U.S. military recruitment has made a comeback following a downturn caused primarily by the COVID-19 pandemic, low unemployment and stiff competition from the private sector.
Posts circulating widely on social media give President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth credit for this increase, a claim that has been pushed by the president and others in his administration.
But Defense Department data shows the uptick began well before Trump's reelection in November and experts point to actions taken by the military during the Biden administration as key reasons for the increase.
Here's a look at the facts.
CLAIM: President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are causing military recruitment numbers to skyrocket.
THE FACTS: This is an overstatement and is missing context. Recruitment numbers for all military branches have been on the rise for the last few years, according to Defense Department data. Experts cite factors such as improving recruitment strategies, increased bonuses and new prep courses that predated the 2024 presidential election as factors in the change, although they acknowledge Trump’s election could have also played a role.
“There may be some American teenagers or their parents, more likely, who were more comfortable joining the military in a Republican administration than a Democratic administration,” said Katherine Kuzminski, director of studies at the independent Washington think tank Center for a New American Security and an expert on military recruitment. “But I don’t think that alone explains why we’ve seen an increase lately.”
Military enlistment was 12.5% higher in fiscal year 2024, which ran from Oct. 1, 2023 to Sept. 30, 2024, than in fiscal year 2023. There were 225,000 new recruits in the former and 200,000 in the latter, said Katie Helland, who oversees recruitment policies and programs as the Defense Department's director of Military Accession Policy, at a media roundtable in October. Those totals include both active and reserve troops in all five military branches, as well as about 4,800 Navy recruits from fiscal year 2024 who signed contracts, but could not be shipped out due to basic training limitations.
And the recruiting numbers for the current fiscal year 2025, which started the month before Trump's election, have continued to increase.
In an interview with The Associated Press in January, then-Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said the Army is on pace to bring in 61,000 young people by the end of the fiscal year in September and will have more than 20,000 additional young people signed up in the delayed entry program for 2026. It will be the Army's second straight year of meeting its enlistment goals.
“What’s really remarkable is the first quarter contracts that we have signed are the highest rate in the last 10 years,” Wormuth said. “We are going like gangbusters, which is terrific.”
Some on social media have given Trump and Hegseth sole credit for the improving numbers, this week citing a Fox News graphic that aired Tuesday during a “Fox & Friends” interview with Hegseth. The graphic compared cumulative recruitment numbers for the first two months of the current fiscal year with those of the first five months.
“Holy smokes. Military recruitment is THROUGH THE ROOF,” reads one X post sharing the Fox graphic. “Absolutely smashing every goal. This is what happens when you have strong leadership.”
Kuzminski noted there's no data to back up whether Trump's election had been a factor in the most recent increase in recruiting numbers.
“We can’t rule out that for some people it was a factor, but the real way to get around that would be to actually do more qualitative surveys or interviews like," she said.
The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment beyond providing numbers around recruitment.
Its most recent Joint Advertising Market Research Survey, published in January, does not list politics among the top reasons for either joining or not joining the military.
The survey polled youth ages 16-21. Fifty-three percent of respondents listed “pay/money” in response to the question, “If you were to consider joining the U.S. Military, what would be the main reason(s)?"
Seventy-two percent chose “possibility of physical injury/death” in response to the question, “What would be the main reason(s) why you would NOT consider joining the U.S. Military?”
Prior to the recent uptick in recruits, military services struggled to overcome severe restrictions on in-person recruiting mandated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the low unemployment rate and stiff competition from private companies able to pay more and provide similar or better benefits.
Kuzminski said modernizing recruitment efforts was a major factor in improving the numbers. Instead of relying on recruiting centers in strip malls, for example, she said there has been a push over the last 20 years to “think about capturing American youth where they exist online and not just in person.”
Another barrier to recruitment has been the number of potential recruits who are qualified for enlistment. According to the most recent Defense Department data available, 77% of youth 17 to 24 years old do not qualify for military service without some type of waiver for issues such as weight, drug abuse or mental health.
Military officials and experts have pointed to prep courses intended to help potential recruits meet academic and physical military standards as helping to solve this issue. The Army launched its Future Soldier Preparatory Course in August 2022. The Navy began its own program, the Future Sailor Preparatory Course, in April 2023.
Enticements, such as bonuses for recruiters who exceed their baseline enlistment requirement and promotions for young enlisted soldiers who successfully bring in recruits, also play a role.
Mark Cancian, a senior adviser in the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ defense and security department, said, “In part, I think you’re seeing the results of money that the Biden administration put in, and Congress too, the incentives are greater.”
But, he added, “I think that, to be honest, Hegseth, I think he has excited a certain part of the American society.”
He noted that, ultimately, there isn't enough data yet to know the impact Trump and Hegseth have had on military recruitment.
Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth listens as President Donald Trump meets with Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre during a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office of the White House, Thursday, April 24, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
