Latest news with #DEIA-related
Yahoo
30-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
US Naval Academy ends affirmative action in admissions: 'Implementing all directives'
A U.S. Court of Appeals ruled the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) can no longer consider race, ethnicity or sex in admissions to the Annapolis, Maryland, service institution, following orders from President Donald Trump. Vice Adm. Yvette Davids made the policy change Feb. 14, noting "neither race, ethnicity nor sex can be considered as a factor for admission at any point during the admissions process, including qualification and acceptance," according to a court filing by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which was made public Friday. Trump's Jan. 27 executive order stated "every element of the Armed Forces should operate free from any preference based on race or sex" and directed the secretary of defense to conduct an internal review of the country's service academies. The decision followed a December ruling in federal court allowing the Naval Academy to continue considering race in its admissions process. Naval Academy Closing Dei Offices To Align With Trump Executive Orders: Memo Academy attorneys in September argued that prioritizing diversity in the military "makes it stronger, more effective and more widely respected," according to a report from The Associated Press. Read On The Fox News App Judges in December found "military cohesion and other national security factors" meant the school should not be subjected to the same standards as civilian universities, according to the report. The appeal was brought by the group Students for Fair Admissions. The DOJ on Friday requested a suspension of the case as it looked over the change in USNA's policy. "The parties require a reasonable amount of time to discuss the details of the Academy's new policy and to consider the appropriate next steps for this litigation, including whether this litigation is now moot and, if so, whether the district court judgment should be vacated," the DOJ wrote in the filing. Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, called the affirmative action policies "unfair and illegal" in a statement to the AP. Trial On Using Race-based Admissions In The Naval Academy Kicks Off In Crusade Against Affirmative Action "Racial discrimination is wrong and racial classifications have no place at our nation's military academies," Blum wrote. Maryland Rep. Sarah Elfreth, a Democrat serving on USNA's Board of Visitors, told the AP the decision was "disastrous" and "will have negative implications on our military's recruitment and retention for decades to come." "A Navy and Marine Corps that reflect the diversity of our country is our strongest Navy and Marine Corps," Elfreth said. "Diversity and inclusion allow our academies to not just reflect how our country looks but are critical to mission readiness and strong national security." In February, the academy said the school was taking steps to close all agency diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) offices and ending DEIA-related contracts in accordance with Trump's executive orders. West Point Disbands Gender-based, Race Clubs In Trump's Dei Sweep Though its DEI and DEIA offices were closed since at least the summer of 2024, Davids noted "concerns have been raised that some of these programs may have been modified in a way that obscures their DEIA objectives." She said if any staff members were aware of changes to obscure the connection between a contract and DEIA or similar ideologies, they should report it to the Office of Personnel Management. "The U.S. Naval Academy did not have a DEI or DEIA office prior to the President's executive order that mandated closure of all agency DEIA offices and the end of all DEIA-related contracts," Cmdr. Tim Hawkins, a Navy spokesperson, told Fox News. "The U.S. Naval Academy sent the Jan. 23 email internally to staff simply to inform its personnel that the executive order was issued and USNA would fully comply. "The Navy is executing and implementing all directives issued by the president with professionalism, efficiency and in full alignment with national security objectives." Human resources officials also told staff USNA emails should not include gender-identifying pronouns on signature lines. Fox News Digital's Greg Norman and The Associated Press contributed to this article source: US Naval Academy ends affirmative action in admissions: 'Implementing all directives'
Fox News
29-03-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
US Naval Academy ends affirmative action in admissions: 'Implementing all directives'
A U.S. Court of Appeals ruled the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) can no longer consider race, ethnicity or sex in admissions to the Annapolis, Maryland, service institution, following orders from President Donald Trump. Vice Adm. Yvette Davids made the policy change Feb. 14, noting "neither race, ethnicity nor sex can be considered as a factor for admission at any point during the admissions process, including qualification and acceptance," according to a court filing by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which was made public Friday. Trump's Jan. 27 executive order stated "every element of the Armed Forces should operate free from any preference based on race or sex" and directed the secretary of defense to conduct an internal review of the country's service academies. The decision followed a December ruling in federal court allowing the Naval Academy to continue considering race in its admissions process. Academy attorneys in September argued that prioritizing diversity in the military "makes it stronger, more effective and more widely respected," according to a report from The Associated Press. Judges in December found "military cohesion and other national security factors" meant the school should not be subjected to the same standards as civilian universities, according to the report. The appeal was brought by the group Students for Fair Admissions. The DOJ on Friday requested a suspension of the case as it looked over the change in USNA's policy. "The parties require a reasonable amount of time to discuss the details of the Academy's new policy and to consider the appropriate next steps for this litigation, including whether this litigation is now moot and, if so, whether the district court judgment should be vacated," the DOJ wrote in the filing. Edward Blum, president of Students for Fair Admissions, called the affirmative action policies "unfair and illegal" in a statement to the AP. "Racial discrimination is wrong and racial classifications have no place at our nation's military academies," Blum wrote. Maryland Rep. Sarah Elfreth, a Democrat serving on USNA's Board of Visitors, told the AP the decision was "disastrous" and "will have negative implications on our military's recruitment and retention for decades to come." "A Navy and Marine Corps that reflect the diversity of our country is our strongest Navy and Marine Corps," Elfreth said. "Diversity and inclusion allow our academies to not just reflect how our country looks but are critical to mission readiness and strong national security." In February, the academy said the school was taking steps to close all agency diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) offices and ending DEIA-related contracts in accordance with Trump's executive orders. Though its DEI and DEIA offices were closed since at least the summer of 2024, Davids noted "concerns have been raised that some of these programs may have been modified in a way that obscures their DEIA objectives." She said if any staff members were aware of changes to obscure the connection between a contract and DEIA or similar ideologies, they should report it to the Office of Personnel Management. "The U.S. Naval Academy did not have a DEI or DEIA office prior to the President's executive order that mandated closure of all agency DEIA offices and the end of all DEIA-related contracts," Cmdr. Tim Hawkins, a Navy spokesperson, told Fox News. "The U.S. Naval Academy sent the Jan. 23 email internally to staff simply to inform its personnel that the executive order was issued and USNA would fully comply. "The Navy is executing and implementing all directives issued by the president with professionalism, efficiency and in full alignment with national security objectives." Human resources officials also told staff USNA emails should not include gender-identifying pronouns on signature lines.
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Unpacking claim of Colin Powell's name disappearing from Arlington Cemetery webpage
In March 2025, a rumor spread alleging that U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth removed former Secretary of State Colin Powell's name from a webpage about noteworthy military figures on the Arlington National Cemetery website. The claim circulated following the removal of links to pages about Black, Hispanic and female veterans buried at the site, among other Department of Defense removals. The Office of Army Cemeteries, a division of the U.S. Army, operates the prominent military cemetery just outside Washington. The Army and other military branches report to the DOD. For example, one X user posted (archived) on March 20, "Hegseth has removed Colin Powell's name from a list of notable Americans, buried at Arlington National Cemetery. In fact all the names removed were people of color or women. Only white men were left on the list. Your thoughts?" Additional X users shared the rumor about Hegseth, who is white, and Powell, who was Black and died in 2021. Users on Facebook and other social media platforms spread the claim, too. However, as of March 24, the cemetery website's page titled "prominent military figures" still featured a brief biography describing Powell's military service, in which he achieved the rank of a four-star Army general. Even so, while neither Hegseth nor anyone under the umbrella of the Defense Department entirely deleted Powell's name from the page, sometime between late February and early March, one or more people with access to edit the page removed a partial amount of biographical information pertaining to Powell's race, as well as one mention of his name from the biography of another noteworthy service member. Someone later restored those pieces of information on the page in mid-to-late March. The remainder of the rumor claiming "Hegseth removed the names of every person of color and every woman," and that "only white men were left in place," was not entirely true. In a post from Hegseth's personal X account, he called the entire rumor "fake." In an email, Kerry L. Meeker, the chief of public affairs at Arlington National Cemetery, labeled the claim that someone removed Powell's name from the website "inaccurate." "All notable graves are represented on our website – including Colin Powell," she said. She pointed us to a statement on the cemetery's website that mentioned "no service members have been permanently removed from the 'notable graves' section of our website." The statement also referenced "compliance with executive orders issued by the president and Department of Defense instructions." President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Jan. 20, 2025, the first day of his second term, seeking to end "illegal" programs and activities related to diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as DEIA, with the "A" standing for accessibility. The order targeted DEIA-related "mandates, policies, programs, preferences and activities in the federal government, under whatever name they appear." An archived version of the Arlington National Cemetery website's "prominent military figures" page from late February 2025 displayed Powell's biography beginning with the sentence, "General Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran, was the first African American to hold three of the U.S. government's highest positions: national security adviser (1987-1989), chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-1993), and secretary of state (2001-2005)." By early March, another archived version of the page confirmed the removal of the fact that Powell was the first African American to hold the three positions. Sometime between March 17 and 21, one or more people restored this sentence to the page. Between February and March, one or more people also removed, then later restored, a mention of Powell's name in the biography for Brig. Gen. Roscoe Conklin "Rock" Cartwright. The late-February version featured a sentence entirely removed from the page, reading, "Cartwright founded a social group that provided mentoring and leadership training to African American officers; prominent members included Generals Colin Powell (Section 60) and Roscoe Robinson Jr. (Section 7A)." Colin Powell receives the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George H.W. Bush at the White House on July 3, 1991. (Howard L. Sachs/CNP/Getty Images) Other temporary removals from the "prominent military figures" page included 17 mentions of "African American," around a dozen for "black" and one for "Irish American." Many of the mentions of "African American" and "black" described milestones, such as Brig. Gen. Hazel W. Johnson-Brown, originally documented on the page as "the first African American woman general in the U.S. Army." The biography for Maj. Kurt Chew-Een Lee originally began by describing him as "the first Asian American officer in the Marine Corps." As of March 21, that fact, as well as the words "Asian American," no longer appeared on the page. The most recent version of his biography also removed the following sentence featured in previous years: "Kurt Chew-Een Lee's record of service not only honored his country, but also demolished anti-Asian stereotypes: 'I wanted to dispel the notion about the Chinese being meek, bland and obsequious,' he told the Los Angeles Times in 2010." In an apparent oversight in the removal process of race-related content, as of March 17, the page still displayed Lt. Col. Alexander T. Augusta of the U.S. Army as "the highest-ranking African American officer of the Civil War," as well as "the Army's first black physician, the United States' first black hospital administrator (Freedman's Hospital, Washington, D.C.) and its first black professor of medicine (Howard University)." Sometime between March 17 and 21, some mentions of "Black" and "African American" reappeared on the website, according to archived page captures. As of March 24, the lone mentions of "Irish American," "Asian American" and "anti-Asian stereotypes" had not reappeared. After we asked Meeker about the removals from Lee's biography about demolishing anti-Asian stereotypes and the fact Augusta's biography still featured four mentions of his race, Arlington National Cemetery spokeswoman Becky Wardwell provided a link to a video from Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell. In the March 20 video, Parnell said, in part, "We want to be very clear, history is not DEI." He also discussed making mistakes and mentioned the usage of artificial intelligence to perform some content edits to comply with the Trump administration's orders. Parnell's mention of errors possibly at least partially referenced the removal, and later restoration, of entries for three women on the "prominent military figures" page. Those women were Lt. Cmdr. Barbara Allen Rainey, "the first woman pilot in the Navy," Maj. Marie Therese Rossi, "the first American female combat commander to fly into battle" during the Persian Gulf War, and Lt. Kara Spears Hultgreen, "the first female carrier-based fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy, and the first woman to qualify as an F-14 combat pilot." All three women disappeared entirely from the cemetery website's page in late February or early March, and reappeared sometime between March 17 and 21, according to archived page captures. Burns, Robert, et al. "Colin Powell Dies, Trailblazing General Stained by Iraq." The Associated Press, 19 Oct. 2021, Christensen, Laerke. "Arlington National Cemetery Removed Links to Webpages about Black, Hispanic and Female Veterans." Snopes, 14 Mar. 2025, "Colin Powell | Biography & Facts." Britannica, "Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing." The White House, 20 Jan. 2025, "Learn More about Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA)." New York Department of State, "Organization." The United States Army, "Our Cemeteries." Office of Army Secretaries, "Wayback Machine."
Yahoo
22-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Investigating claim of Colin Powell's name being removed from Arlington Cemetery website
A rumor that circulated online in March 2025 claimed U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth oversaw the removal of former Secretary of State Colin Powell's name from a list of noteworthy military figures hosted on the Arlington National Cemetery website. Social media users discussed this matter in the days after the removal of links to pages about Black, Hispanic and female veterans buried at the site, among other Department of Defense removals. The Office of Army Cemeteries, a division of the U.S. Army, operates the prominent military cemetery just outside Washington. The Army and other military branches report to the DOD. For example, one X user wrote (archived) on March 20, "Pete Hegseth removed Colin Powell's name from a list of notable Americans, buried at Arlington. Hegseth also removed the names of every person of color and every woman on the same list. Only white men were left in place." Additional X users shared the rumor about Hegseth, who is white, and Powell, who was Black and died in 2021. Users also promoted the claim on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads and TikTok. However, as of March 21, the cemetery website's page titled "prominent military figures" still featured a brief biography describing Powell's military service, in which he achieved the rank of a four-star Army general. Even so, while neither Hegseth nor anyone under the umbrella of the Defense Department entirely deleted Powell's name from the page, some biographical information pertaining to Powell's race was removed, as well as one mention of Powell's name from the biography of another noteworthy service member. The remainder of the rumor claiming "Hegseth removed the names of every person of color and every woman," and that "only white men were left in place," was not entirely true. In an email, Kerry L. Meeker, the chief of public affairs at Arlington National Cemetery, labeled the claim that someone removed Powell's name from the website "inaccurate." "All notable graves are represented on our website – including Colin Powell," she said. She pointed us to a statement on the cemetery's website that mentioned "no service members have been permanently removed from the 'notable graves' section of our website." The statement also referenced "compliance with executive orders issued by the president and Department of Defense instructions." President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Jan. 20, 2025, the first day of his second term, seeking to end "illegal" programs and activities related to diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as DEIA, with the "A" standing for accessibility. The order targeted DEIA-related "mandates, policies, programs, preferences and activities in the federal government, under whatever name they appear." An archived version of the Arlington National Cemetery website's "prominent military figures" page from late February 2025 displayed Powell's biography beginning with the sentence, "General Colin Powell, a Vietnam veteran, was the first African American to hold three of the U.S. government's highest positions: national security adviser (1987-1989), chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989-1993), and secretary of state (2001-2005)." By early March, another archived version of the page confirmed the removal of the fact that Powell was the first African American to hold the three positions. Between February and March, another edit removed a mention of Powell's name in the biography for Brig. Gen. Roscoe Conklin "Rock" Cartwright. The late-February version featured a sentence entirely removed from the page, reading, "Cartwright founded a social group that provided mentoring and leadership training to African American officers; prominent members included Generals Colin Powell (Section 60) and Roscoe Robinson Jr. (Section 7A)." Colin Powell receives the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George H.W. Bush at the White House on July 3, 1991. (Howard L. Sachs/CNP/Getty Images) Other removals from the "prominent military figures" page included 17 mentions of "African American," around a dozen for "black" and one for "Irish American." Many of the mentions of "African American" and "black" described milestones, such as Brig. Gen. Hazel W. Johnson-Brown, originally documented on the page as "the first African American woman general in the U.S. Army." The biography for Maj. Kurt Chew-Een Lee originally began by describing him as "the first Asian American officer in the Marine Corps." As of March 21, that fact, as well as the words "Asian American," no longer appeared on the page. The most recent version of his biography also removed the following sentence featured in previous years: "Kurt Chew-Een Lee's record of service not only honored his country, but also demolished anti-Asian stereotypes: 'I wanted to dispel the notion about the Chinese being meek, bland and obsequious,' he told the Los Angeles Times in 2010." In an apparent oversight in the removal process of race-related content, the page still displayed Lt. Col. Alexander T. Augusta of the U.S. Army as "the highest-ranking African American officer of the Civil War," as well as "the Army's first black physician, the United States' first black hospital administrator (Freedman's Hospital, Washington, D.C.) and its first black professor of medicine (Howard University)." After we asked Meeker about the removals from Lee's biography about demolishing anti-Asian stereotypes and the fact Augusta's biography still featured four mentions of his race, Arlington National Cemetery spokeswoman Becky Wardwell provided a link to a video from Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell. In the March 20 video, Parnell said, in part, "We want to be very clear, history is not DEI." He also discussed making mistakes and mentioned the usage of artificial intelligence to perform some content edits to comply with the Trump administration's orders. Parnell's mention of errors possibly at least partially referenced the removal, and later restoration, of entries for three women on the "prominent military figures" page. Those women were Lt. Cmdr. Barbara Allen Rainey, "the first woman pilot in the Navy," Maj. Marie Therese Rossi, "the first American female combat commander to fly into battle" during the Persian Gulf War, and Lt. Kara Spears Hultgreen, "the first female carrier-based fighter pilot in the U.S. Navy, and the first woman to qualify as an F-14 combat pilot." All three women disappeared from the cemetery website's page in late February or early March, and reappeared sometime between March 17 and 21, according to archived page captures. Burns, Robert, et al. "Colin Powell Dies, Trailblazing General Stained by Iraq." The Associated Press, 19 Oct. 2021, Christensen, Laerke. "Arlington National Cemetery Removed Links to Webpages about Black, Hispanic and Female Veterans." Snopes, 14 Mar. 2025, "Colin Powell | Biography & Facts." Britannica, "Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing." The White House, 20 Jan. 2025, "Learn More about Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility (DEIA)." New York Department of State, "Organization." The United States Army, "Our Cemeteries." Office of Army Secretaries, "Wayback Machine."
WIRED
06-03-2025
- Politics
- WIRED
The US Army Is Using ‘CamoGPT' to Purge DEI From Training Materials
Mar 6, 2025 8:34 AM Developed to boost productivity and operational readiness, the AI is now being used to 'review' diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility polices to align them with President Trump's orders. The United States Army is employing a prototype generative artificial intelligence tool to identify references to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) for removal from training materials in line with a recent executive order from President Donald Trump. Officials at the Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC)—the major command responsible for training soldiers, developing leaders, and shaping the service's guidelines, strategies, and concepts—are currently using the AI tool, dubbed CamoGPT, to 'review policies, programs, publications, and initiatives for DEIA and report findings,' according to an internal memo reviewed by WIRED. The memo followed Trump's signing of a January 27 executive order entitled, 'Restoring America's Fighting Force,' which directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to eliminate all Pentagon policies seen as promoting what that the commander-in-chief declared 'un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist, and irrational theories' regarding race and gender, a linguistic dragnet that extends as far as past social media posts from official US military accounts. In an email to WIRED, TRADOC spokesman Army Maj. Chris Robinson confirmed the use of CamoGPT to review DEIA materials. '[TRADOC] will fully execute and implement all directives outlined in the Executive Orders issued by the President. We ensure that these directives are carried out with the utmost professionalism, efficiency, and in alignment with national security objectives,' Robinson says. 'Specific details about internal policies and tactics cannot be discussed. However, the use of all tools in our portfolio, including CamoGPT, to increase productivity at all levels can and will be used.' Developed last summer to boost productivity and operational readiness across the US Army, CamoGPT currently has around 4,000 users who 'interact' with it on a daily basis, Capt. Aidan Doyle, a CamoGPT data engineer, tells WIRED. The tool is used for everything from developing comprehensive training program materials to producing multilingual translations, with TRADOC providing a 'proof of concept and demonstration' at last October's annual Association of the United States Army (AUSA) conference in Washington, DC, according to Robinson. While Doyle declined to comment on the specifics on how TRADOC officials were likely using the CamoGPT to scan for DEIA-related policies, he described the process of searching through documents as relatively straightforward. 'I would take all the documentation you want to examine, order it all in a collection on CamoGPT, and then ask questions about the documents,' he says. 'The way retrieval-augmented generation works is that the more specific your question is to the concepts inside the document, the more detailed information the model will provide back.' In practical terms, this means that TRADOC officials are likely inputting a large number of documents into CamoGPT and asking the LLM to scan for targeted keywords like 'dignity' or 'respect' (which, yes, the Army is currently using to screen past digital content) to identify materials for subsequent alteration and bring them in line with Trump's executive order. By using CamoGPT, the work of eliminating DEIA-related content will likely result in a rapid change to the US Army's documentation. 'We're competing with 'control+F' in Adobe Acrobat,' Doyle says. CamoGPT isn't the only AI chatbot in the Pentagon's arsenal: The US Air Force's NIPRGPT has seen extensive use among airmen since its launch in June for 'summarization of documents, drafting of documents and coding assistance,' according to DefenseScoop. The AI-assisted assessment of US military training materials comes amid a government-wide effort to root out DEIA initiated the day Trump returned to the Oval Office in January to start his second term. Detailed in Trump's January 27 executive order, the Defense Department's purge has taken the form of the closure of service-specific DEIA offices and program, a department-wide review of past DEI initiatives, and even the removal of historical content related to the famed all-Black Tuskegee Airmen from Air Force basic training materials, the latter of which was swiftly reversed amid public outcry. Originally inspired by the public release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November 2022, CamoGPT is a product of the Army's Artificial Intelligence Integration Center (AI2C), the organization formed in 2018 as part of Army Future Command to spearhead AI research and development efforts by 'leveraging a soldier workforce to build experimental prototypes,' as Eric Schmitz, AI2C's operations and intelligence portfolio lead, tells WIRED. 'The mission is to make AI accessible to the Army through experimentation, and we have an ethos and culture that is very much a start-up ethos.' Schmitz says. 'We are product-centric and believe AI is inherently software-driven: You can do all the research you like in academia, but if you don't have software to deliver it to somebody and find out if it's useful software, then you'll never know if your AI is useful in the real world.' In response to the arrival of ChatGPT, AI2C quickly spun up a CamoGPT prototype based on an open-source LLM in June 2024. The center's approach to CamoGPT is 'model agnostic,' according to Schmitz: While the system currently relies on tech giant Meta's open-source Llama 3.3 70B LLM, the underlying model is 'expendable' should a better version hit the market. What really matters is building software that the average soldier will actually use in their day-to-day operations, an achievement that might influence its long-term adoption across the force. 'When you talk about how the Army doesn't build software well, it's because user adoption is not a priority, but it's a massive priority to us,' Schmitz says. Whether CamoGPT proliferates more broadly across the Army remains to be seen, and Schmitz and Doyle emphasized that AI2C's role is laser-focused on experimental prototyping rather than building products ready for immediate fielding. But with the entire federal government reorienting itself in the name of 'efficiency,' the success of CamoGPT's application to Trump's DEIA overhaul may end up cementing its utility for military planners. 'You need to be ruthlessly critical of what you have built and what you plan to build and hyper focused on driving user adoption,' Schmitz says. 'The core question is: How do you build something that's so valuable that people say they can't live without it?'
