WASHINGTON — After losing a House race in 2022, a Senate race in 2024, and what associates describe as “a real bad round of trivia” in early 2025, former Navy SEAL Hung Cao was elevated Friday to acting Secretary of the Navy, becoming the first person in American history to fail into command of a nuclear-armed fleet.
Cao takes over from John Phelan, the financier-turned-secretary who departed the administration Friday morning citing “personal reasons” and what a source familiar with his thinking described as “the growing suspicion that the Navy has, like, actual boats in it.”
Phelan, whose primary qualification for running the world’s largest maritime force was managing a hedge fund, is expected to return to the private sector, where the ships are metaphorical and the sailors do not email you.
“This is a natural progression,” said Beacon Strategy defense analyst Wren Delacorte, who tracks Pentagon personnel. “The Trump administration has established a coherent pipeline: lose a statewide race, get nominated to run a branch of the armed forces, and eventually inherit it when the guy above you remembers he can just leave.”
Cao, who was serving as Under Secretary, ascends to acting secretary under a Vacancies Act provision that Congress passed in 1998 and has since regretted approximately once per administration. Aides say he plans to spend his first week reviewing shipbuilding contracts, meeting with the Chief of Naval Operations, and, per one staffer, “figuring out which of these are the submarines.”
Supporters point to Cao’s actual military service — 25 years in Naval Special Warfare, multiple deployments — as evidence that he is, in fact, the most qualified acting secretary the department has seen since roughly Tuesday. Critics note that the qualification bar in this administration is a chalk line someone rubbed out with their shoe.
A Senate Armed Services aide, reached by phone, said confirmation hearings for a permanent replacement would begin “whenever the White House sends a name, which historically has been the Wednesday before Thanksgiving of an unspecified year.”
Phelan is reportedly considering a book. Cao is reportedly considering the Pacific.
At press time, three additional two-time losers from the 2024 cycle had submitted résumés to the Pentagon, one of them addressed simply to “whoever’s left.”