Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to withdraw Army recruiters from the nation’s top Black engineering event has ushered blunt criticism from military leadership.
“It’s fucking racist,” one active-duty Army general told Military.com on the condition of anonymity. “For the Army now, it’s ‘Blacks need not apply’ and it breaks my heart.”
The Baltimore-based Black Engineer of the Year Awards (BEYA) has historically been a key event for the Pentagon to recruit high-caliber STEM talent. One Army recruiter told the servicemember news outlet that BEYA is one of the “most talent-dense events we do,” and that the branch “need[s] the talent.” BEYA, in turn, recognizes on its website that the “U.S. military is one of the largest STEM employers in the nation.”
But despite its abundance of talent, recruiters were concerned that attending the event could infringe on Donald Trump’s anti-DEI executive order. Hegseth has, from the jump, been totally on board with the radical shift, making the dissolution of longstanding diversity efforts a priority of his tenure.
On January 31, Hegseth declared that Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and other heritage month observations were officially “dead” and would no longer be recognized by the military. And on Monday, Hegseth made the first move in implementing Trump’s transgender ban on the armed forces, initiating a pause on integrating new trans troops.
“I think the single dumbest phrase in military history is, ‘Our diversity is our strength,’” Hegseth said Friday in an address to Pentagon staff. “I think our strength is our unity. Our strength is our shared purpose, regardless of our background, regardless of how we grew up, regardless of our gender, regardless of our race. In this department, we will treat everyone equally.”
“We will treat everyone with fairness,” he continued. “We will treat everyone with respect. And we will judge you as an individual by your merit and by your commitment to the team and the mission.”
Recruiters that would have attended BEYA weren’t left with nothing to do. Instead, they were redirected to participate in a National Rifle Association-sponsored event in Pennsylvania, which Military.com described as a “predominantly white gathering that recruiters acknowledge is less likely to yield high-quality applicants.”
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