Hegseth Orders Review Of Medical Conditions That Disqualify Recruits

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wants individuals with certain medical conditions to be disqualified from joining the military, according to a new memo released Monday.

“The standards for accession into the U.S. military are high, uncompromising, and clear,” Hegseth wrote in the memo, which was signed Thursday. “Young Americans seeking to serve in the greatest fighting force in history must be physically and mentally capable of performing their duties in the harshest conditions.”

The directive, addressed to senior Pentagon leadership, orders the undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness to review existing medical standards for enlistment and induction into the military services and identify any conditions that should be ineligible for a medical waiver. He is also ordered the identification of any medical conditions for which a waiver may only be granted by the secretary of a military department.

He lists several conditions for which potential applicants can currently receive medical waivers, including schizophrenia, paraphilic disorders, congestive heart failure and chronic use of oxygen. 

“Individuals with such conditions are generally unlikely to complete initial military training or their first term of service,” he writes.  

The Pentagon has said Hegseth’s initiative is in response to concerns about current medical waiver policies and their impact on military readiness, though no specific examples were given. 

There has been a rise in medical waivers in the past decade, with about 17 percent of recruits receiving them in 2022, up from 12 percent in 2013, according to a review by the DOD inspector general.

The rise can partly be attributed to the Pentagon’s 2022 expansion of medical conditions that no longer disqualify people from enlisting in the military. Under a program known as the Medical Accession Records Pilot, an initial 38 previously disqualifying conditions were identified, with another 13 added to the list last year — including childhood asthma and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

Defense officials in October told reporters more than 6,000 people had enlisted through the pilot program, which was meant to “address the changing health landscape” as recruiters struggled to find viable candidates also interested in serving.

Only about 23 percent of young Americans are eligible to enlist in the military without some sort of waiver, said Katie Helland, then the Pentagon’s director of military accession policy, at the time.

Hegseth, however, said that while the desire to serve is admirable, the military “must never compromise our high standards,” and that “requiring anything less poses an unacceptable risk to the mission, to those Service members themselves, and to their fellow Service members.”

The personnel and readiness undersecretary has 30 days to submit their review, which should include any proposed updates.