Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to review the names of several ships honoring the likes of slain gay rights leader Harvey Milk, abolitionist Harriet Tubman and late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, according to multiple reports. 

Navy Secretary John Phelan indicated in an internal memo obtained by CBS News that the name review is aimed at “reestablishing the warrior culture” in the military, a priority of the Trump administration. 

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

“Any potential renaming(s) will be announced after internal reviews are complete,” he added. 

The small team Phelan has assembled to go over potential name changes is expected to announce a new moniker for the USNS Harvey Milk – a replenishment oiler – by the end of June, gay pride month, according to the Associated Press. 

Milk, who served as a sailor during the Korean War, was forced out of the Navy for being gay. 

He later became one of the first openly gay elected officials in American history, when he successfully ran to serve on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. 

Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were both assassinated in 1978 by a disgruntled former city supervisor who opposed the gay-rights activist’s push to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation in public accommodations, housing and employment.

The USNS Harvey Milk, which provides support to carrier strike groups at sea, was christened under the Biden administration in 2021. 

It is currently undergoing maintenance in an Alabama shipyard. 

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who represents San Francisco in the lower chamber, slammed the renaming as “spiteful” in a statement on Tuesday, arguing that it “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,” the congresswoman said. 

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom argued on X that removing Milk’s name from the vessel “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.”

Phelan’s memo indicates that several other Navy ships named after judicial trailblazers, civil rights icons and labor leaders are also on the renaming “recommended list.”

Those vessels include the USNS Thurgood Marshall, USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, USNS Harriet Tubman, USNS Dolores Huerta, USNS Lucy Stone, USNS Cesar Chavez and USNS Medgar Evers, according to CBS News and the New York Times. 

At least one reference to USNS Thurgood Marshall, named after the first black Supreme Court justice, has reportedly already been removed from a Navy website. 

It’s unclear what new moniker the Pentagon is considering giving the USNS Harvey Milk and the other ships. 

It’s not unheard of for the military to rename ships, but maritime superstition has long held that changing a name of a boat is bad luck.

The Biden administration changed the names of two Navy ships in 2023 as part of the effort to scrub references to the Confederacy from military installations and equipment. 

The USS Chancellorsville — named after the Civil War battle won by the Confederacy  — was renamed in honor of Congressman Robert Smalls, a freed slave and sailor who fought for the Union; and the USNS Maury – named after a sailor fighting for the Confederates – was renamed in honor of Marie Tharp, a pioneering geologist and oceanographic cartographer.