The Boise attorney and former Trump domestic-policy aide joins a 15-member panel advising Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on strategy and national security.

Theo Wold — the Boise attorney who served as Idaho’s first solicitor general in years — has been appointed to the Defense Policy Board, the advisory panel that counsels the secretary of war on long-term strategy, force structure and national security.

Hegseth — who carries the title of secretary of war under the Trump administration’s rebranding of the Department of Defense — announced the appointments Monday. Former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer will chair the board and former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman will serve as vice chair. Wold is one of 13 additional members named to the panel, a roster that also includes venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, former Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, China strategist Michael Pillsbury and retired Adm. Chas Richard, the former head of U.S. Strategic Command.

Established in 1985, the Defense Policy Board provides independent advice to the secretary, deputy secretary and undersecretary for policy. It does not set policy or command troops; its work centers on strategic planning, the implications of force modernization, regional defense policy and other national security questions referred to it by Pentagon leadership. The reconstituted board follows Hegseth’s 2025 overhaul of several Pentagon advisory panels, which cleared out prior members as part of a review meant to align the boards with the department’s priorities.

An Idaho legal career with a national profile

Wold, an Idaho resident, is best known in the state as the attorney Raúl Labrador tapped to stand up a revived solicitor general’s office after Labrador won the attorney general’s race in 2022. Labrador announced the hire in November of that year, and Wold began the role in early January 2023 — the first person to fill the position in many years. Labrador cast the new office as a vehicle to track federal litigation and challenge what he described as federal overreach, comparing the role to the state solicitor general posts that have launched the careers of prominent conservative litigators.

His arrival drew scrutiny at the Statehouse because he was not yet licensed to practice law in Idaho; previously admitted in California, Wold sat for the Idaho bar in February 2023 and passed that spring. He stepped down from the solicitor general’s office in October 2023, part of a broader wave of departures from Labrador’s senior staff. He has also worked with Dorothy Moon — now chair of the Idaho Republican Party — on draft legislation that would have altered the state’s voting laws.

Before returning to Idaho, Wold held several posts in the first Trump administration, including acting assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy and deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy. Earlier in his career he was deputy chief counsel to Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, on the Senate Judiciary Committee, directed the Administrative State Project at the Claremont Institute, and clerked for Judge Janice Rogers Brown on the D.C. Circuit and Judge José Antonio Fusté in the federal district court in Puerto Rico. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown, a master’s from the University of St. Andrews and a law degree from Notre Dame.

Today Wold is a senior counselor at Palantir Technologies and a visiting fellow for law and technology at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology and the Human Person — a background weighted toward the intersection of law, national security and emerging technology that has become a growing focus of Pentagon planning.

What the appointment means

Because the board is advisory, its practical influence will depend on which questions Hegseth chooses to put before it and how much weight department leaders give its recommendations. For Idaho, the appointment keeps a Boise attorney with deep ties to the state’s Republican leadership — and to the Trump administration — in the orbit of national defense policy.