JUST IN: Media Outraged As Trump Is Expected To Make Major Move On Day One

Thousands of U.S. service members may be removed from service by President-elect Donald Trump who has promised on his first day in office to rescind accommodations that he and incoming defense secretary Pete Hegseth believe are negatively impacting military readiness.

Hegseth, detailing the plans on a podcast with host Shawn Ryan, said he and Trump are on the same page when it comes to consequences for the military as a result of transgender soldiers. There are about 15,000 who are classified as transgender, a status that requires “tremendous medical costs and disruptions” according to a statement by President-elect Trump. “We are at a tipping point for total institutional corruption, and Trump has a chance to reverse that,” Hegseth explained shortly before the election. “What the military did is they created a Bud Light.”

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Current Defense Department guidance requires all branches of the military to accommodate transgender service members in a variety of ways, including taxpayer-funded surgery for gender reassignment if physicians find it to be medically necessary. Debate over transgender soldiers is not new; in 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450 whose original scope prevented all LGBT individuals from serving in the federal government. The order was narrowly tailored over decades until 2021 when President Biden reversed Trump’s original ban on transgender soldiers. In 2021 he appointed Rachel Levine, assistant secretary in Health and Human Services, the first transgender individual to become a four-star officer in any military arm.

Hegseth said he believed President Biden sought political expediency through the decision. “In search of a nontraditional constituency… they lost the boys from Kentucky and Tennessee and Oklahoma,” he continued, “the traditional dudes who did it because they love their country.”

“Being transgender in the military causes complications and differences,” he added. “We saw it under Clinton with the tinkering of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and the reasons for those changes, and I talked to some of the people who were involved when that was changed, but it really happened, started to accelerate under Obama. You saw the trans stuff come at the end of the Obama administration. You saw the women in combat come at the end of the Obama administration. It’s because they looked around at the bureaucracies that they controlled, and the one in Washington, the one that they didn’t control – Obama spent a disproportionate amount of time focusing on the Pentagon. They were skeptical of leadership and they eventually brought in political appointees and generals who would do their bidding the way they wanted.”

WATCH:

The Independent reports that President-elect Trump’s promised executive order would immediately rescind the Biden policy and likely result in the dismissal of 15,000 transgender troops. All would receive medical discharges.

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