Senate confirms Tata, Trump’s controversial pick to lead Pentagon’s personnel and readiness directorate

The Defense Department is getting a new undersecretary for personnel and readiness after the Senate voted 52-46 on Tuesday to confirm Anthony Tata, President Donald Trump’s controversial nominee for the role.

In his new job, Tata will serve as principal staff assistant and advisor to the secretary of defense for force readiness, health affairs, National Guard and Reserve component affairs, education and training, and military and civilian personnel requirements and management.

He will be in position to play a key role in guiding implementation of Trump administration policies affecting the DOD workforce, such as Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiatives.

During his confirmation hearing in May, he told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that he would work with lawmakers on “optimizing” the DOD workforce and military and making sure the Pentagon doesn’t have “personnel gaps” in back offices or on the frontlines.

“It’s clear the DoD has a cyber talent shortage, in part because of stiff competition from the civilian sector where DoD salaries struggle to compete. Building on my understanding of the Cyber Excepted Service workforce, I will, if confirmed, work with cyber leadership to identify and implement enhancements to the program, as needed,” he told members of the committee in response to advance policy questions ahead of his confirmation hearing.

“I believe it is crucially important that the Department seeks to recruit and retain the best technical and digital workforce across the total force, including civilian and Active Duty military personnel. The obvious advantages of uniformed personnel in these roles are they bring a warfighter focus and come at a fixed labor cost. The perceived disadvantages could be frequent reassignment and requirements to deploy. If confirmed, I will assess how we train and assign our Service members to support their ability to maintain currency in constantly changing fields. In addition to balancing the active duty and civilian workforce, I believe we need to assess how we best utilize the talent of our Reserve Component personnel,” he wrote.

The Trump administration is in the process of cutting tens of thousands of DOD civilians as part of a broader DOGE push.

Tata told lawmakers that, if confirmed, he would prioritize assessing civilian workforce morale and identifying challenges that employees face.

“My goal is to ensure we have the right tools and environment to attract, retain, and support the highly skilled workforce essential to the DoD’s critical mission,” Tata wrote. “I recognize that proposed workforce reductions can create uncertainty and impact morale. If confirmed, I will prioritize assessing the effects of any such reductions on the DoD’s civilian workforce and implement strategies to maintain a high-performing and resilient workforce dedicated to the Department’s mission.”

At his confirmation hearing, he vowed to protect DOD personnel’s sensitive personal and health information from potential mishandling by the DOGE team at the Pentagon.

“It’s a massive amount of data,” Tata noted. “If I’m confirmed, before DOGE is able to access anything with regard to personnel and personal protected information, there will be some kind of contract that prevents them from doing certain things. I’m not in there yet, I haven’t worked with DOGE, I don’t know DOGE. But what I do know is men and women in the military and their families deserve to have their privacy protected, and I will commit to them, and I will commit to you, to doing everything possible to get between anyone that wants to get their data and use it for any other reasons.”

He added: “The military health data, the military personnel data — all the records are so critical that we have to have some kind of guardrail in place that helps us prevent improper access to personnel data. And if confirmed, I can commit that I will do my very best to put guardrails in place. And by the way, I don’t suspect that DOGE would try to do anything improper with this information, but sometimes accidents happen, and so we would need some kind of guardrail in place to be able to protect military members’ personal data and their medical data.”

Tata is a West Point graduate who had a 28-year career in the Army and later performed the duties of undersecretary of defense for policy during Trump’s first term.

Since leaving the military, he has made inflammatory statements as a political commentator, including calling former President Barack Obama a “terrorist leader,” among other remarks that critics have panned. During Trump’s first term, the president withdrew Tata’s nomination to be undersecretary of defense for policy in a Senate-confirmed capacity, in the face of political opposition.

In response to questioning from lawmakers at his confirmation hearing in May for the P&R role, Tata said some of his previous comments that have drawn scrutiny were “out of character.”

He told senators that, if confirmed, he would be an “apolitical leader that is trying to take care of the men and women in uniform and their families and the DOD civilians.”

Democratic members of the SASC expressed concerns that he might support a purge of senior military officers who the Trump administration dislikes.

“I would not support any kind of blatant purge,” Tata said at the hearing. “If an officer is not following the constitution, has committed some kind of breach of his or her duty, then that should be investigated, and the investigation should tell us what to do.”

Jules Hurst was performing the duties of undersecretary for P&R prior to Tata’s confirmation.