Ever since Pete Hegseth took over as the secretary of Defense, he has been promising big changes.

That started right out of the gate when he went looking for Pentagon leaks, even firing close friends he had brought aboard.

Now, the White House is giving Hegseth an order to back down from some of his tactics, particularly the administration of polygraph tests.

Exposing leakers

Hegseth, as many people do, brought in some of his top allies after he was confirmed to serve as secretary of Defense. These were friends who had served with him and/or who had worked with him in some of his other ventures prior to his work with Fox News.

Unfortunately, not long after Hegseth took office, he had alarming leaks coming out of the Pentagon.

Like DNI Tulsi Gabbard, Hegseth immediately turned to the use of lie detector tests to find the leaks, and some of his closest allies apparently failed those tests.

Hegseth let three of them go immediately, and the group of them then ran to the media to complain about it.

Take the tests

After the firings were announced, reports started to show up about Hegseth losing it, as if there was a campaign being mounted against him to make him look unstable.

At one point, Hegseth allegedly threatened the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, telling him, “I’ll hook you up to a [expletive] polygraph!”

Hegseth was apparently using this same threat all over the Pentagon to keep people uneasy.

Then reports started to surface about morale at the Pentagon, with resistance growing against Hegseth's leadership.

Stop it

Patrick Weaver, a current adviser to Hegseth, was apparently told that he would have to take a lie detector test, and he took exception to the idea.

Weaver then openly whined about it to the media, and that move would have been a red flag for me. If you have nothing to hide, why worry about the test?

Instead of backing Hegseth, the White House ordered Hegseth to stop using the tests in this quest to find leaks in the Pentagon.

I don’t want to read too much into this, but it sounds a bit to me like Trump may finally be growing tired of Hegseth. Again, I was never a Hegseth fan, so I want to see him replaced, but this just does not sound like a normal reaction from Trump, considering how important it is to him to stop all these leaks. We will keep our eyes on Hegseth to see how he reacts to the latest development.