Industry & Advocacy News

Authors Guild Condemns Pentagon’s Sweeping Book Bans Across Military Institutions

Book Banning Free Speech

April 16, 2025

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Photo: Department of Defense

The Authors Guild strongly condemns the recent Pentagon-wide effort to remove books and materials deemed to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or “gender ideology” across all military branches. This coordinated censorship campaign began on February 7, 2025, when the Department of Defense Education Activity announced it would remove books “potentially related to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics” in all Department of Defense schools.

The scale of these removals has rapidly expanded. In late March and early April, the U.S. Naval Academy removed 381 books from its Nimitz Library after using keyword searches to flag nearly 900 titles. On April 9, the Army issued a memo directing all Army libraries—including West Point and the Army War College—to review their collections. Meanwhile, the Air Force Academy and other Air Force libraries have been ordered to submit interim lists of flagged books by April 30, with final lists due by May 30.

The targeted materials disproportionately affect works by writers of color and LGBTQIA+ authors, including Maya Angelou, Ibram X. Kendi, and Carol Anderson, as well as books on civil rights, feminism, and even Holocaust studies. The removals follow executive orders from the Trump administration and directives from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Military leaders and librarians report widespread confusion about the criteria for removal, leading to inconsistent and sometimes overzealous censorship. Without clear guidelines, many are erring on the side of excessive removal to avoid potential repercussions. This has resulted in many classic and often taught books being placed in restricted areas and made inaccessible to service members, cadets, and military families. There are also reports of Black History Month displays being taken down and cultural events being canceled across military installations.

Courts across the country, including the Supreme Court, have agreed with the Authors Guild in every case we’ve brought forth that book bans like these are unconstitutional. In our recent amicus brief to the Supreme Court in Mahmoud v. Taylor, we argued forcefully that exposure to diverse viewpoints is not indoctrination and that the First Amendment protects access to a wide range of ideas.

The removal of books not only impacts sales of the banned books but necessarily leads to self-censorship among authors who may feel they cannot write honestly about their own experiences and important elements of American life, including racial justice, gender identity, and other topics central to our national conversation. For military institutions that claim to fight for democracy to engage in such censorship is especially egregious and concerning.

While the methods of censorship may be evolving—from outright bans to new tactics like “restriction” and “flagging”—the outcome remains the same: cutting young people off from information, research, and stories created by authors. 

The backlash to these bans has been swift and widespread, with lawmakers, historians, military alumni, and free speech advocates warning that these actions undermine intellectual development, academic freedom, and the very rights service members defend. To restrict access to books based on political ideology undermines the very freedoms that our military is sworn to protect.