Military Drops Recruiting Efforts at Prestigious Black Engineering Awards Event

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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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