Everything Wrong with Scouting America (And What to Do About It)
A frank assessment of an organization worth saving
Visit a well-run Scout troop on a campout and you will see something genuinely hard to find anywhere else: ten-year-olds learning to cook over a fire, teenagers navigating backcountry trails with nothing but a compass and a topo map, kids who couldn’t look an adult in the eye when they joined standing up two years later in front of a Board of Review to talk about who they are and who they intend to become. That is real. That works. That is worth defending.
The organization delivering that experience is in serious trouble, and very little of the trouble is accidental. Scouting America, formerly known as the Boy Scouts of America, is an institution with a genuine program that produces measurable results, wrapped inside a national structure that has spent decades making decisions that would embarrass a community college student government. The people at the troop and pack level are largely excellent. The program works when it is delivered well. The problem is everything sitting above the unit level, and some things that sit inside it.
This is not written in celebration. It is written in concern, and in the belief that the organization is worth fixing because what it does, when it does it right, matters. The alternative to honest diagnosis is continued decline. Scouting America is already at roughly 1.25 percent market penetration of American youth — the lowest since around 1923. You do not recover from that by publishing a newsletter.
We are going to cover what the organization gets right, then what it has gotten catastrophically wrong, and then what a realistic path forward looks like. The path forward is not complicated. It requires honesty and a willingness to be competent. Those two things have been in short supply at the national level for a while.
Part One: What Scouting Actually Gets Right
Before anyone accuses this article of being an attack piece, let us establish the record of genuine accomplishment. This is important not as a formality but because the case for fixing Scouting rests on the premise that there is something worth fixing. There is.
The Program Works When It Is Delivered Properly
The core Scouting program is not complicated. Young people join small groups. They learn practical skills. They spend time outdoors. They plan and execute activities with increasing levels of independence. They serve their communities. They are asked to live according to a stated set of values. Over time, through deliberate repetition and escalating challenge, they develop competence, confidence, and character.
Research has repeatedly confirmed that this works. A Baylor University study found that Eagle Scouts were significantly more likely than both non-Scout peers and non-Eagle Scouts to engage in civic activities, volunteer regularly, donate to charitable causes, and demonstrate stronger character development across multiple dimensions. A 2026 Harris Poll survey of more than 3,000 American adults, commissioned by Scouting America, found that Eagle Scouts report roughly twice lower rates of loneliness than their non-Scout peers, along with significantly higher well-being, purpose, and leadership capability. The organization released this study noting it was its first major research effort in nearly fifteen years, which is its own problem we will get to later, but the findings themselves are credible and consistent with prior research.
The mechanism for these outcomes is not mysterious. When a young person is given genuine responsibility, exposed to nature, asked to develop real skills, and held to real standards within a supportive community of peers and adult mentors, that person tends to develop in positive ways. This is not a revolutionary insight. It is what Boy Scouts founder Robert Baden-Powell described in 1908, and it remains true. The genius of Scouting is that it systematized something that used to happen organically in communities that no longer exist in the same form.
The Eagle Scout Rank Is a Credential That Holds Real Weight
In a culture where credentials are often inflated to the point of meaninglessness, the Eagle Scout rank retains genuine signal value. Earning Eagle Scout requires sustained effort over years, not a weekend certification course. It requires demonstrated leadership in the patrol, demonstrated service to the community, and successful completion of an independent service project that must be planned, funded, organized, and executed by the Scout with adult support but not adult management.
Employers still recognize it. Military recruiters give Eagle Scouts an enlistment bump in pay grade. College admissions offices still notice it. The reason for all of this is simple: the rank cannot be faked very easily. You either did the work or you did not. The records exist. The project happened. Other people can verify it. In an era of credentialing theater, that matters.
A 2026 Harris Poll report found that Eagle Scouts were significantly more likely to serve in the Armed Forces than the general population, confirming what the Pentagon has long recognized. The rank consistently produces people who go on to contribute. Neil Armstrong earned Eagle Scout. Gerald Ford earned Eagle Scout. Steven Spielberg earned Eagle Scout. Ross Perot earned Eagle Scout. The list goes on for a very long time. That is not coincidence; it is a result.
The Outdoor Access Is Irreplaceable
Scouting America operates an infrastructure of outdoor access that, at its best, is genuinely irreplaceable. Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico covers more than 140,000 acres of backcountry. The Northern Tier High Adventure base operates in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Florida Sea Base operates in the Florida Keys and the Bahamas. The Summit Bechtel Reserve in West Virginia, whatever its financial problems, sits on over 10,000 acres of the New River Gorge and offers legitimate outdoor adventure at scale.
Below the national level, local councils operate summer camps across the country that give youth access to land, lakes, ranges, and facilities that most families could not afford or access independently. A scout from a low-income urban family can attend a week-long summer camp and learn archery, swimming, first aid, and wilderness skills on land that most wealthy adults never visit. That is real access, and it represents an asset that took generations to build and would take generations to replace.
The Values Framework Is Coherent and Portable
The Scout Oath and Scout Law are not complicated. Be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. Do your duty to God and country. Help other people at all times. Keep yourself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.
You can find objections to the specific wording of almost any of those statements, and people have. But as a portable, memorizable ethical framework for young people, it functions. Scouts who have been in the program for any length of time can usually tell you what the Scout Law says without looking it up. More to the point, they have been asked to apply it in practice, not just recite it. That habit of checking behavior against stated values is, by itself, a useful life skill.
Scouting also provides something that almost no other structured youth activity offers: a multi-year mentorship relationship between trained adult volunteers and young people in a non-transactional context. Most adult-youth interactions in modern life are either family (complex, high-stakes, emotionally loaded) or institutional (coaches who need you to perform, teachers who need you to pass tests). Scouting adults are there for the program. The relationship is built on shared activity and mutual respect rather than performance outcomes. A kid who is struggling in school and fighting with his parents can go to a Scout meeting and be known by adults who are glad to see him for reasons unrelated to his GPA. That is not nothing. That is actually quite a lot.
The Patrol Method Is Genuinely Sophisticated Pedagogy
At the heart of Scouts BSA is the Patrol Method. Scouts are organized into small groups of six to eight young people led by a youth patrol leader, not an adult. The patrol plans its own activities, cooks its own food, and operates as a functional unit. The Scoutmaster and adult committee stay in the background, available but not in charge of the day-to-day program.
This is a remarkably mature model of youth development. Most adult-led youth programs keep adults in control precisely because it is easier and less chaotic. The Patrol Method accepts short-term inefficiency in exchange for long-term development. A patrol leader who makes a bad call and learns from it in the field develops judgment. A patrol leader who watches an adult make all the calls learns to wait for adults to make decisions. Scouting chose the harder model and it is right.
The problem is that the Patrol Method is frequently abandoned in practice because it requires adults to exercise patience and restraint that many find difficult. When this happens, the program degrades immediately. This is a training and culture problem, not a structural one, and it is fixable. But it requires someone to care about fixing it.
Part Two: What Scouting America Has Done Wrong
This is the longer section.
The Sexual Abuse Crisis: A Systemic Moral Failure Hiding Behind Process Language
Let us start with the one that cannot be minimized or contextualized away. The Boy Scouts of America maintained internal records of adult leaders accused of sexual abuse that the organization called its “Ineligible Volunteer Files,” which were sometimes referred to in the press and public consciousness by a more direct name: the “perversion files.” These files stretched back decades. They documented accusations. They were not always shared with law enforcement. The organization, in many documented cases, quietly removed accused leaders from one unit without reporting them to police, a practice that allowed abuse to continue elsewhere.
The scale of what ultimately came to light is staggering. More than 82,000 individuals filed claims of childhood sexual abuse under the BSA’s bankruptcy proceedings. The organization filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020. A $2.46 billion settlement fund was ultimately approved by bankruptcy courts and went into effect in 2023. Initial payments of $3,500 went to roughly 7,000 survivors who selected expedited disbursement. As of mid-2025, per Wall Street Journal reporting, the total cost of compensating survivors had exceeded $7 billion — more than twice the original settlement estimate — as insurance litigation continued. Non-settling insurers had been billed nearly $7 billion by June 2025, with no payments received from them as of that date.
The individual settlement amounts have been modest for most claimants. As of early 2025, approximately 21,547 claims had been determined, with roughly $164 million paid to about 22,605 survivors. For many survivors, the process has been additionally traumatic — requiring detailed questionnaires, submission of evidence, and retracing abuse they spent decades trying to leave behind. A subset of 144 survivors actively opposed the settlement, arguing it unlawfully shielded non-bankrupt entities including local councils and chartering churches from future liability.
The organization accumulated approximately $329 million in debt by the time of its 2024 audited statements. It sold camps, art, real estate, and equipment to fund the settlement trust. Local councils were required to contribute at least $515 million. Properties that generations of Scouts camped on were sold to satisfy judgments.
The organizational culture that allowed this to happen for so long was not an accident. It was the predictable output of a leadership structure that valued institutional reputation over accountability, that treated volunteering access to children as a management problem rather than a public safety obligation, and that believed quiet removal was a sufficient response to credible abuse allegations. The people who made those decisions were not monsters in most cases. They were administrators applying an institutional logic that prioritized the organization’s public image. That is what makes it instructive. The failure was structural.
It is worth saying plainly: the organization has implemented significant reforms. Mandatory background checks exist now. Youth Protection Training/Safeguarding Youth Training is required for all registered adult volunteers, not optional. Two-deep leadership requirements are heavily enforced. Most of these reforms arrived after public pressure and legal exposure, not before. But they exist, and they are meaningful.
What has not been said plainly enough, at the national level, is: individual board members, council executives, and professional staff who made specific decisions to not report abuse to law enforcement bear responsibility that cannot be managed away through bankruptcy proceedings. Legal liability has been resolved. Moral accountability is a separate matter. That distinction has not been confronted directly. It should be.
The Membership Collapse
At its peak in 1972, the BSA enrolled about 6.5 million young people. As recently as 1998, membership stood at roughly 4.8 million. By the end of 2024, the organization had roughly 1.1 million members, by its own count — and that number was inflated by accounting adjustments that will be discussed shortly. Market penetration of eligible youth is approximately 1.25 percent. That is a number that warrants serious reflection.
The organization and its defenders have attributed this decline to a list of external factors: smartphones, overscheduled families, competing youth sports, cultural changes, the pandemic. These factors are real. They affect every youth organization. They do not explain why Scouting has declined more steeply and more persistently than comparable programs. Girl Scouts, while also facing challenges, has not experienced the same magnitude of collapse. International Scout organizations in many comparable countries have maintained or grown their programs. The external environment is a partial explanation. It is not a sufficient one.
The membership methodology itself has been manipulated. In August 2023, BSA switched from a fixed-membership scheme, where membership periods were tied to calendar-year unit renewal cycles, to a rolling-membership scheme, where individual memberships expire twelve months after joining. This change had administrative merit but created accounting confusion that the organization exploited. Under the rolling scheme, members who quit shortly after joining in fall 2023 remained on the membership rolls through much of 2024 because their twelve-month membership periods had not expired. In October 2024, BSA also quietly extended the “lapsed member” grace period from two months to three months, meaning people who let their memberships expire were counted as members for an additional month. Researchers and independent Scouting observers estimated that as many as 29,000 Scouts included in the December 2024 count would not have been included under the prior counting methodology.
This is what happens when an organization cares more about the number than about what the number measures. You can massage a membership count. You cannot massage whether a child is actually participating in a program that serves them.
The Mormon Church’s departure deserves specific attention because of its scale. For over a century, beginning in 1913, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was BSA’s largest chartered organization. The relationship provided not just members but volunteer leadership, community infrastructure, and cultural legitimacy within a substantial and well-organized community. When the BSA opened Scouts BSA to girls in 2019, the Mormon Church withdrew its entire program participation, ending an association that had produced millions of Scouts and Eagle Scouts. The immediate membership impact was measured in hundreds of thousands. There is no replacement relationship of similar scale on the horizon.
The pandemic accelerated losses already in progress. From 2019 to 2020 alone, membership fell roughly 43 percent, from about 1.97 million to around 1.12 million. Much of this was pandemic-related unit suspension. Much of it was not. Units that went dormant in 2020 often did not come back in 2021 or 2022. The reasons were familiar: adult volunteers who stepped back during the pandemic found other uses for their time and did not return, programs that went on pause lost their rosters, and an organization that depends on active volunteer labor discovered that passive participation is not a substitute.
The decline is not multi-causal in a way that distributes blame evenly across uncontrollable factors. The numbers have been going the wrong direction, with brief exceptions, for most of the last fifty years. The organization has not strung together a sustained multi-year membership recovery in a quarter century. At some point, the most honest explanation is that the product delivery and organizational management are not good enough.
The Debt at the Summit
The Summit Bechtel Family National Scout Reserve in West Virginia is a genuinely spectacular piece of land. Over 10,000 acres adjacent to the New River Gorge, it has whitewater rafting, ziplines, rock climbing, mountain biking, a skate park, shooting sports ranges, and a stadium capable of accommodating tens of thousands. It is impressive. It is also a financial catastrophe.
The decision to build the Summit was made in the mid-2000s by national BSA leadership that was under political pressure related to the organization’s discriminatory membership policies and wanted an alternative to holding National Jamborees at Fort A.P. Hill, a federal military installation where the government’s equal access policies created ongoing tension with BSA’s exclusion of gay members. BSA spent roughly $350 million developing the property, with significant philanthropic support from the Bechtel Foundation ($50 million), Jim Justice ($25 million, prior to his governorship and senatorial career), CONSOL Energy, and others.
The project made sense as a Jamboree site. As a year-round high adventure base generating revenue sufficient to justify its operating costs and debt service, it has not delivered. The facility was designed for a membership that no longer exists at the scale that was projected. In 2023, the Jamboree drew about 15,000 participants — well below expectations and substantially below the 40,000-plus attendance of the 2013 inaugural event. BSA’s 2024 audited statements carried roughly $186 million in bonds financing the Summit, and per analysis of those statements, the facility in 2023 operated at approximately 97 percent below utilization expectations.
97 percent below expectations. That is not a shortfall. That is a facility that is not functioning as planned by nearly any plausible definition of the word “functioning.”
When the Pentagon, under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, threatened to withdraw military support for the Jamboree in 2025, this was not only an ideological dispute. The military has provided logistical support, medical assets, and personnel to Jamborees since 1937. Without that support, the cost and complexity of operating a 15,000-person event in a remote location increases substantially. BSA’s response to the Pentagon’s pressure will be discussed in more detail in the section on political decisions, but the infrastructure dependency itself reflects a financial vulnerability that national leadership created and has not resolved.
Building a world-class outdoor facility sized for 40,000 when you serve a declining membership base of one million, many of whom cannot afford to travel to West Virginia, is a planning failure of notable scale. The decision-makers who authorized this project held positions with titles and responsibilities. They are not anonymous forces of economic history.
The Compensation Problem: Who Gets Paid What
Scouting America is a nonprofit. That does not mean its leadership works for free. The organization’s IRS Form 990 filings show that its top compensation packages in recent years have reached and exceeded $500,000 annually for top national executives. The President/CEO has been compensated at over $521,000 per year, with at least one other executive role exceeding $544,000.
Against this backdrop, the average salary for a District Executive, the frontline professional employee responsible for recruiting volunteers, building unit strength, supporting program delivery, and fundraising in a geographic territory, ranges from roughly $40,000 to $50,000 per year. District Executives are asked to work evenings and weekends as a routine matter because volunteer meetings happen outside business hours. They are effectively on call around the clock. Employee reviews consistently describe a role defined by no work-life balance, constant pressure on fundraising and membership metrics, insufficient support from senior management, and high personal stress. One Indeed reviewer described the job as requiring twelve-hour days with no overtime pay for seasonal employees. Another described constant deadlines with insufficient resources and no clear path to advancement outside a narrow internal track.
Overall BSA salaries average somewhere between $37,000 and $45,000 depending on the data source, with the organization paying roughly 29 percent below the average for comparable nonprofits according to Salary.com analysis. The Glassdoor compensation satisfaction rating for Scouting America employees stands at 2.6 out of 5 stars, which is a polite way of saying that the people who work there feel they are being paid poorly for what they are being asked to do. Which they are.
This is not a minor HR issue. It is a mission-critical problem. Scouting America’s program delivery depends on an infrastructure of professional staff who support volunteers, who in turn serve youth. If the people who support volunteers are underpaid, overworked, and cycling through positions every two to three years, the quality and consistency of volunteer support degrades. Degraded volunteer support means degraded programs. Degraded programs means families don’t stay. Families who don’t stay become former members who do not recommend Scouting to their neighbors.
The turnover rate for District Executives is a number BSA does not publish prominently. Internal Scouting observers and employee reviewers consistently describe a pattern where new executives are expected to perform at full capacity with minimal training, are measured primarily on fundraising and recruitment numbers that may not reflect program quality, and are pressured out or choose to leave after two or three years. The institutional knowledge cost of this churn is immense and invisible on a balance sheet.
The wage disparity between national leadership and frontline staff is not unique to BSA among large nonprofits. But it is particularly stark for an organization that depends on local community trust, grassroots relationship-building, and sustained professional presence in individual communities. You cannot build community relationships from a distance. You cannot retain the professionals who build those relationships by paying them wages that qualify for SNAP in most major metropolitan areas.
The volunteer side of this equation is equally stressed. The unit-level volunteer is unpaid by definition. They contribute evenings, weekends, personal vehicle mileage, out-of-pocket program expenses, and frequently significant emotional labor managing complex group dynamics among children, parents, and fellow volunteers. The expectation placed on the volunteer Scoutmaster or Cubmaster is high: be present at every weekly or biweekly meeting, plan monthly outdoor activities, manage the advancement records, liaise with the district professional, participate in annual committee meetings, handle the recharter, attend volunteer training, and do all of this while holding a full-time job and managing a personal life. For a parent whose child is in the unit, the situation is somewhat natural because they are there anyway. For a volunteer without a child in the unit — often the most valuable volunteers because they are not distracted by their own child’s experience — the commitment is purely motivated by mission, and it is substantial.
Volunteer burnout is real, it is common, and it is predictable. A volunteer who takes on primary unit leadership responsibility without sufficient support, without a functioning unit committee to share the load, without adequate training, and without mentorship from more experienced leaders will burn out within three to five years. When they leave, the unit may close or may degrade to a low-quality holding pattern while waiting for another willing parent to step up.
BSA has known about volunteer burnout as a retention challenge for decades. The research commissioned in the study cited earlier from IUPUI found that volunteer recognition was a meaningful factor in retention — volunteers who received awards were 1.43 times more likely to renew their commitment than those who did not. This is a low-cost intervention that costs primarily attention and organizational follow-through, not money. The organization should implement systematic volunteer recognition at every level more consistently than it currently does, not because recognition is a substitute for support but because it signals to volunteers that their contribution is seen and valued.
The more substantial intervention is reducing administrative burden. Every hour a volunteer spends on paperwork is an hour not spent with Scouts. The recharter process, the advancement documentation requirements, the meeting attendance tracking, the unit financial reporting — all of these have legitimate purposes, but the aggregate burden is not calibrated to what a person giving their free time can sustain indefinitely.
The Structural Disconnect: National vs. Reality
Scouting America’s national organization operates from a campus in Irving, Texas. Between it and the actual Scout unit where an eleven-year-old is tying bowlines, there are at minimum four layers: the national organization, the regional structure, the local council, and the district. Each layer has staff, committees, volunteer leadership structures, communication channels, and paperwork requirements.
The unit-level volunteer is at the bottom of this stack. The unit-level volunteer is also the person who actually delivers the program. This person is typically a parent or community member who has agreed to give their personal time, on evenings and weekends, indefinitely, in exchange for a registration fee, mandatory training requirements, and the privilege of receiving guidance documents that can run to tens of thousands of words.
The BSA’s Guide to Advancement is, by independent analysis, over 100 pages long with five levels of subsections. Volunteers who want to properly administer the advancement program are expected to know and apply this document. The Guide to Safe Scouting, the Health and Safety material, the Charter and Bylaws, the administrative requirements of Scoutbook, the recharter process, the unit financial reporting requirements — each of these represents a legitimate program need, but the aggregate weight of documentation and compliance requirements is not calibrated to what an unpaid volunteer with a full-time job and a family can reasonably absorb.
At the national level, the organization is making decisions about program design, advancement requirements, policy, and organizational structure, and those decisions are mediated through several layers of professional bureaucracy before they reach the volunteer who is supposed to implement them. The feedback loop runs in both directions, at least in theory. In practice, unit-level volunteers have limited formal mechanisms to influence national policy. The organization removed chartered organizations as automatic voting members of local councils in October 2025, a change that, according to analysts covering BSA governance, further insulated the national structure from accountability to the community organizations that are supposed to deliver the program.
This governance structure produces the classic symptoms of institutional capture. The commissioned professional system — the term used for BSA’s career staff — develops its own incentive structures that may or may not align with program quality. Career advancement within BSA is tied to fundraising metrics, membership numbers, and internal relationships, not to whether the units in a given district are running high-quality character development programs. You get what you measure. BSA has been measuring the wrong things for a long time.
One consequence of this disconnect is program quality inconsistency that is nearly impossible to address systematically because it is invisible to national leadership. A Scout unit in one state with an outstanding Scoutmaster and a healthy committee can deliver a program that matches or exceeds the best youth programming available anywhere. A Scout unit in the next county with an untrained leader and no committee to speak of delivers something that is not really Scouting at all — it is kids meeting in a church basement twice a month while adults handle the paperwork. Both units appear in the membership count. Both recharter annually. The national organization cannot meaningfully distinguish them.
The CEO and Leadership Pipeline Problem
The history of BSA’s national CEO positions is a history of career insiders advancing through the ranks of a closed system, occasionally interrupted by external appointments that did not go particularly well. Wayne Brock, who served as CEO from 2012 to 2015, spent forty years in various BSA roles before ascending to the top position and presided over membership declines of approximately 16 percent. His compensation exceeded $1 million over the period. His most substantive achievement during his term was that he was in the position when the ban on gay leaders was finally ended, a change that was forced on the organization by national volunteer leadership rather than driven by the professional executive staff.
The pattern extends backward and forward. CEOs are evaluated on their ability to manage an enormously complex institutional structure and keep the organization from embarrassing itself in the press. The criteria for success do not appear to include measurable improvements in program quality, youth outcomes, or the development experience of unit-level volunteers. The organization has not had a CEO who emerged from a strong track record of program innovation or who came with a demonstrated ability to grow an organization in decline. It has had a series of capable institutional managers navigating an increasingly difficult situation while being paid at the top of the staff compensation range.
The absence of strong executive leadership creates a vacuum. Per independent Scouting analysts, special interest groups and ideologically motivated volunteers have historically filled this vacuum, using BSA’s governance structures to pursue agendas that have little to do with youth program quality and quite a lot to do with cultural politics. This is not a conspiracy. It is what happens when an institution with significant social and symbolic weight has weak leadership at the center.
Training Inadequacy
Walk into almost any outdoor retailer and ask for the most complex thing they sell. They will show you a GPS navigation system, or a technical harness, or a communications radio. They will provide training. There will be a manual, a demonstration, and probably a warranty.
Walk into a Scout troop as a brand-new Scoutmaster and ask what training you need to do. You will be pointed toward an online module called Scoutmaster Position-Specific Training, which is a self-directed e-learning course. You will need to take Introduction to Outdoor Leadership Skills if you plan to take Scouts camping. These courses are available and, in the case of the outdoor skills training, genuinely useful. But they are not sufficient preparation for managing a complex volunteer organization serving thirty or forty children, and the depth of follow-up training and mentorship available is highly variable depending on which council and district you happen to be in.
Wood Badge, BSA’s premier adult leadership training course, is a highly regarded program that simulates patrol leadership within a troop environment and applies adult leadership development principles to the Scouting context. It is typically a two-phase course spanning one weekend in the field and one follow-up period. It is also not required of most leaders, is offered infrequently by most councils, has a significant cost that some volunteers cannot afford, and reaches only a fraction of the registered adult volunteer base.
National Youth Leadership Training, which develops youth leaders in the Patrol Method, is similarly valuable and similarly under-resourced and under-attended relative to the number of units that could benefit from it.
The consequence is a vast discrepancy in leadership quality across units. The best Scout leaders are extraordinary. They have been doing this for years, they deeply understand the Patrol Method and its application, they run outdoor programs that challenge and develop youth in genuine ways, and they build communities that families are genuinely glad to be part of. These leaders exist. Many of them are in your community right now.
The average Scout leader is trying their best with insufficient preparation. They are a parent who stepped up when no one else would, who took the basic online training and learned the rest as they went, who runs meetings that are mostly organized but lack the outdoor adventure component that makes Scouting distinct, and who would do better if better support were available. This is not a criticism of those volunteers. It is a criticism of an organization that depends on them but provides insufficient structural support for their development.
The inadequate training investment at the volunteer level is particularly damaging because Scouting’s model is explicitly volunteer-led. The quality of the volunteer is the quality of the program. An investment in volunteer training is a direct investment in program quality. That this is not treated as the highest funding priority in the organization is evidence of misaligned organizational priorities.
The Political Zigzag
Scouting America has spent the past fifteen years making a series of major policy decisions in response to external political pressure, and then reversing or modifying those decisions in response to different external political pressure. The organization has presented each change as a principled response to evolving values or circumstances. The pattern, viewed in sequence, suggests an organization without a stable governing philosophy, reacting to whoever is applying the most immediate pressure.
In 2013, BSA ended its ban on gay youth members. In 2015, it ended its blanket ban on gay adult leaders, while allowing religiously chartered units to maintain the exclusion. In 2017, it announced it would accept transgender boys. In 2018, it opened Cub Scouts to girls. In 2019, it opened Scouts BSA to girls and renamed that program. In May 2024, it renamed the entire organization from the Boy Scouts of America to Scouting America, describing this as a continuation of its inclusion mission. The new name initializes to “SA” — common shorthand for sexual assault — and the organization, apparently aware of this, quietly prohibited use of the SA abbreviation on its official platforms while never publicly acknowledging the problem.
Then the political environment shifted. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, under the Trump administration, threatened to sever the Pentagon’s century-old partnership with Scouting unless the organization reversed its DEI initiatives and several of its inclusion policies. The military partnership matters considerably, given that it includes logistical support for the National Jamboree, Scout troop access to military installations worldwide, and an enlistment pay-grade benefit for Eagle Scouts who join the military. Faced with the potential loss of this support, BSA moved quickly. The organization discontinued the Citizenship in Society merit badge, introduced a new Military Service merit badge, agreed to implement a policy requiring members to be identified by biological sex at birth, and announced compliance with executive orders targeting DEI programs.
The Citizenship in Society merit badge had been introduced in 2021 as one of BSA’s responses to the racial justice conversations of 2020. It was a merit badge about diversity and equity. It was introduced after months of internal development. It was discontinued in a matter of weeks under political pressure. Neither the introduction nor the discontinuation was the result of a stable program philosophy applied consistently over time.
This is a specific kind of institutional cowardice. It is the cowardice of an organization that does not have clear principles about what it is and what it is for, and therefore responds to each pressure point by giving ground. An organization with a clear, stable mission can engage honestly with pressure from multiple directions and say: here is what we are, here is why, and here is what we will and will not change. BSA has not been able to do that because it does not appear to have a clear, stable mission that rises above a general desire to continue existing.
The membership and demographic consequences of these policy shifts deserve separate consideration from the policy merits. The Mormon Church’s withdrawal of roughly 440,000 members from BSA’s rolls in 2019, following the decision to admit girls into the flagship program, was the single largest membership loss in BSA history. Whether that decision was right is a separate question from whether the organization anticipated the membership impact and had a plan to replace it. The evidence suggests it did not have a plan. A 16,000-member net gain reported in 2024 as evidence of recovery needs to be measured against a loss of hundreds of thousands. The arithmetic is not favorable.
The relationship with the Pentagon reflects a broader pattern of political vulnerability. An organization that depends on federal facilities, military logistical support, and a pay-grade benefit for its Eagle Scout military pipeline is not in a strong negotiating position with any administration that decides to use that leverage. BSA has essentially allowed itself to become politically exposed on both ends: progressive critics attack it for being too slow, conservative critics attack it for being too fast. Neither side is a reliable institutional ally, and BSA’s pattern of responding to whichever voice is loudest means it consistently disappoints both.
The Program Structure Problem
Here is something that international peer organizations figured out decades ago and BSA has not implemented: age-appropriate program spans.
Scouts BSA, the flagship program, runs from ten-year-old fifth-graders through high-school seniors. No school system, sports league, or serious developmental program treats students leaving elementary school and students preparing to graduate as a single coherent audience with the same program needs. BSA does. The Scout who joins as a ten-year-old and the Scout who is seventeen and preparing for college rank advancement are expected to participate in the same units, follow the same requirements, and be served by the same volunteer leadership.
This is administrative convenience masquerading as program design.
World Scout organizations that have maintained healthy membership typically use age spans of three to five years per program section. A ten-year-old in a European Scout organization is in a section with other ten to twelve-year-olds, with programming calibrated to their developmental stage. A fifteen-year-old is in a different section with programming calibrated to adolescent development and growing independence. The transitions between sections are program events, moments of passage that mark genuine developmental advancement.
In BSA, Cub Scouts runs from kindergarten through fifth grade. Scouts BSA runs from fifth grade through high school. The age ranges overlap at fifth grade, and neither program’s design is clearly optimized for the developmental needs of the specific age cohort it primarily serves. Venturing, BSA’s co-ed high-adventure program for ages fourteen through twenty, overlaps extensively with the Scouts BSA age range.
The consequence is programs that serve neither their youngest nor their oldest members particularly well. The ten-year-old joining a troop is developmentally very different from the seventeen-year-old, and a troop structure built primarily around the older Scouts will not serve the new members well. A troop structure built primarily around new members will not retain older Scouts. Most troops default to somewhere in the middle and serve nobody optimally.
BSA has acknowledged some of these issues and has conducted various pilot programs around program restructuring. The “family troop” pilot, which allowed units to function with mixed-gender membership, was extended in late 2025 as a permanent third option alongside the traditional gender-separated structure. These incremental adjustments address symptoms without addressing the underlying program design problem.
Governance Captured by Staff Incentives
The Scouting Maverick, an independent analytical voice on BSA governance, described the BSA’s governance structure accurately and bluntly in late 2025: the organization’s biggest structural problem is that the Scouting movement — families, youth, unit-level volunteers — is effectively walled off from governance. What fills that space is staff incentives.
Here is how the path works. Unit volunteers are represented through chartered organizations, which had been automatic voting members of local councils. Local councils appoint national representatives. National representatives elect the National Executive Board. In October 2025, the National Executive Board eliminated chartered organizations as automatic voting members of local councils. In practical terms, this means that the community organizations — churches, civic clubs, PTAs — that are supposed to be the local embodiment of Scouting’s community-embedded mission no longer have formal governance voice at the council level.
The governance pathway has always been weak. Volunteers who are focused on running their units do not typically have the time or inclination to participate actively in council politics. But there was at least a formal mechanism for community input. That mechanism has been further attenuated. What this leaves is a governance structure that is increasingly self-selecting: boards that appoint boards that elect boards, with minimal accountability to the people the program actually serves.
An organization governed this way will, over time, optimize for the interests of the people making governance decisions rather than the people receiving the program. That means budget decisions favor administrative infrastructure over volunteer support. Career decisions favor internal networking over demonstrated program competence. Policy decisions favor whatever reduces institutional risk to the people in the room rather than whatever is best for youth outcomes.
This is not a scandal. It is a slow organizational deterioration that is indistinguishable from incompetence because, in practice, it produces the same outcomes.
The Brand Situation
The decision to rename the Boy Scouts of America “Scouting America” was presented as an inclusion statement. It coincided with the organization’s 114th birthday in May 2024. The new name was intended to signal that the organization welcomed girls, who had been participating in significant numbers since 2018 and 2019.
Whatever the policy merits of the underlying inclusion decisions, the brand execution was a notable failure of basic due diligence. The new name’s initialism — SA — is widely recognized shorthand for sexual assault. For an organization that had just emerged from the largest sexual abuse bankruptcy in American history, choosing a name whose abbreviation invites this association suggests that no one in the room with approval authority thought to check whether the initialism had prior usage with negative connotations. The organization apparently recognized the problem after the fact, prohibiting the SA abbreviation on its official platforms without publicly acknowledging why.
An organization that is genuinely rebuilding trust after a sexual abuse crisis handles its naming decision carefully. It tests the name with survivors’ advocacy groups. It considers the abbreviated form. It checks what the initials mean. These are not advanced strategic communications tasks. They are basic quality control.
The renaming also solved a problem that the membership data suggests was not the actual source of BSA’s growth challenges. The research on why families do not enroll in Scouting or do not stay does not primarily cite the name “Boy Scouts of America” as a barrier. It cites program quality inconsistency, time demands, cost, and scheduling conflicts with other activities. Rebranding an organization with declining enrollment is a choice that uses organizational energy and generates press coverage. It does not address the reasons families leave.
The Money Flows in Interesting Directions
BSA’s national organization has, according to its 2024 Form 990, provided first-class or charter travel to key employees or officers. This is a reportable item because it represents a departure from standard nonprofit expense management. For an organization that pays district executives $40,000 to $50,000 a year while working them around the clock, and that has $329 million in debt, and that sold camp properties to pay abuse settlement funds, the expenditure of donated dollars on premium travel for executives is a choice that communicates something about organizational values.
The organization is not unique among large nonprofits in this respect. The gap between what executive leadership is paid and what frontline staff is paid characterizes many organizations. But the Scouting context makes it particularly visible because the mission is explicitly about character, thrift, and service. The Scout Law says “thrifty.” It means something. When an organization whose founder listed thrift as a core value of its program is documenting executive charter travel expenses on its federal tax filing, there is a tension that deserves to be named.
Local councils are separate legal entities from the national BSA organization and have their own financial positions, which vary widely. Some councils are well-managed and financially healthy. Others are not. Council consolidations have been ongoing as declining membership reduces the revenue base needed to sustain independent council operations. Each consolidation is presented as an efficiency measure. Cumulatively, they reflect a contraction of the professional infrastructure at the local level — fewer staff serving larger territories, with less local knowledge and community presence.
Part Three: The Way Forward
The problems described above are real. They are also, with significant effort and honest leadership, fixable. The organization has survived worse than its current condition, though not by much. What follows is a set of specific, actionable recommendations organized by priority and category.
These are not motivational suggestions. They are operational recommendations. Whether the people currently in positions of authority at BSA’s national level have the organizational will to implement them is a question this article cannot answer. What we can say is that the alternative to implementing them is continued decline until the organization either undergoes a forced restructuring or ceases to exist in any recognizable form. At 1.25 percent market penetration, there is no comfortable place to land.
Fix the Pay
This is first because it is foundational. You cannot deliver a quality program through volunteers who lack professional support, and you cannot sustain professional support through a workforce that earns wages below the sector median while working hours that exceed the normal full-time employment definition.
The District Executive salary floor should be set at a minimum of $55,000 annually, adjusted for cost of living in high-cost markets, with a clear three-year advancement pathway to $70,000 or above for executives who demonstrate program quality outcomes. This is not a radical suggestion. It is the minimum necessary to recruit from a pool of candidates who have other options.
The funding for this compensation increase has to come from somewhere. The two most defensible sources are: reduction in national staff overhead and reallocation from the executive compensation tier. An organization where frontline staff earn $40,000 and CEOs earn $520,000 has room to compress the ratio. This is not punitive. It is alignment. The people doing the most mission-critical work closest to the youth should not be earning wages that require them to have a second job.
The District Executive role also needs to be redefined. Currently it is primarily a fundraising and recruitment position with program support as a secondary function. The metrics need to change. Program quality indicators — camping nights, outdoor activity frequency, advancement rate, volunteer training completion, unit health assessments — should be primary. Fundraising matters because money is necessary. But an organization that measures its frontline professionals primarily on fundraising will have frontline professionals who are primarily focused on fundraising rather than program quality. You get what you measure.
Fix the Training
Wood Badge should be required for Scoutmasters and Cubmasters within three years of registration, with councils obligated to offer it at accessible costs and convenient times. This is not a radical requirement. It is the minimum professional standard for someone leading a Scout unit.
But training alone does not deliver consistency. What delivers consistency is ongoing coaching and mentorship. Every district should have a corps of experienced Scouter volunteers explicitly recruited and trained to serve as unit coaches — not to run the units, but to support the unit leadership and help them improve. This model exists in pieces in some councils. It is not systematic.
Online training has a role. The position-specific modules are accessible, reasonably well-designed, and can be completed at the volunteer’s convenience. They should not be the primary or sole training pathway for anyone with unit leadership responsibility. They are good for orientation. They are not sufficient for competence.
The national organization should invest meaningfully in creating a library of practical, video-based leadership development resources that unit leaders can access asynchronously. Not a fifty-page PDF. A fifteen-minute video of an experienced Scoutmaster walking through how a patrol leader handles a conflict between two Scouts on a camping trip. A ten-minute video of a Den Leader running a Cub Scout meeting that is genuinely engaging. Practical, observed, real-world. This does not require a major budget. It requires someone at the national level to prioritize it.
Fix the Governance
The October 2025 decision to remove chartered organizations as automatic voting members of local councils should be reversed. This is not a complicated case. An organization that is moated off from the communities it is supposed to serve will, over time, serve itself. The formal governance pathway for community organizations was already weak. Making it weaker does not make the organization more accountable; it makes it less so.
Beyond reversal of that specific decision, BSA needs genuine mechanisms for unit-level volunteer input into program and policy decisions. Not a survey that gets filed. Not a comment form. Actual representative structures where experienced unit volunteers have a formal voice in national program decisions.
The career advancement criteria for BSA’s commissioned professional staff should be explicitly tied to program quality outcomes, not solely to fundraising and membership metrics. This requires someone at the top to define what program quality means and then build measurement systems around it. This is hard. It is also necessary.
Board membership at the national level should include a meaningful representation of people whose primary connection to BSA is as unit-level volunteers or parents of Scouts, not solely as major donors and organizational executives. The people who experience the program from the ground level know things that are invisible from Irving, Texas. They should have formal seats at the table.
Fix the Program Structure
BSA should restructure its program along developmental lines. The current age compression is a liability. The outline of a better structure:
A Cub Scout program for grades K through 3 (ages 5 through 9), focused on basic skills, outdoor introduction, and family-centered activities. A junior program for grades 4 through 6 (ages 9 through 12), focused on skill development and introduction to the Patrol Method in a supervised context. A core Scouting program for grades 7 through 9 (ages 12 through 15), focused on youth-led units, outdoor adventure, and advancement toward a meaningful first-tier recognition. A senior program for grades 10 through 12 and young adults to 21, focused on high adventure, leadership development, expedition-scale outdoor activity, and the Eagle Scout pathway.
Each transition between sections should be a program event, not an administrative transfer. The Scout who moves from one section to the next should experience this as a rite of passage, not a recharter. The world Scouting movement figured this out. BSA can learn from it.
The Patrol Method should be defended aggressively. When national program changes dilute the Patrol Method — when they increase adult control, reduce youth decision-making, or compromise the primacy of the small patrol group as the unit of Scouting experience — those changes should be contested. The Patrol Method is not one of several equally valid approaches. It is the approach. Everything that reinforces it strengthens the program. Everything that compromises it weakens it.
Fix the Debt and the Real Estate
The Summit Bechtel Reserve is a beautiful and genuinely useful facility for what it does best: hosting large-scale Scout events and serving as a premier high-adventure base. The problem is the debt. With $186 million in bonds still outstanding and utilization far below projections, the facility is a fiscal anchor on an organization that is already under financial stress.
The Summit should be treated as what it is: a premier national facility serving a specific high-value program function, not a revenue engine capable of generating income to justify its debt. The debt restructuring or refinancing of the Summit bonds should be a national organizational priority, not deferred until the next leadership team inherits the problem. If the Summit cannot generate sufficient revenue to service its debt, the options are restructuring, additional philanthropic fundraising specifically targeted at debt reduction, or a managed disposition of some portion of the property. All of these options are uncomfortable. Carrying $186 million in debt on a facility operating at 97 percent below expected utilization is worse.
More broadly, BSA should conduct a comprehensive review of its national and council real estate holdings and honestly assess which properties are mission-critical, which are under-utilized, and which should be sold or transferred to better uses. The mission is youth program delivery. The measure of a piece of property is whether it serves that mission in proportion to its cost.
Local councils that are not financially sustainable in their current form should merge sooner rather than later. Delayed consolidations preserve administrative structures at the expense of program delivery. A merged council with sufficient professional staff and financial resources to serve its region well is better than two councils each too thin to do their jobs.
On Politics: Pick a Lane and Stay in It
The clearest recommendation regarding BSA’s political situation is also the hardest to implement: stop responding to political pressure as a primary driver of policy decisions.
This does not mean BSA should be politically inert or culturally isolated. It means that policy decisions about who can participate in Scouting and under what conditions should be made on the basis of the organization’s mission, its understanding of youth development, and its governing documents — and then held consistently unless there is a genuine internal organizational reason to change them.
Policies changed in response to legal threats, government funding leverage, or ideological pressure from any direction are not policies grounded in mission. They are negotiations. Organizations that negotiate their values in response to whoever has leverage at a given moment do not develop the institutional identity or community trust necessary to recover from the kind of decline BSA is experiencing.
The specific political decisions of recent years — the inclusion of gay members and leaders, the opening of programming to girls, the accommodation of transgender members, the reversal of DEI initiatives, the compliance with Hegseth-mandated policy changes — can each be argued on their merits. What cannot be defended is the pattern: a policy is established with stated rationale, external pressure mounts, the policy is reversed or modified with new stated rationale, and the organization presents each change as principled. This is institutional instability dressed up as responsiveness. Families who are evaluating whether to join Scouting are watching. They see an organization that does not know what it stands for.
What BSA stands for should be simple enough to state on one index card: preparing young people for lives of character and service through outdoor adventure, skill development, and community belonging. Every policy decision that comes before the national executive board should be evaluated against that statement. If a policy serves that mission, it belongs. If it is a response to external pressure unrelated to that mission, it does not belong, regardless of which direction the pressure comes from.
This will not make everyone happy. An organization that cannot make everyone happy will, if it is honest about this fact, be able to make something better: a stable, trustworthy institutional identity that families can rely on to be the same thing it was last year and the year before.
Invest Specifically in Communities That Need It
Scouting America has recently spoken about expanding its reach to underserved communities. This is the right instinct for the wrong reasons if it is primarily a membership growth strategy. It is the right instinct for the right reasons if it reflects an honest recognition that Scouting’s program is most valuable to young people who have the least access to outdoor experience, structured mentorship, and skills-based youth programming.
A child in a rural community who attends a school without strong extracurricular programming, in a family that cannot afford private athletic leagues or camps, in a neighborhood where outdoor access is limited, stands to gain more from high-quality Scouting than a child in a well-resourced suburb who has six competing options for structured youth activity on any given day. BSA’s program should prioritize reaching that child.
This requires something more than marketing. It requires subsidizing registration fees where financial barriers exist, actively recruiting adult volunteers from within communities rather than importing them from outside, and adapting the administrative burden of the program to what volunteer leaders in resource-constrained environments can realistically manage. A church in an underserved urban neighborhood should not need a full-time administrator to run a Scout pack. The program should be designed to work with what is available.
Hold Youth Protection to a Higher Standard Than the Law Requires
The reforms implemented post-bankruptcy are meaningful. They should be maintained and strengthened.
The Safeguarding Youth Training requirement should be renewed more frequently than current policy requires. Two-deep leadership should be enforced uniformly. The reporting obligation — the requirement that registered volunteers report suspected abuse to law enforcement, not solely to BSA leadership — should be written into all volunteer agreements explicitly, in plain language, not embedded in a training module that may or may not be retained.
Every council should have a designated Youth Protection Coordinator whose sole job function is monitoring compliance with youth protection standards, reviewing incident reports, and serving as a first point of contact for concerned volunteers or parents. This role should not be a collateral duty assigned to someone who also handles recharters.
The goal is not to eliminate risk, which is not possible. The goal is to ensure that when abuse occurs, it is reported, investigated, and prosecuted immediately rather than managed quietly. That shift in institutional culture from risk management to accountability is the most important change BSA can make, and it is also the one that requires the most sustained leadership will to implement.
Rebuild the Relationship with the Public
BSA’s public reputation has been damaged severely. The sexual abuse crisis, the bankruptcy, the political zigzagging, and the membership decline have collectively reduced public confidence in the institution as a trustworthy guardian of children.
The path back is not a rebranding. It is not a press release. It is not a National Annual Meeting theme. It is ten years of doing the job well, consistently, transparently, and without drama. Every year that passes in which no scandal emerges, in which program quality improves by measurable indicators, in which volunteers feel supported and families feel their children are well-served, is a year in which the reputation rebuilds.
The organization should publish meaningful outcome data annually. Not a membership number that has been adjusted for accounting methodology changes. Actual program quality indicators: camping nights per Scout per year, percentage of units that conducted at least six outdoor activities in the previous twelve months, volunteer training completion rates, Eagle Scout project data, alumni survey data on life outcomes. If the data is good, it demonstrates the mission is being delivered. If the data is not good, it tells the organization where to focus.
Transparency about what went wrong should extend beyond the settlement payments. The BSA published an internal report on its abuse history as part of the bankruptcy proceedings. That report should be widely shared internally and cited specifically in youth protection training so that the institutional memory of the failure is preserved as a learning document rather than buried in legal archives.
Fix the Name, Or At Least the Initialism Problem
The name “Scouting America” is not terrible on its own terms. The problem is the initialism. BSA should stop forbidding use of the “SA” abbreviation and acknowledge directly, in print, why the abbreviation is problematic, and then commit to never using it in official communications. The act of forbidding the abbreviation while pretending the reason for the prohibition does not exist is itself a small illustration of the institutional honesty problem.
More substantively, if the name “Scouting America” was chosen to signal inclusion, then the organization should make sure the program actually delivers that inclusion in practice. A name is only as good as what it describes. If Scouting America is inclusive in name but delivers inconsistent program quality in communities that have historically been underserved by BSA, the name is marketing rather than mission.
Conclusion: The Case for Getting This Right
Here is the argument for why this matters beyond the Scouting community.
There are roughly 74 million young people in the United States. They are growing up with substantially less time in unstructured outdoor environments than any previous generation. They are less likely to have multi-year mentorship relationships with trusted adults outside their families. They are spending more hours in front of screens and fewer hours developing practical skills through physical challenge. They are lonelier than prior generations by measurable survey data. They are less civically engaged. They are, by multiple indicators, struggling with purpose and identity in ways that translate into worse mental health outcomes and weaker social connections in adulthood.
The program that Scouting delivers, at its best, is a direct response to every one of those deficits. It puts young people outside. It gives them real skills. It connects them with adult mentors in a low-pressure, activity-centered relationship. It asks them to be part of a community and to contribute to something beyond themselves. It challenges them physically and asks them to develop resilience. The research supports these outcomes. Eagle Scouts are more civically engaged, more socially connected, less lonely, and more purposeful than their non-Scout peers. These are not trivial differences.
The country needs an organization that can deliver this program at scale. Scouting America, for all its failures and problems, is the most plausible institution to do it. There is no equivalent alternative waiting in the wings. Building the infrastructure — the camps, the training system, the program structure, the volunteer corps — that BSA has accumulated over 116 years would take decades and require resources that no new organization could plausibly assemble.
The argument for fixing Scouting America is therefore not nostalgia. It is not a defense of an institution for the sake of the institution. It is a practical case that the outcomes this organization is capable of producing are needed badly, that the organization possesses unique assets that could deliver those outcomes, and that the alternative to fixing it is losing something that would be enormously difficult to replace.
The people who could fix it are not mysterious. They are the Scoutmasters who are running outstanding troops right now, whose Scouts are camping monthly and learning real skills and developing real character. They are the professional Scouters who are doing the job well despite insufficient pay and insufficient support. They are the parents who stepped up to lead a pack because someone needed to and who are figuring it out one meeting at a time. They are the Eagle Scouts who carry what they learned in Scouting into their careers and communities and families.
Those people know what the program is supposed to be. They know when it is and when it is not. What they need from the national organization is honesty about the problems, competence in addressing them, appropriate compensation for the professional staff who support them, a training system that actually prepares them, and a governance structure that listens to them.
That is not a long list. It is also not what the current national organization has provided consistently. The distance between what BSA is and what it needs to be is real. The question is whether the people holding the institutional authority are willing to do the work required to close it.
The Scouts have a word for that kind of commitment in the face of difficulty. It is in the Scout Oath: brave. The organization should try to be that.
A Note on Institutional Memory and What Gets Lost
One thing not often discussed in organizational analyses of BSA’s decline is what happens to institutional memory when organizations shed staff and consolidate operations rapidly. The District Executive who has worked a given territory for ten years knows which chartered organizations are genuinely committed to their units and which are passive sponsors who sign a recharter without attending a single meeting. They know which volunteer leaders are burning out and need support. They know which units are thriving and why. They know the principal at the middle school who might be willing to host a recruiting night. They know the veteran in the community who would make an outstanding merit badge counselor.
When that District Executive is replaced by a newer employee covering a territory twice the size, at the same or lower salary, none of that knowledge transfers. It exists in someone’s head, and then it is gone. The new executive has to rebuild from scratch in half the time available because they are covering twice the ground. The units suffer. The program suffers. Some units close.
This loss happens quietly, one consolidation at a time, and it does not show up anywhere on BSA’s financial statements. It shows up in the membership trend lines three to five years later, and by then, the executives who made the staffing decisions have moved on, and the cause-and-effect relationship is impossible to document cleanly.
The same phenomenon affects volunteer leadership. BSA units depend on volunteer succession — the experienced Committee Chair who mentors the incoming one, the seasoned Scoutmaster who guides new leaders during their first year. When units go inactive, this succession breaks. When it breaks, the knowledge that would have been passed down is lost. The next time a unit forms in that same church basement, it starts over from the beginning.
This is not a reason to avoid consolidation when consolidation is genuinely necessary. It is a reason to take consolidation seriously as an organizational trauma, to actively manage the knowledge transfer, and to recognize that the cost of the consolidation is higher than the immediate financial calculation suggests.
The LDS Departure Deserves Its Own Analysis
The departure of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from BSA in 2019 and 2020 was the most consequential membership event in the organization’s recent history, and it has been consistently underanalyzed in BSA’s public communications.
At its peak, the LDS church’s relationship with BSA produced an estimated 20 percent or more of total BSA membership. The church had been a chartered organization since 1913 — over a century of partnership. LDS boys participated in Scouting as an integral part of their young men’s programming, meaning that Scouting was essentially automatic for LDS boys of appropriate age. The church provided facilities, volunteer infrastructure, and cultural reinforcement for Scouting that no other chartered organization could match at scale.
When BSA opened Scouts BSA to girls in 2019, the LDS church announced it would develop its own youth programming. The transition was complete by the end of 2019, removing an estimated 400,000 or more youth from BSA’s rolls. The replacement programming the LDS church developed, Children and Youth, is a home-centered, church-supported curriculum that does not involve the outdoor program emphasis or the advancement system that defined BSA Scouting.
BSA’s decision to admit girls to Scouts BSA was made in response to years of family requests and was presented as an expansion of the program. In retrospect, the organization made that decision without a plan to replace the membership it was virtually certain to lose. This is not a commentary on whether the decision was right. It is a commentary on the quality of the strategic analysis that preceded it.
An organization that expects to lose 400,000 members in response to a policy change should have, before implementing that policy change, a concrete plan for recruiting 400,000 alternative members. BSA did not demonstrate that it had such a plan. The small membership gains reported in subsequent years — measured in the tens of thousands — have not begun to replace what was lost.
The LDS departure is also instructive about the role of chartered organizations in BSA’s model. When BSA operated primarily through large, organized institutional partners — the LDS church, major civic organizations, school systems — those partners provided the infrastructure that made Scouting reach families efficiently. As institutional partnership has declined and BSA has become more dependent on smaller, less institutionally organized chartered organizations, the cost and effort of reaching individual families has increased. The economics of the chartered organization model work better at scale than at the current scale.
The Merit Badge System: Strength and Weakness Combined
The merit badge system is one of Scouting’s most recognizable features and one of its most frequently misunderstood. At its best, the merit badge is a structured introduction to a practical skill or area of knowledge, delivered through genuine engagement with a subject matter expert. The Eagle Scout requirement of 21 merit badges, of which 13 are specified, creates a breadth of experience that develops well-rounded competence across outdoor skills, civic knowledge, personal management, first aid, and citizenship.
At its worst, the merit badge system becomes a box-checking exercise where Scouts complete the paperwork for a badge without genuinely engaging with its content. Merit badge counselors who are not invested in the subject, or who are processing large numbers of Scouts through a camp program at high speed, can confer badges on young people who have technically met the stated requirements but have not developed meaningful competence in the underlying subject.
The merit badge mill — a derogatory term used within Scouting to describe summer camp programs that prioritize merit badge throughput over genuine learning — is a real phenomenon. A Scout who attends summer camp and earns eight merit badges in one week has almost certainly not developed the knowledge and skills those badges are supposed to represent, because the time required to develop genuine competence in eight different areas is not available in one week. The badges are technically valid. What they represent is not always valid.
This is not primarily a policy problem. The requirements for each merit badge are published and are not generally weak. The problem is implementation. A merit badge counselor who understands their subject and is committed to genuine learning will use the requirements as a starting point and go further. A merit badge counselor who wants to sign off on paperwork efficiently will use the requirements as a ceiling. The system cannot fully distinguish between these two outcomes.
BSA updated requirements for over 80 merit badges effective January 2026, with a stated focus on connecting badges to modern career pathways and expanding outdoor and practical education components. This is a reasonable approach to keeping the merit badge system relevant. The more pressing need is better preparation and selection of merit badge counselors, which requires both better volunteer recruitment and better council follow-through on who is approved to serve in the role.
The Eagle Scout service project requirement is the most defensible and most difficult component of the Eagle Scout pathway. The project must be planned and executed by the Scout, must benefit a community organization, must be approved before work begins, and must be documented in a project workbook that is reviewed by the district and council before the rank is awarded. This is not a simple requirement and it should not be made simpler. The project represents genuine independent initiative at a scale that requires sustained adult trust and youth competence in equal measure. It is also, arguably, the single element of the Eagle Scout experience most likely to translate directly to career and civic skills in adult life. Project management, resource acquisition, volunteer coordination, timeline management, documentation — these are directly transferable professional capabilities.
Technology: Both the Problem and Possibly Part of the Solution
BSA’s relationship with technology has been awkward. The organization’s administrative systems have been slow to modernize; the transition from Scoutbook to Scoutbook Plus in recent years has generated significant volunteer frustration, and the general administrative burden on unit leaders has not been reduced by the introduction of digital tools, which have largely added digital paperwork to existing analog paperwork rather than replacing it.
At the same time, the organization has done some genuinely useful things online. Position-specific training modules are well-organized and accessible. The merit badge hub provides clear requirements and counselor resources. The Scouts First helpline for reporting abuse concerns operates around the clock and provides a confidential reporting mechanism independent of local council staff.
The potential for technology to reduce administrative burden on volunteers is large and largely unrealized. A volunteer leader spending two hours a month on Scoutbook data entry is a volunteer leader spending two hours a month not on program delivery. Unit recharter processes that require multiple forms, online submissions, and council verification could be dramatically simplified with better system design. If an organization genuinely believes that volunteers are its most precious resource, it should structure every administrative process to minimize the time volunteers spend on administration. Currently, BSA’s systems do not consistently reflect that priority.
There is also an opportunity in technology for volunteer training and peer community that BSA has not fully developed. The best Scout leaders in the country know things that would benefit every Scout leader in the country. A well-designed digital community with video resources, peer discussion, and facilitated mentorship connections could democratize access to the institutional knowledge currently locked inside individual experienced volunteers. This exists in embryonic form in various online Scouting forums. BSA has not built and maintained the kind of authoritative, high-quality digital resource library that would make it genuinely useful.
The generational dimension of technology is also relevant. The parents now enrolling their children in Cub Scouts are millennials and younger Gen X, populations who expect digital-first administrative processes and on-demand access to information. An organization that requires them to dig through a PDF handbook to find a policy, or to email a council office to request a form that should be available online, is not meeting reasonable expectations for how an institution in 2026 should operate. This is not about being trendy. It is about reducing friction for the people the organization needs to attract and retain.
What International Scouting Knows That BSA Does Not
It is worth noting, before arriving at recommendations, that BSA is not Scouting’s only model. The World Organization of the Scout Movement encompasses over 170 national organizations and roughly 57 million members globally. Most of them are growing. The international Scouting community has developed practices and program innovations over the past three decades that BSA has largely not adopted.
The age-banding issue has already been discussed. But there are other differences worth examining.
Many international Scout organizations have developed explicit programming for young people in their late teenage and early adult years that is distinct from their standard Scout program — focused on high-adventure challenge, international exchange, and community development projects of genuine scale. These programs retain older members by offering them something meaningfully different from what they did at twelve. BSA’s Venturing program was designed with a similar intent but has never achieved the scale or profile of its international equivalents.
Many international Scout organizations have also developed more sophisticated community-embedding strategies than BSA currently employs. In countries where Scouting has maintained or grown membership, the Scout unit is typically understood as a community institution — something the neighborhood or town recognizes as its own — rather than a program delivered by a chartered organization that may or may not have meaningful engagement with the unit. The difference is subtle but important. A Scout troop that is seen by the surrounding community as a genuine community asset attracts families organically, receives community support, and survives leadership transitions because the community has a stake in its continuity. A Scout troop that is merely the program offered by a church to its members does not have that resilience.
BSA’s chartered organization model was designed to create this community embedding. In practice, it creates varying degrees of community connection, from genuine integration to nominal sponsorship where the chartered organization signs a form annually without meaningful involvement. The organizations where Scouting has thrived are the ones where the chartered partner is genuinely invested, and BSA has no systematic way to require or incentivize that investment. Chartered organizations can fulfill the minimum requirements of their agreement while providing no active support to the unit, and BSA’s enforcement mechanisms for charter compliance are limited.
The international insight here is that Scouting works best when it is genuinely part of the community fabric, not when it is a program option available in the community. Getting from the second to the first requires sustained community relationship-building by both professional staff and volunteer leadership — the kind of work that the current District Executive compensation and workload structure makes nearly impossible to do well.
BSA’s national leadership should be studying the organizations within the World Scout Movement that have grown their membership over the past twenty years and asking specifically what those organizations do differently. This is not complicated international benchmarking. The WOSM publishes membership data. The organizations that are growing are identifiable. Their program structures and community engagement models are documented and available. Whether BSA’s national leadership has looked seriously at this research is not evident from its public communications.
The Perversion Files and the Institutional Memory Problem
In 2012, BSA was compelled by court order to release more than 20,000 pages of internal documentation covering approximately 1,200 alleged abuse cases between 1965 and 1985. These documents, which had been maintained internally for decades, revealed that BSA leadership had known about abuse by specific individuals, had removed those individuals from their positions, and in many cases had not reported them to law enforcement.
The release of these documents was a significant institutional moment. It established that the abuse crisis was not a matter of a few bad actors operating undetected in a vigilant system. It was a pattern that the organization’s leadership knew about and managed as an internal personnel problem rather than a public safety emergency.
BSA has, since this disclosure, implemented substantial youth protection reforms. The Safeguarding Youth Training program is mandatory for all registered adults and must be renewed every two years. Background checks are required for all adult volunteers. The two-deep leadership requirement prohibits any adult from being alone with a youth. Digital communication guidelines extend these protections to online contact. A 24/7 helpline exists for reporting concerns. These are meaningful reforms, and they reflect genuine institutional change.
What has not happened is a sustained, honest public reckoning with the specific people who made specific decisions that allowed abuse to continue. The bankruptcy settlement resolved the financial liability. The individual board members, council executives, and national staff who knew about specific abusers and chose not to report them to law enforcement are mostly unidentified in the public record. Their decisions are described in systemic terms — “the organization failed to protect youth,” “there were institutional shortcomings” — language that accurately describes what happened while diffusing responsibility so broadly that no individual is accountable for anything specific.
This is a limitation of how large institutions process historical wrongdoing. The language of systemic failure is not inaccurate, but it is incomplete. Systems are operated by people. The decision not to report an accused leader to law enforcement was made by a specific person in a specific moment. Identifying those decisions and those decision-makers, honestly, in the organization’s own institutional history, would be a more complete reckoning than the bankruptcy settlement has produced.
This matters not only for the survivors, for whom it matters enormously, but for the institution. Organizations that have gone through genuine reckoning with historical wrongdoing — not just legal resolution, not just reformed policy, but honest naming of what happened and why — emerge with greater institutional trust than organizations that managed the legal process and moved on. BSA has not completed that reckoning. The settlement is paid. The policies are reformed. The institutional self-examination is incomplete.
Whether the current BSA leadership has the willingness to complete it is uncertain. Whether doing so would be beneficial to the organization’s mission and public trust is not uncertain. It would be. Honest institutions that acknowledge their failures specifically, rather than managing them through settlement agreements and PR strategy, build the kind of credibility that cannot be purchased or branded into existence.
Laying out what is wrong with an organization is the easier task. The harder task is being specific about what would actually change the trajectory.
Membership will not grow because of marketing. The families who are not in Scouting are not primarily unaware of Scouting’s existence. They are aware of it and are either ambivalent or have had an experience with a specific unit that was not good enough to retain them. The two things that consistently drive enrollment and retention are the quality of the specific unit’s program and the quality of the parent and family experience in the first ninety days of participation.
If a family joins a Cub Scout pack and the first three meetings are disorganized, the parent who is trying to help feels unwelcome or confused, and the kid spends forty-five minutes in a fluorescent-lit church basement watching adults sort through paperwork, that family does not come back. This is not a brand problem. It is a product quality problem. The solution is making sure that every unit’s program is good enough in the first ninety days to retain families who were willing to show up once. That requires unit-level quality standards, council-level support for units that are not meeting those standards, and a feedback loop to identify which units are struggling before they lose everyone they recruited.
The research base for what works in youth-serving organizations is not thin. Organizations like the Search Institute have spent decades studying what young people need from developmental contexts and what makes youth programming sticky. BSA should be deeply engaged with that research and should be building program standards and volunteer training around it. There is no evidence that it is doing this systematically.
The organizations that have successfully revitalized Scouting or Scout-adjacent programs in specific markets have done so by doing several things that are less glamorous than a rebrand: hiring experienced program professionals at competitive wages, giving them enough territory to actually know their communities, providing them with high-quality volunteer training resources, setting clear program quality standards, and measuring what actually matters about youth development outcomes. These things are not complicated. They require sustained commitment and willingness to spend money on the right things rather than on the wrong things.
Recruiting matters more than it is currently prioritized. Most Scouting units recruit through passive channels: they show up at a school night, they post a flyer, they hope someone shows up. The units that consistently grow recruit actively, meaning they have volunteers who go into their communities and personally invite specific families, who build relationships with elementary school teachers and coaches and pediatricians and faith leaders, who follow up when a family expresses interest rather than waiting to see if they come back on their own.
The national organization has built tools for this — recruitment templates, talking points, materials — but it has not built a culture in which active recruitment is treated as a primary program responsibility of unit leadership rather than a professional staff function or a once-a-year event. The District Executive who calls the Cubmaster in October to ask about join night numbers is measuring an outcome. What is needed is a year-round conversation about which specific families in the community have been personally invited, what happened when they were invited, and what support the unit needs to convert interest into active membership.
Retention research is even more detailed than recruitment research: families leave in the first ninety days, or they tend to stay for years. The first campout, the first pack meeting where the parent feels like they belong, the first time their kid comes home genuinely excited about something they did — these events determine whether a family becomes a Scouting family or a family that tried Scouting once. Investing in the quality of those early experiences is the highest-leverage retention intervention available.
What this looks like in practice: every new family in a Cub Scout pack should be personally contacted by an existing pack family within the first two weeks. Every new Scout should be assigned a buddy who can help them feel comfortable at meetings. The first campout should be welcoming to parents who are nervous about camping, not intimidating. The program in the first three months should lead with the most engaging, most accessible, most memorable activities the unit does — not with paperwork and uniform inspections.
The Honest Conversation About Boys
Since the BSA’s 2019 decision to open Scouts BSA to girls, there has been an ongoing and largely unresolved conversation within the Scouting community about whether the program optimally serves boys when it is fully integrated or when it offers gender-specific environments.
This is not a simple question, and anyone who tells it to you is simple is either not paying attention or is arguing from ideology rather than evidence. The research on gender-segregated versus integrated youth programming does not produce a unanimous verdict. What it does suggest is that program design, leadership quality, and peer culture matter more than the gender composition of any given group. The best girl troops in BSA are excellent programs. The best boy troops are excellent programs. The worst of each is equally bad.
What the LDS departure established clearly is that there are large communities of families in America for whom a boys-specific Scouting program is deeply important, and for whom the shift to a co-educational model was not merely a point of cultural disagreement but a reason to leave and build something else. BSA has not found a way to serve that constituency while also serving the families who wanted their daughters to have access to the Scouts BSA program. The “family troop” pilot, made permanent in late 2025, is an attempt to allow individual units to make this choice for themselves. Whether it will work is not yet established.
What can be said with confidence is that an organization serving young people should design its programs around the developmental needs of those young people, should be honest with itself about what its research and field experience tell it, and should be willing to offer genuine program differentiation rather than policy compromises that satisfy nobody particularly well.
Final Word: What the Program Deserves
The research says what the research says. A well-run Scout troop does real things for young people: it reduces loneliness, builds civic engagement, develops leadership, and produces adults who are more purposeful and more connected than their peers who did not have that experience. The program works. The data is consistent across multiple independent studies spanning decades.
The consequences of the organization’s failures are therefore not abstract. They are measured in children who do not get the program they could have received, in employees paid inadequately for demanding work, in volunteers who burn out without sufficient support, and in families who try Scouting once and do not return because the experience was not good enough.
The case for fixing this is simple. The alternative is an organization that continues to decline until it either undergoes a forced restructuring from outside or quietly ceases to be relevant. Neither outcome serves the young people who would benefit from a well-delivered Scouting program. There are 74 million of them in this country. Roughly 1 million currently participate. The gap between those two numbers is the measure of the opportunity.
It is worth being specific about what the stakes are in concrete human terms. A young person who participates in high-quality Scouting for five or more years, who earns meaningful rank advancement, who camps regularly, who develops friendships within a patrol, who has adult mentors outside their family who know their name and respect their developing competence — that young person is measurably less lonely, more civically engaged, more purposeful, and more resilient than their peers who did not have that experience. This is not conjecture. It is what the Harris Poll research shows, what the Baylor University research shows, what the Tufts character development research shows. The outcomes are real, and they are significant.
The young people who most need those outcomes are often the ones least likely to access them. A child with two engaged parents, a financially secure household, access to a good school district, and a full slate of extracurricular options has many paths to the kinds of developmental experiences Scouting provides. They do not need Scouting specifically, though they would benefit from it. The child without those resources has far fewer paths. If BSA is genuinely committed to its stated mission of preparing all young people for lives of purpose, the geographic and socioeconomic distribution of its membership should be a primary concern. It has not been treated as one.
The organization has the program. It has the land. It has the infrastructure. It has 116 years of accumulated knowledge about what works in youth development outdoors. What it has consistently lacked is the organizational courage to hold itself accountable to its own standards, to pay the people doing the mission-critical work what that work is worth, to resist the temptation to manage its image while neglecting its substance, and to make decisions based on the mission rather than on whoever has institutional leverage at a given moment.
None of these are particularly heroic requirements. They are basic competencies of organizational management applied to a mission that genuinely matters. The expectation that a 116-year-old organization with over a billion dollars in assets could meet these basic competencies is not unreasonable.
Filling the gap between what Scouting America is and what it is capable of being requires honesty about what has gone wrong, competence in addressing it, and the organizational courage to be what the program teaches young people to be: trustworthy, prepared, and willing to do difficult things because they are the right things.
The Scouts have been told this for 116 years. It would be useful if the people running the organization actually believed it.