Last fall, one of the top Republicans in Congress left the Pentagon suspecting he’d been told a lie.
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Rep. Mike D. Rogers, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, had learned that the Trump administration planned to remove thousands of soldiers from Romania — even as his committee demanded that the Pentagon consult with Congress before initiating any major withdrawals.
So the Alabama lawmaker devised an honesty test, people familiar with his thinking said. In an October meeting with Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief, the congressman asked whether any troop reductions were coming. Colby, Rogers recounted in an interview with The Washington Post, said he wasn’t aware of any.
Two weeks later, the administration announced that it was removing an Army brigade that had fortified NATO’s eastern flank since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Rogers, who is so pro-Europe that Romania awarded him the honorary rank of commander in 2017, was livid.
“I took him at his word,” Rogers said.
In his own interview with The Post, Colby denied having misled the congressman.
The policy chief said that military leaders had also recommended removing the brigade and that, at the time of the October meeting, the final order to do so hadn’t been given. Colby argued that he was not, then, “in a position to commit the department one way or the other.”
“I am very careful about what I say and what I don’t say,” Colby said, noting that in a formal letter he’d asked Rogers to retract the accusation of dishonesty. Rogers has not.
In the months since, House and Senate Republicans have conducted more aggressive oversight of Colby than nearly any other Trump appointee. They have overruled his policies and blocked the confirmation of two officials nominated to serve as his top deputies. At least two prominent Republicans have publicly accused him of dishonesty.
The extraordinary feud has become an open proxy war within the GOP, people familiar with the dispute said, as Republicans with starkly different ideas of America’s rightful role in the world each have argued their camp best represents President Donald Trump’s vision for an “America First” foreign policy.
But even as the war in Iran — and Trump’s efforts to reach a peace deal — have intensified this power struggle, the two sides have mostly fought with each other rather than break openly with the president.
“His opinion is the only one that matters,” Justin Logan, who leads the libertarian Cato Institute’s foreign policy and defense program, said of Trump. “And he changes policy on a dime.”
This account of the GOP’s foreign policy turf war is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials with experience in the Pentagon and Congress. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer their candid views of Colby’s falling-out with so many Republicans, and how both sides have sought to mend the relationship.
In a statement, Pentagon press secretary Sean Parnell forcefully defended Colby, saying the policy chief was in “lockstep” with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
“He has worked tirelessly to engage lawmakers across the Hill to communicate Secretary Hegseth’s peace through strength approach,” Parnell said.
Outside of Washington, the position of undersecretary of defense for policy is virtually unknown, but it serves a vital role as the Pentagon’s chief strategist on issues such as counterterrorism and nuclear deterrence.
Unlike Hegseth, a former National Guard officer and Fox News personality, and Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, who was a venture capitalist before joining the Trump administration, Colby came to the job with Pentagon experience.
With degrees from Harvard and Yale and as the grandson of former CIA director William Colby, the policy chief is a product of Washington’s foreign policy elite. But in the years leading to Trump’s second term, Colby grew increasingly critical of his former colleagues.
He accused both parties of ignoring the limits of America’s power — say by arming Ukraine while the Pentagon already lacked the weapons it would need for any future war with China. GOP hawks in Congress, who support higher defense spending to back America’s global military commitments, became some of his chief targets.
“It’s the same people who are calling for attacking Iran who are also calling for escalating the war in Ukraine,” Colby said in an interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson after Trump won reelection. “Getting in multiple fights with people at the same time is just, like, foolhardy.”
At his confirmation hearing in March 2025, when GOP senators challenged his views, Colby assured them that he would support the administration, even if that meant providing military options against Iran.
Privately, some Republicans had reservations about confirming Colby, people familiar with the lawmakers’ thinking said. They eventually relented under pressure from the administration, including from Vice President JD Vance, who appeared at the hearing and said Colby would bring “the type of perspective that we so desperately need at the Department of Defense.”
That hearing previewed the coming conflict between Republicans who want the military to be more active and those who prefer restraint. Trump courted both groups while campaigning for reelection, promising to increase military spending but also avoid foreign wars. He has acted on both instincts in his second term, calling for a record $1.5 trillion defense budget while also pulling the military back from regions like Europe.
Yet the Iran war has led many prominent anti-interventionists, such as Carlson, to break with Trump. Other allies like Colby and Vance — who is leading negotiations to end the conflict — have instead defended a war they once opposed.
In his interview with The Post, Colby said he had followed through on commitments made in his confirmation hearing. Although he hasn’t disavowed his past beliefs about using the military sparingly, Colby said he never expected that the administration’s policies would align with everything he previously supported.
Throughout last year, Colby earned a reputation among diplomats and Republican critics as an enforcer of the Trump administration’s transactional approach to U.S. allies.
In speeches and social media posts, he demanded that partners from Europe to East Asia increase their defense spending and prepare for less American support. Last summer, his office recommended canceling security aid to Ukraine and the Baltic nations that border Russia. And at Hegseth’s direction, the policy office began a review of the AUKUS agreement to share nuclear-powered submarine technology with Australia, unsettling many supporters of the program in Congress.
“There’s quite a few of us that are concerned about some of the actions that have not been in the president’s best interest and not been supportive of our allies,” said Sen. Rick Scott (R-Florida), who argued in an interview that Republicans “cannot be isolationists.”
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Colby rejected that label, saying he and others at the Pentagon were seeking to make America’s alliances more “balanced” and “sustainable.”
More than any other incident, though, Colby’s critics referred to last summer’s abrupt halt in military aid to Ukraine as the moment the policy office lost trust with lawmakers.
In June 2025, Hegseth approved a review from Colby’s team intended to help the military conserve some of its most valuable weapons for a possible conflict with China over Taiwan, current and former officials said.
The review itself did not recommend halting assistance to Ukraine, these people said. But the new status quo left military officials unsure of what equipment they could deliver. The ensuing lapse in shipments lasted weeks as Ukraine faced mounting battlefield losses.
Colby declined to address the episode in his interview with The Post. A separate Pentagon official supportive of the policy chief said confusion surrounding the aid occurred, in part, because a separate Defense Department office failed to fully implement the June memo.
Colby, this official said, had backed sending Ukraine some “very high-value, low-density capabilities,” without specifying the weapons.
Last summer, as Sen. Roger Wicker (Mississippi), the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, prepared to lead a group of lawmakers on a trip to Taiwan, Colby’s office urged the administration not to support the delegation, current and former officials said.
Colby, these people said, worried the trip would provoke a backlash from China, which claims the island nation as its territory and denounced a visit in 2022 by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California).
Colby declined to discuss the matter in his interview with The Post. Wicker’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
The Pentagon official supportive of Colby said the policy office did not put much energy into discouraging the trip and that Trump’s approach toward China included avoiding “flashy symbolic displays” around Taiwan. The military eventually provided an aircraft to Wicker, but the episode illustrated the divides between Colby’s office and some Republicans in Congress, people familiar with the matter said.
In November, two of Colby’s top deputies — Austin Dahmer and Alex Velez-Green — appeared before Wicker’s committee for their confirmation hearings, which quickly became Republican venting sessions.
“You know who the hardest guy to get a hold of in the Trump administration is? The undersecretary of defense for policy,” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) said at Dahmer’s hearing.
Wicker’s committee later delayed a vote on the nominees when it became clear they lacked enough Republican support to advance, people familiar with the matter said.
Shortly after the November hearing where he had grown visibly frustrated, Sullivan sent Colby a message.
“I was very frank, and I said you need to get over here,” the senator said in an interview.
He and Colby have met multiple times since then, and the senator said he gave Colby the names of other lawmakers to contact as the policy chief seeks to rehabilitate his standing with Congress.
In the past several months, Colby has visited Capitol Hill to meet with dozens of lawmakers from both parties. As of this month, Colby had approved more than 360 meetings and other conversations between policy office officials and Congress, the Pentagon said.
“It’s dramatically improved,” Sullivan said of the relationship.
Multiple lawmakers and aides said that they, too, had seen an increase in engagement, and that the effort had changed their opinion of the policy office.
Others have not been swayed.
“It’s been like pulling teeth trying to get information,” Rogers said when Colby testified in the House in March.
During the hearing, Rogers questioned Colby’s honesty over the Romania withdrawal, and Rep. Michael R. Turner (Ohio), another senior Republican on the committee, called the policy chief “disingenuous.”
Colby denied both characterizations in his testimony.
Turner’s office did not respond to requests for an interview. Rogers spoke in the halls of Congress, and his office declined further comment.
The senior Pentagon official supportive of Colby said that Hegseth and Feinberg had engaged Congress to affirm Colby’s loyalty to the administration. Some GOP lawmakers and aides have outright declined to meet with policy office staff, the senior official said, which made some in the Pentagon doubt the sincerity of their complaints.
Scott, the Florida Republican, is continuing to block the confirmation of Dahmer and Velez-Green, according to multiple people familiar with the maneuvering.
The senator, who voted to confirm Colby last year, declined to discuss the holds. But he framed his motives around loyalty to Trump.
“I’m not going to support people who don’t support the president’s agenda,” Scott said.
Colby, in response, called himself a “loyal lieutenant” of the president. The policy chief said that he spends hours each week with Hegseth — and that the defense secretary often checks with Trump before making decisions.
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“Trust me,” Colby said of Hegseth, “he will let me know if I’m off base.”
