against the defense bill this week, warned that U.S. adversaries would use the name change to frame the Pentagon as destabilizing and conflict-prone.
“I think it’s a desire to appeal to an adolescent fantasy of this president,” Kaine told reporters Thursday. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated the rebrand could cost anywhere from $10 million to $125 million depending on the extent of Pentagon’s effort. In a separate show of bipartisan pushback, the Republican-led House and Senate committees also moved to reverse Hegseth’s decision to rename Army bases across the South that had previously honored Confederate military figures.
Overriding Trump’s first-term veto, Congress ordered that the original Confederate names be removed in 2020. They were later redesignated to honor prominent military figures, including women, minorities and military families, before Hegseth reversed the process last year. To do so, the Trump administration found a work-around that skirted the congressional ban on honoring Confederates in the military.
Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, for example, now is named after World War II hero Roland Bragg rather than Confederate General Braxton Bragg. The House bill would restore all of the post-2020 names, whereas the Senate’s version would do so only for three bases in Virginia. Both chambers of Congress sought to block Hegseth’s move last year, but the effort failed after Trump again threatened to veto the bill.
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