Academy’s Board of Visitors approved to resume meeting
Decision follows new lawsuit, Department of Defense review of Pentagon advisory committees
The Naval Academy’s Board of Visitors will resume meeting again after the Department of Defense halted 40 Pentagon advisory committees, including at the Naval Academy, for a seven-month review.
Chair of the board, U.S. Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Baltimore County, announced Monday the defense department cleared the board to begin operations again after evaluating defense department members and dozens of military advisory boards to ensure they “aligned with the priorities outlined in the National Defense Strategy.” The board has not met for a year and plans to regroup on Sept. 27, according to the board’s website.
The conclusion of the review comes after President Joe Biden asked this month for the resignation of 18 former members of the service academy boards appointed by former President Donald Trump. For those who did not resign, their positions were terminated.
“Throughout this process, I have urged the Department of Defense to expedite reviews of our service academy boards so that we can get back to our critical oversight responsibilities,” Ruppersberger said in a statement. “I am relieved this review has finally come to an end and I look forward to working with my colleagues — both Republicans and Democrats — to get up to speed on the state of affairs at our service academies.”
The board of visitors are tasked with “inquiring into the state of morale and discipline, the curriculum, instruction, physical equipment, fiscal affairs, academic
methods, and other matters relating to the academy,” according to its website. Six of its members are appointed by the president, three by the vice president, four are appointed by the speaker of the House of Representatives, and one is designated by the Senate Armed Services Committee and another is designated by the House Armed Services Committee.
Sean Spicer, former President Donald Trump’s press secretary, was among several people asked to resign from the Naval Academy Board of Visitors by Sept. 8. Spicer who was appointed to the board in 2019 by Trump, joined a lawsuit against the Department of Defense, the Navy, the Army, the Air Force, their service academies and their superintendents over the failure of the schools’ boards of visitors to meet.
“The demand for the resignation to a military service academy, in this case the United States Naval Academy, is unprecedented and, I believe, bad policy because it is divisive, would destroy the politically balanced structure of the Boards of Visitors as created by Congress and deprive the academies of the diversity of experience, knowledge and perspectives the academies traditionally have had and need in order for the academies to fulfill their missions competently and in a manner reflective of all of the American people,” Spicer wrote in a Sept. 12 letter to the White House detailing his refusal to resign.
In addition to Spicer, John Coale, Russell Vought, Jonathan Hiler, Anthony Parker, who currently serves as vice chair for the board, and retired Rear Adm. Joseph Walsh were asked to resign from the Naval Academy Board. Board members typically serve three-year terms.
The board elected Ruppersberger as chair in June 2020. He said in a statement earlier this month no one consulted or notified him about the decision to ask the six Naval Academy board of visitors members to resign. Ruppersberger added he respects the president’s ability to appoint members to the board, just as Trump did.
Among those being asked to resign from the Air Force Board of Visitors are Kellyanne Conway and Heidi Stirrup. Stirrup is one of the plaintiffs suing the Department of Defense and military leaders over the inability for the Board of Visitors to meet. The lawsuit focuses on the legitimacy of the DOD to keep the boards from meeting because the boards were created by Congress, not the DOD. It was filed July 15 in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and is spearheaded by Stirrup.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called for the “Zero Based Review” after expressing concern “with the pace and the extent of recent changes to memberships of the department advisory committees done with a bit of frenetic activity in the final two months of the previous administration,” an unnamed official said in a DOD report in February.
“I think it … gave him pause to consider the broad scope and purpose of these boards and to think about how they can best be aligned and organized and composed to provide competent, technical professional advice,” the official said in the report.