On January 5, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a formal letter of censure to Senator Mark Kelly and began proceedings to reduce his retired rank, and with it his military retirement pay, as punishment for Kelly's participation in the “illegal orders” video, in which six Democratic lawmakers reminded service members of their duty to refuse unlawful orders.
The Pentagon said the action rested on Kelly's public statements from June through December 2025, in which he “characterized lawful military operations as illegal and encouraged members of the Armed Forces to refuse lawful orders.” Hegseth called the video “seditious.” Kelly is a retired Navy captain, a former Navy pilot and a former astronaut who served in the Navy for more than two decades.
Kelly sued on January 12, and on February 12 U.S. District Judge Richard Leon granted a preliminary injunction barring the Pentagon from giving effect to the censure and, for now, from reducing Kelly's rank and pay. Leon wrote that the defendants had “trampled on Senator Kelly's First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees.” The case marked an extraordinary step: the Defense Department moving against a sitting U.S. senator's earned military retirement over his speech.
The Pentagon appealed. In May, a majority of a three-judge D.C. Circuit panel appeared poised to reject the government's position. CNN described the case as the latest flashpoint in Trump's campaign to use the levers of government to punish high-profile critics.
Correction (October 14, 2026): This entry previously said Hegseth cut Kelly's retirement pay; he began proceedings that could reduce it, and the pay was never cut. It also quoted Hegseth as citing Kelly's “public statements characterizing lawful military operations as illegal”; the Pentagon's actual wording, quoted above, has been substituted. It described Kelly as a “combat pilot”; the available sources describe him as a former Navy pilot. Two quotations attributed to an April 2026 amicus brief, and a claim that the Justice Department's brief conceded retirees have “a broad right to criticize military policy,” were removed because they could not be confirmed against an available source; a verified quotation from the amicus brief replaces them. A status line saying no appellate ruling had been issued as of August 2026 was removed because it could not be confirmed. Citations to a Washington Post article, a CNN article and an Al Jazeera article that do not exist, and an unverifiable PBS link, were removed.