Now both the military policy and the lives of many would-be service members are caught in suspense.
Read: How Trump’s transgender ban compromises his military authority “This is like someone told the White House to light a candle on the table and the WH set the whole table on fire,” a Republican aide wrote in an email to Politico. The group went over Mattis’s head to Trump, and the president, apparently on a whim, decided instead to casually ban not the surgery, but the service members. A group of House conservatives had been threatening to withhold support for a defense-authorization bill that included border-wall funding unless the military stopped covering the costs of gender-reassignment surgery for troops, a move resisted by the defense secretary, James Mattis. Why the haste and chaos from a president who had campaigned as friendly to LGBTQ rights? The careers of trans service members appeared to be a political sacrifice to Trump’s border wall, according to Politico. "Generally speaking, this is not a healthy state of affairs in a nation of civilian control.”
“In other words, the military told the commander in chief to go jump in a lake,” Charles Krauthammer wrote at the time. The next day, the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared that “no modifications” would be made to the existing military policy until the White House issued formal guidance on the meaning of the announcement. In the instant, no one knew whether the tweets themselves had the weight of policy. Read: Trump gives an order too vague for his generals to obey “I cannot recall another instance in United States military history of such a stark and unfounded reversal of policy.”
“So much careful thought had gone into development of the policy, with consensus at the highest levels of military leadership,” wrote the former U.S. Reporters quickly pointed out that the “tremendous medical costs” cited by the president amounted to less than 10 percent of what the military paid out each year to treat erectile dysfunction. It had been only a year since the Obama administration announced that these individuals could serve their country openly, having found after an exhaustive review that the likely impact on the military was minimal. victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.