NEW YORK (AP) — The Secretary of the Army on Wednesday directed the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to review its hiring practices, bar outside groups from choosing employees and remove a newly announced hire who led the nation’s cybersecurity agency under President Joe Biden.
The directive, shared on the social platform X by Secretary Dan Driscoll, came just a day after Jen Easterly was announced as the Robert F. McDermott Distinguished Chair in West Point’s social sciences department.
It demonstrated how vigorously President Donald Trump’s administration has sought to wield control over the ideology and leadership of higher education and the military during the president’s second term.
It also highlighted how deeply concerns about censorship have seeped into the Republican Party and the Trump administration. As the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, Easterly faced harsh criticism from Republicans who argued that her work to counter misinformation about elections and the COVID-19 pandemic amounted to censorship.
CISA secures the nation’s critical infrastructure, including the nation’s dams, banks and nuclear power plants. It also secures voting systems — work that became controversial as Trump has made false claims to create doubt about the integrity of elections in recent years.
Easterly has denied claims that her agency censored anyone and said last fall that “allegations against CISA are riddled with factual inaccuracies.” She said in January she hopes the agency will be allowed to continue its election-related work despite “contentiousness” around that part of its mission.
Driscoll’s directive came after far-right activist Laura Loomer posted about Easterly’s new role on X, saying “Biden holdovers” at the Defense Department were “undermining” Trump’s administration. Loomer has frequently urged Trump’s administration to purge staffers she deems insufficiently loyal to his agenda, and on multiple occasions, they have been fired.
The memo directs West Point to terminate Easterly’s agreement with the institution and “immediately pause non-governmental and outside groups from selecting employees of the Academy, including instructors, professors, teachers and shaping academic or developmental lectures.” It also requests an immediate review of the military training academy’s hiring practices.
Asked for a reason for the memo, an Army spokesperson said in a statement that ahead of the new academic year, “we are crafting a deliberate approach to ensure that our future officers are best prepared to meet the demands of the modern battlefield.”
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell was more blunt about the reasoning in a post on X.
“We’re not turning cadets into censorship activists,” he said. “We’re turning them into warriors & leaders. We’re in the business of warfighting.”
Easterly, an Army combat veteran and West Point graduate, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
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