President Donald Trump on Monday dismissed the advisory boards at all four U.S. military academies, saying they've been dominated by "Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years."
"I have ordered the immediate dismissal of the Board of Visitors for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards. We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!"
Boards of Visitors serve as advisory panels at military academies, providing academy officials with guidance on curriculum, discipline, fiscal affairs, and overall operations. Board members typically serve three-year terms and are appointed by the president, the vice president, and congressional leaders.
The move is part of Trump's broader push to overhaul the military since his return to the White House. Trump has signed executive orders abolishing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the military and barring transgender personnel from the armed forces. The president also reinstated soldiers who had been dismissed for not taking the COVID-19 vaccine.
In 2021, then-president Joe Biden fired all military academy board members who had been appointed by Trump, drawing widespread backlash from conservatives. Biden's purge, one board member said, "shows that the administration is hellbent on the woke mob controlling or having input into military education."
Trump's defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has vowed to remove "woke" civilian professors from the academies and replace them with military personnel.
"We need more uniformed members going back into West Point, the Air Force Academy, the Naval Academy as a tour to teach with their wisdom of what they've learned in uniform instead of just more civilian professors that came from the same left-wing, woke universities that they left and then try to push that into service academies," Hegseth said at his confirmation hearing.