At Hearing, Warren Warns Trump Administration's Attacks on Military Diversity Are “Wildly Self-Destructive”
Warren: “Tying the hands of the academies as they compete with other top universities for talented faculty will undercut the academies and, over time, undercut the leaders the academies are teaching.”
Washington, D.C. – At a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ranking Member of the Subcommittee, delivered opening remarks highlighting how Republican attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts at military academies endanger national security, worsen military recruiting challenges, and limit the growth of talented students. Senator Warren also submitted letters for the record from 24 Naval Academy and West Point alumni who shared the importance of the academies and their concerns about the direction that the Trump Administration is taking them.
Transcript: Hearing to Conduct Oversight and Receive Testimony on the Status of the Military Service Academies
Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel
March 26, 2025
As Delivered
Senator Elizabeth Warren: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I’m also looking forward to continuing the bipartisan tradition of this subcommittee and I hope to work with you and all of our members to make sure we improve the lives of our servicemembers, their families, and our civilian workforce, so that they can stay focused on the mission of keeping Americans safe.
I want to start by extending my condolences to the four families that just lost loved ones during a training mission in Lithuania. They remind us – those who go into harms’ way and their families are always at risk and put it on the line for the people of the United States of America. We are a deeply grateful nation.
I am glad that we’re starting this year focusing on how we recruit and retain our next generation of military leaders. Our military service academies are among the top academic institutions in the nation.
West Point, the Air Force Academy, the Naval Academy provide a quality education, and they recruit and train almost 20 percent of our military officers.
Currently, our military academies are very selective—almost as tough to get into as the top colleges in this country. But that knife cuts both ways. Every student admitted to the military academies has other options. Academy students are often highly recruited by other schools. The competition for talent—for tomorrow’s leaders—is already fierce. Attacks on our military academies or policies that shrink the pool of young Americans who will consider applying for military service will cause lasting damage to our military and to our nation.
The latest U.S. census found that the youngest generation of Americans is more diverse than ever. That means we need our military academies to continue developing successful leaders from all walks of life—not push away strong recruits because they feel unwelcome or undervalued.
Ham-fisted efforts to reshape the academies are bound to backfire. For example, a mix of military practitioners and civilian instructors have successfully worked together for decades to shape students at the service academies into a lethal fighting force. In the same way that competition for talent exists for academy students, the same competition is true for faculty. Well-respected professors have options, and many are aggressively recruited. When Secretary Hegseth seemed to suggest that academies should have fewer civilian professors, and when the Department of Defense imposes a ban on travel by civilian personnel, it suggests that the military doesn’t care about civilians supporting its mission and that it will make it harder to attract and keep top talent to teach tomorrow’s military leaders.
The foolishness of the travel ban was immediately apparent. Testing sites for military entrance exams were forced to close or reduce hours, so fewer young people could apply to the military. While DOD has begun to allow civilians to travel to these testing sites again, these attacks on civilian personnel who help to support our military are worrying, and civilian personnel are key to helping our academies successful as well.
Our military students deserve the best teachers, people who are experts in their field. Tying the hands of the academies as they compete with other top universities for talented faculty will undercut the academies and, over time, undercut the leaders the academies are teaching.
Students need to develop their skills both inside the classroom and outside as well. I’m sure that many of us can think of sports teams and extracurricular activities that helped shape our experiences at school, that helped build our communities, and made us better leaders. Surely as a coach, Chairman Tuberville saw students’ leadership skills develop and grow through out-of-classroom work.
The Executive Order’s attacks on clubs at academies that it considers DEI isn’t creating more effective warfighters – it’s cutting off students from opportunities to grow as leaders.
When we’re trying to maintain a military force that can deter China, we can’t afford to be shutting down engineering clubs. But under President Trump, West Point has already disbanded chapters of the National Society of Black Engineers and the National Society of Women Engineers. Both organizations have been praised repeatedly for helping recruit and retain more young engineers for military service. Closing those chapters at the military academies while those chapters remain open at more than 600 other colleges and universities does not help our military recruit top talent.
This committee held two hearings on recruiting last year, and both hearings made clear that the United States cannot meet our recruiting goals without women. The Army met its recruiting goals in 2024 primarily because of new female recruits – there was an 18 percent increase in women signing up for active duty compared to an increase of just 8 percent for men. Let me be clear: these women are not looking for a preference or a handout. They just want a chance to compete straight up.
But we won’t be able to attract the women we need if they see a new glass ceiling on their opportunity to command. By removing women like Chief of Naval Operations Vice Admiral Franchetti from leadership roles simply because they are women and confirming a Secretary of Defense who has a long record opposing women in combat, the Trump administration has already set a tone from the top that women are not welcome.
We are already hearing concerns that women are hesitant to join certain military jobs because they believe they won’t be welcome solely due to their identity, not because of their qualifications.
Black recruits face their own challenges. When a Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a man who served honorably for over 40 years and who outlined our most successful strategy to deal with foreign terrorists, is fired solely because President Trump cannot imagine that he earned the job on the merits, Black military recruits across the nation get the message: your race makes you vulnerable. And when national organizations to support Black college students who major in engineering are suddenly dropped at the military academies while those organizations remain lively at more than 600 other colleges and universities, the message that the military academies may not welcome you gets even louder.
Recruiting and retaining talent—including Black and female talent—is a critical job for the future security of our nation. Pushing away more than half our future leaders is wildly self-destructive.
Mr. Chairman, twenty-four alumni from West Point and the Naval Academy have written to me, sharing their stories about what the academies mean to them and why they are concerned about the direction this administration wants to take them. I would like to enter those into the record for their letters and their testimony.
Let me read from just one of them, who wrote that these attacks on diversity are “a direct affront to the principles upon which our military was built and a betrayal of the sacrifices made by generations of service members.” Let those words sink in. A betrayal. We owe them better than that.
I look forward to this hearing and hearing the testimony of the witnesses who are here today. I thank you for being with us.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
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