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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has appointed 15 new members to the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board.

Some shit you should know before you dig in: The Defense Policy Board has been around since 1985, and its job is to act as an advisory panel that kicks independent strategic advice up to the defense secretary, his deputy and the Pentagon’s top policy official. The board focuses on things like force structure, modernization and regional defense strategy. Hegseth gutted the previous lineup back in April 2025 after a 45-day review, telling staff in a memo the department was overdue for “fresh thinking to drive bold changes,” and the panel sat empty until the Pentagon formally revived it last August.

What’s going on now: Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s trade chief during his first term, will chair the new board, with former Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman as vice chair. The other 13 names lean hard into Trump’s orbit, they include venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, former Trump policy planning director Michael Anton, the Conservative Partnership Institute’s Rachel Bovard, former California Representative Mike Garcia and former Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, alongside retired Admiral Chas Richard, longtime China hawk Michael Pillsbury and several others.

Andreessen’s spot raised some eyebrows. His firm, Andreessen Horowitz, has backed a string of companies that hold Pentagon contracts (including OpenAI, SpaceX, and defense startups Anduril and Hadrian).

Under the Federal Register notice that brought the board back, members serve without pay and are supposed to give advice “based on their best judgment without representing any particular point of view and in a manner that is free from conflict of interest.”

This all comes after Biden’s Defense Secretary, Lloyd Austin, purged the board Trump appointed during his first term.