Having previously bragged about his intention to look into such a thing, our sleazy doofus of a president has taken the first formal step toward instituting a policy that would allow service academy athletes to defer their military service obligations in order to pursue careers in professional sports. This was an initiative Trump first mentioned in early May. It was also an active Obama-era policy until Trump rescinded it upon taking office, out of spite.
According to a report from the Associated Press, President Trump issued a presidential memorandum Wednesday giving the defense secretary 120 days to “develop a plan” to accomplish what was already accomplished by the 2016 policy President Trump’s Department of Defense wiped out in early 2017.
The memo says student athletes graduating from the academies and Reserve Officers’ Training Corps should be able to defer their military service obligations due to the “short window of time” they have to “take advantage of their athletic talents during which playing professional sports is realistically possible.”
Hard to imagine why they’d need four months to “develop” the very plan they axed. That is, until you remember it’s entirely possible no one associated with the Trump administration actually bothered to become familiar with the policy in the first place, before deciding it needed to go. It’s a good thing this no-nonsense business genius has risen out of the private sector to wipe all the grinding bureaucratic inefficiency and wasteful partisanship out of the federal government.