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John M. Donnelly

A seasoned national security reporter with a passion for the underdog. 

About

Donnelly is a senior writer at CQ.com and RollCall.com, where he has worked since 2004.
He has earned numerous honors for investigative and exclusive reporting. In 2018,  for example, he won both the National Press Foundation’s Dirksen award for the best coverage of Congress and the National Press Club’s Dornheim award for unmatched reporting on defense.
Previously, Donnelly reported for and ultimately edited Defense Week, an award-winning newsletter.  He has been published in newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune and has appeared on or been cited by CNN, NBC,  MSNBC, National Public Radio, C-SPAN and others.
Donnelly has served as president of Military Reporters & Editors and chairman of the National Press Club Board of Governors and its Press Freedom Committee. He was an officer on the congressional Standing Committee of Correspondents, which accredits news media in the nation's capital.
Donnelly is a graduate of the College of William & Mary in Virginia and Gonzaga College High School on Capitol Hill.

Roll Call •

Hill-favored projects called defense budget's 'black hole'

Congress directed the Pentagon to spend $12.2 billion in the current fiscal year on nearly 1,000 different “program increases” in the Defense spending bill’s research account alone, projects pushed by lawmakers that the Defense Department did not publicly request, according to a previously unpublicized database.

As spending on the overall defense budget grew in the last several years, the number of these lawmaker-inserted projects has ballooned from 600 in fiscal 2021 to 996 today, a 66 percent
Roll Call •

Congress barely dents scourge of hunger in military

A recently enacted income supplement for low-ranking U.S. troops, put in place primarily to alleviate food insecurity in the ranks, will help less than 1 percent of the estimated scores of thousands of hungry U.S. military families, according to Pentagon figures.

That statistic, which has not been previously reported, suggests Congress has a lot more work to do to ensure servicemembers who put their lives on the line for their country don’t also have to sacrifice food for themselves and their f
Roll Call •

Pentagon report reveals inroads white supremacists have made in military

A soldier in the Florida National Guard who co-founded a murderous fascist group was chatting with a fellow white supremacist in the extremist “Iron March” online forum in 2016 when the guard member made a remarkable statement.

The guard member said he felt free to be a neo-Nazi in the U.S. Army.

“Are you worried at all about being found by your mates or someone, now being in the U.S. military?” he was asked. “You’ll be straight f—ed surely.”

To that, the soldier replied: “I was 100% open abo
Roll Call •

Trump team's case for new nuke cites risks in current arsenal

The Trump administration, in a closely held memo to lawmakers this spring, justified developing the first new U.S. atomic weapon since the Cold War by citing vulnerabilities and risks in the current nuclear arsenal that are rarely or never acknowledged in public.

In an unclassified five-page white paper sent to Congress in May, the Pentagon and the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA, affirm a point they have long minimized: the dangers of land-based missiles r
Roll Call •

Zombie Zumwalt: The Ship Program That Never Dies

In 2006, Congress started funding construction of the first of three Navy destroyers named after the late famed Navy chief Adm. Elmo Zumwalt. But nearly a dozen years later, none of the Zumwalt ships is ready to fight.

None will be for years. And hundreds of millions more dollars will be required to get there. The ships, known as DDG 1000s, may yet become capable and, with enough additional money, they may even become warships of unprecedented lethality. But the extent of the program’s problems
Roll Call •

Pentagon Document Contradicts Trump’s Gold Star Claims

In the hours after President Donald Trump said on an Oct. 17 radio broadcast that he had contacted nearly every family that had lost a military servicemember this year, the White House was hustling to learn from the Pentagon the identities and contact information for those families, according to an internal Defense Department email.

The email exchange, which has not been previously reported, shows that senior White House aides were aware on the day the president made the statement that it was n
Roll Call •

Safety Experts: Some F-35 Ejections Pose ‘Serious’ Death Risk

The F-35 fighter jets’ flawed ejection seats, which Air Force officials said in May had been fixed, still pose a “serious” risk that will probably injure or kill nearly two dozen pilots, according to an internal Air Force safety report that service officials withheld from the press.

The F-35 Joint Program Office — which runs the $406.5 billion initiative, the most expensive weapons program in history — has declined to try to save those lives by conducting less than a year’s worth of additional
Roll Call •

Pentagon Panel Urges Trump Team to Expand Nuclear Options

A blue-ribbon Pentagon panel has urged the Trump administration to make the U.S. arsenal more capable of “limited” atomic war.

The Defense Science Board, in an unpublished December report obtained by CQ Roll Call, urges the president to consider altering existing and planned U.S. armaments to achieve a greater number of lower-yield weapons that could provide a “tailored nuclear option for limited use.”

The recommendation is more evolutionary than revolutionary, but it foreshadows a raging deba
Roll Call •

Pentagon harbors culture of revenge against whistleblowers

After an Army master sergeant witnessed sexual harassment and other misconduct in the ranks in 2014 and reported it to internal Defense Department authorities, the soldier’s supervisors retaliated. They suspended the whistleblower’s security clearance, issued a derogatory performance evaluation and put a written reprimand in the soldier’s file, among other reprisals.

Although the Pentagon inspector general’s office proved last year that the Army master sergeant was wrongly punished and the unde

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