Thousands of potential applicants -- including high school students -- may face challenges in taking the military's entrance exam after a pair of programs that put testers in high schools and remote testing sites were halted last week.
Marshall Smith, a spokesman for Military Entrance Processing Command, on Wednesday confirmed the halt to the programs that provided testing to about 65,000 applicants at remote locations last year. The shuttering could close off a key pool of recruits just as the services prepare for the summer and the busiest time of the year for recruiting.
Military.com on Tuesday first reported that the command was shutting down its Military Entrance Testing program, which is designed to aid recruiting by offering the entrance exam, known as the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, or ASVAB, to potential recruits at closer locations and more convenient hours.
Military.com spoke with a tester with the program from a state in the Deep South who was furloughed last week, and they were offered anonymity in order to share their experiences freely, without fear of retribution.
The tester's bosses told them ahead of the halt to the programs that they and their coworkers were all "critical to the mission" and that the office was "working for exemptions."
"Then I went to work on Thursday, and 17 minutes prior to the conclusion of my shift, I was suspended," they said.
Military recruiters are able to offer practice or abbreviated versions of the test at recruiting stations, but the official exam has to be conducted in a formal test-taking environment run by testers like the one who spoke with Military.com.
"We were testing over 1,000 people a month" and, in 2024, the tester said they tested "over 12,000 high school applicants within our region, which exceeded our goal."
When first asked about the halt to testing services, officials for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth initially referred Military.com to a memo written by Darin Selnick, who is performing the duties of under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, that was issued March 5 and restricted almost all civilian travel on government credit cards.
On Wednesday, officials in Hegseth's office still had no comment on the policy or its impacts on the testing programs aside from referring back to the travel memo.
Without details from the Pentagon, the full scope of the testing program shutdown is still unknown. But it comes at a critical time for military recruiting when all the services are trying to hold on to the gains they've made in dealing with serious shortfalls in recruiting over the last several years.
"We're right around the corner from the summer, and in the summer we get what you call the summer surge," the tester explained, adding that it's the time in the year when "everybody's out of school, everybody has a chance to take the test, everybody has a chance to go to basic training."
"For the services to meet their mission ... they require all the bodies that we had manning all these stations," they added.
The ASVAB is a critical, early step in that process because it determines a potential recruit's job opportunities in the military, their level of interest, and how valuable they are to any one service.
It's also a key tool in getting high school students who may not be otherwise interested in military service to consider enlistment without the need for them to actually approach a recruiter.
The tester told Military.com that he and his colleagues didn't use government charge cards, which have also been capped at $1 by the Pentagon as President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk slash the department and other government agencies. They used their own cars and received reimbursement for mileage through vouchers.
Meanwhile, the military services appeared surprised and unaware of the move.
Despite an official announcement of the testing program's halt on Friday, none of the recruiting commands were able on Wednesday to provide a statement on the effects.
The silence comes just weeks after the services all proudly touted their successes in meeting their annual recruiting goals and Hegseth cheered those successes on social media.
Smith, the Military Entrance Processing Command spokesman, said that high school and remote site testing was halted, but the locations that process would-be military recruits -- Military Entrance Processing Stations, or MEPS -- would still be offering the test.
However, relying on those sites presents issues.
The first is that, while there are more than 60 MEPS locations across the country, they are mostly located in major cities or at large military installations, which means there are large portions of the country without one close by.
States like Kansas or Wyoming, for example, just don't have a MEPS location.
Large states like Montana, Alaska and Colorado have a single location, which means a recruit could be required to drive hours just to take an exam that is only one of the first steps in their enlistment.
Even more populous states like Florida, which has three MEPS stations, has cities that are hours away from a location. Would-be recruits in U.S. territories like Guam or American Samoa would have to fly for hours to a MEPS location to take the test.
That introduces a major hardship at a time when military leaders have actively tried to make enlisting as easy as possible in an effort to keep every possible applicant.
Last year, the Navy's top personnel boss revealed that just 10% of scheduled appointments with recruiters converted into sailors entering the delayed-entry program or boot camp after about five months.
Another issue with the halt to high school and remote testing is volume.
Smith said that, in the last year, remote sites across the country proctored around 65,000 tests while "the vast majority of the tests" -- around a million -- were given at MEPS locations that, according to him, "are open for business .... seeing applicants and no real impact on getting our applicants into uniform."
However, it's not clear whether all MEPS locations will be able to handle the increased volume of recruits in the long term.
The tester told Military.com that, in their state, the testing responsibilities come down to a handful of employees at their one MEPS site -- employees who also have to shoulder the burden of other tasks besides just administering exams.
"It's a real tedious process that you need your personnel to handle the volume [of work] which is required to man our forces," they said.
The tester explained that, in addition to offering the tests, employees are required to do rigorous checks to make sure that the data that is being entered into the military databases is accurate and complete.
"You have to make sure their demographic information is correct, you have to make sure that education is correct," they said. "You have to make sure that the applicant that comes in, they're taking all their special tests because if they don't take a special test … they have to come back, and this further delays the system."
Plus, testing at remote locations and high schools was just easier on applicants in some cases.
The tester told Military.com that the staff in their state ran nearly one dozen stations that would administer exams throughout the day.
"We're opening up at 0530 and closing down at 1930 at night," they said. "It's easy to see how we test in the hundreds if not thousands easy, especially if you're doing Monday through Friday minus your federal holidays."
Meanwhile, at high schools, one testing session could mean administering the ASVAB to more than a hundred people in one sitting with almost no effort required on the part of the student.
"How are you going to test over 12,000-plus high school applicants if you no longer are allowed to go to those high schools?" the tester said.
In the past, military officials regularly laid some of the blame for their recruitment struggles on COVID-19 pandemic-era policies that forced them to retreat from places like high schools, thus denying them an opportunity to speak with a key recruiting pool.
The path forward for both programs remains unclear and, while there has been silence from leaders in the military and the Pentagon, it appears that on the ground, the urgency is real.
Smith told Military.com that officials were looking at "alternative means" to restart the programs, including using active-duty troops instead of civilian employees.
"Our managers understand what's at risk, and they're trying to get us back," the tester said. "We even had some people volunteering to keep the sites open."
In the meantime, testers like the one who spoke to Military.com aren't fired, but they aren't working either at a time when scrutiny on allegedly underperforming government employees is at an all-time high.
Musk, the purported head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, recently succeeded in having agency leaders, including Hegseth, mandate that all employees send weekly emails of the top five things they accomplished each week to a centralized email account.
"Now we sit at home and ... we still have to send in our weekly 'Top Five' emails," the tester said.
Related: Hegseth Ban on Travel Forces Closures, Reduced Hours at Military Entrance Exam Sites
