Trump Administration Aims to Ban Affirmative Action at Military Academies
Credit: Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images- President Donald Trump issued an executive order eliminating DEI initiatives in the military, including race-conscious admissions at the military academies.
- Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has gone on record opposing race-based preferences at these schools.
- Citing national security concerns, recent court rulings have preserved affirmative action at West Point and the Naval Academy.
- The president’s authority in light of these legal decisions remains unclear.
As the Trump administration takes aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs nationwide, it recently trained its sights on the military and its service academies.
Recent directives seek to eliminate DEI programming along with the consideration of race in admissions at institutions such as the U.S. Military Academy (West Point), the Naval Academy, and the Air Force Academy.
One problem: Recent Supreme Court and district court rulings have upheld race-conscious admissions at these schools.
Evidently undeterred by such edicts, the Trump administration issued an executive order on Jan. 27 titled “Restoring America’s Fighting Force” that calls for the “elimination of race-based and sex-based discrimination within the Armed Forces of the United States. No individual or group within our Armed Forces should be preferred or disadvantaged on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, color, or creed.”
The order instructs the secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security to “carefully review the leadership, curriculum, and instructors of the United States Service Academies and other defense academic institutions associated with their respective departments to ensure alignment with this order” and to “abolish … initiatives established to promote a race-based preferences system that subverts meritocracy” and “perpetuates unconstitutional discrimination …”
Two days later, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a memo saying the department will “strive to provide merit-based, color-blind, equal opportunities to service members.””No DoD (Department of Defense) component will establish sex-based, race-based, or ethnicity-based goals for organizational composition, academic admission, or career fields,” it states.
Prior to his confirmation as Defense secretary, Hegseth told lawmakers he opposes the consideration of race in admissions at the military academies, according to Reuters.
“I reject the idea that the MSAs (military service academies) should have different standards for individuals with different skin colors,” he wrote in response to questions.
Yet the courts continue to protect race-based admissions preferences at the academies.
In his majority opinion in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard, the U.S. Supreme Court case that abolished race-conscious admissions, Chief Justice John Roberts included a brief footnote exempting the nation’s military academies “in light of the potentially distinct interests [they] may present.”
Roberts didn’t specify what those distinct interests entail, but his footnote references an amicus brief filed by the United States arguing for the importance of maintaining diversity among military leadership.
In his December 2024 ruling in a case SFFA subsequently brought against the Naval Academy, Senior District Judge Richard Bennett, an Army veteran, expounded on the importance of diversity within the military and affirmed that the academy’s “race-conscious admissions policies are narrowly tailored to further a compelling governmental interest in national security.”
Bennett’s lengthy discussion of race in the military cited historical examples of how racial imbalance in the various service branches, especially a lack of Black representation within the officer corps, caused unrest and disloyalty among the troops.
“The military’s history of racial discrimination and racial tensions, and resulting ‘lack of unit cohesion,’ ‘lack of trust,’ and ‘diminish[ed] … capability,’ directly informed the military’s judgment about the critical need for diversity in the armed forces generally and in the officer corps more specifically,” he wrote.
Bennett ruled in favor of the Naval Academy, preserving the consideration of race in admissions — not as a means of satisfying a quota but as a plus factor for applicants of color.
Earlier in 2024, the Supreme Court similarly denied SFFA’s bid to prevent West Point from considering race in its fall admissions cycle. Another SFFA suit, against the Air Force Academy, is pending with the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.
So even as recent judicial rulings have continued to protect the right of military academies to consider race in admissions, the Trump administration seeks to advance policies to the contrary.
Whose authority reigns? That remains unclear, even to legal scholars.
“I think the fundamental answer is that we don’t know,” Aziz Huq, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Chicago Law School, told Democracy Docket. “There have been moments where there has been some level of defiance on nonconformities to judicial orders in the past.”
This may constitute another example of the “constitutional crisis” caused by one governmental branch testing the limits of its authority and circumventing checks and balances. Or it might be ultimately sorted out in the courts.
When the Supreme Court issued its decision on West Point, it didn’t take up the case per se, calling it “underdeveloped” and clarifying that “this order should not be construed as expressing any view on the merits of the constitutional question.”
In other words, we may not have heard the last of this issue from the court’s perspective, especially now that the court’s authority has been challenged.