By Suzanne Bowdey

While there aren’t a lot of familiar faces from Donald Trump’s first term, Americans are hoping there will be some familiar policies. From the border wall to tax cuts, voters have made it clear that the last thing they want is a continuation of Biden’s radical social agenda. And nowhere is that more critical than the United States military.

Of course, the president-elect is used to inheriting messes. (He spent four years cleaning up Barack Obama’s.) This time around, the repeat commander-in-chief will have his hands equally full. Morale is in the (gender-free) toilet, deadly conflicts blaze around the world, readiness and retention are in the basement, and our technology is about to become a distant second to China’s. Since the day Joe Biden walked into the Oval Office, he’s been too obsessed with advancing the culture war to fight the real ones. And until that changes, the shortfall of troops won’t either.

From everything (and everyone) Trump has appointed, the next administration has a good grip on the severity of the crisis. If the collective meltdown over Pete Hegseth’s nomination to head-up the Defense Department is any indication, the military is about to undergo a top-to-bottom overhaul. And not a moment too soon.

And based on the latest reports, the 47th president knows exactly where to start: with the rollback of Biden’s devastating transgender policy. Sources from inside Trump camp say priority number one is weeding out the thousands of gender-confused troops this administration welcomed into the ranks under the guise of “inclusion.” Unlike last time, when Trump tried to undo the Obama trans policy with tweets, the president-elect is said to be planning an executive order that would put the brakes on transgender service on day one.

According to The Independent, “The ban is expected to be wider ranging than a similar order made during his first term in office, when Trump prevented transgender people joining the armed forces, but allowed those already serving to keep their jobs. President Biden rescinded the order, but this time even those with decades of service will be removed from their posts, according to several sources.”

While no one has a real read on how many troops would be affected — liberal sources say upwards of 15,000 — the Pentagon counted 2,200 servicemembers who had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria in 2021 of the country’s 1.3 million active-duty personnel.

Though the Trump team refuses to confirm its plans on the policy, the Left is already in a panic, spinning a web of lies in advance of the change. “There is no money being spent,” Paulo Batista, one of the Navy’s trans-identifying analysts lied. “It’s just continued care.” But that “continued care” — at a bare minimum — includes a refrigerator full of hormones that costs upwards of $3,700 per person, per year, according to the National Library of Medicine. The actual transition surgery can range from an eye-popping $20,000 to more than $150,000 depending on the complexity of the operation.

No one has to guess where Hegseth, Trump’s pick to lead the DOD, stands on the topic. The young veteran has been extremely vocal about his frustrations with our woke military, calling the current leadership “weak” and “effeminate.” This whole idea of taxpayer-funded medical care for these troops (which FRC calculated before Bidenflation to cost the nation billions of dollars in hormones, surgeries, counselors, and lost service time) is “an extravagance the Pentagon cannot afford,” he argued. To waste this kind of money on such a small population is “trans lunacy,” Hegseth fumed, to say nothing of the “complications” it causes.

Lt. Colonel (Ret.) Robert Maginnis, FRC’s senior fellow for National Defense, made the point that if Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) supports single-sex facilities in the Capitol, “the same should be true for the U.S. military.” “For readiness reasons, all transgender persons ought to be booted out of the ranks,” he insisted.

Of course, as he explained, all of this has its roots in the past two decades of the Left’s “confused sexuality.” “Early in the 20th century, the military considered gender dysphoria a mental condition and refused to enlist such persons. Then in 1993, President Bill Clinton came to the White House promising to lift the Pentagon’s long-standing ban on homosexuals. Clinton’s directive resulted in the policy known as ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’ … [Then], eventually, President Barack Obama pulled the plug on that policy promising sexual orientation was not a barrier to service in the military.”

Back then, Maginnis pointed out to The Washington Stand, “military personnel with common sense knew all too well that sex in an already limited-privacy setting, especially same-sex attraction, is a readiness issue and always will be. Unfortunately, the woke Left under President Joe Biden pretends otherwise and uses his political power to throw sanity overboard. Today, the Pentagon’s ranks include allegedly thousands of transgender personnel” that hinder America’s ability to fight and win wars.

Practically speaking, Biden’s policy doesn’t even make sense. A trans-identifying person needs a steady stream of hormones and drugs, “which means that he or she can’t deploy overseas and must remain under a doctor’s constant care. That’s an extravagance the Pentagon cannot afford because it detracts from combat readiness.”

Before the election, Trump vowed to scrap all of the wokeness plaguing our military, Maginnis continued, “which includes the transgender issue.” The reasons are obvious, he underscored: “Our service members have a full plate preparing for war, and any distractions or unnecessary drain on our precious resources must be eliminated. Besides, there are likely more healthy, well-adjusted people who would take their place in the ranks if the Pentagon dumps the woke nonsense and focuses on what’s important to our national defense.”

To those who say America can’t afford to lose thousands of personnel “at a time when the military can’t recruit enough people,” as one source complained, the administration didn’t think twice about booting 8,000 qualified men and women from the ranks when they refused the COVID vaccine. Where were the alarmists then?

In this instance, the impact can only be positive. As Maginnis reminds everyone, “Trans-identifying troops are non-deployable, and they create a health care burden. We only recruit and retain those who advance readiness.” In dangerous times like these, he cautioned, “We need every service member to be ready to deploy. For every non-deployable person like the trans soldier, another service member must be sent in their place. That creates additional burdens on an exhausted force and hurts morale.”

Not to mention, if the military can reject someone for a mild peanut allergy or flat feet or taking Adderall for six months as a child, why on earth would it accept the ongoing distraction of recruits with mental health issues and ongoing medical needs?

As Major General (Ret.) Joseph Arbuckle said on Monday’s “Washington Watch,” “There is no right to serve in the military. Nobody has that right. Standards drive performance, and if the trans community cannot meet those standards, and if they’re not prepared to deploy physically or mentally because of that, then they should not be serving. That’s the bottom line.” Congressman Mark Alford (R-Mo.), who was guest hosting the show, agreed. “The enemy doesn’t really care what your pronoun is.”

During an exchange with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a hearing, Alford remembers saying, “‘[I]f we go … right now across the Potomac, and we look down at those white tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery, would you be able to tell me the skin color or the gender or the pronoun of that person?’ And [Austin] said, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘That’s because our diversity is not our strength. Our strength is from our unity of our common purpose.’”

When Trump strips DEI out of the military, he’ll restore a lot of morale that Arbuckle thinks is “suffering through the ranks right now, because the mission focus has been taken away.” “So I see the morale coming up. I see recruitment coming up. I see retention coming up. And our combat effectiveness. … That’s exactly what we need.”

At the end of the day, political correctness doesn’t win wars — and it’s time to put an end to policies that pretend it does.

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.