Hung Cao, Who Helped Recover JFK Jr.’s Body After Plane Crash, Confirmed As Undersecretary Of The Navy

Another Trump nominee has been confirmed.

Former Navy Captain Hung Cao has been officially confirmed to serve as the Under Secretary of the Navy.

Cao was nominated by President Trump in February shortly after he lost his senate race against Senator Tim Kaine.

🚨 BREAKING: US Senate CONFIRMS Trump nominee Hung Cao as Under Secretary for the Navy, 52-45.

Hung Cao served in the Navy for YEARS and fled communism from Vietnam. He ran for Virginia US Senate in 2024. 🔥🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/YmjRoOFx1z

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) October 1, 2025

WUSA 9 reported more details on Cao’s confirmation:

Hung Cao is now the Under Secretary of the Navy.

Cao was nominated in February by President Trump after losing the Senate race against Senator Tim Kaine. This role is the Navy’s second-highest ranking official.

“Hung is the embodiment of the American Dream. As a refugee to our Great Nation, Hung worked tirelessly to make proud the Country that gave his family a home,” Trump said on Thursday. “With Hung’s experience both in combat and in the Pentagon, he will get the job done. Congratulations to Hung, and his wonderful family!”

A Navy captain from Loudoun County, Cao has served in the branch for 25 years.

Cao made a name for himself nationally as a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2024, running against incumbent Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine and stumping for Trump’s presidential campaign at the Republican National Convention and while Trump made campaign stops in the commonwealth.

As a candidate, Cao criticized what he described as the Navy’s, “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts.

“When you’re using a drag queen to recruit for the Navy, that’s not the people we want,” Cao said during a debate with Kaine in October 2024. “What we need is alpha males and alpha females who are going to rip out their own guts, eat them, and ask for seconds. Those are the young men and women that are going to win wars.”

Sen. Kaine went on to defeat Cao in that race; 54.3% to 45.4%.

Cao also ran for office in Virginia’s 10th US Congressional district in 2022, losing to former Democratic Rep. Jennifer Wexton; 53.2% to 46.7%. That seat is now held by Democratic Rep. Suhas Subramanyam.

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John Phelan, a major donor to Trump’s 2024 campaign was the president’s nominee for Secretary of The Navy. A businessman and art collector, Phelan notably has not served in the military.

Phelan faced a U.S. Senate confirmation hearing earlier Thursday, that featured questioning from Cao’s former election opponent, Sen. Kaine.

Cao notably was part of the search and rescue mission to find JFK Jr.’s body after his plan tragically went down.

Trump just named Hung Cao, one of the Navy divers who helped recover JFK Jr.’s body, as Undersecretary of the Navy. pic.twitter.com/bajssS5SUP

— Jimmie 🇺🇸🦅 (@JimmieShaman) February 28, 2025

Yahoo News reported more in depth on Cao’s connection to the search and rescue mission for JFK Jr.:

“John F. Kennedy [Jr.] crashed in July of 1999 and we were at my commanding officer’s house that night. People had been searching for days,” Republican congressional candidate Hung Cao told National Review.

“We were able to recover the body of, really, America’s son, and lay him to rest,” Cao said, describing the salvage operation that recovered the former president’s son.

Prior to running for Congress in Virginia, Cao salvaged planes and ships around the world, including that of Kennedy’s, as part the Navy’s Special Operations unit.

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“I’ve done many salvages in my lifetime, bringing up planes, tanks, just things at the bottom of the ocean,” Cao said. “The first part of anything that happens in the United States starts with salvage, so we can bring back the American spirit.”

Cao mentioned the salvage operations after Pearl Harbor and 9/11, when the materials from the damaged ships and the World Trade Center were refurbished, saying, “We start with salvage so we can bring back the American spirit, to show that we can’t be held down.”

Cao was the operations officer in the mission to recover Kennedy’s plane, meaning he was in “charge of really running the entire operation” at Martha’s Vineyard to recover Kennedy; his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister Lauren Bessette.

“Within twelve hours of the operation, we found the plane,” Cao said, adding that divers began diving the morning after the plane was found.

Once all the divers were “dirty,” meaning they had been diving for an extended amount of time with “surface decompression,” they weren’t allowed to dive for another 24 hours, he said. That’s when Cao, along with another diver, was summoned to retrieve the plane himself.

“We go down there, we rig up the plane, and the ship has its own crane that will pull it up from there,” he said, describing the operation as “sad.”

“It was just a family that was mourning so many losses, and we were able to put away an American icon. The iconic picture of John F. Kennedy saluting his saluting his father’s coffin as it came by — every American remembers that.”

Cao escaped Vietnam shortly before the fall of Saigon and served as a captain in the U.S. Navy in Special Operations for 25 years. He “deployed in combat to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia serving alongside Special Forces and SEAL Teams,” according to his website.