Without a bold vision, BSA is doomed within a decade. With Move Forward: Save Scouting, we can be relevant to society, improve programming, ditch unsound practices, and streamline the experience.
When the Boy Scouts of America, recently rebranded as Scouting America, gathers in Dallas May 11-15 for its National Annual Meeting, its leaders will confront a crisis that messaging cannot solve. At the end of 2025, the organization’s market share sank to about 1.25 percent of American youth, the lowest since about 1923. The organization has not strung together a multi-year recovery in 25 years.
BSA’s decline is not the generic story of a youth organization losing ground to phones, sports, or overscheduling. Those affect everyone. BSA’s problem is more specific. Its historic advantages—brand recognition, inexpensive outdoor access, and the prestige of Eagle Scout—once masked program defects. As those advantages diminish, families see the defects more clearly.
The obstacle is BSA’s national culture. Inside BSA, career advancement and volunteer appointments are too often detached from producing better youth programs. Instead, they are commonly prestige markers awarded to those who avoid candor. Accountability is optional; institutional deference is not. The result is a class of insiders who deny decline with cheerful press releases while treating internal critics as disloyal.
This culture validates bad ideas. The clearest example is the program Americans still picture when they hear “Boy Scouts”: Scouts BSA, the tan-uniform program that runs from 10-year-old fifth-graders to high-school seniors. No school, sports league, or serious youth-development program would treat children leaving elementary school and young adults preparing to graduate as one developmental audience. BSA does.
This pattern extends to BSA’s other programs. Cub Scouts makes fifth graders share a program that also accommodates kindergartners. Venturing and Sea Scouts run from eighth graders to 20-year-old adults. The pattern is not developmental clarity. It is administrative convenience.
BSA is an outlier in world Scouting. International peer organizations typically use age spans of three to five years, and none merge middle schoolers and high schoolers into one program. Those age bands are where development moves fastest, and BSA chose to blur it.
All of BSA’s international peers organize programs around coherent developmental stages, and they do not pit programs against each other. BSA’s bad program design makes it an outlier.
The cost falls on both ends of Scouts BSA. That program is optimal for middle schoolers, but middle schoolers are not trusted to own it. They are managed by older youth instead. High schoolers fare no better. Instead of receiving programming built around autonomy, peer challenge, advanced outdoor adventure, and responsibility suited to their age, the vast majority are trapped in a middle-school program where their main role is supervising the younger Scouts. BSA romanticizes this as mentoring. Teenagers see it as babysitting. They know the difference, and they leave.
That culture’s deepest failure is conceptual. Leadership is a key Scouting promise, the only item common to its methods and aims, and the promise BSA often invokes to justify Eagle Scout, youth offices, patrols, and adult training. But leadership is not a patch. It is not a title, office, authority, or chain of command. Leadership is influence: persuading voluntary followers to move toward a shared vision for change.
BSA has spent decades replacing leadership with administration. This substitution is evident in how BSA replaced the patrol method with a corporate-bureaucracy simulation. Widely used internationally, the patrol method is small, independent, self-governing teams of youth making real decisions, solving real problems, and learning through consequences. It centers on the patrol and Patrol Leader. Decades ago, BSA evicted the patrol method in favor of emerging corporate-management theories. Patrols became roster slots inside a bureaucracy of titled youth roles, layered reporting, meeting scripts, and committee procedure. BSA never stopped saying “patrol method.” It preserved the vocabulary while replacing the operating system.
Wood Badge, the organization’s premier adult-training program, reinforces the substitution. Marketed as leadership training, it functions mainly as a bureaucrat-polishing school. Adults rehearse the corporate-bureaucracy simulation and return home to faithfully implement what undermines leadership development.
The Eagle Scout rank illustrates the same drift. American society gives BSA an extraordinary gift: it treats Eagle as a distinction among high schoolers, a signal of maturity and leadership. BSA undercuts that gift. Eagle is just part of a middle-school advancement ladder, and 11-year-olds can earn it.1 Instead of certifying tested leadership, it often rewards advancement velocity, compliance, and tenure in bureaucratic titled offices. Its famous service project is mostly a worksheet exercise, accompanied, tellingly, by no project-management training.
The culture’s aversion to candor extends to public missteps. After emerging from a sexual-abuse bankruptcy, BSA rebranded itself “Scouting America.” The new name initializes to “SA,” common shorthand for sexual assault. National leadership appears to know: BSA forbids use of the SA acronym, and on its official volunteer forum, national bureaucrats censor SA. When an initialism-rich organization chooses an initialism-prone brand yet forbids the initialism, it admits competence and candor problems.
The institutional priorities are visible elsewhere. BSA’s 2024 audited statements list about $329 million in debt, including roughly $186 million in bonds for a West Virginia facility that in 2023 was utilized 97 percent below expectations. And when Secretary of War Pete Hegseth threatened military support, BSA quickly abandoned DEI initiatives, discontinued the Citizenship in Society merit badge, and undid inclusive policies. While readers may disagree about those policies, the institutional lesson is clear: BSA can act fast when outside pressure threatens the convenience or prestige of its national organization. It does not act at all when youth flee its programs.
Dallas is the moment for truth. A serious agenda would begin with admissions: middle-schoolers deserve ownership of their own program; high-schoolers deserve a program built for their life stage; the corporate-bureaucracy simulation must be evicted and the patrol method restored; adult training must focus on genuine leadership; Eagle’s public meaning is being squandered; and the new corporate brand is an unforced error. These are starting points, not the full agenda. None of this requires another pilot program. It requires leaders willing to name the problems in public.
This hard work is unlikely. Reform at BSA follows a familiar arc: stalled for decades, then bungled when finally implemented. The admission of gay members and girls took this course. National leadership has convinced itself that doing little, offending no one, and appeasing every constituency will produce the turnaround it needs. It will not.
The membership trendline does not care about institutional feelings. If national leadership will not eat a few sacred cows in Dallas, the organization will be eaten by its own irrelevance. Anything less than candor is cheerful packaging around continued neglect. And if inaction means high-schoolers will remain in a middle-school program to supervise younger youth, BSA should at least have the honesty to pay the babysitters.
Continue the conversation
Keep the discussion going by leaving a comment below or joining social-media groups friendly to discussing Scouting’s hard topics:
- Scouters: Not Afraid of Controversy on Facebook
- r/BSAOpen on Reddit
- Untended Fire on Discord
- The shortest path to Eagle is 19 months. A Cub Scout can switch to Scouts BSA upon earning the Arrow of Light badge. As long as the Arrow of Light is earned within 5 months of turning 10, then that Scout can earn Eagle as an 11-year-old. ↩︎