When Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense appears before the Senate Armed Service Committee, they ought to ask his views on the health care and other benefits provided to the Americans who serve our country. If he is honest, Pete Hegseth's answer may surprise or even shock many Trump supporters who naively believe the president-elect “loves our veterans,” as he often declares.

If Hegseth believes anything, it is that veterans’ benefits are wasteful and way too lavish – and because he is a veteran who promotes that canard, he has consistently enjoyed the support of wealthy benefactors and right-wing media outlets. That is probably why, despite his manifest failures and disturbing personal history, he is on the verge of taking over the Pentagon’s top position.

Trump reportedly chose Hegseth, a glib and telegenic figure decorated for his service in Iraq and Afghanistan, because he “looks the part.” Presumably that is also why he appealed to the billionaires who elevated him to lead two conservative veterans’ organizations – Veterans for Freedom (VFF) and later Concerned Veterans for America (CVA).

Neither of those organizations could ever have been described as a “grassroots” group with organic roots among actual veterans. Instead, as The New Yorker magazine reported in its damning profile of Hegseth, each of these outfits was a synthetic construct financed by super-rich and ultra-right Republicans for specific purposes that had little or nothing to do with veterans’ own interests. To describe them as “veterans advocacy organizations” is bit like describing MAGA as an immigrant advocacy organization.

The actual purpose of VFF was to advocate for the expansion of the war in Iraq, a project that Hegseth eventually repudiated -- long after the American public and even Republicans who had supported the initial invasion (including Trump) decided that the war had been a terrible mistake. Far from helping veterans, VFF promoted a conflict that caused the deaths and grievous wounding of thousands of American soldiers.

Hegseth’s gross mismanagement of that group and its finances resulted in his ouster before it was folded into another organization to avoid bankruptcy. By then, however, Hegseth had established himself as a conservative talking head with a military resume.

The far-right Koch brothers, who have deployed their fortune in support of their politics under many guises, hired him as the public face of CVA, the “veterans organization” that is an integral part of their ideological network. CVA serves multiple purposes on the Republican right, putting a stamp of veteran approval on GOP candidates and causes.

Among those CVA causes is privatization of the Veterans Administration, which the Kochs apparently viewed as a way of driving down costs and cutting federal spending. Their general attitude is that everyone in American society benefits too much from government, which is funded with their money, which they shouldn’t have to pay in taxes.

But Scrooge McDuck isn’t a great look for any corporate leader, so billionaires like the Kochs always need someone else to front for them, advocating benefit cuts and other policies that will probably be unpopular. No doubt that's why Pete Hegseth held onto those well-compensated jobs at VFF and CVA, even though he spent much of his time getting drunk and abusing women while employed by those Republican fatcats. Although his embarrassing misconduct became too big a liability for them, he had moved on to Fox News by then, where his misogyny and extremism were a perfect fit.

Whatever his sponsors may have felt about Hegseth as a human being, they appreciated his views on veterans’ benefits and health care – which closely paralleled their own desire to cut spending. As head of Concerned Veterans for America, Hegseth pushed drastic cuts in Veterans Administration programs, so that the network of hospitals and comprehensive medical care would be provided only to those with “service-connected disabilities and specialized needs” – not the lifetime health benefits that veterans have long received. Many veterans would no longer qualify for VA care of any kind.

Now the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, and his billionaire pal Vivek Ramaswamy, have articulated much the same vision for their “Department of Government Efficiency” or DOGE. They want to cut a trillion or two from the federal budget, and the Veterans Administration is in their gunsights. Of course neither of them has ever served in the US military, nor has anyone in their families.

That is where Pete Hegseth has always played such a useful role. Having begun his career in politics and media as the servant of wealthy Republicans who wanted to slash veterans’ benefits, he serves the same purpose now, except with immeasurably higher status – and, given his extraordinary lack of qualifications as defense secretary, the potential to do grave damage to the security of the United States.

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.