Pete Hegseth floats plan to personally sabotage the Pentagon Pizza Report

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spent part of his weekend thinking about pizza. Specifically, he joked about ordering it in bulk to confuse people watching the Pentagon Pizza Report.

While the idea sounded silly, it tapped into a long-running internet conspiracy theory about tracking the late-night pizza orders in the area around the Pentagon as a clue to looming military action—including Israel’s attack on Iran last June.

Hegseth acknowledged the social media account during a Sunday Fox News appearance and suggested he might intentionally create false alarms by placing random orders. 

What Hegseth said about the "Pentagon Pizza Report"

Hegseth told Fox News that he knew about the Pentagon Pizza Report and how it worked. He explained that spikes in delivery traffic could signal long nights at the Pentagon, then joked that those spikes could just be him tapping an app.

"I’ve thought of just ordering lots of pizza on random nights just to throw everybody off," he said.

"Some Friday night when you see a bunch of Domino's orders, it might just be me on an app, throwing the whole system off so we keep everybody off balance. We look at every indicator."

While seemingly joking, Hegseth also stressed awareness of open-source intelligence and alleged that defense officials watched what the public watched.

Because of that, he argued, operations like Midnight Hammer stayed secure. He claimed officials accounted for both open and classified signals. In that context, pizza tracking became just another variable.

The Pentagon Pizza Report X account, which was created in August 2024, was preceded by pizzeria owners who noticed the trend in the 90s. While it wasn't something that was as easily accessible to the general public, it didn't go unnoticed.

Reddit reacted with jokes and a lot of side-eye

The story was shared on Reddit, where folks had a lot to say about Hegseth's competence, or lack thereof, with his pizza plan.

u/Airanuva questioned the scale of cost. "That's either going to be a lot of money on random pizzas, or will be unnoticed since it is only massive orders that trigger it."

Meanwhile, u/victorspoilz joked, "Him and Kash are willing to go so far as to fly to spring break or international beach destinations to order food on the government’s dime to 'throw off the trackers.'"

Redditor u/RCer1986 pointed out the absurd part of the story, saying, "It might accomplish his goal of fooling pizza tracking websites. What it will not do is fool any foreign intelligence organization worth fooling."

u/knowledgepancake pointed out why this was a terrible plan. "This wouldn’t even work. The tracker isn’t based on the number of pizzas ordered, it’s based off of the number of phones present at a location."

u/NovitaProxima added to this, saying, "actually in this case, no because during an actual event agents would be busy working on whatever they are working on in the pentagon. That's why they're ordering pizza in the first place, because they are too busy to go to an actual location to eat or pick up food."

The internet is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s newsletter here.