Anti-affirmative action group drops lawsuits against West Point and Air Force Academy after policy changes
Students for Fair Admissions threw out the two lawsuits after reaching an agreement with the administration that said the new admissions policy changes will be 'permanent' and that the elite military academies must notify it of any changes to the schools' policies so that the group can mount new legal challenges.
Attorney General Pam Bondi welcomed the resolution to the two lawsuits, saying in a statement Tuesday that her department 'is committed to eliminating DEI practices throughout the federal government.'
The decision by SFFA to drop the cases follows a similar move that it made in a case it brought against the Naval Academy over that school's admissions policies.
'Together with the Naval Academy case earlier this year, this agreement ensures that America's critically important military service academies will admit future officers based solely on merit, not skin color or ancestry,' SFFA president Edward Blum said in a statement.
The Air Force case was brought in a federal court in Colorado in December and had not yet yielded any major rulings by the time Trump returned to the White House.
The West Point lawsuit was filed in September 2023. In that case, a federal judge in New York ruled against SFFA, which then sought an emergency order from the Supreme Court barring the academy from considering race. The Supreme Court declined to take the group up on that request at the time, saying the case was 'underdeveloped.'
The trio of lawsuits from SFFA were the group's latest front in its long-running legal battle against affirmative action policies at the nation's colleges and universities.
In a landmark 2023 decision, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court invalidated admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that considered race as one of many factors in deciding which students to admit. That longstanding practice, the court ruled, violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause.
But the court explicitly declined to apply that same rationale to the military academies. The Biden administration had argued at the time that the federal government had a compelling interest in developing a diverse officer corps. In a footnote, Chief Justice John Roberts noted that no military academy was a party to the litigation that reached the high court.
'This opinion also does not address the issue,' Roberts wrote, 'in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.'
That inspired SFFA, the same group that had sued Harvard and UNC, to launch separate litigation against each of the military academies, including the Air Force Academy in Colorado and West Point in New York.
But Trump effectively headed off that litigation earlier this year by ordering that 'every element of the Armed Forces should operate free from any preference based on race or sex.'
The change reversed a decades-long effort, during Republican and Democratic administrations, to make the officer corps better reflect the enlisted soldiers they lead and the country they represent.
As part of the Trump administration's broader war on efforts to increase diversity, the president signed an executive order on January 27 barring the armed services from relying on 'any preference based on race or sex.' In early February, acting on that order, the Air Force eliminated the use of 'quotas, objectives, and goals based on sex, race or ethnicity,' including for admissions.
As the Biden administration sought to defend the need for the military schools' policies before the high court in 2022, then-Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the justices that 'our armed forces know from hard experience that when we do not have a diverse officer corps that is broadly reflective of a diverse fighting force, our strength and cohesion and military readiness suffer.'
'So it is a critical national security imperative to attain diversity within the officer corps,' she said at the time.
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