The Army and other service branches are abandoning recruiting efforts at a prestigious Black engineering event this week, turning down access to a key pool of highly qualified potential applicants amid President Donald Trump’s purge of diversity initiatives in the military.
Until this week, Army Recruiting Command had a long-standing public partnership with the Black Engineer of the Year Awards, or BEYA, an annual conference that draws students, academics and professionals in science, technology, engineering and math, also known as STEM.
The event, which takes place in Baltimore, has historically been a key venue for the Pentagon to recruit talent, including awarding Reserve Officers’ Training Corps scholarships and pitching military service to rising engineers. Past BEYA events have included the Army chief of staff and the defense secretary.
“This is one of the most talent-dense events we do,” one Army recruiter told Military.com on the condition that their name not be used. “Our footprint there has always been significant. We need the talent.”
The services cited concerns that participation in the predominantly Black event could run afoul of Trump’s orders and the Pentagon’s intensifying push to erase diversity efforts in the military, according to multiple sources familiar with the decision. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Jan. 31 ordered that Black History Month, Women’s History Month and others were officially “dead” and that the military would no longer mark them.
“In compliance with Department of Defense and Headquarters Department of the Army guidance, U.S. Army Recruiting Command will not participate in the upcoming BEYA event,” Madison Bonzo, a service spokesperson, said in a statement to Military.com. “Service members and civilians are permitted to attend this event in an unofficial/personal capacity if they choose to do so.”
Officials for BEYA did not return a request for comment.
The Navy, Air Force and Space Force are also pulling out of the event and forbidding officials from attending in an official capacity or in uniform. It was unclear Monday whether the Marines were still participating.
Additional recruiting events tied to specific racial or gender groups are also likely to be scrapped, two defense officials told Military.com. That includes other conferences and career fairs with thousands of participants.
The decision to abandon the Black engineering event marks a significant shift in military recruiting strategy — and sparked calls of discrimination.
“It’s f—ing racist,” one active-duty Army general told Military.com on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. “For the Army now, it’s ‘Blacks need not apply’ and it breaks my heart.”
While the services are pulling out of BEYA, a well-established pipeline for high-caliber STEM talent, they remain engaged with other events. Last week, the same Army recruiting unit that would have attended BEYA instead participated in a National Rifle Association-sponsored event in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a predominantly white gathering that recruiters acknowledge is less likely to yield high-quality applicants.
The BEYA conference has long been intertwined with the Pentagon and the defense industry amid an ongoing competition with Silicon Valley for top-shelf talent as military jobs become increasingly technical. It regularly features panels with senior military leaders and hosts various recruiting initiatives. Top sponsors include Lockheed Martin and Google.
“The U.S. military is one of the largest STEM employers in the nation, yet its critical role in driving technological innovation often goes overlooked and misunderstood by the civilian sector,” a note on BEYA’s website says. “BEYA works to bridge this gap by highlighting the vast STEM opportunities available within the armed forces and showcasing military leadership in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.”
Beyond being a recruiting event, the services also had a significant relationship with BEYA that included its own awards ceremonies. In 2023, Gen. Randy George, the top officer in the Army, awarded now-retired Maj. Gen. Robert Edmonson II the Stars and Stripes General Officer of the Year Award, a prestigious accolade for achievements in national security.
“It’s our mission to keep the United States safe from a range of 21st-century threats,” former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a keynote address at the BEYA ceremony in 2023. “We’re determined to continue innovating to make America more secure; that means drawing on the strengths of all people.”
Army officials interviewed by Military.com, which included five recruiters, saw the move as a significant and problematic escalation in the Pentagon’s rejection of diversity initiatives, which have been widely interpreted as programs that recognize women and troops with minority backgrounds, as well as gay and lesbian troops. Trump has initiated a separate effort to eliminate transgender troops from the ranks.
Hegseth, who was confirmed last month, has made rooting out diversity his top priority at the Pentagon, with the services scrambling to scrub programs, policies and even words from documents and websites. Trump, Hegseth and supporters claim that so-called “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, programs have made the military weak.
Hegseth has falsely suggested the military has race- and gender-based quotas in promotions and assignments. No such policies exist, though there are loose aspirational goals in some efforts to have segments of the military ranks better resemble the general population.
Much of Hegseth’s diversity rollback had centered on bureaucratic changes, such as replacing references to “gender” with “sex” in policy language and scrapping the heritage month observances, including Black History Month.
But some officials now see the move away from recruiting events as a deliberate step to reduce outreach to Black applicants.
The move also comes after the Army Band canceled a concert at George Mason University in Virginia, where it was set to play music by Janelle Monáe, a Black singer and rapper.
The Army’s partnership with the Black engineering awards has historically been about talent, not race, recruiters argue. The military’s growing emphasis on STEM has made events like BEYA even more critical to recruiting, particularly as services compete for skilled candidates in a shrinking pool of qualified applicants.
“The military has been selecting on merit the whole time,” said Katherine Kuzminski, an expert on the military and veterans at the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington, D.C. “Some people might be seeing how the civilian world has handled DEI issues and applying that view to the military, but it has frameworks in law and policy, all these interwoven standards that are rigorous and always have been rigorous.”
The number of Black recruits in the Army — the largest military service by far — has risen over the years. In 2022, Black applicants made up 24% of the Army’s new enlistments, according to internal data reviewed by Military.com, while Black Americans are just 14% of the general population.
Much of the Pentagon’s recruiting woes have been tied to a shrinking pool of low-quality applicants, who increasingly struggle to meet academic standards on the military’s SAT-style entrance exam.
The Navy and Army, the largest services with the highest recruiting quotas, have started pre-basic training prep courses that tutor applicants to perform well enough on the test to qualify for a job and move onto basic training. Those prep courses have effectively ended the recruiting slump that has plagued the Pentagon since the COVID-19 pandemic.
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