Congress must kill DEI before it kills our military readiness



In June, with four months left in fiscal year 2025, the Army announced that it had surpassed its goal of enlisting 61,000 recruits. Female recruitment surged in particular across every branch, a shift many credit to President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s return to a “warfighter” ethos.

Yet Republicans in Congress still haven’t done their part to cement this new direction in law.

Congressional Republicans must seek a permanent end to the regime that has so disastrously compromised the military’s lethality.

The misguided and weak leadership of the previous administration allowed the ideology of diversity, equity, and inclusion to run rampant at the Pentagon, strangling recruiting efforts and sidelining the military’s true mission.

Under Joe Biden, the Army fell nearly 30,000 recruits short. Misguided priorities drained confidence in the service and hollowed out the ranks. If the “Trump bump” holds, it could reverse those losses and begin restoring the military’s strength and credibility after years of neglect and ideological tinkering.

Lingering progressive activism

Racial and gender identity politics defined the Biden administration so deeply that simple executive orders cannot uproot them — especially in the military. Former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s 2022-26 Strategic Management Plan spelled it out, imposing race-based quotas on every service member and civilian across the force.

The Trump administration must insist that Congress make it impossible to return to this decades-long embrace of race and gender essentialism. Such action is necessary for Secretary Hegseth to continue sharpening the edge of American military power with confidence.

Congress has started moving in the right direction. The Senate Armed Services Committee recently advanced the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act with two measures aimed at curbing DEI. Section 547 blocks race and identity from influencing service academy admissions. Section 920 repeals several provisions that embedded DEI in the Defense Department.

These changes, though welcome, fall short. Congress must go farther if it wants real impact. Identity politics must be banned not just in admissions, but throughout the military. And for Section 920 to matter, DEI cannot simply be buried — its presence should disqualify applicants from future government service.

Ending DEI-based admissions

Another urgent target for repeal is the 2021 DEI selection board mandate, which forces military boards to “represent the diverse population of the armed force concerned.” That order undermines their core mission: choosing the most capable leaders to win wars.

Early signals from the House and Senate Armed Services Committees show they recognize the problem, but they have yet to commit to locking in Trump-era reforms. America’s depleted readiness should be evidence enough. Lawmakers must act decisively — restore the military’s lethality and bury DEI for good.

RELATED: How DEI took a sledgehammer to the US military’s war ethos

Photo by Ivan Cholakov via Getty Images

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) has pushed consistently to root DEI out of the military. But he works with razor-thin majorities in both chambers, where entrenched Armed Services Committee staff — Republicans in name only — resist meaningful reform.

Trump’s political resurgence leaves no excuse. Republicans in Congress must break this pattern and confront the bureaucrats blocking change.

Republicans have their chance

Lawmakers now face their moment. The current Senate and House drafts of the NDAA fall short. Republicans must seize this chance to codify President Trump and Secretary Hegseth’s reforms and restore warfighting as the military’s sole organizing principle.

To end the tyranny of DEI and race quotas, Congress cannot stop at praising executive action. It must legislate a permanent end to the ideology that has gutted readiness and crippled lethality.

Federal security agents had chat groups about sex changes, bizarre fetishes as part of DEI commitment: Report



The National Security Agency's stated aim is to "provide intelligence support to military operations through our signals intelligence activities," while also ensuring that American military communications and data remain "out of the hands of our adversaries."

It appears, however, that intelligence employees at the Pentagon agency had other priorities under the previous administration — namely engaging in yearslong discussions about their genitals, sex-change mutilations, and fetishes on a chat system intended for government work.

One active NSA employee and one former employee provided Christopher Rufo and Hannah Grossman of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal with logs of obscene chats that took place within channels on the NSA's Intelink messaging program.

Chat logs dating back two years reportedly show a fascination among employees with male sex-change mutilations, in which patients' penises are cut off and the remains are manipulated into mock vaginas.

"Mine is everything," one NSA employee stated. "I've found that i like being penetrated (never liked it before GRS), but all the rest is just as important as well."

Another intelligence official tasked with making the country safer reportedly bragged that his sex-change mutilation enabled him to "wear leggings or bikinis without having to wear a gaff under it."

Other NSA employees apparently discussed their kinks and the costly procedures they underwent in order to masquerade as members of the opposite sex.

'At least we know what they did last week.'

According to the NSA sources, the obscene chats — which included explicit sexual discussions about orgies and urination fetishes — were the product of activists' transformation of non-straight "employee resource groups" into opportunities to "turn their kinks and pathologies into official work duties."These efforts were legitimized as part of the agency's commitment to DEI.

Former NSA Director Paul Nakasone told Congress in October 2021 that the agency had 11 employee resource groups, which he engaged "directly to hear their concerns and ideas on making NSA a more inclusive workplace."

The source currently employed at the NSA told City Journal that the non-straight resource groups "spent all day" recruiting fellow travelers and holding meetings with titles such as "Ally Awareness," "Pride," and "Transgender Community Inclusion" and did so with the blessing of the NSA leadership, which maintained that DEI was "not only mission-critical, but mission-imperative."

NSA appeared to go all in on DEI.

In 2023, House Republicans obtained a leaked glossary of DEI terms that had apparently been circulated within the NSA, which hinted at the agency's ideological capture under the previous administration.

The glossary was saturated with leftist presumptions and biases. For instance, the glossary characterized capitalism as an "unequal market system of production and consumption"; claimed "structural racism" is a "feature of the social, economic, and political systems in which we all exist"; and suggested that the popular recognition that normalcy means embracing one's biological sex "feeds into a system of oppression that privileges cisgender individuals and denies equality to transgender people."

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said of City Journal's findings, "This behavior is unacceptable and those involved WILL be held accountable."

"These disgusting chat groups were immediately shut down when POTUS issued his EO ending the DEI insanity the Biden Admin was obsessed with," continued Gabbard. "Our IC must be focused on our core mission: ensuring the safety, security, and freedom of the American people."

Elon Musk noted, "Well ... at least we know what they did last week."

BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre tweeted, "The US security state was operating a troon chat room so employees could hook up and recruit."

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