Pentagon to screen troops 30 and older for testosterone deficiency

Pete Hegseth ordered the Pentagon on July 15, 2026, to begin annual testosterone-deficiency screening for service members age 30 and older, folding the test into the military’s periodic health assessment. Troops under 30 will be able to request the screening voluntarily, and Hegseth said any treatment would also be voluntary, including testosterone replacement therapy.

The policy applies to women as well as men, a detail that immediately sharpened questions about how the program will work in practice and what medical evidence supports it. The Pentagon did not publicly explain what research or academic studies underpinned the move, and it did not say whether female troops in perimenopause would be evaluated for estrogen-based therapy.

Hegseth framed the change as a readiness measure, saying troops need the right testosterone levels to operate at their “absolute best” and preserve a “biological foundation” for fighting. The announcement fits his effort to cast himself as a leader aligned with a harder-edged view of military fitness and masculinity, but it also pushes the department into contested medical territory.

The Endocrine Society has long advised against diagnosing androgen deficiency syndrome in healthy women, saying there is no well-defined syndrome and that data linking androgen levels to specific symptoms are unavailable. The American Urological Association’s guidance on testosterone deficiency, by contrast, focuses on evaluating and managing patients who have signs and symptoms along with measured low testosterone. That divide leaves the Pentagon facing a question at the center of the new screening policy: whether a broad annual test can meaningfully improve force health and performance, or whether it simply casts a wider net over a condition medicine has defined much more narrowly.

The move also lands amid a broader shift inside the Trump administration and the Pentagon. Politico reported that Hegseth rolled out new combat-role standards last September that required members to meet a “male standard” regardless of gender. Politico also reported that the Trump administration repealed a Biden executive order allowing transgender troops to serve on the first day of Trump’s second term in 2025.

Taken together, the testosterone screening plan extends a pattern already visible in Hegseth’s personnel and readiness agenda: a series of policies that recast military fitness through a more rigid lens of biology, with consequences for women service members, privacy, follow-up care and the line between medical screening and cultural signaling.