Defense Secretary Hegseth says military support for Scouts hinges on ending 'woke' merit badges

• The Pentagon will keep ties with Scouts, as long as the group complies with military directives.
• Scouts will end DEI initiatives and seem poised to ban transgender youth, per Pentagon requests.
• The move is part of a larger federal effort to force private groups to follow ideological directives.

The Pentagon is pulling back on plans to cut ties with Scouting America, as long as the nonprofit organization adopts policies that echo new military directives, including eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and banning transgender youth from the Scouts.

In a video posted to X Friday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said he had been "very seriously considering" cutting all military support to the organization, citing what he described as its failure to comply with President Donald Trump's executive order aimed at ending "illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity."

The move is part of a growing Pentagon campaign to pressure private institutions like AI giant Anthropic, journalists who cover the US military and universities attended by troops to accept the Trump administration's policies and preferences. The move put the defense secretary in the position of telling a private youth organization who can join and what their application asks, and doing so amid a tense build-up in the Middle East that could see the US striking Iran within days or hours.

Military support for Scouts has traditionally included logistics to the group's National Jamboree event (which is also a significant military recruiting event) and hosting of Scouts aboard military bases.

The Pentagon is essentially enforcing Trump's executive order, applicable to government agencies, onto private institutions, said Dan Maurer, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and associate law professor at Ohio Northern University.

"The fact that they're capitulating at all is a little weird to me, because they can withstand the loss of the connection, frankly," Maurer, a former Eagle Scout, said of Scouting America, expressing astonishment that the defense secretary personally focused on this. "His attention could be focused on other things."

Scout leaders agreed to "review and replace politicized, divisive, and discriminatory language throughout the organization," Hegseth said in the video, adding, "no more DEI. Zero."

Merit badges that "mask" DEI "activism" have been "discontinued," he said, and a new military service badge will be added, in partnership with the Pentagon.

Scout participants will only be allowed to join based on their birth sex, which may amount to a ban on transgender youth.

"That means that the application, any application, will have only two sex designations, male and female, and the application must match the applicant's birth certificate," the defense secretary said.

It is not clear how many Scouts would be personally affected by such a shift, and it remains to be seen how families will feel about the Pentagon's involvement in setting terms of their organization.

Hegseth said he believed Scouting should return to being a boy-only group, but added that such a change is not imminent.

In November, an NPR report revealed the Pentagon was weighing whether to sever ties with the organization. As many as 16% of recent cadets at the US Military Academy have scouting in their backgrounds, a percentage that rivaled that of students from high school JROTC programs and reflected the Scouts' deep military ties. Many cadets were also Eagle Scouts.

Beginning in 2012, "the Boy Scouts lost their way," Hegseth said in the Friday post. "A once great organization became gravely wounded. Diversity, equity and inclusion, DEI, crept in. The name was changed to 'Scouting America.' Girls were accepted. The focus on God as the ruler of the universe was watered down to include openness to humanism and Earth centered pagan religions."

"They even welcomed the destructive myth of gender fluidity and transgenderism to infiltrate their membership. Along the way, standards were lowered and merit destroyed in favor of an insidious, radical woke ideology that is anti-America and anti-American."

The Scouts said they had made changes to comply with the Trump administration's policies after months of discussion.

"Scouting America is proud to uphold our longstanding commitment to military families across the globe through a renewed, strengthened partnership with the Department of War," Scouting America said in a statement to Business Insider, referring to the Trump administration's unofficial name for the Defense Department that Congress has not approved.

"Over several months, we engaged in dialogue with Department leadership to align on how we could deepen our service to military families, while making programmatic updates to comply with Executive Order 14173."

Hegseth did not specify what policy changes he was referring to in 2012, though in 2013 openly gay youth were allowed to join.

The Boy Scouts adopted changes to address declining participation that was caused, in part, by thousands of decades-old child sexual abuse cases finally made public in 2012, said David Chetlain, a Navy veteran and former Boy Scout, who expressed concern about the Pentagon's pressure campaign.

The so-called 'perversion files' eventually contributed to Scouting America filing for bankruptcy in 2020. Opening ranks to a more diverse array of participants was part of the group's attempt to maintain relevance and cleanse its reputation, Chetlain said.

Various religious merit awards have been around for decades, he added, and reflect the diversity of the group, which has foreign members across the world. Two Japanese exchange scouts were in his own troop, he said, recalling his time as a young Scout in the 1970s and 1980s, and as an occasional leader since then.

"It's always been multicultural. It's always been agnostic to religion or accepting of all religions," said Chetlain, though he noted that Scouts previously barred atheists for decades. "Even as a kid, I loved that inclusivity and having a place where everybody belonged and we were all accepted. And it was a safe place for me."