Senior members of the military command that approves hopeful recruits as fit for service say they cannot hire enough civilian workers to operate its medical exam facilities at full capacity.
Military Entrance Processing Command, known as MEPCOM, is the medical and testing screening authority for the tens of thousands of people who enter the military each year.
Four MEPCOM officials with direct knowledge of staffing levels told Business Insider that unless it can ramp up civilian hiring soon, some locations could fail to meet goals for processing new military recruits over the next year. This could trigger a breakdown in a crucial part of military recruiting, they said.
One senior MEPCOM official compared the command’s hiring predicament to a hurricane warning.
The command can get by with current staffing levels, they said, but the “lethargically slow” pace of hiring risks a critical shortfall of recruit processing staff within five or six months.
A looming worry
At MEPCOM’s outposts across the US, young people who want to become military recruits, known as “applicants,” undergo an academic test and a battery of physical exams to determine whether they are fit for service. The command processed over 300,000 medical exams alone last year.
Twenty of the military command’s 65 stations have been forced to “reduce capacity,” the number of total applicants they can process weekly, due to staff shortages, said one of the officials with direct knowledge. Those reductions don’t signal immediate emergencies since not all locations reach maximum capacity every week. But, “there’s certain locations that are at very high risk right now” of reaching emergency status within the next year, he said.
Two sources with direct knowledge of recruiting efforts in one major US city told Business Insider that staffing levels have forced them to decrease the number of prospective recruits that they process daily by 20%. Each said their location is experiencing normal turnover but not receiving new hires to replace those who leave.
President Donald Trump’s federal hiring freeze is partly to blame. MEPCOM has an exemption to hire essential workers, but the additional approvals needed for those hires have created a bureaucratic quagmire. In some cases, the approval process has delayed hires by as much as six months, sources said.
“The Department of Defense is reorganizing and optimizing its workforce to best support its top priorities and meet its mission, now and in the future as part of its workforce optimization initiatives,” a command spokesperson said in an emailed statement to Business Insider that also referenced MEPCOM’s exemption from the hiring freeze for essential workers.
The number of applicants a facility can process fluctuates periodically, the statement said, which was supported by sources who spoke to Business Insider.
If the current staffing attrition rate continues, more locations will be forced to lower the number of applicants they can screen daily, a senior official said. Over the longer term, this could impact the rate of military recruitment.
The services have recently started to turn the corner on a yearslong recruiting crisis. Until this year, the Army and Navy, and to a lesser extent, the Air Force, have fallen thousands of recruits short for the past few years. The Pentagon has touted the recent higher recruiting numbers as evidence of a patriotic “Trump Bump,” though evidence suggests it’s a mix of factors.
‘Do it with less resources’
Sources told Business Insider that major metropolitan MEPCOM locations have a notoriously hard time retaining staff, including administrators who oversee applicant histories and processing, IT workers, and medical technicians. High costs of living and low government salaries lead to high turnover, forcing MEPCOM to rely on a steady stream of new hires, they said.
These issues have been exacerbated, in part, by the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program — essentially a buyout that has also been offered to civilian workers. To date, 15,000 civilian workers within the Army have taken the buyout, an Army spokesperson told BI. Though MEPCOM supports all services, it is managed by the Army.
The wobbly staffing comes at a time when MEPCOM’s work volume has ballooned, rising annually by tens of thousands. In 2022, they processed 215,000 medical exams alone, another senior official said. Two years later, it was 312,000. The command has already exceeded that number in the first half of 2025.
Of the 65 MEPCOM locations, fewer than 20 process over half of all the nation’s applicants, a senior official said. Some of those are locations hardest hit by hiring challenges, he added, speaking from direct knowledge.
“There’s a pressure on one side to increase efficiency processing applicants at the MEPS, which requires resources to do that,” the official said, referring to local MEPCOM facilities known as Military Entrance Processing Stations, or MEPS. “Keep the numbers flowing, keep things efficient in terms of when the applicants are being processed,” he added. “But at the same time, do it with less resources.”
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