The White House is blocking the permanent appointment of Ricky Buria as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's chief of staff because of his criticisms of President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
Buria is a Biden administration holdover who retired as a colonel in the Marine Corps to become a senior adviser to Hegseth. He became Hegseth's de facto chief of staff after Joe Kasper stepped down last month and was reassigned to another position in the Pentagon.
Kasper's departure came after a tumultuous week for Hegseth as multiple high-level personnel were fired amid ongoing leak investigations. Senior adviser to Secretary of Defense Dan Caldwell, the Pentagon's deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, the chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg were dismissed — with Buria's encouragement, the New York Post reported Friday — even though they denied any role in the leaks.
"There is an ideological component to this," a Buria critic told the Post. "Hegseth is elevating a Democrat who does not share the vice president's or the president's worldview and who weaponized his position to push out internal rivals, including people who had very strong histories of being supporters of the MAGA agenda."
Buria, who filed paperwork to retire from the Marine Corps last month to allow for a possible political appointment, in February condemned Trump's decision to use military aircraft to repatriate illegal immigrants and to use Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to facilitate deportations. He declared it a "dumb waste of money," the Post reported, citing three independent sources.
"He hated and loathed the border mission," one person told the Post. "He thinks it's a waste of money, resources, and time, and [we've] got to focus on China."
Two sources told the Post that Buria condemned Vance's views on foreign policy after Vance expressed internal opposition to airstrikes on Iranian-backed Houthi terrorists in Yemen in mid-March, a stance which was reported by Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic magazine after he was mistakenly added to a Signal chat that included administration officials.
Days earlier, on March 5, Buria clashed with Vance's team during a trip to the southern border when Vance's staff denied Buria's requests to be included on a helicopter flight with Vance and Hegseth despite being told the manifest was full and there was no space for him, four sources told the Post.
Although Trump's Office of Presidential Personnel has rebuffed Hegseth's attempts to install Buria officially, White House leaders have deferred to Hegseth over whether to keep Buria as an adviser, the Post reported.
"PPO, the White House, everybody's impression was, 'Look, if [Pete] wants to detonate, sometimes you just got to let him,'" one person familiar with the matter told the Post. "They couldn't understand why or what was compelling this."
The Pentagon and White House did not comment to the Post or push back on a detailed list of claims made by sources. Multiple attempts by the Post to reach Buria for comment via email, phone, and through the Pentagon press office were unsuccessful.