Newly confirmed U.S. secretary of defense Pete Hegseth issued a memo Jan. 29 ordering the Department of Defense to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and offices—including race-conscious admissions at military academies.
The memo establishes a task force “charged with overseeing the department’s efforts to abolish DEI offices” and specifically prohibits “sex-based, race-based or ethnicity-based goals for academic admission” within the department, which oversees military academies. Hegseth wrote that he’s enforcing an executive order issued by President Trump instructing military academy leaders to eliminate DEI initiatives.
When the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in 2023’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill, the justices explicitly made an exception for the military academies. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that the institutions, which train the military officer corps, may have “potentially distinct interests” when it comes to admissions and that diversity in the armed forces may be a national security prerogative.
Three of those academies—the Military Academy at West Point, the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy—have since been sued by anti–affirmative action groups seeking to eliminate the exemption. Last February the Supreme Court declined to hear the case against West Point, and in December a federal judge ruled that the Naval Academy can continue to consider race in admissions; the case against the Air Force Academy is ongoing.
It is unclear if Hegseth’s order to eliminate race-based “quotas” in admissions would prohibit military academies from considering race at all when reviewing applications.
