Military processing stations are slimming down on the number of applicants they review with a prescreening process that flags any of 28 medical conditions that are generally considered disqualifying for service.
U.S. Military Entrance Processing Command, MEPCOM, officials announced Monday that they are implementing a new policy that cuts applicants earlier in the recruiting process. If an applicant has at least one of 28 identified medical conditions, they will not be invited for a physical exam with a doctor, which is required before joining the service.
“It is a process change that stops processing for applicants with one or more specific disqualifying conditions that have been identified by service waiver authorities as unlikely to be waived,” Marshall Smith, a spokesperson for MEPCOM told Task & Purpose.
The list of 28 medical issues includes health conditions that are either relatively common across certain segments of the U.S. population or are on the rise in some instances. It includes sickle cell disease, which disproportionately affects African Americans, peanut allergies, one of the most common food allergies across the U.S., and type I or II diabetes, which is on the rise among young Americans.
Other conditions that were deemed “unlikely to be waived” by the military branches include those with: cancer that is active or in remission for less than one year; Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis; eczema or psoriasis which have required medication within a year; a knee ligament rupture in the last year; stress fractures in the previous 6 months; cochlear implants or a pacemaker. The list also includes mental health conditions that required antipsychotic or mood stabilizers (like lithium) in the previous year, a history of two or more suicide attempts, or a diagnosis of Bipolar disorder I or II.
Kate Kuzminski, from the Center for New American Security, said the policy “doesn’t actually narrow the candidate pool, since anyone with the listed conditions would be disqualified from military service in the end.”
The process reduces the number of applicants and filters out those “who ultimately couldn’t serve regardless,” she said, adding that it’s “fairer to the candidates themselves, sparing them the false hope.”
MEPCOM officials said it would “reduce unnecessary medical evaluations” and allow recruiters to focus on applicants who are more likely to qualify for military service.
“Instead of doing complete processing and then handing it to the waiver authority, we’ve created a trigger on the front end for these specific conditions that requires additional service sign-off, because all services agreed that they are unlikely to be waived on the back end,” said Army Col. Megan McKinnon, the USMEPCOM command surgeon, in a MEPCOM release.
“The list of conditions isn’t surprising; the services always have to weigh the risks associated with either the presence of a condition or the lack of the ability to treat a condition on the battlefield when considering waivers, and they also have to weigh the potential costs associated with any given medical condition,” Kuzminski said.
MEPS officials said the policy “complements” recent recruiting changes, including a July 2025 memo from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth which identified 13 health conditions that were labeled as disqualifying from military service and 13 others that require a waiver from the Army, Air Force, or Navy secretaries. Some of the waiverable conditions include ostomy, a history of kidney disease requiring dialysis, chronic liver failure, or a history of mood disorders like schizophrenia, delusions, or unspecified psychoses.
The majority of the MEPS list released Monday is different from the conditions in Hegseth’s July memo, though a handful address similar issues, like heart conditions or a history of suicide attempts.
The majority of applicants flagged under one of the 28 conditions will not continue through the recruiting process, “except in rare cases as approved by the service waiver authority,” officials said in the release. “Recruiters will work with their chains of command to determine whether to pursue processing for applicants with [conditions unlikely to be waived].”
The policy also comes as processing stations have implemented new prescreening methods and AI tools to review applicant health records, according to a 2025 MEPCOM report. Officials said in the report that these pre-screening tools can weed out applicants earlier in the recruiting process to move faster and save resources for those who are more likely to qualify for service. In fiscal year 2025, nearly half a million applicants were pre-screened.
