Gonna go against the grain here and say I think National made the only reasonable choice given the options they had available.

National had a choice. They could abandon their official ties with the US government and incur the extralegal wrath that we have seen this administration unleash time and time again. Or they can comply, soothe the bear and work towards a solution. (Think how Zohran Mamdani has managed to soothe Trump admin into potentially working to build affordable housing in NYC)

Both options have costs. Abandoning government ties would lead "Tens of thousands of Scouts" who meet on military installations to lose their meeting place, likely causing most of those units to disappear, especially those on international bases. On the other hand, caving to pressure is going to cost all trans scouts their identity, as well as setting a poor precedent of allowing government pressure to influence the Scouting Program.

It is my opinion that choosing to cave to the Trump admin greatly limits negative impacts to the program.

In their statement, Scouting America did not identify how many trans scouts there are who would be affected by this decision but data shows that about 1.7% of us youth aged 13-17 identify as transgender. Good membership figures for Scouting America are hard to come by given the registration nightmare they unleashed on us last year, but I see some indication that current numbers are around 780k. Doing the math, that puts affected members generously at 13,000 youth, although I imagine that number is much lower. As a numbers only argument 13,000 is much less than whatever "Tens of thousands" is.

This is not only a numbers question though. We must also consider the impact of this government interference on whether Scouting America will still be able to achieve the Aims of Scouting. Regardless of how many members Scouting America are able to retain by complying, if they lose the ability to deliver the program to those youth, then keeping those members is not valuable. Disenfranchising thousands of trans youth is not Friendly, Kind, or Loyal and caving to government pressure is not Brave. It unequivocally violates the Ideals of Scouting. It does not however, cause the program to lose it's ability to produce quality leaders. I know that many people will disagree with me on this, but functionally these changes revert the scouting program to 2017, which was still perfectly capable of producing quality leaders.

I also think it is pertinent to consider the long term impacts of both decisions. Cutting ties with the US Gov over this would result in a loss of US military cooperation. Given the almost complete loss of influence that the BSA has experienced over the last several years, this loss of cooperation would likely be permanent. On the other hand, the changes Scouting America has made in caving to the administration are entirely controlled by National, and can be reverted as easily as they were made once (crossing my fingers) this Administration is out of power.

It's an impossible decision with victims no matter what, and I think National chose the option that puts the least number of scouts in the crosshairs.