Hegseth orders the name of gay rights activist Harvey Milk scrubbed from Navy ship

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, a highly rare move that will strip the ship of the moniker of a slain gay rights activist who served as a sailor during the Korean War.

U.S. officials say Navy Secretary John Phelan put together a small team to rename the replenishment oiler and that a new name is expected this month. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the next name had not yet been chosen.

The change was laid out in an internal memo that officials said defended the action as a move to align with President Donald Trump and Hegseth's objectives to “re-establish the warrior culture.”

It marks the latest move by Hegseth and the wider Trump administration to purge all programs, policies, books and social media mentions of references to diversity, equity and inclusion. And it comes during Pride Month — the same timing as the Pentagon’s campaign to force transgender troops out of the U.S. military.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement that Hegseth is “committed to ensuring that the names attached to all DOD installations and assets are reflective of the Commander-in-Chief’s priorities, our nation’s history, and the warrior ethos.”

Phelan’s office did not respond to a request for comment on the decision, which was first reported by Military.com.

The USNS Harvey Milk was named in 2016 by then-Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who said at the time that the John Lewis-class of oilers would be named after leaders who fought for civil and human rights.

Milk, who was portrayed by Sean Penn in an Oscar-winning 2008 movie, served for four years in the Navy before he was forced out for being gay. He later became one of the first openly gay candidates elected to public office.

Milk served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and had sponsored a bill banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in public accommodations, housing and employment. It passed, and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone signed it into law.

On Nov. 27, 1978, Milk and Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, a disgruntled former city supervisor who cast the sole vote against Milk’s bill.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat representing San Francisco, said in a statement Tuesday that "this spiteful move does not strengthen our national security or the ‘warrior’ ethos. Instead, it is a surrender of a fundamental American value: to honor the legacy of those who worked to build a better country.”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom also slammed the move, saying Milk was a Korean War combat veteran whose commander called him “outstanding.”

“Stripping his name from a Navy ship won’t erase his legacy as an American icon, but it does reveal Trump’s contempt for the very values our veterans fight to protect,” the Democrat wrote on X.

The ship was christened in 2021, and during the ceremony, then-Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said he wanted to be at the event “not just to amend the wrongs of the past, but to give inspiration to all of our LGBTQ community leaders who served in the Navy, in uniform today and in the civilian workforce as well, too, and to tell them that we’re committed to them in the future.”

The ship is operated by Military Sealift Command, with a crew of about 125 civilian mariners. The Navy says it conducted its first resupply mission at sea in fall 2024, while operating in the Virginia Capes. It continued to resupply Navy ships at sea off the East Coast until it began scheduled maintenance at Alabama Shipyard in Mobile, Alabama, earlier this year.

While the renaming is rare, the Biden administration also changed the names of two Navy ships in 2023 as part of the effort to remove Confederate names from U.S. military installations.

The USS Chancellorsville — named for the Civil War battle — was renamed the USS Robert Smalls after a sailor and former enslaved person. And the USNS Maury, an oceanographic survey ship originally named after a Confederate sailor, was renamed the USNS Marie Tharp after a geologist and oceanographic cartographer who created the first scientific maps of the Atlantic Ocean floor.

Maritime lore hints as to why renaming ships is so unusual, suggesting that changing a name is bad luck and tempts retribution from the sea gods.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listens during an event with President Donald Trump to sign executive orders regarding nuclear energy in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, May 23, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

MALE, Maldives (AP) — Divers on Wednesday recovered the last two bodies of four Italians who died deep inside an underwater cave in the Maldives last week.

The Italian divers had been exploring the cave in Vaavu Atoll on Thursday when they disappeared. The body of their Italian diving instructor was recovered outside the cave and the Finnish recovery divers brought the bodies of two of the divers to the surface Tuesday.

Presidential spokesperson Mohameed Hussain Shareef said the last two bodies were recovered by three Finnish divers supported by the Maldives coastguard and police.

The bodies were taken to a morgue and identified as Muriel Oddenino and Giorgia Sommacal. On Tuesday Monica Montefalcone and Federico Gualtieri were brought out, government spokesperson Ahmed Shaam said. The instructor, Gianluca Benedetti, was found near the mouth of the cave on the day the divers disappeared.

Montefalcone and Sommacal were mother and daughter.

“After that we will coordinate with the Italian government and start the procedure to repatriate the bodies,” Shareef said. He thanked the Finnish divers, praising them for their professionalism and leadership.

The four bodies were located Monday at a depth of around 60 meters (200 feet), twice the legal depth for recreational diving in the island nation. The search had been temporarily suspended after a local military diver died during a perilous retrieval attempt.

The Maldives government said the recovery divers spotted the bodies in the cave’s innermost area. Shaam said the four bodies were found “pretty much together.”

The cave has been explored in the past by local experts and foreign divers, presidential spokesperson Shareef told The Associated Press earlier.

While the Italian divers had a permit, authorities didn’t know from their proposal the exact location of the cave they were exploring, and at least two of the dead were not on the list of researchers that had been submitted, “so we didn’t know they were part of the expedition,” Shareef said.

He described the conditions deep in the cave as “challenging” with difficult terrain, strong currents and poor visibility.

An alert had also been issued due to bad weather and investigators must determine whether the divers took adequate precautions, Shareef said.

The Divers’ Alert Network Europe, which deployed the Finnish divers, described them as technical and cave divers with experience in search and recovery missions, including operations in “deep overhead environments, confined spaces and high-risk scenarios.”

The rescue team used closed-circuit rebreathers, a system that recycles exhaled breathing gas and removes carbon dioxide through a chemical scrubber, allowing for “significantly longer dives,” the organization said.

The cause of death of the Maldivian military diver was still under investigation, but colleagues have suggested he may have died from nitrogen narcosis or decompression at depth.

Francis reported from Colombo, Sri Lanka.

In this handout photo release by Maldives President Media Division, a Finnish diver gets ready to attempt to recover the bodies of two of the four Italians who died deep inside an underwater cave in an atoll earlier this month, at Alimathaa Island, in Vaavu Atoll, Maldives, Tuesday, May 19, 2026. (Maldives President Media Division via AP)

In this handout photo release by Maldives President Media Division, a Finnish diver, left, gets ready to attempt to recover the bodies of two of the four Italians who died deep inside an underwater cave in an atoll earlier this month, at Alimathaa Island, in Vaavu Atoll, Maldives, Tuesday, May 19, 2026. (Maldives President Media Division via AP)