The only available video over the last 15 months of the official who really wields power in Donald Trump’s Pentagon is a cartoon animation. Released in May on X by the US government, it shows a silver haired figure in a grey suit lighting up a cigar and sitting at a massive wooden desk with a nameplate: DEPSECWAR FEINBERG.

Stephen Feinberg, the 66-year-old billionaire founder of private equity giant Cerberus Capital Management, has served as the deputy undersecretary of defense since March 2025. His boss, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, makes frequent appearances working out with troops or insulting reporters at press conferences, and posts often on social media. But Feinberg does not show his face. He has been obsessively media shy for decades, and is so reclusive that since his confirmation hearing he has not testified to a single committee on CapitaI Hill, has held no press conferences and given no interviews. His press spokesperson left the government months into his tenure and has not been replaced.

Still, 10 people across Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the defense contracting community say Feinberg has far eclipsed Hegseth in actual influence and impact.

“Everything is centered around Feinberg,” one veteran Pentagon bureaucrat said.

“I don’t think there’s anything that goes on that he doesn’t have a stake in,” said a financier familiar with his operations at the department.

There is no evidence that Feinberg is engaged in Hegseth’s ideological crusades inside the building – scratching women or Black people from promotion lists for example, or negotiating with the scouts about its policies towards trans children. “He’s perfectly happy to let Hegseth do that horseshit so long as Hegseth stays out of his hair and he can do what he wants,” said Winslow Wheeler, a defense analyst and former Government Accountability Office official .

Feinberg has unprecedented control over the Pentagon’s vast procurement network, and a remarkable new ability to invest in defense companies with taxpayer dollars, all to remake the so-called industrial base of the military contracting world.

Both his critics and his supporters say Feinberg shredded the old cumbersome rules of government weapons acquisition and seems to have turned the Pentagon into its own private equity powerhouse.

To help him, he has seeded the department with his loyalists – current or former executives of Cerberus – he is empowering to change the military industrial complex.

A Pentagon official who worked with Feinberg told the Guardian: “In his mind the most qualified people are the people who have been working for him for 10 years. Their whole thing is shaking up the way government works.”

Feinberg briefly was the center of unwanted attention this month, when a CIA official faced federal charges for allegedly lying about his background. Federal agents wrote David Rush had stashed millions of dollars worth of gold in his house. Feinberg, officials said, supported Rush in a phone call to the agency before learning of the scandal. A Pentagon spokesperson said Rush and Feinberg didn’t have a “close personal relationship of any kind”.

‘Serious conflicts of interest concerns’

One Cerberus alumnus who joined Feinberg is George Kollitides, a senior executive adviser to Feinberg who, SEC filings show, maintains his seat on an investment company’s board of directors. Another is Tomas Rakusan, whose work at Cerberus followed a tenure at the CIA as a case officer and is another senior adviser to Feinberg at the Pentagon. A third is David Lorch, a Cerberus managing director running a multibillion dollar office to invest in critical minerals and strategic industries. John Gallagher, a Cerberus managing director, was also brought in by Feinberg and his Linkedin profile describes him as Feinberg’s “Senior Advisor & Deputy Chief of Staff”, though two sources say he has moved to other duties at the Pentagon.

Even at an agency where generals and CEOs stroll through revolving doors in a predictable pattern, Feinberg’s Cerberus crew at DOD has achieved an extraordinary amount of influence.

Feinberg and Cerberus have had a breadth of investments that run parallel to Pentagon priorities.

For example, Cerberus owns Stratolaunch, a hypersonic flight test company it purchased in 2019 that announced a new $90.8m Pentagon contract in January. Hypersonics – high-speed manoeuvrable missiles – have been a key item on the DOD shopping list.

Months before Trump won the 2024 election, Cerberus bought control of a federal contracting company called M1 Support Services, which supplies training and operations to the US military. This year, it launched a Saudi Arabian subsidiary.

Feinberg said in early 2025 that once he joined the government he would fully divest holdings in Cerberus and its affiliates. Perhaps, he said, he would donate them to trusts owned by his adult children. In March 2025, he certified that he did divest.

A Cerberus spokesperson told the Guardian that “Mr. Feinberg divested his stake in Cerberus and any funds that it manages, and is not involved with the operations of Cerberus or any of its portfolio companies in any way.”

But some critics, like Elizabeth Warren, the senator, say the DOD giving contracts to a company Feinberg founded and ran for 34 years is an inherent problem even if he is not personally profiting. She wrote in a letter to Feinberg in April that some companies affiliated with Cerberus have been awarded contracts related to the “Golden Dome” missile defense system. “The award of contracts to Cerberus-linked companies raises serious conflicts of interest concerns,” she wrote.

Warren has been bird-dogging Feinberg since he was nominated for the Pentagon post.

“I am concerned that your track record as a private equity executive shows you lack the skills and demonstrated experience needed to manage and execute the scale of reforms necessary at the Department of Defense,” she wrote in February 2025.

The Pentagon strongly disputed that any conflicts of interest exist. “The Deputy Secretary is a man of integrity who has conducted himself ethically throughout his entire career and has had a generational impact on the Department of War,” said Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson.

‘Economic Defense’

After Feinberg brought his team in, in February this year, a newly formed “blank check” company in the British Virgin Islands launched an effort to raise a quarter of a billion dollars. The company, D Boral Acquisition I, was sponsored by Boral Capital, a boutique firm that has underwritten ventures of the Trump family, including Trump’s media company.

The new BVI firm raising the money listed its directors on 12 February 2026. One was Kevin McGurn, who was an adviser to Trump Media and Technology Group at the time and is now the interim CEO.

Another board member was Kollitides, who was already working for Feinberg at the DOD. In the SEC filing, Boral described former Cerberus partner Kollitides as “Senior Executive Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of War”. Kollitides, the filing says, was also a senior adviser to an investment advisory firm called “Alvarez and Marsal”.

Kollitidies, two sources say, is a “special government employee”, which means that for a limited time period he is allowed to both work for the federal government and continue his private sector employment.

Kollitides’s dual employment and connections to Boral haven’t been previously reported. Feinberg installed Kollitides as director of the “Economy Defense Unit” and vice chairman of the investment committee of the office of strategic capital. The law creating the “Economic Defense Unit” said that it would “report directly to the Deputy Secretary of Defense”.

Parnell, in a statement to the Guardian, said: “The Economic Defense Unit is a critical component that is catalyzing these key reforms and will ensure America maintains the strongest and most lethal military in the world.”

The Pentagon’s budget writeup has a lot of euphemisms about what the EDU will do. It will “proactively build national economic power” and “serve as the central nervous system for the DOW’s economic statecraft”.

But what that translates to is this: Feinberg and Kollitides – overseeing the EDU, and the office of strategic capital – can spend billions in so-called critical infrastructure and critical minerals deals, not as contracts but as actual equity investments and loans.

Kollitides’s job oversees all of those investments. Last year, the office of strategic capital approved a $620m loan to Vulcan Elements, which is partially owned by Donald Trump Jr. Another Pentagon fund put $15m into a company called Kopin Corp, a display company which is associated with Unusual Machines, a company partially owned by Don Trump Jr.

In January, apparently using another pot of money, the DOD even put $1bn into L3Harris, in the form of preferred shares, so it could form a new company, though it is still unclear which part of the Pentagon actually owns the shares. That makes the US the partial equity owner of a firm that will make solid rocket motors.

As a former Pentagon official says: “it’s all subject to Feinberg’s whim.”

There is no evidence that Feinberg and his fellow Cerberus alumni are personally lining their own pockets. “He’s a patriot,” said one executive who worked for him. And the sources all say Feinberg is working diligently to fix the Pentagon problems identified by both Democratic and Republican administrations.

“There are no conflicts of interest with Cerberus,” the Pentagon’s Parnell told the Guardian. “The Department of War maintains a rigorous, multi-layered ethics framework that includes financial disclosure reviews, divestitures where appropriate, and screening to prevent conflicts of interest.”

But critics say no matter how well meaning Feinberg may be, the conflicts are so integral to what Feinberg’s team is doing that they can’t be unwoven.

In a statement to the Guardian, Warren said: “In the latest Trump Administration giveaway to Wall Street, the Department of Defense appears to be setting up a unit staffed almost entirely by employees of one private equity firm, which could make our nation’s defense industrial base Wall Street’s latest playground. I have serious concerns about how this might impact our national security and what it might cost taxpayers.”

A retired military officer who works with the Pentagon said people outside the building are simply not aware how influential Cerberus now is inside the department. “There have been revolving doors before. Frequently. But we haven’t ever had a concentration like this in the hands of one company. This is different. It’s one’s organization’s core team.”

He said the Cerberus influence is evident on a daily basis.

“Ultimately it’s the unusual concentration of the single entity; with an outsized role of reinventing the pentagon. Sure: Maybe just having these people from one company could bring efficiencies. But it can concentrate all these inherent biases or ulterior motives.”

Moreover, the revolving door conflicts at the Pentagon perhaps don’t stand out as much in an administration rife with allegations of personal profiteering.

“Conflicts of interest?” said a former Pentagon official who knows Feinberg. “That would have been a thing in previous administrations but not in this one.”

‘Special forces jockstrap sniffer’

Feinberg graduated in 1982 with a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, where he was the captain of the tennis team. Hegseth graduated from the same school 21 years later. Hegseth announced last year that the alma mater he and his deputy share is now too “woke” and military officers can’t go to Princeton anymore for their education.

Feinberg dove into finance, landing his first job at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the firm made famous by the junk bond exploits of Michael Milken, and then founded Cerberus in 1992. He quickly became known as a vulture investor, and in 1999 at the age of 39 he made the ranks of Fortune Magazine’s richest 40 millionaires under 40.

It’s unclear if Feinberg knew Donald Trump personally back then, but in 1995 the New York Times reported that Cerberus Partners was one of Trump’s investors in the Atlantic City Taj Mahal, which Trump had billed at the time as “the eighth wonder of the world”.

Cerberus specialized in troubled assets. Cerberus once lent $10m to the cash-desperate publisher of Penthouse magazine, using Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus as collateral. When payment was late, Cerberus sued, the New York Daily News reported in 1997.

Feinberg was obsessively secretive from the start. In a rare disclosure in 2006, a Portfolio magazine reporter quoted Feinberg from a shareholder meeting as joking that “We try to hide religiously. If anyone at Cerberus has his picture in the paper and a picture of his apartment, we will do more than fire that person, we will kill him.”

In spite of his aversion to the press, Feinberg knew how to pay for top political talent, adding Dan Quayle to his international board, and bringing aboard former Canadian PM, Brian Mulroney. Likewise in 2006, he installed John Snow, freshly departed as George W Bush’s treasury secretary, as the company chairman.

His penchant for secrecy didn’t keep away the scandals. Cerberus dove into enterprises accused of exploiting regular Americans. For example, Cerberus bought a company called FirstKey, whose business was buying up single family homes. Cerberus quickly became the third largest private equity company in that industry, with an estimated 22,000 homes. In 2018, a Washington Post review of Cerberus homes in Memphis found the company “files for eviction at twice the rate of other rental home property managers in the Memphis area and threatens renters with removal at the highest rate among the area’s large management firms”.

Feinberg had launched a campaign to buy iconic US gun manufacturers, and stacked them under an umbrella company called Freedom Arms. The effort was omnivorous; they bought military type weapons companies, like Bushmaster, which made the AR-15, as well as firms like Marlin, best known for its cowboy style lever-action rifles, or H and R, which produced solid hunting shotguns. Kollitides became the CEO of Freedom Arms in April 2012. Eight months later, a gunman killed 26 people including 20 children in Sandy Hook, Connecticut with a Remington firearm. Remington was in the Cerberus portfolio, and the company decided to sell off its stake in Freedom Group.

Critics say another debacle Cerberus presided over was the purchase, from Boston’s catholic archdiocese, of hospitals that then became part of a for profit healthcare system called Steward. Cerberus sold its stake in 2020 and four years later Steward declared bankruptcy. Feinberg has insisted, in his Senate confirmation hearings, the company did nothing wrong.

During the US splurging on the global war on terror, Cerberus made the plunge into national security contracting – ultimately the most important of all its ventures. One effort was setting up a company called Tier 1 Global, a competitor with the private security firm Blackwater.

A source who has been to the Tier 1 Global facilities said they are arranged with bullet proof partitions to teach Swat teams and special forces soldiers how to clear rooms. A businessman who worked with Feinberg at the time said Feinberg would sometimes come by to fire weapons. He said Feinberg was a “special-forces jockstrap sniffer”, using an ugly phrase used to describe admirers of high school sports heroes.

Cerberus, starting in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq, went on a buying spree in the defense industry: AI, aviation, intelligence. Cerberus even became a major player during Joe Biden’s presidency, in the global geopolitical game with China, buying up Subic Bay port in the Philippines, as the US was trying to thwart Chinese expansion.

So by the time Feinberg stepped into his fifth floor office at the Pentagon in March of 2025, the company had substantial investments in US national security.

There’s nothing new about demands for change and reform and speed at the Pentagon. “People have been saying for decades you need to reform it,” Stacie Pettyjohn, of the Center for New American Security, told the Guardian.

What’s new, she says, is something else: in the Trump administration it’s harder than ever before to follow what’s actually happening behind the walls of the Pentagon. “Its really hard to keep track of where the money’s going with the way they’re doing their budgeting process. I’d like to see where the money’s going and how it’s being used.”