Leading Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee are demanding the Navy “immediately” put a stop to the removal of books from the service’s academy library after officials pulled hundreds of titles promoting diversity, equity and inclusion from the collection.
The call came in the days after the U.S. Naval Academy got rid of nearly 400 volumes from its Nimitz Library collection on topics ranging from racism to gender identity and the Holocaust — the latest salvo in the Trump administration’s push to target so-called culture war issues in the armed forces.
House Armed Services Committee ranking member Adam Smith, D-Wash., and Pennsylvania Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, the top Democrat on the Military Personnel Subcommittee, slammed the action as “a blatant attack” on free speech and “a clear effort to suppress academic freedom and rigor” in an April 4 letter to Navy Secretary John Phelan.
