Exclusive: Military watchdog sues Air Force for records of experiment aimed to boost women, minority graduation rates

A military watchdog sued the Air Force on Monday, seeking records pertaining to an experiment run in 2021 that sought to increase graduation rates for women and minority pilots.

The Center to Advance Security in America (CASA) filed a lawsuit Monday seeking to enforce a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking all communication records from organizations and persons involved in an experiment conducted by the 19th Air Force command near San Antonio, Texas. The experiment sought to “cluster” racial minorities and women into a separate class from other trainees to see if it would improve graduation rates, according to documents previously obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation in 2023.

The experiment was unsuccessful, showing no increase in graduation rates, while officers involved with the project alleged they were forced to engage in unlawful discrimination.

“In 2021, the Biden DoD ran a DEI experiment in the Air Force aimed at increasing flight school graduation rates for women and minorities. It failed miserably, and some involved were openly skeptical of its legality,” CASA Director James Fitzpatrick told the DCNF. “This lawsuit will force the Air Force to provide the records and communications related to this effort in order to educate the public on this failed attempt by the Biden administration to inject DEI into Air Force flight school.”

The Air Force increased their efforts to pursue diversity in the wake of the death of George Floyd in 2020, setting diversity targets for service-wide recruitment. Air Education and Training Command (AETC) took on the diversity initiatives that year, according to the DCNF’s previous reporting.

Officers involved with the program said in a memo previously obtained by the DCNF that they were verbally pressured to meet certain demographic characteristics in making the special class, dubbed “America’s class.” The class contained 62% underrepresented groups, far exceeding the average of around one-third in other classes, according to a previous DCNF data analysis from 2020 to 2023.

“When other priorities, like gender or race, are introduced as a metric of assignment and advancement, the foundations of performance-based competition are sacrificed and the emphasis on safety takes a backseat,” an Air Force instructor pilot and former trainer for Undergraduate Pilot Training, who spoke on a condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal, previously told the DCNF.

The Air Force did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

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