President Donald Trump said Monday he fired the boards of visitors at four U.S. service academies, claiming they had been “infiltrated by woke leftist ideologies.”
Trump ordered the immediate dismissal of board members at the Military Academy in West Point, New York; the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland; the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado; and the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut.
“We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards,” Trump wrote on his social network platform, Truth Social. “We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!”
The boards of visitors are made up of lawmakers and presidential appointees who traditionally meet several times a year to provide nonbinding advice on issues like curriculum, student morale, academic methods and the needs of the institutions, such as equipment and funding.
Trump did not immediately name replacements to the boards.
Trump’s dismissal of the board members follows a similar action former President Joe Biden took after his inauguration in 2021. At the time, the White House asked for the resignation of 18 members of the advisory boards at the Army, Navy and Air Force academies who were appointed by Trump during his first term.
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Trump’s supporters criticized Biden’s decision at the time, saying it was a dangerous politicization of non-partisan boards. Biden’s administration argued they were concerned about the qualifications of the appointees. They included former White House press secretary and Navy officer Sean Spicer, former national security adviser H.R. McMaster and Kellyanne Conway, a former senior counselor to Trump, among others.
Prior to Biden’s decision, non-lawmaker members of the boards typically served out their three-year terms, even across presidential administrations. Several members appointed by former President Barack Obama at the end of his term served several years into the Trump administration.
The boards consist of six members appointed by the president, three appointed by the vice president and four appointed by the House speaker, as well as one designated by the Senate Armed Services Committee and one designated by the House Armed Services Committee.
Among the most recent appointees on the Military Academy board were former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, the first enlisted combat veteran to lead the Defense Department, and retired Lt. Gen. Nadja West, a former Army surgeon general who was the service’s first Black woman to be made a three-star and the highest-ranking woman to graduate from West Point.
Jack McCain, a reserve naval aviator and the son of Navy veteran and longtime lawmaker John McCain, served on the Naval Academy board, as did retired Adm. Michelle Howard, who was the first Black woman to command a combatant ship and the Navy’s first female four-star.
Retired Vice Adm. Peter Neffenger, the former vice commandant of the Coast Guard and a former leader of the Transportation Security Administration, sat on the Coast Guard Academy’s board. Former Secretary of the Army Eric Fanning was part of the board at the Air Force Academy. Fanning became the first openly gay leader of any military branch in 2015.
Nikki Wentling is a senior editor at Military Times. She's reported on veterans and military communities for nearly a decade and has also covered technology, politics, health care and crime. Her work has earned multiple honors from the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, the Arkansas Associated Press Managing Editors and others.
