President Trump gives orders and expects them to be carried out.
Trump got blindsided by some bad news on that front.
And Pete Hegseth now has a problem growing inside his own building.
The Pentagon’s Own Juries Decided They Outrank the Commander in Chief
The New York Times went digging inside the separation boards the Pentagon set up to carry out the ban, and the paper came back practically giddy about what it found.
Times military correspondent Dave Phillips went on CNN to walk viewers through it. According to Phillips, Navy and Marine Corps boards keep voting to keep transgender service members in uniform about three out of every four times.
Those boards have one job. They apply the rules.
And Phillips admitted the rules leave them no wiggle room at all. “If transgender, then you must throw them out. But that’s not what these boards are doing,” he said.
He didn’t dress up what that means, either. Phillips described the boards’ votes as “basically them quietly defying orders.”
But some Marines apparently skipped the quiet part. Phillips said he saw Marine Corps paperwork where board members scratched out the printed instruction telling them to discharge the service member, then voted to keep that person anyway.
Picture a juror crossing out the judge’s instructions with a ballpoint pen before deliberations even start. Any courtroom in America would know exactly what to call that.
A Lawful Order With the Supreme Court’s Blessing
President Trump signed his executive order, titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” on January 27, 2025. It rests on a premise the armed forces lived by for most of their history: sex is biological, and no amount of paperwork changes it.
Activist lawyers ran to friendly district judges and got the ban frozen. Then the Supreme Court stepped in on May 6, 2025, lifted the injunction, and cleared the administration to enforce the policy while appeals play out. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson wanted to keep it blocked.
So the question of who sets personnel policy for the military already has an answer. The Commander in Chief the voters picked sets it.
The Pentagon saw this kind of resistance coming. In August 2025, the Air Force told its boards they “must recommend separation of the member” when a record showed a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to the Associated Press. By October 2025, a department-wide memo let commanders override any board that voted to keep a transgender service member, the AP reported.
Phillips said the Army discharged almost everybody early on, 95 percent or maybe higher. But he said even the Army has started keeping more people as time goes on.
The New York Times Finally Got the Story It Wanted
Notice who’s telling this tale. Back in 2015, the Times editorial board urged the Pentagon to let transgender troops serve openly. A decade later, its reporters present rank-and-file defiance of a lawful order as a heartwarming story about conscience.
Phillips even suggested the boards have figured out that current leadership may not have their “best interests in mind.” That’s a remarkable thing for a reporter to say about the civilian leadership voters put in charge in 2024.
The Times laid out its best argument plainly enough. Phillips pointed to troops who are “a decorated war hero or a really needed highly-trained technician” and said the boards just don’t want to throw them out.
But military service has never worked like a talent show judged one contestant at a time. Recruiters turn away eager young Americans every year over a childhood asthma history, a bad knee, or a prescription bottle in the medicine cabinet. Nobody calls that bigotry. The armed forces write one set of standards for the whole force and apply it to everybody, and a standard rooted in biology doesn’t bend because an individual happens to be likable or good at the job.
And look at the numbers Phillips himself offered. He put the total at about 4,200 people, roughly one-tenth of one percent of the force. The Left spent years insisting this issue was too small to fight about. Now, by the Times’ own account, boards inside the Pentagon will defy orders over it.
Jury Nullification in Uniform Can’t Stand
Think about where this road leads. The cause today happens to be one the Times likes. Next year a board somewhere might decide it doesn’t care for a different lawful order on readiness standards, deployments, or missions at the southern border. A military where the ranks pick which orders count stops being a military in any meaningful sense.
And it fits a pattern. Washington’s permanent machinery has spent years slow-walking, leaking against, and working around President Trump whenever his policies cut against its preferences. This time the resistance just wears a uniform and carries a clipboard.
But the fix already sits on the shelf. Phillips conceded every board vote amounts to a recommendation. The service secretaries, all Trump appointees, review each case and can reverse it, and the October 2025 memo hands commanders the same power.
So the real test lands on the desks of those secretaries. They can rubber-stamp the boards’ workaround, or they can enforce the policy the President ordered and the Supreme Court allowed.
Harry Truman faced his own version of this, only from the top of the ranks instead of the bottom. Douglas MacArthur publicly undercut the President’s policy in Korea, convinced he understood the war better than the man elected to run the country.
On April 11, 1951, Harry Truman relieved the most famous general in America for deciding he knew better than his Commander in Chief.
Sources: Mediaite, “Military Boards Are Defying Hegseth’s Orders To Ban Transgender Troops”; CNN interview with Dave Phillips of The New York Times; Associated Press reporting on Air Force and Pentagon separation board directives (August and October 2025); SCOTUSblog, United States v. Shilling docket (May 6, 2025); The White House, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness” executive order (January 27, 2025); Mediaite, “NY Times Ed Board to Military: Allow Transgender Soldiers to Serve Openly” (2015)