Army Secretary Dan Driscoll on Wednesday ordered the US Military Academy at West Point to rescind an offer of employment to a former top national security official who served under President Joe Biden, announcing the move in a post on X — the latest example of the Pentagon’s political leadership dictating staffing and curriculum at the nation’s military academies.
Jen Easterly, a West Point graduate who served as the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency under Biden, was named by the academy on Tuesday as the new Robert F. McDermott Distinguished Chair in the Department of Social Sciences. Her appointment was announced by West Point in since-deleted posts on X and LinkedIn.
Before they were deleted, the announcements drew the attention of far-right activist Laura Loomer, who on Tuesday tagged Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in a post on X calling Easterly a “Biden holdover who worked to silence Trump supporters under Biden.”
In a post on LinkedIn on Thursday, Easterly wrote that the rescinding of her job offer was “a casualty of casually manufactured outrage that drowned out the quiet labor of truth and the steady pulse of integrity.”
“The Warrior Ethos was forged into me long ago, and it does not waver now,” she added. “And though I will not walk the grounds of West Pointthis fall, I will continue advancing its mission—by leading with honor and integrity.”
In 2023, House Judiciary Committee Republicans accused CISA under Easterly’s leadership of “surveillance” and “censorship” because of its focus on fighting disinformation online and countering foreign malign influence operations.
“Looks like some of your underlings are trying to screw you,” Loomer wrote on Tuesday. “Who the hell is doing the hiring over at DOD @DeptofDefense? It’s horrendous.”
On Wednesday, Driscoll posted a memorandum on X that said West Point will be terminating its “gratuitous service agreement” with Easterly; that it will be pausing “non-governmental and outside groups from selecting employees of the Academy”; and that Driscoll will be requesting “an immediate top-down review” of West Point’s hiring practices. Loomer responded with a clapping emoji.
In response to Driscoll’s post, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said on X that “we’re not turning cadets into censorship activists. We’re turning them into warriors & leaders. We’re in the business of warfighting. Our future officers will get the most elite training so that America can continue to dominate on the battlefield.”
“We won the election, you lost,” Parnell said in response to a reporter who pointed out that Trump administration political appointees are increasingly playing direct roles in decisions made by the military academies.
Driscoll’s interference follows other interventions made by the Pentagon’s political leadership in the affairs of the country’s service academies — including at West Point.
A tenured professor of philosophy at West Point wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times in May that he was resigning after 13 years at the school because it was “suddenly eliminating courses, modifying syllabuses and censoring arguments to comport with the ideological tastes of the Trump administration.” The professor, Graham Parsons, wrote that West Point was interpreting Hegseth’s order “broadly,” and conducting “a sweeping assault on the school’s curriculum and the faculty members’ research.”
In response to Parson’s op-ed, Hegseth posted on X, “You will not be missed Professor Parsons,” and the DoD’s rapid response account called Parsons “woke.”
Shortly thereafter, the Pentagon ordered all military academies to identify and remove books from their libraries that deal with issues such as race, gender ideology, and other “divisive concepts” that are now considered “incompatible with the department’s core mission,” CNN reported at the time.
In a separate memo released around the same time, Hegseth also said there will be “no consideration of race, ethnicity, or sex” in admissions to US military academies, which will focus admissions “exclusively on merit.” The memo ordered the service academies to rank candidates, starting with the 2026 admissions cycle, “by merit-based scores,” accepting the highest-ranking candidates in each nomination category.
And earlier this year, the US Naval Academy removed nearly 400 books from its main library in an attempt to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order in January mandating the removal of all “diversity, equity, and inclusion” content from K-12 schools, which Hegseth later said also applied to military academies.
Shortly thereafter, the Naval Academy canceled a lecture that author Ryan Holiday was scheduled to give to students there last month after he refused to remove slides from his planned presentation that criticized the academy’s decision to remove the books, CNN has reported.
CNN’s Zachary Cohen contributed to this report.
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