In a move that underscores the escalating political tensions within the Pentagon, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has ordered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to retract an employment offer extended to a former senior national security official who served under President Joe Biden. This decision, announced via a post on X, marks another instance of the Defense Department’s political leadership exerting influence over staffing and curriculum at the nation’s esteemed military academies.
The official in question, Jen Easterly, a distinguished West Point alumna, was slated to become the new Robert F. McDermott Distinguished Chair in the Department of Social Sciences. Easterly previously held the critical role of director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) during the Biden administration, an appointment that West Point initially celebrated in now-deleted social media announcements.
However, these announcements quickly caught the attention of prominent far-right activist Laura Loomer. On X, Loomer directly challenged the appointment, tagging Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and labeling Easterly as a “Biden holdover who worked to silence Trump supporters under Biden,” effectively igniting a public firestorm around the academy’s hiring choice.
Loomer’s accusations stemmed from Easterly’s tenure at CISA, where the agency focused on combating online disinformation and countering foreign malign influence operations. Despite CISA’s critical national security mission, Loomer characterized its efforts under Easterly’s leadership in 2023 as “surveillance” and “censorship,” framing them as partisan actions against specific political factions.
Responding to the mounting pressure, Secretary Driscoll publicly released a memorandum on X on Wednesday. The memo detailed the termination of West Point’s “gratuitous service agreement” with Easterly, announced a pause on “non-governmental and outside groups from selecting employees of the Academy,” and confirmed Driscoll’s request for “an immediate top-down review” of West Point’s hiring practices. Loomer conspicuously celebrated Driscoll’s announcement with a clapping emoji.
This intervention by Secretary Driscoll is not an isolated incident but rather the latest in a series of similar actions by the Pentagon’s political leadership impacting the country’s service academies. These interventions reflect a broader pattern of ideological battles extending into the hallowed halls of military education, raising concerns about academic freedom and institutional independence.
A notable example includes the resignation of Graham Parsons, a tenured philosophy professor at West Point, who left after 13 years. Parsons cited what he described as a “sweeping assault” on the school’s curriculum and faculty research, alleging that courses were being eliminated, syllabuses modified, and arguments censored to align with the “ideological tastes of the Trump administration,” specifically interpreting Secretary Hegseth’s directives.
Further intensifying this trend, the Pentagon previously issued orders for all military academies to identify and remove books from their libraries that address “divisive concepts” such as race and gender ideology, deeming them “incompatible with the department’s core mission.” Concurrently, a separate memo from Hegseth mandated that admissions to U.S. military academies would focus “exclusively on merit,” with no consideration of race, ethnicity, or sex for the 2026 admissions cycle onward.
The impact of these directives has been tangible, with the U.S. Naval Academy, for instance, removing nearly 400 books from its main library earlier this year. This action was taken to comply with an executive order from former President Donald Trump, which Hegseth later clarified also applied to military academies, underscoring a pervasive effort to reshape the intellectual and educational environment within these critical national institutions.
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