Boy, can Elon Musk and Pete Hegseth pick ’em. Mmm, mmm, mmm. Justin Fulcher is quite the character. He got canned at the Pentagon just today. He started his government career in Trump world as an employee of DOGE. Then he got promoted to the role of senior advisor to Pete Hegseth. No, we don’t know if it was his idea to install the makeup studio but that’s a good question. This guy sounds like that’s what he would have come up with. His tenure in Trump world was not a long one.
In April, a Pentagon spokesperson announced Fulcher’s role as a part of a new Defense Department leadership team, along with Marine Col. Ricky Buria and Patrick Weaver — both Hegseth aides — and chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell. It was created after sensitive military plans regarding an attack on the Houthis in Yemen were shared in a chat on the Signal messaging app in March between Hegseth and other top Trump administration officials.
“The Department of Defense is grateful to Justin Fulcher for his work on behalf of President Trump and Secretary Hegseth. We wish him well in his future endeavors,” Parnell in a statement to CBS News Saturday.
As we have noted before, so many shakeups come from the Department of Defense. And if one cabinet secretary is going to be shown the door, it will be Hegseth, is my prediction.
So who is Justin Fulcher? So glad you asked. He’s somebody who looks successful — if you don’t look too close.
A glance at his career suggests he’s a successful entrepreneur: the founder of a global telehealth startup and a charity focused on boosting access to internet connectivity and healthcare in South Carolina. He was also behind a $500 million plan to invest in an advanced manufacturing plant that was hailed by the Biden administration.
And like a number of DOGE hires before him, Fulcher, who started his first software company as a teenager, has impressive programming chops, according to former colleagues and collaborators who spoke with Forbes; multiple people said he claimed to have done programming work for the FBI as a teenager (the FBI declined to comment).
But a closer examination of Fulcher’s career also suggests his accomplishments don’t always add up, according to internal company documents and interviews with 10 people who have worked with him. Fulcher’s Singapore-based telehealth company, RingMD, for instance, went bankrupt after he raised more than $10 million from investors. His attempt to restart it in the U.S. led to litigation with a business partner, who claims Fulcher owes him hundreds of thousands of dollars. And the half-billion-dollar manufacturing facility promoted by the Biden administration appears to be one of a few claims that never materialized.
Fulcher’s national security credentials are also unclear. In 2023 he received a master’s degree in nonproliferation and terrorism studies from Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. One of his professors there, Jason Blazakis, described him as “a bright guy, hard worker.” On his LinkedIn, Fulcher also claims a doctorate of international relations and affairs from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. But John Bates, who oversees student records at the university told Forbes that “we have no record of this individual as a student.”
Oh, wow. Another Bob Lazar. Remember him? He’s the one who claimed to be a “physicist” with degrees from Cal Tech and MIT, who “blew the whistle” on the space aliens at Area 51. And now we find out we had somebody like this working in our government at the Department of Defense, no less. I’ll sleep better tonight, won’t you? And you’ll love this: like Eric Trump (and the rest of the Trump family) who cannot run charities anymore in the State of New York, because they used to steal from them, Fulcher has similar issues.
The South Carolina-based non-profit Fulcher started in 2023, the Palmetto Initiative, stated on its website that it was a U.S. 501(c)(3) U.S. public charity. But the organization’s employee identification number does not match Internal Revenue Service records. In a statement, Shannon Wiley, general counsel for the South Carolina secretary of state’s office, said the organization was incorporated as a non-profit, but “has not registered to solicit charitable funds in the state of South Carolina.” The IRS declined to comment.
Fulcher didn’t respond to multiple comment requests. After Forbes contacted him, the Palmetto Initiative’s website removed mention of it being a charity. On his LinkedIn page, mention of his Johns Hopkins doctorate was updated to state it is “in progress.”
The Musk-led DOGE effort has brought both hope and despair to the federal government workforce, promising to cut long unchecked bureaucracy and costs — and thousands of jobs. At the Pentagon, where officials are planning to slash up to $50 billion from its budget, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has celebrated DOGE’s arrival. “They’re going to be incorporated into what we’re doing at DoD to find fraud, waste and abuse in the largest discretionary budget in the federal government,” he said in a February address. “We are focusing as much as we can on headquarters and fat and top-line stuff that allows us to reinvest elsewhere.”
On Monday, [note that this article was published March 4, 2025] the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson, Sean Parnell, said in a video posted to X that DOGE had identified programs to cut that would “probably save $80 million in wasteful spending,” citing initiatives linked to “strengthening democracy” and DEI. “We are working hand in glove with DOGE,” he said.
Forbes couldn’t determine how Fulcher was connected to the DOGE team, or whether he has a security clearance. Forbes previously reported that DOGE staffers would be employed directly by the Defense Department to focus solely on the efficiency-focused mandate.
It doesn’t really matter how Fulcher was connected. He’s another one of these conmen who puts together an image on paper and the truth turns out to be something else altogether. What his firing offense was or whether he resigned was not made clear in the CBS story at the top of this piece. But from reading about Fulcher in Forbes, it’s clear that he, like Hegseth, is miscast in the job he held and was on slippery ground. After only six months something tripped him up and he fell out of the job.
Take close note. This is going to happen again and again in Trump 2.0 because you cannot run a government like a cartoon with characters from the Fox News talent pool who can’t do the job and whose “credentials” are largely puffery.
I wonder how much money has been wasted on the “Space Force” program and division that was promoted by Drumpf during his first White House occupancy?