The Defense Department will review the list of medical conditions that automatically disqualify potential recruits from joining the U.S. military or require a waiver to serve.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness last week to review the medical standards for accessions to determine whether any should automatically disqualify an individual or require a service secretary's approval for a waiver.

In a memo to senior Pentagon officials Thursday,^[1] Hegseth said the effort will ensure that the DoD would "never compromise our high standards" and that young Americans "seeking to serve in the greatest fighting force in history" must be physically and mentally fit.

Read Next: Service Members Detained After DEA Raid at Alleged Illegal Underground Nightclub in Colorado^[2]

"Requiring anything less poses an unacceptable risk to the mission, to those service members themselves and to their fellow service members," Hegseth wrote.

The move follows Hegseth's order in March for the services to review military fitness standards for combat^[3] jobs, part of his overall effort to institute higher physical requirements for U.S. forces.

Hegseth has put great emphasis on physical fitness, saying in a speech last week at the U.S. Army^[4] War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, that U.S. troops should be "fit, not fat; sharp, not shabby."^[5]

"It's why we are reviewing how the department has maintained standards in the past, especially in the last four years, and whether those standards have dropped," Hegseth said.

Department of Defense Instruction 6130.03 outlines the medical standards for potential recruits and officer accessions and allows applicants who do not meet the standards to be considered for a waiver.

A pilot program, the Medical Accession Records Pilot, was introduced in 2022 to allow potential recruits with 38 medical conditions to join the service without a waiver as long as they meet other requirements.

That program expanded to include 51 conditions such as common diagnoses, including attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, and childhood asthma.

The pilot eliminated the waiver requirement for individuals previously diagnosed with ADHD if they did not receive medical treatment for the condition for one year, down from three, and for those with asthma if they haven't used an emergency inhaler for four years.

According to Stars and Stripes, more than 6,000 persons^[6] enlisted through the pilot program's requirements between 2022 and November 2024.

A 2023 DoD Inspector General review found that 17% of recruits in 2022 received a waiver to join, up from 12% in 2013. Across the services, 77% of the 54,206 waiver requests were granted, with the Marine Corps^[7] having the highest approval rate, accepting 7,955 applicants of 8,124, or 98%.

The Navy^[8] accepted 84% of its 17,538 applicants; the Army 12,972 of 18,788, or 69%; and the Air Force^[9] 65% of 9,756 potential recruits.

The services have made recent strides on recruiting^[10] but generally struggled over the past five years to meet their goals.

In 2022, the Army missed its goal by 15,000 soldiers. In 2022, just two of the five Defense Department branches -- the Marine Corps and the Space Force^[11] -- met their requirements. While all the services were successful in 2024, they still compete with one another for the 23% of Americans ages 17-24 who meet the medical standards without needing any waivers.

On Monday, Jules Hurst, a senior Pentagon official who is acting as under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said that over the next 30 days, his office will identify medical conditions that should be ineligible for a medical accession waiver.

According to Hurst, the list will be used to make updates to the DoD policies used by the services to assess the medical readiness of potential recruits and officer candidates.

"High, uncompromising, and clear standards are a hallmark of the U.S. military and are essential to helping us remain the most lethal and effective fighting force in the world," Hurst said in a statement Monday.

In his memo, Hegseth said the current version of the list of waiverable conditions includes "schizophrenia, paraphilic disorders, congestive heart failures and chronic use of oxygen."

He did not detail how many individuals were let into the service with those conditions under a waiver but stipulated that the DoD should "never compromise our high standards."

"While the desire to serve the United States is honorable, individuals with such conditions are generally unlikely to complete initial military training or their first term of service," Hegseth wrote.

Related: Federal Judge Rules Defense Department Can't Ban HIV-Positive People from Joining the Military^[12]

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth boasted on social media Tuesday that he had dismantled a program supporting women on security teams — and may not have realized the program he tried to break was not a “woke” Biden-era initiative but instead a celebrated program signed into law by his boss, President Donald Trump.

Hegseth in an agitated post on X, the website formerly known as Twitter, called the “Women, Peace & Security” program at the Department of Defense "a UNITED NATIONS program pushed by feminists and left-wing activists. Politicians fawn over it; troops HATE it.”

It was, in fact, bipartisan legislation that Trump signed into law in 2017 that recognized the role women have in achieving security objectives, especially in situations overseas where their male counterparts may not for cultural reasons be able to question or would not for religious regions have direct access to women. Trump's own Cabinet officials supported the program when it was working its way through the legislative process.

This month, Gen. Dan Caine, the new Joint Chiefs Chairman, told Congress that the program had helped troops in battle.

“When we would go out into the field after concluding an assault, we would have female members who would speak with those women and children who were on the objective and they would help us to understand the human terrain in a new and novel way,” Caine said during his April confirmation hearing. Trump met and became endeared to Caine when he was serving in Iraq, which was part of the reason Trump nominated him to the chairmanship.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who at the time represented South Dakota in the House, wrote the House version of the 2017 Women, Peace and Security Act alongside Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois. And as recently as this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who as a senator co-sponsored the Senate version of the bill, said that it was "the first law passed by any country in the world focused on protecting women and promoting their participation in society.”

That proposal stemmed from a U.N. resolution unanimously endorsed by the Security Council, the most powerful U.N. body, in October 2000, aimed at including women in peacebuilding efforts, as women and girls have historically borne the brunt of global conflict.

“It’s no secret that women remain, largely on the periphery of formal peace processes and decision making, which is not good for the cause of peace,” U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said in response to Hegseth's comments Tuesday.

Dujarric added that “one of the real-life impacts of the Women Peace and Security program has been the increasing number of women peacekeepers who serve in U.N. missions, which has had a very clear, measurable and positive impact on the protection of civilians in conflict zones.”

Hegseth's tweet drew immediate fire from Senate Democrats who are continuing to question Hegseth's qualifications for the job amid the continuing fallout from his use of the commercial app Signal to share sensitive military operations on an unsecured channel with other officials, his wife and brother.

“Hegseth has absolutely no idea^[1] what he’s doing,” said New Hampshire Democrat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen.

“That tweet contains some glaring inaccuracies that are far beneath the standard we should expect from the Department of Defense,” Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said as he read the tweet aloud during a Congressional hearing Tuesday.

A spokesman for Hegseth did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the secretary’s tweet.

While Hegseth in his post called the program “yet another woke divisive/social justice/Biden initiative that overburdens our commanders and troops" and pledged to do the bare minimum required by Congress to maintain it while working to eliminate it altogether, the program has been celebrated by Trump, his administration and his family.

It became a heralded part of the first Trump administration's accomplishments for women, and in 2019, Ivanka Trump celebrated that the WPS program was starting a new partnership to help train female police cadets in Colombia.^[2]

___

Sagar Meghani contributed from Washington.

About $8.5 billion would be pumped into barracks maintenance, military health care and other service member quality-of-life initiatives under a massive funding bill being advanced by congressional Republicans.

The quality-of-life funding is part of the $150 billion for the Defense Department that Republicans are proposing in a wide-ranging bill they are working to push through along party lines to enact President Donald Trump's agenda. The defense portion of the bill was released over the weekend ahead of the House Armed Services Committee's debate on it, which is scheduled for Tuesday.

In addition to the quality-of-life funding, the legislation would inject billions of dollars into shipbuilding, military operations on the southern border and the Golden Dome, the nebulous idea for a new missile defense shield to protect the U.S. homeland.

Read Next: Job Cuts Delay Pentagon Plans to Expand Work to Prevent Sex Assaults and Suicides^[1]

"America's deterrence is failing and without a generational investment in our national defense, we will lose the ability to defeat our adversaries," House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said in a statement Sunday. "With this bill, we have the opportunity to get back on track and restore our national security and global leadership."

The Pentagon funding is just a sliver of what Trump has declared will be a "big, beautiful bill" to cut taxes and beef up border security, among other priorities.

In order to pass the bill without needing Democratic support, Republicans are using a process known as reconciliation that will allow the bill to pass in the Senate with a simple majority rather than the 60-vote threshold needed for most legislation in the upper chamber.

While bulking up Pentagon spending typically attracts bipartisan support, other expected aspects of the bill are drawing fierce Democratic opposition. In particular, in order to help pay for tax cuts and increased Pentagon and border spending, Republicans are eying up to $1.5 trillion in government spending cuts.

Republicans have not unveiled detailed cuts, but Democrats maintain that level of downsizing will be impossible to reach without slashing popular social safety net programs such as Medicaid and the food assistance program known as SNAP.

"For over six decades, House Armed Services Democrats have stood proudly with our Republican colleagues in investing prudently in the greatest sources of America's strength: service members and their families, world-leading innovations, modernization and our continued commitment to allies and partners," Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement Sunday. "We can and should do this without requiring the most vulnerable among us to carry the burden of the costs on their backs."

Of the quality-of-life funding in the defense portion of the bill, about $1.3 billion would go toward barracks maintenance and restoration across the military services. The military has faced persistent problems with squalid living conditions for the military's most junior troops.

In addition to the barracks funding, the bill would also provide temporary authorization for more widespread barracks privatization, an idea that has gained steam in recent years^[2] as the services have struggled with maintenance backlogs.

The quality-of-life funding also includes $2 billion for defense health programs to "prevent shortages in the provision of health care services;" $2.9 billion for basic allowance for housing^[3] payments; $50 million for special pay and bonuses; $100 million for child-care fee assistance for service members; and $10 million for military spouse^[4] professional licensure fee assistance, according to the bill text and summary of the bill from the House Armed Services Committee.

The single biggest pot of money in the defense part of the bill is for shipbuilding at about $34 billion. Among the shipbuilding programs that would get extra funding are an extra Virginia-class^[5] submarine in fiscal 2027, two additional Arleigh Burke-class^[6] destroyers, San Antonio-class amphibious transport docks and America-class^[7] amphibious assault ships.

The bill would also set aside about $25 billion for various missile defense accounts with the intention of fulfilling Trump's vision for a layered missile defense system he is calling the Golden Dome, according to the bill summary. Republicans are proposing funding for the Golden Dome even though the Pentagon has yet to release specific plans for the program.

The Golden Dome funding in the bill would be used to "develop and deploy new space and terrestrial based capabilities to detect and interdict missiles, including hypersonic missiles bound for the homeland with kinetic and nonkinetic means," according to the bill summary.

Also in the bill is about $5 billion for U.S. military operations related to the border and immigration. Trump has deployed thousands of service members^[8] to the U.S.-Mexico border as part of his immigration crackdown, as well as used U.S. military aircraft to deport migrants and tapped military bases such as Guantanamo Bay^[9] to hold detained migrants.

The border funding in the Pentagon bill would cover "deployment^[10] of military personnel, operations and maintenance, counter-narcotics and counter-transnational criminal organization mission support, the operation of and construction in national defense areas, the temporary detention of migrants on Department of Defense installations, and the repatriation of persons in support of law enforcement activities," according to the bill text.

While the bill will not need Democratic support to pass, passage is not guaranteed as gaps persist between House and Senate Republicans on exactly how much government spending to cut and how to calculate the cost of tax cuts.

Related: Republicans Advance Massive Defense Budget Boost as Pentagon Eyes 'Offsets'^[11]