By Nate Raymond  |  Reuters

In a policy reversal in line with President Donald Trump’s views, the U.S. Naval Academy will no longer consider race as a factor in admissions as the elite military school had long done to raise its enrollment of Black, Hispanic and other minorities.

The change was disclosed on Friday in a Justice Department legal filing in an appeal by a group opposed to such affirmative action policies that challenged the race-conscious admissions program at the Naval Academy, located in Annapolis, Maryland.

The Naval Academy had continued to employ its affirmative action admissions program even after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 rejected such policies at civilian colleges and universities.

That ruling was an outcome long sought by many U.S. conservatives who have complained that white and certain other applicants were being disadvantaged.

Days after returning to office, Trump signed an executive order on January 27 that eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the military.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was appointed by the Republican president, two days later issued guidance barring the military from establishing “sex-based, race-based or ethnicity-based goals for organizational composition, academic admission or career fields.”

In light of those directives, Naval Academy Superintendent Vice Admiral Yvette Davids issued guidance prohibiting the consideration of race, ethnicity or sex as a factor in its admissions process, the Justice Department filing said.

A Naval Academy spokesperson declined to comment.

U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett in Baltimore last year ruled that the Naval Academy’s affirmative action admissions program, which had been defended by Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration, was legal.

The ruling came in a lawsuit by a group called Students for Fair Admissions, founded by anti-affirmative action activist Edward Blum, challenging the policy.

Friday’s filing by the Justice Department was made in the group’s ongoing appeal of Bennett’s ruling.

The Biden administration argued in the case that senior military leaders had long recognized that a scarcity of minority officers could create distrust within the U.S. armed forces, which were racially segregated until 1948.

Bennett decided that the academy’s program was narrowly tailored to meet that interest by rectifying the “significant deficiency” in the number of racial minorities who are Navy and Marine officers and are trained at the Naval Academy.

The judge said that while racial minorities currently make up 52% of enlisted Navy service members, only 31% of its officers are minorities. In the Marine Corps, the least diverse branch of military, minorities comprise 35% of enlisted Marines but just 29% of its officer ranks, the judge said.

The Justice Department said in its Friday filing that the Naval Academy’s policy change could affect the lawsuit.

Blum’s group has been seeking to build on its 2023 victory at the Supreme Court. The court’s 6-3 conservative majority sided with the group by barring policies used by colleges and universities for decades to increase their number of minority students.

That ruling invalidated race-conscious admissions policies used by Harvard and the University of North Carolina. But it explicitly did not address the consideration of race as a factor in admissions at military academies, which conservative Chief Justice John Roberts wrote at the time had “potentially distinct interests.”

Blum’s group subsequently filed lawsuits against the Naval Academy, U.S. Air Force Academy and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point seeking to invalidate the carve-out for military schools. The Naval Academy case was the first to go to trial.

Blum in a brief statement said more news about his cases would be “forthcoming.”