However, August of last year, three months prior to the election, saw a higher number of recruits than in December – 7,415 recruits compared to the 5,877 in December. January 2025 still has not surpassed August 2024 for the highest monthly count of the past year.
In other words, the positive recruiting trend began before the election.
Army recruiting is up, but data show trend began before the election, former Army official says.
"Army's recruiting started getting better much earlier. We really started seeing the numbers, the monthly numbers, go up in February of 2024. We were seeing sort of in the high 5000 contracts per month, and that accelerated, you know, into the spring all the way into August, when the Army really hit a peak."
Starting in October 2023, the Army put 1,200 more recruiters in the field. By September 2024, before the election, the Army announced it had exceeded its recruiting goals.
The groundwork was laid that October when Wormuth and Gen. Randy George, the Army chief, began a sweeping initiative to help those who did not meet academic standards or fitness requirements. The six-week pre-boot camp, called the Future Soldier Prep Course, helps lower-performing recruits meet enlistment standards.
They also moved away from just recruiting in high schools to posting on job message boards. Recruiters got trained by Amazon, Wells Fargo and other industry leaders in talent acquisition. Additionally, the Army brought back the "Be All That You Can Be" branding campaign from the 1980s.
"We've been selecting soldiers who have personalities that are more suited to recruiting. We improved our marketing very dramatically in terms of being very data driven and very targeted. And then, of course, the future Soldier Prep course, which the Army established some time ago, has been a big success and has accounted last year for about 25% of the new recruits that came in," Wormuth said. "If you look at our Army ads, we show young people, you know, jumping out of helicopters. We show kids doing, you know, night patrols in the jungle."
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'MAGA junkie' breaks into tears after DOGE eliminates her job: 'I expected better'
A self-described "MAGA junkie" from West Virginia tearfully recanted her vote for Donald Trump after her job was eliminated by the Department of Government Efficiency.
Jennifer Piggott, of Parkersburg, told CNN that she once flew a Trump flag outside her house in Wood County, where 70 percent of voters backed the president, but the DOGE team he established at billionaire backer Elon Musk's behest cut her job along with more 100 others at the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Fiscal Service.
"We had the flag, I had the shirt – I was a MAGA junkie," Piggott told CNN.
Piggott's job was eliminated when DOGE gutted the bureau where she was classified as a probationary civil service worker.
"I cried," she said, tearing up again. "It’s scary, you know, it’s a really scary thing, and I was embarrassed."
DOGE cut Piggott and her colleagues over alleged poor performance, but she told CNN that she'd received "the highest rating" possible on a job review three weeks before she was fired, and she now regrets voting for Trump a third time.
“I’m not sure that I would have [voted for Trump], and the way that it’s been done," she said. "I’m for balancing the budget, that type of thing, but not, not in this context, it’s just not right."
A federal appeals court judge has refused to pause a ruling that requires the administration to reinstate more than 17,000 workers who lost their jobs across six agencies, but that's little consolation to Piggott, who said she has been targeted with vandalism and death threats since speaking out about the cuts.
"I expected better from [Trump], I really did," she said. "I expected that you would do what was right and cut waste and fraud and all of those things that you promised us before we elected you in office, but you're not doing that. You're creating a disaster, and I don't know what America is going to look like if this continues."
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