The U.S. Military is pulling out of a 40-year-old STEM event in Baltimore as part of its campaign to abandon “DEI” programs and push back against a perceived “wokeness” among American troops.
The Becoming Everything You Are Conference (BEYA), once called the Black Engineer of the Year Award Conference, has been running in Baltimore for four decades. It’s a place that fosters students pursuing STEM degrees and gives them a chance to mingle with colleges and employers.
According to its organizers, BEYA got the Pentagon 300 recruits last year. Now it won’t get any.
Even organizer Tyrone Taborn told Stripes that the government was set to spend $1.5 million to participate in the event. On Monday the cancellations rolled in and officials from various branches at the Pentagon pointed to a January 31 memo from the Pentagon titled “Identity Months Dead at DoD” that officially ended the U.S. military’s involvement with anything related to “cultural awareness.”
Tabron told Stripes he was baffled. “BEYA is the major recruiting activity for everybody, and they put all their money behind this. It’s such an ecosystem,” he said. “We’re not even DEI, unless you want to say there’s too many Black people or too many Hispanic people coming to the event…we just can’t figure it out.”
Military contractors also pulled out of the event at the last minute. Booz Allen Hamilton, the Naval Nuclear Laboratory, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX also canceled.
The U.S. Military has been suffering from a recruitment crisis over the past few years. It’s a complex problem with a lot of different factors, but one of them is that a future-focused military needs smarter, more STEM-focused recruits. It’s hard to convince those kinds of people to sign up for military service when they could take a six-figure job working for a tech company. BEYA and conferences like it are prime recruiting grounds for those kinds of candidates.
The Army met its recruiting goals in 2024 and, so far, has set a good pace in 2025. To hear Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth tell it, that’s all because of President Donald Trump. “We’ve already seen it in recruiting numbers. There’s already been a surge since President Trump won the election,” Hegseth said during his confirmation hearing.
According to Hegseth and Trump, no one wants to join the military anymore because it’s too woke. “Concerns about the Army being, quote, woke, have not been a significant issue in our recruiting crisis,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told PBS. “They weren’t at the beginning of the crisis. They weren’t in the middle of the crisis. They aren’t now. The data does not show that young Americans don’t want to join the Army because they think the army is woke—however they define that.”
The real reason young people weren’t joining the military is multifaceted. Twenty years of losing foreign wars was part of it. Then there was a pandemic. Add to that the increased divide between military and civilian families and recruiting standards that most American recruits couldn’t meet. Prohibitions against tattoos, certain hairstyles, and the use of psychoactive drugs (including those commonly prescribed for ADHD and depression) all drove down numbers.
A lot of kids also weren’t physically fit enough or academically capable of passing the entrance tests to get into the military. And it’s on this last point that the Army has made a lot of progress. Starting in 2022, the Army offered what it calls the Future Soldier Prep Course. This is a 90-day intensive training regime that gets recruits physically and academically ready to enter basic training.
It’s training for the training. And it’s working. The Army hit its 2024 recruiting goal in September of that year. About a quarter of the candidates had been through the Future Soldier Prep Course.
Another reason the Army saw a surge in recruits last year? Women. More than 10,000 of 2024’s Army recruits were women, that’s up 20% from the previous year. It’s easier for them to get in. They tend not to have criminal records and perform better on the entrance exams. They’re also more physically fit. About 70% of the people who tried to join the Army, failed, and had to go through the Future Soldier Prep Course to get into shape were men.
