Sec. of War Pete Hegseth has drawn the ire of the Left with his recent decision to block the promotions of some black and female officers.
Last month a list of nearly two dozen Navy promotions to one-star rank included no women and only two non-white officers. Hegseth reportedly did the same thing with Army officers in March and has thwarted the advancements of more than one dozen female and black officers across the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines. 
A Defense Department task force has now confirmed the War Department's successful implementation of a departmentwide directive from War Sec. Pete Hegseth to eliminate all DEI offices and initiatives.
Bob Maginnis is a national defense analyst and president of Maginnis Strategies LLC.
"That's his prerequisite. That's why he's the Secretary of War. He's appointed by the president, confirmed by the Congress, as long as he's in compliance with the rules and regulations under Section 8 of the Constitution. Congress has oversight on for the agency. They can disagree, they can take him to court, but he can certainly do that."
Maginnis says one example of a DEI appointment was Lloyd Austin (shown above), the Secretary of Defense under Joe Biden.
Austin made DEI a central pillar of his leadership, framing it as a strategic imperative for military readiness and lethality rather than just a social goal.
He frequently stated that the military must "look like America" to be effective. He publicly defended DEI training against congressional criticism, asserting that inclusion is vital for cohesion and that a department under his leadership would continue to prioritize such efforts.
In 2021, he ordered a department-wide "stand-down" to address extremism and implicit bias, which included mandatory training sessions that critics argued focused heavily on DEI concepts like white privilege and systemic racism.
In 2022, Austin created the Defense Advisory Committee on Diversity and Inclusion to provide independent advice on improving racial and ethnic diversity, inclusion, and equal opportunity within the armed forces.
Under Austin’s leadership, the Pentagon’s budget request for dedicated DEI activities grew significantly, reaching $114.7 million in the Fiscal Year 2024 request, up from $68 million in 2022.
“He wasn't especially a great commander, and I've known people that knew him. He was an underclassman of mine at West Point, so it's what it is. Keep in mind, the politicians run the military. They tell us sometimes to do things that we don't like. The fact is that we put so much of this DEI trash into our system that it takes a while to flush it out, and what Pete is doing is flushing it out, and it's painful."
Maginnis graduated from West Point in 1973, Austin in 1975.
The pain in flushing
The pain in flushing comes from multiple fronts, including law as a U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia panel voted 2-1 this week against the Trump administration's efforts to ban transgenders from military service.
But the ban will remain in effect for now as litigation continues to play out. The ruling would apply to plaintiffs serving in the military, but not those seeking to join.
"They're just radically bent on using the military as their social experiment platform and defanging it in terms of warfighting skills. This is all about their reengineering of America, and it has nothing to do with our ability to defend ourselves. In fact, it hurts us because it drains us of necessary resources to medically care for our people and doing preventative medicine," Maginnis said.
He says Congress will never lift a finger to codify the president's transgender ban into law.
"Even if the Republicans had a healthy majority, there are enough Republicans that are intimidated by this topic. They don't have the intestinal fortitude to do what's right."
