by Wallace White
The Senate voted Wednesday to confirm retired Navy captain and former Republican Senate candidate in Virginia Hung Cao as the Undersecretary of the Navy.
The vote went along party lines, 52 in favor and 45 against, with Republican Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski being the only GOP dissenter, according to the official tally. Cao has long advocated for reforming the military to focus on lethality and rebuilding the lagging U.S. Navy amid a massive Chinese naval buildup threatening Indo-pacific security.
The confirmation comes amid the first day of a government shutdown caused by congressional Democrats refusing to authorize a continuing resolution to fund the government. The shutdown is the first since 2019.
The Undersecretary of the Navy is the number two office in the branch’s secretariat, serving under Navy Secretary John Phelan.
Cao came to the United States as a refugee from Vietnam in 1975 at age four, after his father served as deputy minister of agriculture in the South Vietnam government. He was a member of the first graduating class of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia, and graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1996 with a Bachelor of Science in Ocean Engineering.
After graduation, Cao joined Navy Special Operations, serving 25 years before retiring as a captain in October 2021. His operational deployments included duty in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia.
During his non-combat assignments, Cao helped balance the Navy’s $140 billion annual budget at the Pentagon and worked with the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.
During his time in the Navy, he continued his post-graduate education, earning a Master’s degree in physics from the Naval Postgraduate School followed by fellowships at MIT and Harvard.
In 2022, Cao ran as the Republican candidate for Virginia’s 10th Congressional District but lost to Democratic incumbent Jennifer Wexton 53% to 47%. Two years later, he ran for U.S. Senate, winning the Republican primary with 61.8% of the vote in a five-candidate race before falling short in the 2024 general election to incumbent Sen. Tim Kaine.
President Trump nominated Cao for Undersecretary of the Navy in February 2025, praising him as “the embodiment of the American Dream” and highlighting his 25 years of combat service as a Special Operations Officer.
“Years of neglect and mismanagement have resulted in ships that cannot get underway, aircrafts that cannot fly and submarines that cannot dive because we have deferred maintenance requirements as a cost cutting tool,” Cao said during his confirmation hearing in June. “We cannot solve the problems of tomorrow with the solutions of the yesterday.”
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Wallace White is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation. Christina Botteri, the Executive Editor at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network, contributed to this article.
The post Hung Cao, Navy Vet and Former Republican Candidate, Confirmed as Undersecretary of Navy first appeared on The Arizona Sun Times.