'Divisive feminist agenda': Trump's Pentagon abruptly shuts down 74 year-old panel
Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson announced that Secretary Pete Hegseth will terminate the Defense Department Advisory Committee on Women in the Services — a 74-year-old federally established panel whose recommendations have been adopted more than 90% of the time — alleging it is “advancing a divisive feminist agenda that hurts combat readiness.”
“Secretary Hegseth has focused on advancing uniform, sex-neutral standards across the Department,” Wilson wrote in a social media statement.
Politico described the Committee as one that “encourages” women to enter the military.
“One of the oldest Defense Department advisory committees is no more,” noted award-winning journalist Jim Laporta of CBS News, a former Marine who has written extensively on the U.S. military. “Since 1951, the Committee has submitted over 1,100 recommendations to the secretary for consideration. As of 2025, about 94% have been either fully or partially adopted by DoD, per DoD.”
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The Committee’s website (archived) says it “was created following the passage of the 1948 Women’s Armed Services Integration Act to advise on strategies to improve the recruitment of women into the U.S. military during the Korean War.”
“Over the years, the DACOWITS charter has evolved, enabling the Committee to submit numerous recommendations to the Secretary of Defense – the majority of which have been either fully or partially implemented. The Committee’s recommendations have been instrumental in effecting changes to law and policies pertaining to the service of women in the U.S. military.”
According to the Military Times, the committee’s termination comes just “days after a previous memo established plans for reactivating it,” after it had been placed on hiatus earlier this year.
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“Major themes” of the committee’s work “since the 2010s, according to a data analysis, have been prevention of sexual assault and harassment, gender equality and integration, career progression and women’s health and wellbeing.”
But according to the right-wing Daily Caller website, “critics say DACOWITS today is largely advancing a feminist agenda with a detrimental effect on combat readiness.” It did not list who those critics are, but added that the committee had “expressed concern for the ability of military women to obtain abortions after the Supreme Court overturn of Roe v. Wade, according to a DACOWITS information request in August 2022.”
Politico also reported that Hegseth, a “former Fox News host, who has previously questioned the role of women in combat, has also shut down a program that boosts the number of women in peace building and conflict prevention efforts, calling it ‘woke’ and ‘divisive.'”
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