An urgent plea by five former defense secretaries -- including Lloyd Austin, who stepped down in January -- for Congress to immediately hold hearings on the recent and unexplained firings of top military officers by the Trump administration appears likely to go unanswered. In the letter , the former top Pentagon civilian leaders said they were "deeply alarmed" by the firings, which they called reckless, and feared they were carried out for "purely partisan reasons" to politicize the military.