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West Point remains an institution seemingly immune to President Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth‘s vision for a military dedicated to lethality and immune to the ideological temptation to play politics with the U.S. Army.

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From the stubborn employment of professors who facilitate absurd, leftist academic endeavors to the brazen appointments of censorship regime Biden officials, West Point has become a warning of how critical elements of the federal bureaucracy can become immune to accountability and political control, an urgent crisis worthy of serious reform.

While Hegseth ordered broad and complete reforms that should have fundamentally altered how West Point conducts affairs, compliance has been at worst illusory and at best delayed. West Point leaders met orders to dismantle the diversity, equity, and inclusion complex with brash censorship and a cudgel of policies that ostracized academic freedom without meaningfully dismantling the DEI bureaucracy.

This inept compliance with lawful orders became clearer as evidence of the renaming and reorganization of DEI bureaucrats became clear. The sponsor, a civilian professor of supposedly academic efforts such as Evolution of Crossdressing, still guides and forms cadets in the classroom. Numerous advocates of DEI initiatives are still employed, somehow responsible for leading an organization meant to dismantle such an ideology. Change is a process.

West Point raised the most serious doubt about its standpoint toward faithfully operating in an apolitical, compliant manner when Army Lt. Gen. Steven Gilland appointed Jen Easterly to lead the storied Department of Social Sciences.

Easterly, the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the Biden presidency, was the chief architect of the federal government’s suppression of online speech relating to the 2020 election, the COVID-19 pandemic, and important stories such as the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Easterly was even a named defendant in Missouri v. Biden, a lawsuit in which federal courts halted CISA’s ability to restrict Americans’ free speech rights.

Perhaps Easterly is qualified to lead an academic department at an institution of higher education, but future service as a nonpolitical public servant at an institution as important as West Point should be out of the question. Such a possibility is so absurd, in fact, that her appointment can only be attributed to a malicious desire to undermine the Trump administration or a disqualifying degree of ignorance of her recent track record in federal service.

The Department of Social Sciences, colloquially known as “SOSH,” is not merely an academic entity that affects the academic culture of West Point. In fact, there exist recent historical examples of borderline subversion scholarship directly affecting American foreign policy around the world.

Gen. David Petraeus and acolytes directly or indirectly affiliated with SOSH seized upon the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent morass in which the military found itself, to advocate a renewed commitment to counterinsurgency doctrine, or “COIN,” as a means of strategically confronting low-intensity conflict. Petraeus and many SOSH faculty penned FM 3-24, the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, in 2005. This doctrine served as the foundation and justification for former President George W. Bush’s Iraq troop surge and former President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan troop surge. COIN became the doctrine of Middle East forever wars, and the home was the West Point Department of Social Sciences.

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While perhaps appropriate for an academic department to produce theoretical doctrinal analysis, it’s a bizarre chain of events that leads an operational commander to conspire with academic faculty to produce policy-defining doctrine in less than three years. Such a place should be under direct and assertive political control.

This frustration with West Point’s true intentions only strengthens the suspicion that this historic institution on the Hudson River has become a pervasive embodiment of the deep state’s runaway military bureaucracy. It is difficult to envision a functional chain of command tolerating the repeated rejection of the Trump administration’s efforts to build a force unburdened by DEI initiatives and the broader culture of wokeness.

One factor behind West Point’s unaccountable nature is its unusual position in the Department of the Army’s chain of command. Although it technically falls under Training and Doctrine Command, the academy operates without a true peer institution, making it difficult to enforce cohesive policies or hold its leadership to consistent standards.

This challenge is compounded by the fact that West Point sits under the constant scrutiny of powerful external stakeholders, ranging from influential alumni to the board of visitors, all of whom blur the question of who truly calls the shots. Such ambiguity allows West Point’s leadership to maneuver around direct adherence to policy changes. Senate staff have even noted that West Point officials are often the most vocal irritants when politically accountable representatives craft military policy through the National Defense Authorization Act each year.

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The Pentagon cannot allow West Point’s proud history as the crucible of America’s military leadership to harden into an untouchable fortress, immune to oversight and reform. An academy that once stood as a beacon of merit and martial excellence risks becoming a symbol of bureaucratic arrogance, ideological drift, and political defiance. If the nation tolerates such defiance, the rot will inevitably spread across the force it is meant to form.

The path forward demands not symbolic gestures or cosmetic reorganizations, but direct, decisive accountability. The administration must secure West Point’s future as a training ground for warriors bound by discipline, loyalty, and devotion to country. It can never be an incubator for officers or ideas unmoored from the democratically accountable political chain of command. Anything less than bold reform will leave America with a military elite detached from the people it serves, and a republic whose defenders are guided not by civilian authority, but by the unchecked designs of an entrenched bureaucracy. That is a crisis the nation cannot afford.

Will Thibeau is the director of the American Military Project at the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. He is also a visiting fellow at the Center for Renewing America.