The Pentagon on Friday directed the nation’s prestigious military academies to end consideration of race, gender and ethnicity in their admissions processes, and begin a purge — along with other Defense Department academic institutions — of educational materials focused on those “divisive concepts.”
Beginning with the service academies’ next admission cycle, prospective students will be evaluated for acceptance based “exclusively on merit,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote in one of two policy memos released by the Pentagon. The document emphasizes that “no consideration” be given to candidates’ race, gender or ethnicity, but factors such as “unique athletic talent” and previous military service may be taken into account.
“This ensures only the most qualified candidates are admitted, trained, and ultimately commissioned to lead the finest fighting force in history,” Hegseth’s memo says. “Selecting anyone but the best erodes lethality, our warfighting readiness, and undercuts the culture of excellence in our Armed Forces.”
The U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Air Force Academy each ended their race-conscious admissions policies earlier this year, soon after President Donald Trump’s return to office.
The academies’ admissions practices have been the subject of legal scrutiny for the past few years, with the Supreme Court in 2024 denying a conservative group’s emergency request seeking to prevent the U.S. Military Academy at West Point from considering race when choosing its next class of cadets. The high court two years ago rejected the use of affirmative action in college admissions but left unsettled the specific question of whether race may factor in admissions to the service academies, whose graduates go on to serve as military officers.
The second memo released Friday instructs each of the military services to scour the library collections maintained by their educational institutions — not only the academies, but the various leadership schools attended by military officers later in their careers — and “sequester” materials covering a range of subjects relevant to race and gender.
Once that work is done later this month, an ad hoc committee of “knowledgeable leaders, educators, and library professionals” will determine “an appropriate ultimate disposition for those materials,” the memo says. It was signed by Timothy D. Dill, a senior Pentagon official and onetime aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) who joined the Trump administration in January.
To guide the library purge, Dill’s memo directs that several search terms be employed, including “Diversity in the Workplace,” “Gender Expression” and “White privilege.”
