Commerce Secretary Lutnick tapped to review Pentagon’s Cerberus Capital deals

Howard Lutnick, who runs the Commerce Department, has been handed an unusual side assignment: reviewing any transactions between the Pentagon and companies connected to Cerberus Capital Management. The Department of Defense made the choice, according to a US official, placing Lutnick in the center of one of Washington’s more complicated conflict-of-interest situations.

The reason Lutnick is doing this rather than someone inside the DoD gets to the heart of the problem. Stephen Feinberg, who co-founded Cerberus and ran the firm as CEO, has been serving as Deputy Secretary of Defense since March 2025. That is the second-highest job at the Pentagon.

The Feinberg factor

Feinberg did divest his personal holdings in Cerberus when he took the role. What critics have focused on is what he did not divest: assets sitting in family trusts that still benefit members of his household.

Senator Elizabeth Warren has been among the most vocal, sending multiple letters to the DoD demanding greater transparency on contracts linked to Cerberus-affiliated companies and calling for a cleaner break between Feinberg and procurement decisions. Cerberus-connected firms have collected meaningful Pentagon business since Feinberg took office.

Stratolaunch, a company with ties to the Cerberus orbit, received a contract worth $90.8M for hypersonics testing work in early 2025. The Golden Dome missile defense initiative, a program valued at over $185B, has also drawn scrutiny for the involvement of Cerberus-linked entities in its contracting pipeline.

The personnel overlap compounds the optics. George Kollitides and David Lorch, both former Cerberus executives, now hold senior roles inside the Pentagon overseeing investment and procurement functions, which are precisely the areas where Cerberus-affiliated firms are seeking and winning business.

A Pentagon that thinks like private equity

The DoD has been actively developing investment strategies modeled on private equity mechanics, with programs targeting up to $200B in deployment. Bipartisan criticism has followed, with lawmakers questioning whether the Pentagon’s new investment posture creates structural incentives for insiders to steer contracts toward firms they know well.

Lutnick’s appointment as the reviewing official is the DoD’s answer to that concern, at least for the Cerberus-specific question. By designating someone outside the building to scrutinize these transactions, the Pentagon creates at least one layer of separation between Feinberg’s shop and the contracts that touch his former firm.

Cerberus is a large private equity firm with holdings spread across defense contractors, financial services, and industrial businesses. Determining which entities count as Cerberus-associated for purposes of this review requires structural analysis of that wide web of affiliated companies.

For Feinberg, the review adds institutional awkwardness to a role that was already politically sensitive from day one. His confirmation proceeded over objections that the conflict-of-interest mitigations were insufficient, and the contract awards that followed did little to quiet those objections.

The Golden Dome program, with its multi-hundred-billion-dollar ceiling, represents a long runway of potential future awards. Lutnick’s review, if it produces documented findings, could either clear the air or confirm the concerns that have been building since March 2025.

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