Pentagon orders new purge of social media sites to dump diversity, inclusion mentions by March 5

▶ Follow live updates on President Donald Trump and his new administration. WASHINGTON — Building lethality in the military may be the buzzword for the new Trump administration, but busywork and paperwork have become the reality at the Pentagon, as service members and civilian workers are facing a broad mandate to purge all of the department’s social media sites and untangle confusing personnel reduction moves. On Wednesday, the department’s top public affairs official signed and sent out a new memo requiring all the military services to spend countless hours poring over years of website postings, photos, news articles and videos to remove any mentions that “promote diversity, equity and inclusion.” If they can’t do that by March 5, they have been ordered to “temporarily remove from public display” all content published during the Biden administration’s four years in office, according to a copy of the memo obtained by The Associated Press. And despite Trump’s celebration of Black History Month, it also calls for the elimination of all content that promotes so-called cultural awareness months that Hegseth decried in an earlier memo titled “Identity Months dead at DOD.” In that Jan. 31 memo, he said that “efforts to divide the force — to put one group ahead of another — erode camaraderie and threaten mission execution.” He has also argued that efforts to broader diversity took emphasis away from warfighting. Such overreach caused problems early on following Trump’s initial order to purge DEI from social media — the Air Force quickly took down new recruit training courses that included videos of the Tuskegee Airmen.