The Department of Defense is conducting a comprehensive review of the elimination of DEI programs across the military and will present a progress report on June 1.
In January 2025, President Donald Trump issued Executive Order 14151, titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” which mandated the termination of all Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) initiatives across the federal government.
The order required agencies to dismantle existing DEIA programs and report related personnel to the Office of Management and Budget within 60 days.
As President Trump stated, “The Biden Administration forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI), into virtually all aspects of the Federal Government, in areas ranging from airline safety to the military.”
In alignment with this directive, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth released the Restoring America’s Fighting Force memorandum on January 29, 2025.
The memo reaffirmed the military’s core mission of warfighting and called for a return to merit-based, color-blind policies.
It emphasized that leadership and advancement within the ranks must be based on talent, excellence, and hard work—not race, sex, or ethnicity.
To ensure implementation, the memo established a task force to oversee the dismantling of DEI offices across the Department of Defense.
Under the Biden administration, the Department of Defense redirected significant funding and focus toward diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs—which wasted taxpayer money, lowered standards, and divided military personnel.
Rather than concentrating solely on capability and lethality, the military was pushed to adopt DEI-driven agendas, including diversity quotas for leadership roles, even at the expense of traditional merit-based standards.
While previous efforts to eliminate racism in the ranks had been widely supported, the tone of these initiatives changed in 2020 when then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper introduced training on “implicit bias” and established bureaucracies dedicated to enforcing DEI policy.
These efforts expanded further under President Biden. In fiscal year 2023, DEI spending rose to $86.5 million—up from $68 million the previous year—with a staggering $114.7 million requested for 2024.
These programs did more than misallocate resources—they undermined national security.
A December 2020 Pentagon memo called for the removal of aptitude test requirements viewed as barriers to diversity and proposed strategies to shape leadership demographics based on U.S. Census data.
This effectively institutionalized diversity quotas, suggesting that identity mattered more than competence in selecting military leaders.
DEI was also deeply embedded in military education. All branches implemented DEI training, and both ROTC programs and service academies treated it as a “core competency.”
Freedom of Information Act requests revealed that these courses often promoted critical race theory, teaching concepts such as White privilege, systemic racism, and internal bias. Some academies went so far as to implement “eyes and ears” programs, encouraging cadets to report private conversations that contradicted DEI ideology.
These teachings, rooted in Marxist frameworks like CRT, clashed with the very values the military was sworn to protect. Rather than uniting service members under a shared mission, DEI training introduced narratives portraying America as oppressive and even suggested that patriotism was a form of racial supremacy.
Historically, similar DEI campaigns in the 1970s coincided with a recruitment crisis. By 2024, the military once again faced a shortfall in enlistment, with branches either falling short of goals or lowering standards to meet them.
The military’s sole mission is to protect the United States from foreign threats—a goal undermined by DEI programs that promoted division, diverted resources, and advanced ideologies incompatible with America’s founding principles.
In 2025, under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Defense began a sweeping DEI purge aimed at restoring meritocracy, unity, and mission readiness.
Executive Order 14151 prohibits any form of preferential treatment or disadvantage based on race, sex, or other identity categories, and bans quotas or demographic targets in hiring, promotions, academic admissions, and career field assignments.
The order also mandates broad reforms in military education and training. Instruction on DEI, Critical Race Theory, and gender ideology is now banned across all DoD institutions.
Service academies have been directed to reaffirm the belief that the United States and its founding documents are a force for good in the world. DEI-focused advisory boards and working groups have been disbanded, and the Army has even implemented AI tools like “CamoGPT” to systematically remove DEIA references from training materials.
The Department’s renewed focus—on lethality, accountability, standards, readiness, and meritocracy—is guided by the principle that providing equal opportunity, not equal outcomes, is the key to maintaining the world’s most effective fighting force.
A nine-member Department of Defense task force, led by Jules W. Hurst III, is visiting military installations and service academies throughout April and May to evaluate the implementation of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Restoring America’s Fighting Force memorandum.
Issued on January 29, 2025, the directive ordered the elimination of all DEI offices and initiatives across the department.
The task force, operating under the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, is responsible for overseeing this transition—dismantling DEI programs, eliminating content promoting concepts like systemic racism and gender ideology, and ensuring compliance with earlier executive orders, including EO 13950 and the January 2025 order on restoring biological truth in government policy.
It will issue a preliminary report by March 1 and a final report by June 1, 2025.
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