A federal judge on March 20 issued an order blocking the Trump administration’s media access policy at the Pentagon following a lawsuit filed by The New York Times. The Department of War had tightened media access rules in September 2025, citing concerns that reporters were moving freely through secure areas of the Pentagon.
Officials said the changes were intended to protect national security, the Epoch Times reported. Under the policy, efforts by reporters to seek non-public information from department personnel or encourage employees to violate the law were described as falling outside the scope of protected newsgathering.
The rules also allowed officials to deny or revoke press credentials if a journalist was deemed to pose a safety or security risk. Most members of the Pentagon press corps declined to sign an acknowledgment of the updated policy and subsequently lost their press credentials, the outlet added.
The New York Times sued in December, arguing that the policy violated the Constitution’s First Amendment by restricting “journalists’ ability to do what journalists have always done—ask questions of government employees and gather information to report stories that take the public beyond official pronouncements.”
U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman, a Clinton appointee, actually wrote in his Friday ruling that the nation’s founder “believed that the nation’s security requires a free press and an informed people and that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech.”
“That principle has preserved the nation’s security for almost 250 years. It must not be abandoned now,” he wrote without actually addressing the legal and constitutional issue at hand: Whether the War Dept. has the authority to issue the rules.
The judge, who argued that the media restrictions infringed upon the Fifth Amendment, reiterated a point he made in open court. He stated that the federal government has previously been dishonest in its communications with the public regarding military matters.
“We’ve been through, in my lifetime, you know, the Vietnam War, where the public, I think it’s fair to say, was lied to about a lot of things. We’ve been through 9/11. We’ve been through the Kuwait situation, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay,” he said, per the Epoch Times.
The judge noted that the department was unable to demonstrate any harm that would result from the cancellation of the policy. He also described the policy as vague, stating that it “fails to provide fair notice of what routine, lawful journalistic practices will result in the detail, suspension, or revocation” of a press pass.
The policy’s “true purpose and practical effect,” he claimed, was “to weed out disfavored journalists—those who were not, in the Department’s view, ‘on board and willing to serve,’—and replace them with news entities that are.”
Friedman issued a permanent injunction, preventing the department from enforcing the contested restrictions. The judge also ordered the department to reinstate the credentials of six reporters and to submit a status report to the court by March 27, confirming compliance with the order. It’s not clear whether the Trump administration will appeal the ruling, but that seems likely.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced earlier this month that the Pentagon will cancel all military attendance at a group of elite universities beginning with the 2026–27 academic year, as part of a broader reshaping of military education policy, Defense Department officials said.
In a video posted on social media, Hegseth said the policy would apply to institutions that have traditionally hosted U.S. military officers for graduate and professional education, including Princeton University, Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Brown University, and Yale University.
“Today, just like we did with Harvard, I am ordering the complete and immediate cancellation of all Department of War attendance at institutions like Princeton, Columbia, MIT, Brown, Yale, and many others, starting next academic year, 2026-2027,” Hegseth said.
“We cannot and will not continue to send our most capable officers, senior officers, into graduate programs that undermine the very values they have sworn to uphold,” he added.