In February 2026, online users shared a rumor claiming that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had removed former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s name from a list of notable military figures hosted on the Arlington National Cemetery website.
That rumor, which appeared in March 2025, referenced the removal of links to pages about black, Hispanic, and female veterans buried on the site, among others. Department of Defense firings that took place in the first weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term.
The Office of the Army Cemeteries, a division of the US Army, OPERATING prominent military cemetery outside of Washington. Army and other military branches report at DOD.
For example, a Threads user posted (archived) a meme on February 1, 2026 that read: “Pete Hegseth removed Colin Powell’s name from a list of prominent Americans buried at Arlington. Hegseth also removed the name of every black person and woman from the same list. Only white men remain.” Social media users shared the rumor about Hegseth, who is white, and Powell, who was black and died in 2021.
(@joeybraun50/Threads)
Briefly, as of March 2025—and continuing into February 2026—the cemetery’s website page titled “prominent military figures” still featured a brief biography describing Powell’s military service, in which he attained the rank of four-star Army general.
While neither Hegseth nor anyone under the Department of Defense umbrella removed Powell’s name from the page entirely, sometime between late February and early March 2025, one or more people with access to edit the page removed a partial amount of biographical information regarding Powell’s race, as well as a mention of his name from the biography of another notable service member. Someone later restored that information in mid to late March.
The rest of the rumor that “Hegseth removed the name of every colored person and every woman” and that “only the white men were left,” was not entirely true. In a March 2025 post on Hegseth’s personal X account, he called the whole rumor “false”, responding to a popular X post (archived) promoting the text later featured in the meme pictured above.
In a March 2025 email to Snopes, Kerry L. Meeker, chief of public affairs at Arlington National Cemetery, labeled the claim that someone had removed Powell’s name from the website “inaccurate.” “All the notable graves are represented on our site – including Colin Powell’s,” she said.
She pointed us to an (archived) statement on the cemetery’s website that stated “no service member has been permanently removed from the “notable graves” section of our website.” The statement also referred to “complying with executive orders issued by the president and the instructions of the Department of Defense.”
President Donald Trump issued an executive order (archived) on January 20, 2025, the first day of his second term, seeking to end “illegal” diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and activities, as well as DEIA, with the “A” standing for accessibility. The order targeted “the mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities of the federal government, by whatever name they may appear,” related to the DEIA.
Historical facts about Powell temporarily removed
An archived version of the “prominent military figures” page of the Arlington National Cemetery website as of late February 2025 displayed Powell’s biography beginning with the sentence “General Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran, was the first African-American to hold three of the highest positions in the US government: National Security Advisor (1987-1989), Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-1993), and Secretary of State (2001-2005).”
In early March, another archived version of the page confirmed the removal that Powell was the first African-American to hold the three positions. Sometime between March 17 and 21one or more people restored the sentence on the page.
Between February and March, one or more people removed, then later restored, a mention of Powell’s name in the biography for Brig. Gender. Roscoe Conklin “Rock” Cartwright. The late February version contained a sentence completely removed from the page, which read “Cartwright founded a social group that provided mentorship and leadership training to African-American officers; prominent members included Generals Colin Powell (Section 60) and Roscoe Robinson Jr. (Section 7A).”
Colin Powell receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George HW Bush at the White House on July 3, 1991. (Howard L. Sachs/CNP/Getty Images)
“Anti-Asian stereotypes” and an apparent omission
Other temporary moves from “prominent military figures” page it included 17 mentions for “African American” and about a dozen for “black.” Many of the mentions of “African American” and “black” described landmarks such as Brig. Gen. Hazel W. Johnson-Brown, originally documented on the page as “the first African-American woman general in the U.S. Army.”
The biography for Major Kurt Chew-Een Lee originally began by describing him as “the first Asian-American officer in the Marine Corps.” Starting with March 21the fact that, as well as the words “Asian American,” no longer appeared on the page. The latest version of his biography also removed the following sentence that had appeared in previous years: “Kurt Chew-Een Lee’s record of service not only honored his country but also demolished anti-Asian stereotypes: ‘We wanted to dispel the idea that the Chinese are soft, gentle and docile,’ he told the Los Angeles Times in 2010.” Those facts about Lee, as well as the quote, reappeared on site at some point between March 24 and March 29according to versions of the page archived via the Wayback Machine.
In an apparent oversight of the March 17 removal of race-related content, the page still displayed Lt. Col. Alexander T. Augusta of US Army as “the highest-ranking African-American officer of the Civil War” as well as “the Army’s first black physician, the United States’ first black hospital administrator (Freedman’s Hospital, Washington, DC) and its first black professor of medicine (Howard University).
Sometime between March 17 and 21some mentions of “black” and “African-American” have reappeared on the site, according to archived page captures.
After asking Meeker about the deletions in Lee’s biography about demolishing anti-Asian stereotypes and the fact that Augusta’s biography contained four more mentions of his race — and before the deletions in Lee’s biography were restored — Arlington National Cemetery spokeswoman Becky Wardwell provided a link to a video from Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell. In the March 20 video, Parnell said, in part, “We want to be very clear, history is not DEI.” He also discussed the mistakes and mentioned the use of artificial intelligence to make some content edits to comply with orders from the Trump administration.
Three women removed, then restored
Parnell’s mention of the errors referred, at least in part, to the removal, and subsequent restoration, of entries for three women on “prominent military figures” page. Those women were Lt. Cmdr. Barbara Allen Rainey“the first female pilot in the Navy”, Maj. Marie Therese Rossi, “the first female American fighter commander to fly in combat” during the Persian Gulf War, and Lt. Kara Spears Hultgreen, “the first female fighter pilot in the US Navy and the first female to qualify as an F-14 fighter pilot”.
All three women disappeared completely from the cemetery’s website page in late February or early March and reappeared sometime between March 17 and 21according to archived page captures.
Sources:
Burns, Robert, et al. “Colin Powell Dies, Pioneering General Tarnished by Iraq”. The Associated Press19 Oct. 2021, https://apnews.com/article/colin-powell-dead-covid-9c918dc1c137ebf368f2cbb461e4fad4.
Christensen, Laerke. “Arlington National Cemetery Removed Links to Web Pages About Black, Hispanic, and Women Veterans”. Snopes14 Mar. 2025, https://www.snopes.com//fact-check/arlington-national-cemetery-veterans/.
“Colin Powell | Biography and Facts”. Britannicahttps://www.britannica.com/biography/Colin-Powell.
“Ending DEI Programs and Radical and Wasteful Government Preferences.” White house20 January 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-and-wasteful-government-dei-programs-and-preferencing/.
“Learn more about Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA).” New York Department of Statehttps://dos.ny.gov/dei.
“Organization.” United States Armyhttps://www.army.mil/organization/.
“Our Cemeteries”. Office of the Secretaries of the Armyhttps://armycemeteries.army.mil/About-Us/Our-Cemeteries.
“Return Machine”. Archives.orghttps://web.archive.org/.