Author: Aren Cambre

Scouts BSA is a program for ages 10-17.¹ That age span is the problem.

The lived experience is a middle-school program that traps high schoolers, then asks them to supervise the middle schoolers. That is a babysitting program decorated with leadership language.

High schoolers are simply unpaid staff for the middle-school program.

Mixed-age patrols expose the contradiction

The tension appears in BSA’s own troop-structure guidance, where gold loopers speak out of both sides of their mouth regarding mixed-age patrols. That is where a 10-year-old and a 17-year-old are peers in the same patrol.

BSA’s online documentation presents mixed-age patrols favorably, falsely claiming it is the historical model² and placing them first in a list, without qualification.³ The adult-leader guidebook praises the same model, presenting it as the historical approach that has “several advantages”.⁴

But then gold loopers’ literature admits the problem: 10-year-olds and 17-year-olds have little in common.⁵ It offers new-Scout, regular, and older-Scout patrols as a “better approach”.⁶

More broadly, this is about the program, not just the patrols. The three-tier patrol scheme is still part of a culture that traps high schoolers in the middle-school program to serve as unpaid staff.

Gold loopers have long known that high schoolers need something different. The 1938 Guide Book of Senior Scouting admits this, calling it “one fact that we cannot escape” that a high schooler’s needs differ from those of younger youth.⁷

Today, BSA is alone among its international peers, still trapping high schoolers in a middle-school program:

The troop converts high schoolers into staff

Many troops fill troop-level titled roles with high schoolers. Not always, but commonly enough that the pattern matters. High schoolers are routinely called out to operate the bureaucracy that keeps the middle schoolers in line. Even when placed in their own patrol, even without a titled role, high schoolers are still pulled toward troop-level instruction and supervision, especially of the youngest youth.

That is babysitting.

The since-abandoned Leadership Corps admits to this logic. The 1981 Scoutmaster Handbook described it as a troop structure for 14- and 15-year-old troop-level bureaucrats. The theory is that it would also allow them some activities of their own, holding their interest in Scouting while providing “leadership” services for the troop.⁸

Strip away the vocabulary and the bargain is obvious: high schoolers remain in a middle-school program to provide babysitting services, with occasional chances at age-appropriate programming on the side.

Middle schoolers and high schoolers both lose

Middle schoolers lose first because the staffing model displaces patrol ownership. They get a program mediated through high-school instruction and crowd control, rather than one centered on their own patrols and their own developmental needs.

High schoolers lose leadership development. Gold loopers often pretend that Scouts BSA can remain appropriate for high schoolers by giving them the corporate-bureaucracy simulation to operate. The bargain is blunt: stay in the middle-school program, hold an office, keep middle schoolers moving, and call that leadership.

Running a bureaucracy is not leadership. Fulfilling a check-boxed role, keeping eleven-year-olds in line, delivering concrete instructions to middle schoolers, and maintaining an adult-authored organization chart do not give high schoolers leadership experience. It just makes them bureaucrats.

Leadership is a mutual-influence process: earning trust, motivating skeptical peers, shaping a shared vision, and moving with people who can push back.

That leadership work is messy because peers are not subordinates. Crucial to leadership development is the give-and-take of similar-age peers: skepticism, disagreement, ambition, status, humor, resistance, and buy-in.

In cross-age interactions in a formal-supervision scheme, the age gap alone, plus how early adolescents still tend to be rather concrete and literal, create authority without before a word is even spoken. This displaces the social processes–the influence dynamic–that is table stakes to leadership. This is a supervision system, not leadership training.

Scouts BSA withholds genuine leadership development while praising high schoolers for supervising middle schoolers inside a tidy corporate-bureaucracy simulation.

The defenses fail

The defenses arrive in a familiar cluster. High schoolers should “give back”. Offices supposedly keep them engaged. The troop bureaucracy supposedly needs officeholders. Troops supposedly need high schoolers for continuity and expertise. High-school staffing is supposedly inherent to Scouting.

These claims sound practical until they are taken seriously.

“Giving back” is not a debt

“Giving back” as an institutional expectation seeks involuntary servitude while obscuring it with cheery language.

Help received as a middle schooler is not a labor debt. Scouting service is voluntary and generous, not a bill that comes due when the middle schoolers enter 9th grade.

No age band of Scouts owes anything to any other age band of Scouts.

“Keeping them engaged” is not a program

Gold loopers have long tried to use troop-level youth offices as a retention device.

Their 1938 Senior Scouting guide, even while providing excellent supports for why high schoolers should be in “Senior Scouting” programs, claimed that many high-school-aged Scouts found satisfaction in filling positions of responsibility.⁹ The 1959 Scoutmaster’s Handbook made the same workaround explicit, saying the Junior Assistant Scoutmaster office may “hold the interest of older boys”.¹⁰

Strip the cheery veneer and look at the blunt truth: Instead of moving high schoolers into an age-appropriate program with broader adventure and age-level peer experiences, gold loopers kept them tied to the middle-school program by handing them bureaucratic, titled roles.

“We need officeholders” is circular

The officeholder defense is circular. It says high schoolers must remain in Scouts BSA because the troop’s corporate-bureaucracy simulation must be staffed. This treats a need created by this bureaucracy as proof that high schoolers belong in the middle-school program.

A better answer is to stop clinging to myths, specifically that bureaucratic roles are the program or are essential to Scouting. The best answer is to restore the patrol method, abolishing all troop-level youth-staffed offices. The patrol method is not a troop-level bureaucracy!

“Troop continuity” is troop convenience

The continuity defense is troop convenience dressed up as youth development.

If meetings, campouts, and new-Scout instruction depend on high schoolers managing middle schoolers, that indicts the troop machinery. Adult leaders must handle troop-level continuity without turning high schoolers into staff, and patrols can still own their own activities.

“Expertise transfer” does not require a staffing class

The expertise-transfer defense has a narrow truth. A high schooler may choose to teach a skill or serve as a limited Guide (expanded below). That is voluntary service under adult guidance, not a condition of being in Scouting, not a reason to assign a whole age cohort to manage middle schoolers, not a reason to trap high schoolers in a middle-school program.

Adults have a duty of adult association. It’s what we signed up for, a part of being a direct-contact adult leader. Part of that duty is mentoring all youth directly, not hiding behind youth offices.

High-school staffing is not inherent to Scouting

The claim that high-school staffing is inherent to Scouting is absurd.

Baden-Powell did not want high schoolers trapped inside a middle-school program. After observing older youth leaving the program and noting substantial differences between older and younger youth, Baden-Powell recommended in 1918 that older youth have their own program that meets separately.¹¹

Per the chart near the top of this article, BSA is the last of its international peer organizations to not adopt this 1918 vision. That 90% of BSA’s high schoolers linger in its middle-school program makes BSA an outlier.

A Guide is a compromise, not the cure

A Guide role may have a place as a compromise. I have argued elsewhere for creating Guides as a position of responsibility. The role must be created alongside the end of the babysitting regime, not as a new name for it.

A Guide must be voluntary, limited, adult-supervised, and available across programs: a youth, while active in an age-level program, may choose to serve a program for a younger age band.

That is not assigning a whole class of high schoolers to staff a middle-school program. A Guide is a service opportunity. It cannot be the theory of high-school membership.

To re-emphasize: Voluntary service is a non-negotiable aspect of the Guide role. If none of a community’s high schoolers are interested in being a Guide, then middle schoolers will exclusively receive adult mentorship. That’s fine. High-school staffing of a middle-school program is not essential to Scouting and must never be compelled.

The age-section prescription is simple

I have made the full age-section argument elsewhere: Scouts BSA is a middle-school program, early founders pointed toward differentiated programs, BSA’s international peers use differentiated age sections, and high schoolers belong in an age-level program.

The program-design prescription is summarized in the Move Forward: Save Scouting proposal: Scouts BSA will focus on grades 6-8. Youth in grades 9-12, including 18-year-old seniors¹², should be in Venturing or Sea Scouts. Starting with high-school graduation, Venturers and Sea Scouts graduate to Rovers¹³, a worldwide program that gold loopers killed in the 1950s.

Shiny objects and older-Scout patrols are just pressure valves

Gold loopers’ literature calls the older-Scout patrol a safety valve.¹⁴ That safety valve leaves the faulty architecture intact: a ten-year-old and a seventeen-year-old do not need the same program, pace, or adult posture.

Gold loopers also create shiny objects that help sustain the staffing bargain: high adventure, paid camp staffing, and Order of the Arrow. The theory is these occasional escapes help keep high schoolers registered in the middle-school program.

While OA is a shiny object today, I have argued elsewhere that it must be retired.

High adventure and camp staffing are great. But once this occasional escape is completed, the high schooler returns to being infantilized, to babysitting duties in a troop.

The value of high adventure and camp staffing would increase if they were adjuncts to an actual high-school program, or to Rovers for high-school graduates. As substitutes for age-appropriate program design, they are diminished.

Admitting high-school disgust with the bargain

High schoolers are disgusted with the bargain. “Eagling out” is the common phenomenon where high schoolers, tired of babysitting chores and being infantilized in a middle-school program, head to the exit as they complete Eagle. Another common phenomenon is quiet quitting, where a high schooler reduces involvement or disappears while remaining on the roster, resurfacing only in time to knock out Eagle before turning 18. A third common phenomenon are high schoolers who have resigned themselves to their disgust of babysitting chores, showing up but clearly conflicted about why he’s there.

Conversations on this often turn to a “blame the unit-volunteer” ethic, a common, blame-shifting tactic of gold loopers to avoid accountability for their own incompetence.

BSA tacitly admits to this disgust. The following passage responds to that unstated frustration¹⁵:

You might think of Venturing and Sea Scouts as somewhat akin to the Scoutmasters’ lounge at summer camp: a place to renew and refresh before diving back into the work of leading a troop.

Here, BSA admits that high schoolers are tired of babysitting chores, frustrated with being infantilized in a middle-school program. That is why high schoolers would need to “renew and refresh”. The troop program no longer works for them! But instead of providing age-level program that meets their needs, the prescription is only a relief valve.

Also, this sentiment minimizes the high-school programs. Unlike Scouts BSA, they use the patrol method, and they support leadership development. Just as bullies target qualities in others they are jealous of, gold loopers representing the middle-school program snipe at the programs all high schoolers should be in.

End the staffing bargain

Today’s Scouts BSA program design induces a problem, then it calls management of that problem “leadership”.

For middle schoolers, good Scouting means patrols with ownership, mentored by adults. For high schoolers, it means an actual high-school program: Venturing or Sea Scouts.

The series ends where it began: the patrol method is not a youth bureaucracy. Restore patrol ownership, restore adult association, and move high schoolers into an age-appropriate program. The troop no longer needs high schoolers to staff a machine that should not exist.

However, if inaction remains the gold-looper playbook, then BSA should at least have the honesty to pay the babysitters.

Footnotes

1. Scouts BSA: Frequently Asked Questions, Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
2. In the context of an ages 10-17 program–an 8 year age span–it is disingenuous to claim that mixed-age patrols are the historical approach, especially without qualification. In 1918, Scouting’s founder Robert Baden-Powell, after having gained considerable experience following his 1907 Brownsea Island experiment, recommended older youth be moved to their own program. Since then, all of BSA’s international peer Scouting organizations–UK, Australia, Mexico, Canada, Ireland, and many more–have fulfilled the founder’s vision vision. Generally, all their programs span only 3-4 years. Due to its intransigence on this, BSA is an outlier on the world stage. 3-4 year age spans map to common understandings of adolescent developmental stages. 8-year age spans combine considerably different developmental stages, an entirely different proposition. Cast more accurately, it is absurd to claim that mixed-age patrols in a program that spans 8 years is the historical approach. Rather, it is the approach of an organization beset by inertia and indifferent about the quality, effectiveness, and safety of the programs it designed. ↩︎
3. Types of Patrols, Troop Leader Resources, Boy Scouts of America ↩︎
4. Troop Leader Guidebook, Volume 1, Boy Scouts of America, 2018, p. 17. ↩︎
5. Ibid., pp. 64-65. ↩︎
6. Ibid., pp. 17-18. ↩︎
7. Guide Book of Senior Scouting, Boy Scouts of America, 1938, p. 6. ↩︎
8. Scoutmaster Handbook, Boy Scouts of America, 1981, pp. 63-65. ↩︎
9. Boy Scouts of America, Guide Book of Senior Scouting, 1938, pp. 15-17. Note: This claim holds no water. Despite decades of this experiment—retaining high schoolers while trapping them in a middle-school program—no evidence exists that it has meaningfully improved older-youth retention. ↩︎
10. Boy Scouts of America, Scoutmaster’s Handbook, Fifth Edition, 1959, p 53. ↩︎
11. Provisional Rules for Rover-Scouts, 6th Edition, The Boy Scouts Association (UK), Sept. 1918, p. 5. ↩︎
12. Current youth-protection standards must be changed to accommodate societal norms. 18-year-old high-school seniors must be treated the same as other high schoolers. For example, if an 18-year-old 12th grader wishes to buddy with a 16-year-old 11th-grade friend, that must not be prohibited. ↩︎
13. Rovers is a young-adult program. Mapped to USA norms, Rovers would begin at high-school graduation. ↩︎
14. Troop Leader Guidebook, Volume 1, Boy Scouts of America, 2018, p. 17. ↩︎
15. Troop Leader Guidebook, Volume 2, Boy Scouts of America, 2018, p. 124. ↩︎

The Scouts BSA corporate-bureaucracy simulation displaced patrol ownership and gave adults a place to hide.

The phrase “Ask your SPL” is one symptom. In Scouts BSA culture, it often means an adult has declined to mentor a child, instead routing the Scout into the youth-staffed, troop-office bureaucracy. Adult abdication gets dressed up as youth-led practice, then openly celebrated:

The adult-association method is core to Scouting. Adults cannot fulfill that method by withholding it. They must know Scouts and patrols directly.

Adult association is not optional

Adult association must comply with BSA’s youth-safeguarding standards.¹ Especially important is the “no one-on-one contact” rule, which must always be upheld.

“Association with Adults” is one of the methods of Scouts BSA. Youth learn by watching adult conduct and by having adult leaders who listen, encourage, and “take a sincere interest in them”.²

The current adult-leader guidebook contains adult-association language: adults should listen, encourage, challenge, guide, make themselves available on hikes and campouts, provide quiet support during patrol work, and strengthen mentoring relationships on outings.³

The trouble is the competing instruction. Through the same guidebook, gold loopers normalize a Scoutmaster “reced[ing] into the background” as the Senior Patrol Leader becomes “more effective”.⁴ In practice, that becomes a culture where adults hide behind troop-level youth offices and call their distance youth leadership.

Adult association is not a decoration added after “youth-led” has supposedly done the real work. It is core to how Scouting develops youth.

The danger used to be stated more plainly. The 1922 Handbook for Scoutmasters warned that when Scoutmasters lose personal touch with the youth, that may lead to military discipline and classroom methods. By 1981, the Scoutmaster Handbook still recognized that Scoutmaster conferences could build adult-Scout relationships, but it placed that relationship-building inside scheduled set-pieces. The old warning was about losing personal touch. The later structure made personal touch easier to isolate from ordinary troop life.⁵

That is the practical loss. As the corporate-bureaucracy simulation took over, administration became the dominant concern, and adult association became easier to confine to scheduled moments while the daily life of the troop was routed through youth offices.

Association is relational, and administration is structural. This series opposes the second and pleads for the first.

Baden-Powell prescribed adult presence

Baden-Powell’s language was relational. BSA’s own curation of Baden-Powell quotations includes the idea that the Scoutmaster guides the boy in the spirit of an “older brother” and knows the boys well enough to understand them.⁶ This phrasing matters because of the posture behind it: adults close enough to know youth and guide them without taking over.

Elsewhere Baden-Powell described Scouting as “a game for boys … in which elder brothers can give their younger brothers a healthy environment and encourage them to healthy activities such as will help them to develop.”⁷ By “elder brother”, Baden-Powell was referring to adults, not high-school substitutes.

Baden-Powell was describing adults close enough to know the youth, restrained enough not to commandeer their work, and mature enough to translate adult judgment into the language of youth. That posture leaves no room for adults standing at the back of the room while a teenager relays every meaningful interaction.

“Ask your SPL” is adult absence

In gold loopers’ Scouts BSA corporate-bureaucracy simulation, “Ask your SPL” is the polite version of an adult stepping back.

A Scout confused about a Tenderfoot rank requirement should not be bounced through a teen chain of command. A homesick Scout should not be told to find the right youth manager. A patrol chef should not be unsupported when cooking the pancakes. A Patrol Leader who is overwhelmed should not be treated as if the only adult relationship available is a scheduled meeting with the Scoutmaster after the PLC. Yet that is the culture encouraged by the “Ask your SPL” retort.

The 1981 Scoutmaster Handbook made that posture sound normal. Its model of a good troop has the Scoutmaster away from the meeting while the Senior Patrol Leader runs the meeting, the Scribe keeps records, the Patrol Leaders’ Council plans, and Patrol Leaders keep order.⁸

The 1981 adult-leader handbook tells the Scoutmaster to work into the background and put the youth-staffed troop-office machinery into the foreground.⁹ The current adult-leader guidebook is mixed. It preserves some good adult-association language, but still puts adults inside a structure where youth bureaucrats—the SPL, Assistant SPL, youth offices, and PLC—carry the operating load.¹⁰ The result is not youth initiative. As a governing habit, it’s youth administering a machine while adults admire their own absence.

Adults should know patrols directly

Another example of competing instruction in the adult-leader guidebook is how adults are encouraged to focus direct mentorship to the youth-office structure.¹¹ If they do this, ordinary Scouts lose much direct adult association, Patrol Leaders are undermined as patrols lose adult focus, and the bureaucracy gains false moral authority. The previous article explains how unit adults inherited that self-reproducing machine.

Adults need a direct feel for patrol life: what each patrol is attempting, which Scouts are growing, which Scouts are isolated, which Patrol Leaders are earning trust, and which conflicts are ordinary friction rather than real harm.

Adults therefore have to tolerate some disorder. A patrol sorting through disagreement is not automatically a management failure. It may be the exact place where leadership is being learned. The adult task is to keep that space safe, humane, and developmental. That does not happen when the adult replaces association with a corporate-bureaucracy simulation, even though that bureaucracy looks cleaner from across the room.

Adults should mentor Patrol Leaders without converting them into middle managers. They should help a Patrol Leader ask better questions: What does your patrol want? Who is quiet? What are you worried about? What can you try before an adult steps in? What did you learn from the last failure?

Teen staff are not adult association

Cross-age help among youth can have value in narrow circumstances (see next section), that does not substitute for adults knowing and mentoring middle schoolers directly.

In the troop-office chain, high schoolers often become the adults’ front line: supervisors, instructors, and buffers between adults and middle schoolers.¹² That turns teen help into a babysitting regime with leadership language painted on it.

The substitution damages both age groups. Middle schoolers lose the adult relationships that are core to Scouting. High schoolers lose the chance to pursue age-level adventure with peers because they are kept in the middle-school program as staff. The adult-association failure starts here: adults have handed off a method of Scouting to youth offices.

Middle schoolers especially need this distinction. Research on adolescent support notes that younger adolescents may report more support from parents and other adults compared to older adolescents.¹³ BSA has every reason to preserve intentional, non-parental adult association in Scouts BSA, a program whose developmental focus is middle school.

Cross-age mentoring must be adult-guided…

The cross-age mentoring research supports a narrow proposition: older youth can help middle schoolers when adults build and supervise the relationship. A meta-analysis of cross-age mentoring found positive effects, but the stronger programs had moderate or high adult oversight and supervision. That finding supports adult-guided help from older youth, not teen substitution.¹⁴

The comparison evidence is cautionary. In a review of Big Brothers Big Sisters school-based mentoring, high-school mentors supported by local BBBS agencies did not significantly improve many school-related measures compared with non-mentored youth. The broader BBBS comparison likewise found some relational advantages for older-peer mentoring, but weaker or absent results on misconduct, classroom effort, and academic competence. Adult mentoring may not win every comparison, but the research does not justify turning middle schoolers over to high schoolers.¹⁵

The program-design literature points the same direction. In this research, “peer” does not mean that a 17-year-old is an ordinary program peer of a 10-year-old. It means an older or more-experienced youth in a defined helping role with someone younger or less experienced. That role needs clear objectives, matching, training, monitoring, guidance, and evaluation. The National Mentoring Resource Center likewise treats cross-age mentoring as promising but only preliminarily backed by evidence, and it stresses adult guidance, training, and supervision.¹⁶

That structured mentoring model is different from ordinary Scouts BSA culture, where high schoolers are expected to manage middle schoolers as part of the troop machine, all the while pretending to be program peers to the middle schoolers, in an environment where adults are encouraged to keep their distance. The research can support approachable, adult-guided help from older youth. It does not validate BSA’s jumbled program design, where high schoolers are trapped in a program designed around the developmental stage of middle schoolers.

…but adult mentoring is good

The adult-mentoring evidence supplies the positive case for adult association. A meta-analysis associated natural adult mentoring with positive youth outcomes, especially when the relationship itself was high quality.¹⁷ A large meta-analysis of intergenerational youth mentoring programs likewise found statistically significant effects across youth outcomes.¹⁸ Other research on youth support systems describes supportive youth-adult relationships as sources of care, challenge, support, expanded possibility, and shared power.¹⁹

That evidence fits the ordinary advantages of adult maturity. Adults bring judgment, accountability, emotional range, and distance from the peer-status games that shape adolescence. That maturity lets them teach, protect, and interpret without asking high schoolers to impersonate adults.

Adult association fits the evidence. A troop culture built on teen substitution lacks that support.

The repair is active adult association

The repair is simple but not passive: adults in Scouts BSA should be close enough to know Scouts and restrained enough to let patrols own their work.

Adults can ask questions, teach skills, notice risk, and speak directly with Scouts without turning every problem into adult control. That is healthy adult partnership: direct, accountable, and respectful of patrol ownership.

What does that look like in practice? It looks ordinary, and it stays inside Scouting’s safeguards.

On a campout, an adult moves through the patrol sites and stops where a patrol is cooking. The adult asks how the meal is coming, watches a new Scout fumble the stove, and shows the fix directly rather than waiting for the SPL to be summoned. The adult notices a Scout sitting apart from the group and finds a reason to bring them back in. None of that requires a title, a scheduled meeting, or involvement of a troop-level youth bureaucrat.

A Scoutmaster conference unrelated to advancement is another channel, and it works when it is a conversation rather than a checklist, when it results in adult action and support instead of passive listening then forgetting. It may include asking what a Scout is enjoying, what is hard, and who they are becoming.

Sometimes direct association means visibly doing nothing: an adult watches a patrol argue its way through a bad plan, stays close enough to intervene if anyone is at risk, and lets the patrol own the outcome. Presence is not control. The adult who can stand near a struggling patrol without seizing the wheel is practicing adult association in its hardest form.

In each scene the adult is close, accountable, and visible, and in no scene is the patrol’s self-ownership challenged. The safeguards that govern adult-youth contact never required adult distance—only that adult presence be conducted in the open. Distance was never the rule. It became the habit years before safeguarding was even a thing in BSA.

Restoring adult association weakens the Scouts BSA troop-office machinery because that structure depends on adult distance. Once adults resume direct mentorship, troop-level youth-bureaucrat offices lose their borrowed moral authority.

Scouts BSA’s repair

A repaired Scouts BSA program would set aside the gold loopers’ corporate-bureaucracy simulation. It would be rebuilt around patrol ownership. Adults would be present. Youth would own real adventures. No high schooler would be asked to substitute for the adults Scouting promised would be there.

The next article follows the cost of that substitution for high schoolers themselves: deprived of age-level programming, most are trapped inside a middle-school program, then praised for operating the very bureaucracy that traps them there.

Footnotes

1. Scouting’s Barriers to Abuse, Scouting America. ↩︎
2. Scouts BSA: The Aims and Methods of Scouting, Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
3. Troop Leader Guidebook, Volume 1, Boy Scouts of America, 2018, pp. 15, 70, 127, 130. ↩︎
4. Ibid., PDF p. 20. ↩︎
5. Handbook for Scoutmasters, Second Edition, Boy Scouts of America, 1922, p. 16;The Official Scoutmaster Handbook, Seventh Edition, Boy Scouts of America, 1981, pp. 147-149. ↩︎
6. Pearls of Wisdom – Quotes from Baden-Powell, Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
7. Robert Baden-Powell, Aids to Scoutmastership, 1944, p. 6. The elder-brother framing appears elsewhere in the book as well. ↩︎
8. The Official Scoutmaster Handbook, Seventh Edition, Boy Scouts of America, 1981, p. 19. ↩︎
9. Ibid., pp. 18-22. ↩︎
10. Troop Leader Guidebook, Volume 1, Boy Scouts of America, 2018, pp. 85-88, 127. ↩︎
11. Ibid., pp. 11, 69-72, 83-84. ↩︎
12. For a BSA-hosted example of the chain-of-command posture, see Kip Krumwiede, “Lessons I Learned as a Scout Leader,” Boy Scouts of America, 2020, especially the section “Respecting the Chain of Command.” ↩︎
13. Caroline L. Bokhorst, Sindy R. Sumpter, and P. Michiel Westenberg, “Social Support from Parents, Friends, Classmates, and Teachers in Children and Adolescents Aged 9 to 18 Years: Who Is Perceived as Most Supportive?”, Social Development, 2010. This is cited by and expanded on in Shannon M. Varga, Mark Vincent B. Yu, Haley E. Johnson, Valerie Futch Ehrlich, and Nancy L. Deutsch, “‘It’s going to help me in life‘: Forms, sources, and functions of social support for youth in natural mentoring relationships”, Journal of Community Psychology, 2023. ↩︎
14. Samantha Burton, Elizabeth B. Raposa, Cyanea Y. S. Poon, Geert Jan J. M. Stams, and Jean Rhodes, Cross-age peer mentoring for youth: A meta-analysis, American Journal of Community Psychology 70 (2022): 211-227, PDF pp. 1-3, 9, 11. ↩︎
15. Burton et al., Cross-age peer mentoring for youth: A meta-analysis, PDF pp. 2, 5. ↩︎
16. Michael J. Karcher and Joshua R. M. Berger, One-to-One Cross-Age Peer Mentoring: National Mentoring Resource Center Model Review, National Mentoring Resource Center, September 2017; Linlin Luo and Heidrun Stoeger, Unlocking the transformative power of mentoring for youth development in communities, schools, and talent domains, Journal of Community Psychology 51 (2023): 3067-3082, PDF pp. 2, 7-10. ↩︎
17. L. Van Dam, D. Smit, B. Wildschut, S. Branje, J. Rhodes, M. Assink, and G. Stams, Does Natural Mentoring Matter? A Multilevel Meta-analysis on the Association Between Natural Mentoring and Youth Outcomes, American Journal of Community Psychology, 2018. ↩︎
18. Elizabeth B. Raposa et al., The Effects of Youth Mentoring Programs: A Meta-analysis of Outcome Studies, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 2019. ↩︎
19. Taylor N. Melton, Maya V. Brehm, and Nancy L. Deutsch, Broadening the perspective on youth’s systems of support: An ecological examination of supportive peer and adult relationships during adolescence, Journal of Community Psychology, 2021. ↩︎

Troop-level positions of responsibility undermine the patrol method. They steal ownership from patrols by taking over decisions that should belong to small teams, and they teach Scouts that real responsibility sits outside the patrol.

Even the thin positions matter. They pull youth away from patrol programs and into troop-level duties that are often just make-work.

The roster changes where everyone looks for responsibility. Patrols lose autonomy when Scouts treat troop-level titles as the owners of concerns. This reduces the patrol to a labor pool for someone else’s plan, or a side project beneath the troop machine.

Gold loopers legitimize the swap by calling it leadership. That word hides a youth-staffed bureaucracy.

The first article in this series argued that gold loopers replaced patrol ownership with a youth-operated corporate-bureaucracy simulation. The second article traced how gold loopers built this simulation and gave it a leadership-development theory. This article looks inside the machinery: troop offices and advancement incentives that deflate the patrol method.

Troop offices pre-decide patrol work

Start with the main patrol-method question: “How will this patrol own its adventure?”

Troop positions of responsibility often answer that question before the patrol can ask it. Every formal troop-level office above the patrol is a decision already made, an opportunity thieved from the patrol.

A troop needs troop-level coordination. The first article put that work where it belongs: a congress of patrol leaders whose authority rises from the patrols.

Over the 20th century, gold loopers neutered patrols, moving authority from patrols to a corporate-bureaucracy simulation. This simulation became the troop operating model. The simulation was institutionalized in the 1972 Improved Scouting Program.

The 1981 Official Scoutmaster Handbook illustrated this simulation, describing troop-level bureaucratic positions as “natural”, naming the Senior Patrol Leader as the “big shot” who “directs Patrol Leaders, chairs the Patrol Leaders’ Council, and is in charge of the troop”, then treating other roles, like Quartermaster, Scribe, and more, as obvious troop-level answers whenever a related concern arises.¹ Before the patrol could ask how to solve a problem, gold loopers had already bureaucratized the answer.

The organization chart takes sides. It tells adults and Scouts that the troop’s real operating logic is bureaucracy, not leadership, with ownership centered in troop offices instead of patrols.

The thefts are different

The corporate-bureaucracy simulation damages patrol ownership by changing who sets the program, where decisions are made, where Scouts look for direction, who participates in patrol life, how patrols learn, who provides adult association, and what receives status.

The Senior Patrol Leader role and Patrol Leaders’ Council apparatus pull program ownership out of patrols. Instructor and Troop Guide shift patrol learning into troop-level youth offices, displacing adult association. Other roles, like Quartermaster, Scribe, and Historian, are softer examples, but they still show patrol concerns yielding to bureaucratic youth titles on a troop roster.

This heavy administrative machinery was not part of Baden-Powell’s design for Scouting. Even early administrative youth roles in BSA, like Scribe, began emerging in the 1910s to help with the paperwork and logistical burdens of growing units. They were practical answers to administrative problems, not proof that patrol ownership had to give way to a youth-staffed office chart.

In other national programs, the framing tends to be healthier. Where analogues to BSA’s bureaucratic youth offices even exist, these are typically informal roles that are subordinate to patrol life, rotated among patrol members, and used to strengthen the patrol. They generally don’t build a troop-level bureaucracy that displaces patrol ownership. For example, Scouts Ireland describes analogous roles as “roles within the Patrol” that “reinforce a Scout’s sense of belonging to a Patrol”.³

World Scouting frames the same principle structurally rather than anecdotally. Its team system is “not a pyramidal structure for the transmission of orders”.⁴ Instead, each small team provides its own leadership and “the young people organise their life as a group.”⁵ National programs follow suit. The Scout Association in the United Kingdom centers its youth structure on Patrol Leaders rather than a roster of troop offices, and treats the Patrol Leaders’ Council not as a governing body but as a way “to make sure that the adult leadership team hears from young people.”⁶ Scouts Australia, under a “Youth Leading, Adults Supporting” model, locates leadership in the patrol: “the role of the Patrol Leader is to lead their patrol”. Patrols rotate responsibility for troop-level activities, coordinated through an informal council of Patrol Leaders.⁷

Program determination moves upstairs

Every troop office is a stored decision, a governance choice pre-encoded before the patrol can make it.

The biggest stored decision is program ownership. The Senior Patrol Leader description makes the point plainly: the SPL chairs troop meetings, events, activities, the annual program planning conference, and Patrol Leaders’ Council meetings, while also appointing other troop youth leaders and assigning duties.⁸ But the stored decision is not just one youth title. It is the apparatus itself: troop program is made upstairs, and Patrol Leaders are trained to feed input into that machinery rather than lead independent patrol programs.

When answers sit in troop-level offices, troop-level action becomes the program, upending the patrol method. BSA affirms the primacy of troop-level programming: “[m]ost patrol activities take place in the context of troop activities” and may not “conflict with the troop calendar”.⁹

Patrols may still divide chores inside a troop event, but chores are not ownership. A patrol can decide who brings the stove yet have little meaningful say over its program.

The Patrol Leaders’ Council name misleads. It sounds like a congress of patrols. In fact, it is the “troop’s elected and duly appointed governing body”, a standing bureaucratic committee chaired by the SPL.¹⁰ A key part of the corporate-bureaucracy simulation, this committee reduces Patrol Leaders to middle management inside a troop machine. The patrol is still visible, but ownership of its destiny has been moved upstairs. The adult-leader guidebook reinforces the supremacy of troop-level planning, with Patrol Leaders not being pulled into annual event planning until the Scoutmaster and SPL have already drafted a plan.¹¹

Removal of officers from patrols

Presumably to allow sufficient focus to operate the Scouts BSA bureaucratic machine, the SPL, Assistant SPL, and Troop Guide are not members of patrols.¹² This is not just a distraction from patrol life. The corporate-bureaucracy simulation removes them from the patrol method.

Adult leaders have long debated how the SPL should relate to ordinary patrols because an SPL can overshadow the Patrol Leader of whichever patrol he joins. That gives away the problem. The office is treated as powerful enough that adults must manage its effect on ordinary patrol operations.¹³

Troop offices steal patrol-based learning and adult association

A patrol that owns its adventure also owns much of its learning. If its members cannot cook, tie a knot, or care for a new member, the problem belongs to the patrol. That isn’t always orderly, yet that is where patrol leadership starts.

In the patrol method, adult association is the backstop. Adults stand in relationship with patrols and mentor them toward greater capability.

The corporate-bureaucracy simulation pushes troop-level Instructor and Troop Guide roles into the space where patrol learning and adult association should happen.

BSA’s Instructor description assigns basic-Scout-skill instruction and merit-badge-counselor coordination to this youth bureaucrat.¹⁴ The Troop Guide partly overlaps Instructor, partly provides specialized training for Patrol Leaders.¹⁵ Neither of these roles comes close to the mentoring relationship of a caring adult.

Even with good intentions, the younger patrol’s leader becomes a person being managed rather than the person leading. Growth and team formation both suffer.¹⁶

Patrols should not be left ignorant. Adults should help them develop the habit of teaching, orienting, and strengthening themselves. The theft happens when the patrol learns to receive instruction from the troop’s youth bureaucracy instead of owning that development with appropriate adult partnership.

The roster makes patrols look upward

A youth troop office pulls bureaucracy into the youth program. It gives one youth a title over a concern that might otherwise belong to patrols, adults, or nobody at all. Scouts then spend less time influencing peers inside a patrol and more time staffing an adult-authored roster of bureaucratic offices. Patrol autonomy disappears by habit. Everyone keeps looking upward.

Quartermaster, Scribe, and Historian show the pattern. The Quartermaster is assigned records on patrol and troop equipment, equipment issuing, and related administrative chores.¹⁷ The Scribe is described as the troop’s secretary, attending PLC meetings, recording discussions, coordinating attendance, and maintaining advancement records.¹⁸ The Historian gathers photos and facts about troop activities, cares for troop trophies and souvenirs, and keeps information about former troop members.¹⁹

These offices steal differently. Gear has a real patrol dimension. Records may be necessary but mostly serve troop administration. Historian is a thin role that often exposes make-work. Together, they show how the troop-office roster changes the center of gravity. A patrol should care for its own gear habits, decide what records help its own members, and choose whether it wishes to memorialize its own adventures. The troop office teaches a different lesson: look outside the patrol for the real owner.

Scouters sometimes ask how to make these bureaucratic offices meaningful when the natural work is thin. The answers often become make-work: newsletters, spreadsheets, social media, attendance logs, binders, kits, closets, photo rosters, and reminders. Some of that work may have a patina of value. But this is bureaucracy. Calling it youth leadership shows how far the office roster has wandered from leadership or the patrol method.²⁰

A theme of the youth-staffed, troop-level bureaucratic roles is how they take on troop-level responsibilities that adults should handle in the background. Adults can track shared equipment, keep a website updated, add to a troop scrapbook, and check attendance. That is just administrative work, not leadership. It should not compete with the Patrol Leader’s authority, remove a patrol decision, displace Scouts from patrol involvement, or tell Scouts that the real action is in a youth-staffed bureaucracy.

Advancement turns offices into currency

Advancement is part of Scouting. World Scouting includes personal progression as part of the Scout Method²¹, and peer organizations have awards and progression. For example, The Scout Association in the United Kingdom offers badges that Scouts can work toward²², and Scouts Australia describes its Achievement Pathways as a personal progression framework that recognizes personal development²³.

Scouts BSA’s badge ladder turns troop offices into rank-advancement currency. The Star rank requires a Scout to serve four months in one or more listed positions of responsibility, or to carry out a Scoutmaster-approved “leadership project”. The Life rank does the same while raising the bar to six months. The Eagle Scout rank then eliminates the leadership-project option.²⁴ The adult-leader guidebook makes the pressure explicit, pushing adult leaders to ensure offices are filled to support advancement.

This guidebook even warns that receiving a badge of office does not itself make a Scout a leader. That warning is right, but the advancement machinery provides different incentives.²⁵

The patch becomes proof of tenure, and the Scoutmaster becomes the adult who must keep enough recognized offices available for the advancement machine.

Motivation to advance can be healthy. But with the immense cultural weight on BSA’s advancement, the credential needs to mean more. The badge should recognize real leadership, real adventure, and real growth, not tenure in an adult-authored, bureaucratic office.

Adventure and the patrol method have no need for a youth-staffed, troop-level Librarian role.²⁶ The advancement system does.

Unit adults become innocent accomplices

Gold loopers call their troop organization chart “samples”, and technically they are. But the troop-structure page tells the Scoutmaster and Senior Patrol Leader to determine what positions the troop needs from that chart. Then it ties those positions to advancement and says all youth should have the opportunity to serve in them.²⁷

Adults receive the chart as ordinary Scouting, then are told advancement depends on it. This is immense pressure to conform.

Unit-level adults are largely innocent, not understanding they were hoodwinked by gold loopers in the theft of patrol ownership. Unit-level leaders faithfully set up the very bureaucracy that displaced the patrol method: the patrol still gets a name, but the troop-position roster stripped the power and stripped adult partnership.

The machine is easier to preserve than patrol space

The patrol method leaves green space for personal growth. Bureaucracy paves over it.

That green space is where leadership development happens. A patrol that owns its own program works through ambition, uncertainty, and risk. It burns pancakes, forgets tent stakes, changes its mind, argues, recovers, and discovers that a patch does not make a leader. Peer trust does, and peers can ignore you if you have not earned it.

Gold loopers created a system with its own institutional interests: huge books, patches, advancement, training syllabi, and committees that defend their machinery. The patrol method, by contrast, asks adults to tolerate the messiness of patrol ownership.

Gold loopers are bureaucrats. While their corporate-bureaucracy simulation is orders of magnitude more complex than the patrol method, it is also more definable. It is easier for bureaucrats to standardize and defend, plus it generates ample make-work to justify even more gold-looper volunteer and professional roles. Once gold loopers built their complex machine, their incentive was to preserve it and blame unit volunteers for failures.

The next article turns from the youth offices to the adults standing behind them. Once adults believe that meaningful guidance must be routed through a troop-level org chart, they abandon one of Scouting’s core methods. By hiding behind this manufactured youth bureaucracy, adults sever direct mentorship of the patrol and abdicate their main duty, the adult-association method of Scouting.

Footnotes

1. The Official Scoutmaster Handbook, Seventh Edition, Boy Scouts of America, 1981, pp. 49-54. ↩︎
2. Ibid., p. 49. ↩︎
3. The Scouters Manual, Scouts Ireland, 2010, p. 51. ↩︎
4. Scouting: An Educational System, World Organization of the Scout Movement, 1998, p. 26. ↩︎
5. The Scout Method, World Organization of the Scout Movement. ↩︎
6. Run a Patrol Leaders’ Council, The Scout Association (UK). ↩︎
7. Scouts Australia Official Program Resource, Patrol Leader role description (Aug 2021, v1.2); New Program Overview, Scouts Australia. ↩︎
8. Senior Patrol Leader and Patrol Leader, Troop Leader Resources, Boy Scouts of America; Scouts BSA Troop Leader Guidebook, Volume 1, Boy Scouts of America, 2018, pp. 75-76. ↩︎
9. Scouts BSA Troop Leader Guidebook, Volume 1, Boy Scouts of America, 2018, p. 20. ↩︎
10. Patrol Leader’s (sic) Council Monthly Planning, Troop Leader Resources, Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
11. Scouts BSA Troop Leader Guidebook, Volume 1, Boy Scouts of America, 2018, pp. 33-37, 119-121. ↩︎
12. Senior Patrol Leader Handbook, Boy Scouts of America, 2018, pp. 15, 140-141. ↩︎
13. Ibid.; also as illustrative examples: With whom does the SPL eat?, Scouter.com, April 9, 2010, and SPL and ASPL do they belong to a Patrol?, Scouter.com, September 26, 2005. ↩︎
14. Instructor,Troop Leader Resources, Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
15. Troop Guide, Troop Leader Resources, Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
16. (these are provided as illustrative examples, so this is not an exhaustive list; the depth of the argument is in the comments, sometimes not apparent by the thread titles indicated by the link names) Question About Troop Guide Position, Reddit r/BSA; using troop guides, Scouter.com; Why were Venture patrols done away with?, Scouter.com; Troop Guide in Mixed Age Patrols Without New Scout Patrol, Scouter.com; New Scout Patrol, Scouter.com; Question – Does your troop have a leadership patrol?, Reddit r/BSA. ↩︎
17. Quartermaster, Troop Leader Resources, Boy Scouts of America; Scouts BSA Troop Leader Guidebook, Volume 1, Boy Scouts of America, 2018, pp. 73, 128-129. ↩︎
18. Scribe, Troop Leader Resources, Boy Scouts of America; Troop Leader Guidebook, Volume 1, 2018, p. 73. ↩︎
19. Historian, Troop Leader Resources, Boy Scouts of America; Scouts BSA Troop Leader Guidebook, Volume 1, Boy Scouts of America, 2018, p. 73. ↩︎
20. (this is provided as an illustrative example) Making Positions of Responsibility Meaningful, Reddit r/BSA. ↩︎
21. World Scout Youth Programme Policy and AIS, World Organization of the Scout Movement. ↩︎
22. Scout Awards, The Scout Association. ↩︎
23. Achievement Pathways, Scouts Australia Official Program Resource. ↩︎
24. 2025 Scouts BSA Requirements, Boy Scouts of America, 2025, pp. 17-22. ↩︎
25. Scouts BSA Troop Leader Guidebook, Volume 1, Boy Scouts of America, 2018, pp. 16, 19, 69, 96. ↩︎
26. Librarian, Troop Leader Resources, Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
27. Troop Structure, Troop Leader Resources, Boy Scouts of America;Scouts BSA Troop Leader Guidebook, Volume 1, Boy Scouts of America, 2018, pp. 14-15, 133. ↩︎

The Scouts BSA corporate-bureaucracy simulation did not appear all at once. Gold loopers did this gradually. They built up the troop-office machinery, wired it into advancement, and then gave that machinery a faux leadership-development theory. In 1972, gold loopers used the Improved Scouting Program to validate their gradual creep and give it a curriculum.

The first article explained that the patrol method means self-governing patrols, not youth administration of a troop machine. This article presents the institutional history, how BSA’s gold loopers gradually stole the patrol method from our youth.

The theft was gradual

Unit-level adults did not create the corporate-bureaucracy simulation. They inherited it from from gold loopers.

Gold loopers did not commit a single midnight theft. The records show no single heist. Instead, we see accretion, one handbook at a time.

A troop practicing the patrol method would feel like a collection of patrols, each mentored by adults, with a focus on the patrol agendas. Over the 20th century, gold loopers gradually imposed a troop-level office layer that grew in size and prominence. That shifted the Scouts BSA program’s focus away from patrols and toward a troop-level machine. It also pulled everyday adult association back from most youth, except for those in selected, troop-level offices.

The handbooks show patrols giving way to offices

The Scoutmaster handbooks show the original center of gravity and the building tension. Youth-facing books repeated the same machinery.

The 1914 Handbook for Scout Masters, First Edition, does not yet present a durable troop-office layer as the normal center of Scout operations. Its early troop-organization material is sparse: Patrol Leaders and the Scout Scribe are the only visible youth structure.¹

While the Scout Scribe was a troop-level role, it was not a functionary in youth bureaucracy. Rather, the role was practical, to assist the Scoutmaster²:

Troop records giving details of the progress of the boys enrolled are invaluable to the Local and National Organizations. A complete set of records should therefore be kept by every troop. Inasmuch as the Scout Master himself may not be able to give the time required in the preparation of data of this kind, it is important that one of the members of the troop be chosen as Scout Scribe or Troop Secretary.

Description of the Scout Scribe role from the 1914 Handbook for Scout Masters. This youth role provided clerical support to the Scoutmaster. It was not an officer in a youth chain of command.

Even in 1914, though, the first seed of troop-level youth authority is visible. In one ceremony, “[i]n case there is no Assistant
Scout Master”, a senior patrol leader (SPL) handles some ceremonial details.³ Elsewhere, the book says the senior patrol leader usually presides at troop meetings, and a model troop constitution calls the Senior Patrol Leader the Troop Leader or Troop President, with general supervision over the troop and subordinate officers. The patrol-leader-training chapter then pulls the title back toward patrol merit. It describes the SPL as a situational role filled by the “advanced or senior Patrol Leader”, or more precisely “the Leader of the patrol doing the best work”. This is not a permanent, bureaucratic supervisor position. Instead, the SPL “should occasionally be in full charge” when the troop is assembled.⁴

That is the first tension: a patrol-derived honor and occasional troop function already carrying the seed of later troop-office authority. Had this been the limit of the progression, then we could comfortably say that the patrol method was still in use. But that seed later germinates.

The 1922 Handbook for Scoutmasters, Second Edition, illustrates the patrol method⁵:

In the chart, the Patrol Leader answers to no other youth and is mentored directly by the Scoutmaster. But the text grows the 1914 tension by assigning a more expansive role to the senior patrol leader⁶:

Senior Patrol Leader: Preside at meetings. Lead games. Carry out plans of the Scoutmaster. Supervise and direct work of Patrol Leaders and Scouts.

Role description from the 1922 Handbook for Scoutmasters.

This is still not a supervisor of an expansive youth bureaucracy, and use of lower case in other sections suggests it’s still an informal role. But the word “supervise” matters. By 1922, the troop-supervisory idea is no longer theoretical. It appears in a practical division-of-labor section.

The 1922 Handbook for Scoutmasters also lays out other troop-level administrative roles for youth. The formally recognized roles were only “Bugler and Scout Scribe”.⁷ But by also listing not-formally-recognized roles that were “often added” by troops, gold loopers make an early admission of a drift away from a patrol focus: “Assistant Treasurer, Librarian, Quartermaster (in charge of troop property), Scout Assistant Instructors (experienced Scouts who help the younger members), Hike Master, Drill Master, Color Bearer, Game Leader, etc.”⁸

The third edition of Handbook for Scoutmasters, first published in 1936, makes the tension more visible. It still gives an entire part to “THE PATROLS IN THE TROOP,” including chapters on the patrol method, Patrol Leaders, the Troop Leaders’ Council (the body later known as the Patrol Leaders’ Council or PLC), and the working of the patrol method. Written by William Hillcourt (the famous Green Bar Bill), this text asserts the patrol method: real patrols, real Patrol Leaders, patrol meetings without adults (no longer permitted⁹; the point here is the handbook’s focus on the patrol program), patrol hikes, patrol projects, patrol spirit, and boy responsibility.

Compared with 1922, the 1936 edition gives the existing pieces a fuller operating system. The 1922 edition had already named some troop jobs. The change in 1936 was structure: a detailed Troop Leaders’ Council, Green Bar Patrol, formal Junior Assistant Scoutmaster role, and more explicit troop program and advancement machinery. The book still teaches the patrol method while building more machinery around it.¹⁰

Hillcourt should not be cast as a Baden-Powell purist on troop structure. While his enduring focus on patrols is commendable, he tried to keep patrol vitality alive inside a growing troop-level architecture that he did not challenge. His own materials presupposed that architecture: Senior Patrol Leader, troop officers, Troop Leaders’ Council, Green Bar Patrol, and the troop-meeting-centered rhythm.

While the 1936 version remains patrol-centered, it furthers the formal troop machinery that later overgrows the patrol.

By 1959, troop offices had grown heavier

The 1959 Scoutmaster’s Handbook still has the right official center of gravity. Its strongly affirms the patrol method with¹¹:

The Scoutmaster’s FIRST Job: Helping boy leaders make the PATROL METHOD work and to work with and through responsible adults to give Scouting to boys.

Direction to Scoutmasters that affirms the patrol method.

It also says the patrol method is an “absolute necessity” and affirms the adult-association method by asserting that freeing the Scoutmaster from details so that “above all, you have time to help each individual boy in the troop through frequent personal contacts”.¹²

However, the 1959 handbook reveals that the troop-office architecture had grown heavier. The Senior Patrol Leader is described as the troop’s highest elected office and executive officer. Assistant Senior Patrol Leaders relieve the SPL of details. “Troop warrants”, formal recognition of youth officeholders, extend to Instructor, Junior Assistant Scoutmaster, Scribe, Quartermaster, Librarian, Den Chief, and other offices. The Patrol Leader’s transmission-belt role is also clearer: he represents his patrol in the Patrol Leaders’ Council, brings ideas from the patrol, and carries the accepted program back to the patrol for action.¹³

Reaffirming this is mixed language. Despite language asserting the primacy of patrols, described above, other language conflates the patrol method with running the troop, such as “letting your boy leaders run THEIR troop”.¹⁴ This reveals a growing the tension about which gets primacy, the patrols or the troop. Is the program about the patrol method, or is it about the troop-level bureaucracy?

While this book still argues for the patrol method, it furthers the administrative structure that would later overpower it.

Advancement wired offices into rank

In 1965, advancement gave the office machinery credentialing force. BSA’s own On Scouting summary says the “Revised Boy Scout Advancement Plan” took effect on October 1, 1965, and required Scouts to serve in positions of responsibility as part of rank advancement. A rank-history chart compiled from Boy Scout handbooks identifies Star, Life, and Eagle requirements in 1965 as requiring service as a troop “warrant officer”, which today is called a “position of responsibility”. Patrol Leader was included, but only as one position in a list that also included several other roles.¹⁵

The list later evolved into something even more revealing. Today, for credentialing purposes, leading a patrol counts the same as maintaining the troop’s website. Assistant Patrol Leader, the only other titled, patrol-level role, counts for nothing.¹⁶ The advancement affirmed the troop-office layer.

Youth-facing books taught the machinery

The 1967 Patrol Leader’s Handbook confirms the troop-level focus. Its Patrol Leader’s Code, after listing personal and patrol-centric duties, says that, as a “leader in my troop”, the Patrol Leader should “[t]ake an active part in the patrol leaders’s council”, “[s]ee that the patrol is prepared to take an active part in all troop activities”, and “[w]ork with the Scoutmaster and other troop leaders to make the troop run well”.¹⁷

This isn’t about participating in a congress of patrols in a patrol-centric troop. Other parts of this book make clear that this is subsuming considerable parts of the Patrol Leader function into the troop-level machinery, such as working with the SPL in “plan[ning] the troop activities and mak[ing] sure they are carried out”¹⁸, that the Patrol Leader has a “share” of “[t]aking charge of the troop”¹⁹, conformance with a “troop … budget plan” and with a youth-staffed, bureaucratic finance apparatus,²⁰ that activities run by a patrol on behalf of a troop are decided by the PLC and announced by the SPL²¹, that the agenda of the PLC is set by the SPL-“chairman” and Scoutmaster²², that the Patrol Leader is a transmission belt for planning that emerges from the PLC²³, and more. The focus is on the troop, not the patrols.

The same 1967 youth-facing handbook gives the Patrol Leaders’ Council a parliamentary meeting structure. The Senior Patrol Leader chairs, the troop scribe keeps minutes, other troop leaders attend when their work is being planned, and the council holds annual and monthly planning meetings to build the troop program. It even warns that patrol hikes must not conflict with troop activities, because “the patrols must be present” for a troop function.²⁴ That is youth-facing bureaucratization.

The 1972 Scout Handbook, also youth-facing, carries the office-and-council model into the Improved Scouting Program era. It tells youth that the troop leaders’ council makes troop plans with help from the Scoutmaster and that, through that council, the Patrol Leader becomes the patrol’s voice in what the troop does.²⁵

The same 1972 youth handbook also describes an elected Senior Patrol Leader who sees that things happen in meetings and activities, chairs the troop leaders’ council, attends troop-committee meetings, may appoint an assistant, and may appoint Scouts to various troop-level roles.²⁶

The new-to-1972 feature was neither the youth-facing description of bureaucracy nor the bureaucracy’s advancement link. It was the concrete packaging of the bureaucracy.

By 1981, the troop chart became the operating model

The 1981 Official Scoutmaster Handbook, Seventh Edition, confirms the same emphasis. Its table of contents puts “Troop Organization and the Patrol Leaders’ Council” before “The Patrol Method,” then places Advancement, Training Junior Leaders, and Troop Administration inside a later section called “Tools to Do the Job.”²⁷ It elevates the SPL to “the ‘big shot’ of the troop.”²⁸

The 1981 adult-leader handbook repeats the Patrol Leader’s troop-serving role in job-description form: the Patrol Leader is to “[p]repare [the] patrol to take part in all troop activities” and “[w]ork with other troop leaders to make the troop run well”.²⁹ This is not mostly autonomous patrols. The patrol is just a cog in a troop machine.

The focus of the troop is also clarified by the troop organization chart³⁰, which is below. Here, gold loopers now mainly define a troop as a roster of troop-level officers. Patrols do not even appear on the chart. Patrol Leaders sit on the bottom tier of a chain of command. Notably, the chart almost entirely routes ordinary mentoring through the troop’s youth offices. Direct adult association, key to Baden-Powell’s patrol method, is displaced to scheduled set-pieces, like the Scoutmaster conference. With how these conferences are conveyed, they amount to a sideshow scheduled at the convenience of the Scoutmaster³¹, considerably different than Baden-Powell’s vision of adults as “older brother[s]” in a “jolly fraternity”.³²

The above diagram shows a Patrol Leaders’ Council (PLC), indicated by the heavy lines. The PLC amplifies the drift. The PLC is an administrative board, implemented as a bureaucratic committee, whose main point is “to plan and run the troop’s activities and to train the patrol leaders”.³³ It “runs the troop through democratic representation of the patrols”.³⁴

This drives the point home: Patrol programs now exist at the whim of a troop-level bureaucratic structure. No longer leaders of independent teams, Patrol Leaders are diminished to just having a seat at the table in a bureaucratic committee. This often means patrols are reduced to labor pools. Patrol identity revolves around doing the chores described previously or doing activities ordered by the PLC.

The “suggested order of business” for a PLC meeting emphasizes the bureaucratic nature of this committee³⁵:

Note what isn’t on this agenda: any patrol’s own adventure. It is a production meeting for troop output.

1972 gave the machine a theory of itself

The popular account treats 1972 as the original sin. Gold loopers weakened outdoor requirements. A few years later, Hillcourt later restored the outing to Scouting. That is where the story often ends.

The outdoor-program grievance is real. It also crowds out the structural grievance. The handbook progression above shows the troop-office machinery was already built, youth-facing, and wired into advancement. Gold loopers used the 1972 Improved Scouting Program to ratify that six-decade trajectory.

What 1972 added was a theory of the machinery. The Improved Scouting Program was gold loopers’ broad overhaul of “every aspect of the Scout program”.³⁶ It made the troop-office layer look like pedagogy. Office-holding was no longer merely administrative scaffolding. The office became the lesson.

White Stag, a Monterey Bay Area Council leadership-training experiment that predated the Improved Scouting Program, belongs in that 1972 context because it explains how the drift could be mistaken for leadership training rather than admitted as a retreat from patrol ownership. White Stag’s founder, Béla Bánáthy, and its program gave BSA the Eleven Skills of Leadership, a language of formal competencies and intentional training design.³⁷

Gold loopers studied that approach, adapted it into Wood Badge, and later credited White Stag in the Troop Leader Development Staff Guide.³⁸ Gold loopers’ own 1972 report to Congress says the new Wood Badge syllabus concentrated on leadership development for Scoutmasters, with youth-facing Troop Leader Development was being tested at Schiff and Philmont.³⁹

Hillcourt resisted the shift from Scoutcraft to leadership competencies. White Stag’s history says John Larson reported that Hillcourt “fought us all the way,” that Hillcourt proposed a camping-oriented alternative, and that Chief Scout Executive Joseph Brunton approved Larson’s leadership-development plan instead.⁴⁰ Hillcourt was contesting how the troop-office machine would be used: as support for Scoutcraft and patrol life, rather than as an explicit leadership-competency curriculum. Gold loopers chose the latter.

Gold loopers then carried the same theory down to youth training through Troop Leader Development. The 1974 staff-guide material traced the leadership-development concept through social-science studies, Army noncommissioned-officer experiments, White Stag, Wood Badge testing beginning in 1967, junior-leader expansion in 1969, a 1971 Philmont test, full Wood Badge integration in 1972, and use in every council beginning in 1973.⁴¹

Alongside that overhaul came the Leadership Corps, a new upper-age service layer. It assembled 14- and 15-year-old “[p]otential leaders” to serve the troop as bureaucrats and instructors. The Senior Patrol Leader ran that group.⁴² That is a revealing design. The older and more experienced Scouts were chiefly organized as a troop-staffing layer, an age-span problem taken up in part 5.

The same turn appeared in BSA’s youth-facing Patrol and Troop Leadership. With chapters on the patrol, the troop, troop operation, troop leaders’ council meetings, and the Leadership Corps, that book was part of the same early-1970s turn.⁴³ Before this turn, a Quartermaster could be understood as someone who kept the gear sorted. After this turn, being Quartermaster could be framed as practicing leadership competencies. The bureaucracy acquired a curriculum.

The office-and-training machinery survived the rollback

Much of the 1972 program was later reversed. By 1978, gold loopers had largely scrapped much of their Improved Scouting Program.⁴⁴ They turned to William Hillcourt to author the new Scout handbook that restored an emphasis on the outdoors.⁴⁵

But restoring outdoor emphasis did not restore the patrol method because the outdoor-program grievance and the structural grievance were never the same thing. Gold loopers could put camping and Scoutcraft back into the handbook while preserving their corporate-bureaucracy simulation.

This may be the most compelling evidence that the corporate-bureaucracy simulation’s survival was not an accident. The broader framework survived because gold loopers had sold it as “leadership development”, tested it, evaluated it, and integrated it into training. White Stag’s historical material says an outside evaluator compared BSA’s leadership-development methods favorably with the best leadership-development programs available to managers.⁴⁶

Hold on: the outside benchmark for Scouting’s “leadership development” was the best training available to managers? That is a confession! The design center was managerial training, which is not leadership, and the structure gold loopers built around it behaves accordingly. That makes the managerial character of the program hard to miss.

That is why “corporate-bureaucracy simulation” is the right name. Gold loopers’ structure did the work: a chief youth officer, assistants, department-like offices, chains of command, reports, training, troop-wide production, and high-school-aged Scouts often assigned to keep the machine running.

The current roster still reproduces the machine

Current Scouts BSA materials still show the same center of gravity. Official troop-position materials list a familiar roster of youth positions.⁴⁷ The Senior Patrol Leader is treated as the troop’s top youth office and primary link between Scouts and adults.⁴⁸ The Patrol Leaders’ Council is described as the troop’s elected and appointed governing body.⁴⁹

The roster has power because positions of responsibility are tied to advancement. Star and Life require months in one or more listed positions of responsibility unless the Scout completes a Scoutmaster-approved leadership project. Eagle removes that project alternative.⁵⁰ The recognized-position requirement remains. Once advancement depends on recognized offices, the troop-level bureaucracy becomes immortal: Adults feel pressure to keep offices available. Scouts feel pressure to occupy them. The troop chart becomes a credentialing system even when the patrol method needs none of those offices.

Adult training teaches the simulation, not the patrol method

The adult-training problem is part of the same story. While it continues to wave at the patrol method, adult training’s emphasis is on the corporate-bureaucracy simulation.

A key example comes from Montclair State University’s Building Evidence in Scouting Together (BEST) study of Scoutmaster Position-Specific Training, part of what allows Scoutmasters and Assistant Scoutmasters to be considered trained. The official syllabus treats the patrol method as required content. In the observed in-person courses, researchers found “zero instances” of trainers reinforcing the patrol method, even though they were instructed to do so!⁵¹

This finding makes sense. This is not just a practical response to time limitations. Given the prioritization and complexity of the corporate-bureaucracy simulation, when something must give to teach this simulation, trainers appear incentivized to skip the very thing that gold loopers have paved over: the patrol method.

(The BEST study was produced in collaboration with and is promoted by BSA⁵² and was funded by Stephen Bechtel Jr., a major Scouting donor and namesake of the Summit Bechtel Reserve.)

Wood Badge makes adults rehearse the machine

In BSA culture, Wood Badge is often treated as the mark of serious adult formation. BSA describes Wood Badge as an advanced national leadership course covering topics common with managers, such as conflict management, coaching, and project planning.⁵³

Wood Badge is delivered as a five-day⁵⁴ practical course, often run over two weekends, in which adults live inside a model Scouts BSA troop, living inside the corporate-bureaucracy simulation. They treat that simulation as the framework for practicing program skills.⁵⁵

The objection is not that adults receive training. Adults need formation, knowledge, and practice mentoring youth. Wood Badge’s problem is the structure it normalizes. Its model troop teaches adults to inhabit the corporate-bureaucracy simulation that gold loopers built: troop offices, troop-wide coordination, management language, and a youth bureaucracy treated as the normal operating system.

Enormous documentation

The lengthy Wood Badge dress rehearsal is just part of it.

The Scouts BSA corporate-bureaucracy simulation is so complicated that the official BSA reference for program-side adult leaders in troops (Scoutmaster and Assistant Scoutmasters), the Troop Leader Guidebook, is two volumes. Together, these volumes are 338 pages and 180,738 words.

By comparison, the U.S. Constitution, with all its amendments, is only 7,591 words.

The patrol method is simple

The patrol method needs no immersion course, no mind-bogglingly long documentation, because it fits in four sentences!

Even Hillcourt, despite working inside gold loopers’ growing troop-level architecture, could still describe the older simplicity of the patrol method⁵⁶:

If you want to be a Scout, you go and make up a patrol and go out and do scouting. That’s all it says in the early books in those days.

It was the out-of-doors, scouting and camping. The ideals also. The life of a small patrol in the out-df-doors with the campfires. That was the real appeal to me.

William Hillcourt musing on his experiences as a youth.

The next article turns from the historical buildout to the machinery itself: the official troop offices and positions of responsibility that move patrol work upward and turn youth bureaucracy into the apparent center of Scouts BSA.

Footnotes

1. Handbook for Scout Masters, First Edition, Boy Scouts of America, 1913 & 1914, p. 22. ↩︎
2. Ibid, p. 22. ↩︎
3. Handbook for Scout Masters, First Edition, Boy Scouts of America, 1913 & 1914, p. 68. ↩︎
4. Ibid, pp. 115, 118-119, 142. ↩︎
5. Handbook for Scoutmasters: A Manual for Leadership, Second Edition, Boy Scouts of America, 1922, p. 17. The title page says this is the “third imprint”. ↩︎
6. Ibid, p. 255. ↩︎
7. Ibid, p. 17. ↩︎
8. Ibid, p. 17. ↩︎
9. Scouting’s Barriers to Abuse, Scouting America. Current policy prohibits one-on-one contact between adult leaders and youth members and requires two registered adult leaders at all Scouting activities. ↩︎
10. Handbook for Scoutmasters, Volume One, Third Edition, Boy Scouts of America, 1938, pp. vi, 2-3, 130-132, 191-208. The copyright page indicates that the first imprint was in 1936. William Hillcourt’s authorship is mentioned on p. vi. ↩︎
11. Scoutmaster’s Handbook, Fifth Edition, Boy Scouts of America, 1959, p. 32. ↩︎
12. Ibid, pp. 40, 42. ↩︎
13. Ibid, pp. 48-57. The handbook describes the Patrol Leader as both patrol leader and troop leader, describes the Senior Patrol Leader and Assistant Senior Patrol Leader, and lists troop warrants for youth offices. ↩︎
14. Ibid, p. 40. ↩︎
15. Bryan Wendell, One surprising fact about anyone who earned Eagle before Oct. 1, 1965, On Scouting, Dec. 27, 2021. (On Scouting is a recent, new brand for the online versions of Scouting and Scout Life magazines.) See also Jeff Snowden, BSA Rank Advancement Requirements, 1910-2019, Troop 97, Fort Collins, Colorado, updated Sept. 2019, pp. 9-10. ↩︎
16. Star Rank Requirements, Life Rank Requirements, Eagle Rank Requirements, Boy Scouts of America. See the requirement in each that mentions “positions of responsibility”. ↩︎
17. Patrol Leader’s Handbook, Boy Scouts of America, 1967, p 10. ↩︎
18. Ibid, p. 7. ↩︎
19. Ibid, p. 7. ↩︎
20. Ibid, p. 14. ↩︎
21. Ibid, p. 43. ↩︎
22. Ibid, p. 63. ↩︎
23. Ibid, p. 64. ↩︎
24. Ibid, p. 89. ↩︎
25. Scout Handbook, Boy Scouts of America, 1972, p. 26. ↩︎
26. Ibid, pp. 22, 26-27. ↩︎
27. The Official Scoutmaster Handbook, Seventh Edition, Boy Scouts of America, 1981, pp. 4-5. The table of contents places troop organization and the Patrol Leaders’ Council before the patrol method, and later lists advancement, junior-leader training, and troop administration as tools to do the job. ↩︎
28. The Official Scoutmaster Handbook, Seventh Edition, Boy Scouts of America, 1981, p. 52. ↩︎
29. Ibid, p. 51. ↩︎
30. Ibid, p. 49. ↩︎
31. Ibid, pp. 23-24. ↩︎
32. Robert Baden-Powell, Aids to Scoutmastership, 1944, p. 3. ↩︎
33. The Official Scoutmaster Handbook, Seventh Edition, Boy Scouts of America, 1981, p. 54. ↩︎
34. Ibid, p. 54. ↩︎
35. Ibid, p. 55. ↩︎
36. Annual Report to Congress, Boy Scouts of America, 1972, pp. 8, 21-22.. ↩︎
37. Béla H. Bánáthy, Founder of the White Stag Leadership Development Program, White Stag Leadership Development. The page describes Bánáthy as a systems scientist and founder of White Stag. See also The Eleven Skills of Leadership, White Stag Leadership Development. ↩︎
38. U.S. Boy Scouts Adapted the White Stag Program, White Stag Leadership Development. ↩︎
39. Annual Report to Congress, Boy Scouts of America, 1972, pp. 21-22. ↩︎
40. U.S. Wood Badge Origins in White Stag, White Stag Leadership Development. ↩︎
41. Troop Leadership Development’s Origins in White Stag, White Stag Leadership Development. The page reproduces material from the 1974 Troop Leader Development Staff Guide, pp. 94-95. ↩︎
42. The Official Scoutmaster Handbook, Seventh Edition, Boy Scouts of America, 1981, pp. 50, 63-65. While not a primary source for this article, Leadership Corps (1972-89), Senior Scouting History, is worth a review. This summarizes the 1972 Leadership Corps program, including older Scouts serving as troop leaders and instructors. It has some information not corroborated by the 1981 Scoutmaster Handbook, such as the theory that Patrol Leaders are excluded from the Leadership Corps. ↩︎
43. Patrol and Troop Leadership, Boy Scouts of America, 1972. ↩︎
44. Lawrence van Gelder, “A Work of Love for ‘Boy Scout,’ 78“, The New York Times, Feb. 4, 1979. ↩︎
45. Robert W. Peterson, “Bill Hillcourt — Still Going Strong on the Scouting Trail,” Scouting, vol. 73, no. 4 (Sept. 1985), p. 26. ↩︎
46. Troop Leadership Development’s Origins in White Stag, White Stag Leadership Development. The page reproduces material from the 1974 Troop Leader Development Staff Guide, pp. 94-95; it says an outside evaluator compared BSA’s leadership-development methods favorably with leadership-development programs available to managers in public and private organizations. ↩︎
47. Troop Positions, Troop Leader Resources, Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
48. Senior Patrol Leader, Troop Leader Resources, Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
49. Patrol Leader’s Council Monthly Planning, Troop Leader Resources, Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
50. 2025 Scouts BSA Requirements, Boy Scouts of America, 2025, pp. 17-22. ↩︎
51. Implementing the BSA Scoutmaster Training Model as Designed: A Fidelity Assessment, Montclair State University, July 2019. ↩︎
52. https://bsabeststudy.org/ ↩︎
53. Wood Badge, Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
54. Bryan Wendell, “Inside the Wood Badge update that makes the program more accessible than ever“, Scouting Magazine, September 2020. ↩︎
55. Wood Badge 2025, Suffolk County Council, Boy Scouts of America. The page describes the practical phase as conducted as a troop and using a model Scouts BSA troop as the foundation for training. ↩︎
56. Lawrence van Gelder, “A Work of Love for ‘Boy Scout,’ 78“, The New York Times, Feb. 4, 1979. ↩︎

The patrol method is not complicated. That is its strength.

The patrol method–the core of Scouting–means small teams of youth pursuing adventures they actually own, with adult support. That’s really it.

Genuine leadership happens there: in the patrol, not in a youth-operated troop bureaucracy or a management structure staffed by youth wearing officer patches.

While BSA’s gold loopers¹ still use “patrol method” when talking about the Scouts BSA program, they are using the words while abandoning the thing. Over the past century, gold loopers have mostly paved over the patrol method, filling that space with a corporate-bureaucracy simulation.

Before I go on, some level setting:

• BSA means the Boy Scouts of America, now rebranded as Scouting America.
• Scouts BSA is the program that I separately argue is optimized for middle schoolers.
• A troop is the community-level implementation of the Scouts BSA program, divided into patrols (teams) of roughly six to eight youth.

Scouts BSA’s focus has strayed far from youth leading self-governing patrols. Instead, the focus is on youth filling bureaucratic roles in an adult-authored, troop-level structure.

What the patrol owns

A patrol is more than a seating chart or a camping subunit. Again, it a small team of youth pursuing adventures they actually own.

BSA’s material describes a patrol as a small team where youth “learn skills together, share responsibilities and take on leadership roles”.² World Scouting treats the “Scout Method”³ (its equivalent to “patrol method”) as an “essential and unique system for progressive self-education”⁴.

The patrol method is the timeless vision of Scouting’s founder, Robert Baden-Powell⁵:

The Patrol System is the one essential feature in which Scout training differs from that of all other organizations, and where the System is properly applied, it is absolutely bound to bring success. It cannot help itself!

Robert Baden-Powell, Aids to Scoutmastership, 1920 edition

It is also visible in BSA’s international peer organizations. The exact wording varies, but the center of gravity is familiar: patrols do the program, adults support. For example:

• Scouting Ireland says the troop program should be based around “Patrol based adventure and interaction”, that camp should be patrol based, and that Scouts should decide and organize their own program while working in patrols with adult support.⁶
• Scouts Australia says the patrol method “is integral to Scouting” and that “[v]irtually all Scouting activities occur in Patrols”.⁷
• The Scout Association in the United Kingdom says patrols “should be able to conduct their weekly programme on their own” with “adult[s] providing advice and guidance where needed”.⁸

The adult-support point is crucial. The patrol method is not youth isolation. In BSA terminology, the support comes through “adult association”⁹: adults close enough to guide and restrained enough not to own the result.

Scouts BSA’s own aims and methods point the same way. Leadership development is the only item that appears both as an aim and as a method.¹⁰ The patrol method develops leadership because it gives small teams the space for real decisions, real peer influence, and real consequences.

The patrol is the natural unit of action

No ordinary group of youth, handed a blank page and a trail map, would invent a corporate-bureaucracy simulation. They would invent a patrol. A leader would emerge. They would choose a destination, argue about what would make the trip worth doing, decide how bold they want to be, and come home with a story that belongs to them. They will stumble. That is part of the work. The patrol method gives them a real space in which to try.

That instinct sits near the beginning of Scouting. Baden-Powell wrote about the natural youth gang as raw material for Scouting¹¹, and Ernest Thompson Seton likewise built from the tendency of boys to form groups¹²¹³.

Seton’s Woodcraft Indians program formalized that instinct into small bands, which were essentially patrols, with their own youth leaders and adult guides. (Some cross-band youth roles also existed, but they supported the patrols in rotating, episodic terms, such as during a campout. They were not a lasting bureaucracy that replaced small-team ownership.)¹⁴

This is much of the magic of the patrol method: personal development by harnessing a natural tendency of youth.

The patrol is the unit of action. It is where a Scout with a vision has to motivate actual peers, not simply occupy a titled office inside a bureaucratic structure devised by gold loopers.

The troop exists to support patrols

The patrol method means Scouts acting through small, self-directed teams. It does not mean youth filling offices in a troop-wide administrative chart.

The patrol method places the spotlight on patrol programs, not troop machinery. The troop supports the patrol method by being a container for patrols and a support structure around them. It is not supposed to be the operating unit that consumes patrol autonomy.

That said, the support of patrol autonomy still needs guardrails. A working troop has safety expectations, adult availability, transportation limits, calendar realities, facility reservations, and shared patrol commitments. However, those limits come from practical necessity, not obedience to a youth bureaucracy.

For example, the Patrol Leaders and Scoutmaster might agree that the troop will host a campout at Tyler State Park in October and that all patrols will share a Saturday evening meal. That facility and meal choice will bound the option space for patrol adventures. This bounding is a result of the decision of the patrols, and the remaining option space is expansive, allowing real patrol autonomy.

The simple test is this: Who gets to answer the patrol’s real questions? What adventure do we want to attempt? What would make this ours? What risks are we ready to manage? What help should we ask from adults? Which mistakes are ours to learn from? What traditions and habits do we want to build?

If those questions are answered by a troop bureaucracy before the patrol ever asks them, the patrol method has been stolen. And that is what the next article will help us see, the gradual theft of the patrol method and how it was replaced with a troop-level youth bureaucracy.

A council of patrol leaders is not troop staff

Some will point to Baden-Powell’s own council of Patrol Leaders as evidence of troop-level staffing. That council was not a troop staff meeting. It was Patrol Leaders guarding collective standards and settling inter-patrol questions while each patrol kept its own program.¹⁵ Authority flowed up, from the patrols, into this council from the patrols.

In the gold-loopers’ Scouts BSA corporate-bureaucracy simulation, the PLC inverts that authority. The modern PLC is where a Senior Patrol Leader chairs a standing committee whose stated purpose is to “review[…] and carr[y] out” the “troop’s plans”¹⁶ (emphasis added), and patrols then share in execution of PLC decisions alongside troop-level youth bureaucrats.

Baden-Powell’s PLC was patrols in congress. BSA’s PLC is operation of a corporate bureaucracy.

The semantic fate of “court of honor” tells the same story. In Baden-Powell’s formulation, the court of honor was a narrower form of the Patrol Leaders’ Council, intended to handle the more thorny issues, such as advancement and discipline. Advancement and discipline are now adult-managed, and that is appropriate.¹⁷ However, this name survives today as a ceremony to hand out patches.¹⁸ The disappearance of the original court of honor function is a symptom of a larger shift, which requires us to ask, “What meaningful responsibility remains for Patrol Leaders and patrols, especially beyond contributing to planning troop activities and supplying labor to a troop-level youth bureaucracy?”

Gold loopers stole the patrol method from youth

In the Scouts BSA program, we often see teams that cook together, camp together, make duty rosters, clean gear, and solve ordinary camp problems. We mistakenly believe this is evidence of the patrol method.

While those chores are necessary, they are not proof that the patrol method is being used. An adult can point to Scouts planning a menu and still miss the deeper thing: patrol self-government.

The patrol method depends on the patrol having meaningful control over its own life. The patrol should be able to form its identity, choose its adventure, make its arrangements, develop its habits, and live with the consequences.

The question is not whether a team is performing chores together. Essential to the patrol method is that the patrol owns its adventure.

Gold loopers stole the patrol method from BSA’s youth. Their design for the Scouts BSA program displaces the patrol method with a corporate-bureaucracy simulation¹⁹:

The teams are still there, and they are still called patrols. That is why Scouts BSA can appear to preserve patrol-method vocabulary even though the patrol’s crucial self-government opportunity is hollowed out.

The patrol flag remains. The patrol name remains. The patch remains. The chores remain. But gold loopers captured the patrols, moving the center of decision-making into a troop-level youth bureaucracy. They eviscerated the very thing Baden-Powell said the patrol method exists to do²⁰:

The object of the Patrol System is mainly to give real responsibility to as many of the boys as possible with a view to developing their character. If the Scoutmaster gives his Patrol Leader real power, expects a great deal from him, and leaves him a free hand in carrying out his work, he will have done more for that boy’s character expansion than any amount of school-training could ever do.

Robert Baden-Powell’s reflection on the point of patrols in Aids to Scoutmastership, 1919 edition (emphasis added).

Leadership is influence, not administration

The Patrol Leader is supposed to be the leader of a largely self-governing patrol. That means this youth helps turn the patrol’s own will into action: drawing out a vision, persuading peers, coordinating preparation, settling friction, noticing who needs help, and keeping the patrol moving toward a shared purpose.

The Patrol Leader’s authority is peer-based leadership. This is trust, competence, and respect inside the patrol, not a titled slot inside a troop chain of command.

The Scouts BSA corporate-bureaucracy simulation changes the Patrol Leader’s work. Instead of leading a semi-autonomous patrol, the Patrol Leader becomes a transmission belt inside a troop machine: attend the PLC²¹, receive the troop plan, relay it to the patrol, supply labor for troop activities, report upward, and keep the patrol aligned with decisions made elsewhere.

Management keeps the institution running. Supervision keeps people in line. Administration keeps the files straight. These are what the corporate-bureaucracy simulation emphasizes.

Leadership is different: it is mutual influence around a shared vision.

That distinction is not some eccentric Scouting obsession. For example, Abraham Zaleznik‘s classic Harvard Business Review essay, “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?”, contrasts the managerial concern for competence, control, and balancing groups with the imaginative, desire-driven work of leadership.²² Translate that into Scouts BSA, and the problem becomes obvious. The corporate-bureaucracy simulation gives adults the neat surface of management. The patrol method, which gold loopers paved over, gives youth the messy social space where leadership can actually form.

Administration does not become leadership because youth do it

Competence with the English language can help one be a better plumber, yet it would be absurd to claim that high-school English classes constitute training for plumbers. The same goes for administration, management, and supervision: they are not leadership. While training in those competencies can have value to leaders, they do not cause a person to become a leader.

A Scout can chair a meeting, direct traffic, enforce a schedule, assign tasks, or take minutes without practicing leadership. Those actions may be useful. They may even be necessary in a bureaucracy. But usefulness does not make them leadership.

Nor does foisting troop-level administrative duties on youth, especially in the sense of lasting, titled roles, cause leadership development. Those tasks can be useful. A particular older youth might even want some of them as an additional challenge. But just because a youth occupies that titled role does not transform it into leadership.

Also, there is nothing essential to Scouting that requires troop-level administration to sit at the center of any youth’s experience. What this mainly does is redirect youth attention out of the leadership-oriented patrol experience towards troop-level bureaucratic concerns, and it removes from patrols the decision points that make self-directed teams real.

Even worse, this troop-level youth bureaucracy stands in for adult mentoring, filtering it through a youth-run, supervisory chain of command.

None of this enhances BSA’s mission to develop leaders.

When adults snort, “But the youth lead the troop,” they have not answered the charge. They have repeated the problem. Instead of being provided leadership opportunity, the youth were presented with a bureaucratic scheme and told to operate it.

The burden of proof belongs on gold loopers

In BSA culture, those who doubt gold loopers are treated with disdain. This culture puts the burden of proof on supporters of the patrol method, requiring them to explain why they resist the corporate-bureaucracy simulation. That has it backwards, and the burden should run in the other direction.

Unlike the corporate-bureaucracy simulation, the patrol method has the founder’s warrant, remains recognizable in world Scouting, fits the natural way youth form small teams around shared adventures, and supports genuine leadership development. If gold loopers want to replace leadership development with a bureaucratic, troop-office scheme, the burden is on them to explain why their substitute is better.

Gold loopers’ usual answer is that troop offices and positions of responsibility teach leadership. But a bureaucratic office does not become leadership merely because gold loopers say so. Gold loopers have mostly kept the patrol-method vocabulary while training Scouts and adults to operate something else.

Adjacent programs show the shape

The irony is that the programs on either side of Scouts BSA preserve the small-team shape better than Scouts BSA itself.

Cub Scouts adapts the small-team pattern for younger children. Elementary-school children need adults much closer at hand, so the program is adult-led. But structurally, the den remains the small team, the Den Leader works directly with that team, and dens generally run independent programs.²³

Venturing adapts the same spirit for high schoolers. Adult Advisors advise rather than command²⁴, and the crew design allow officer duties and team structure to vary with the crew’s needs.²⁵ High schoolers can mentor within their own ranks: planning age-level adventures, apprentice younger high schoolers into real responsibility, and build a peer culture appropriate to their age.

The next article follows the historical buildout of the Scouts BSA corporate-bureaucracy simulation, where gold loopers gradually built a troop-office machine, wired it into advancement, and then gave that machine a leadership-development theory.

Footnotes

1. Gold loopers are people associated with BSA’s national organization, which also includes territories, wear yellow shoulder loops on their uniforms. Formally, this color is called “gold”. While shoulder loops date only to the uniform redesign from around 1980, I apply the term retroactively to BSA’s national-level volunteers and professionals of every era. (Council and district adults, not a subject of this series, wear silver loops.) ↩︎
2. The Patrol, Troop Leader Resources, Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
3. Constitution of the World Organization of the Scout Movement, World Scout Bureau, August 2024 ed., Chap. I, Art. III, p. 7. The team system is a constitutional element of the Scout Method, agreed by all member organizations, including BSA. ↩︎
4. Scout Method, World Scouting. ↩︎
5. Robert Baden-Powell, Aids to Scoutmastership, 1944. p. 8. This is the World Brotherhood edition. Pagination is based on the digitized PDF copy with three columns. ↩︎
6. How to Run Scouts, Scouting Ireland, pp. 21-22. ↩︎
7. The Adventure Begins – Scout Method, Scouts Australia, Feb. 1, 2018. ↩︎
8. Leadership, The Scout Association. ↩︎
9. Scouts BSA: The Aims and Methods of Scouting, Boy Scouts of America. BSA lists “Association with Adults” as one of the methods of Scouts BSA. ↩︎
10. Scouts BSA: The Aims and Methods of Scouting, Boy Scouts of America. BSA identifies leadership development as one of Scouting’s aims and also as one of the methods of Scouts BSA. ↩︎
11. Robert Baden-Powell, Aids to Scoutmastership, 1944, p. 8. ↩︎
12. David C. Scott, Ernest Thompson Seton: The Beginnings of Controversy, Scouting Milestones, curated by Colin Walker. ↩︎
13. Ernest Thompson Seton, The Birch-Bark Roll, 6th Edition, 1906, p. 3. ↩︎
14. Ernest Thompson Seton, The Book of Woodcraft, 1921, pp. 179-189. ↩︎
15. Robert Baden-Powell, Aids to Scoutmastership, 1944, p. 8. ↩︎
16. Patrol Leader’s Council Monthly Planning, Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
17. This evolution is appropriate. The Barriers to Abuse places discipline under the Adult Supervision section. While the Guide to Advancement, 2025, permits limited youth involvement in selected advancement mechanics, it is always at the discretion of adults. For example, section 4.2.1.2 The Scout Is Tested leads with “The Scout’s unit leader authorizes those who may test and pass the Scout on rank requirements”, then lists selected, titled youth roles the unit leader might consider authorizing for this duty. ↩︎
18. Troop Courts of Honor, Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
19. Troop Structure, Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
20. Robert Baden-Powell, Aids to Scoutmastership, 1919, p. 47. ↩︎
21. Despite the name, the Patrol Leaders’ Council (PLC) does not focus on Patrol Leaders or patrols. The focus is on the troop-level machinery. Patrol Leader’s Council Monthly Planning, the main documentation for how this committee works, leads with “The troop’s plans…” ↩︎
22. Abraham Zaleznik, Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?, Harvard Business Review, Jan. 2004. Zaleznik contrasts the managerial concern for competence, control, and balance with the imaginative work of leadership. ↩︎
23. How Cub Scouting is Organized, Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
24. Venturing Terminology, Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
25. Crew Officer Orientation: Facilitator’s Guide, Boy Scouts of America, 2025. ↩︎

Order of the Arrow, a branded operation of BSA, is known best for 111 years of redface minstrel shows.

In an incomplete reform attempt, BSA now requires OA-branded council operations to stop some of their cultural theft, instead putting that cultural use under tribal purview. The purview is to be documented in a written agreement.

I am using “fraud” in a public-accountability sense: while these agreements look like tribal oversight, they are really blanket permission slips, vague enough to let councils continue their OA-branded redface minstrel shows.

OA’s identity is wrapped around over 111 years of its indigenous fraud. This is a powerful incentive for OA to perpetuate its redface minstrel show, so I always suspected we’d see flawed tribal agreements. I am right: all agreements to date are flawed.

OA’s ethical problem

One form of OA’s redface minstrel shows is where non-Native, teenage actors perform pageants based on OA’s fake “legend”, which is just Western children’s fantasy fiction. The legend has a phony Native connection, where OA decorated it with stolen and phony tribal culture. OA racist core is revealed in how it treats tribal culture like war trophies of conquered peoples.

Many have been scammed by OA’s false claims of being an honor society or by its phony religion. The ensuing emotional connection drives aggressive, counterfactual defenses of OA. An example fake defense is that OA’s cosplay pageants are vital to preserving tribal culture.¹ Others White-wash OA’s cultural theft as respect, honor, or appreciation of tribes.² There’s more. No matter the defenses, OA’s ethic celebrates the intended outcome of the USA’s White-supremacist tribal-eradication campaign. Had the campaign been successful, we’d be in a dystopia where tribal culture is divorced from any sense of ownership, and non-Indigenous people would be needed to preserve tribal culture.

Thankfully, the USA’s White-supremacist campaign failed. Tribes still exist.

The naked truth is OA has always stolen tribal culture for its own profit. This profit is measured in coherence. With this stolen culture, OA concocts a faux, animist-pagan religion. This religion distracts everyone from how OA has no purpose, no reason to exist. Without its faux religion, OA’s absurdity becomes obvious, and OA collapses.

This profit shows up in other facets of the OA redface minstrel show. For example, OA permits³ councils to name their OA operations—lodges and chapters—with words stolen from Indigenous peoples, often from the Lenape people.⁴ OA gets unearned gravitas from its use of these stolen words, similar to how military impostors benefit from stolen valor.

OA’s intent

In 2024, OA announced it will clean up some of its act, only allowing Indigenous-themed performances in councils that have a written agreement with a local state- or federally-recognized tribe.⁵ This policy went into effect on January 1, 2026.⁶

Few councils have agreements. All of those agreements discovered as a press time are defective: they evade the intent of OA’s restriction, were struck with what federal tribes consider a phony entity, or both!

OA intends that councils restrict AIA to what is authorized under a written agreement with a local⁷ tribe.

In its AIA Policy page, OA says “[t]ribes may determine to what extent they want [councils] to conduct American Indian programming.”⁸ As it would be unethical for a tribe to authorize use of any other tribe’s culture, the most a tribe could authorize is use of that tribe’s own culture.

OA further clarifies that councils “are free to pursue multiple agreements if they would like to offer a wider variety of programs that appreciate the different traditions in their area.”⁹ The only reason that OA would say that is because each tribe can only ethically authorize use of its own culture. Councils that wish to employ culture of additional tribes must reach an agreement with those tribes.

To summarize, legitimate tribal agreements may only authorize councils to use the culture of the tribe they struck an agreement with. The ethics of this are obvious, and OA’s own words reinforce those ethics.

Old Hickory Council evades intent

Here’s an example agreement that Old Hickory Council struck with a tribe (names of the tribe and individuals, other than the council CEO, are redacted):

This agreement does not restrict this council to using only the culture of the signing tribe. In fact, the first bullet’s phrase “the practices of the American Indian people vary from tribe to tribe” does a lot of work. It is a license to continue the old practices, where the council may freely steal from any tribe!

As evidence of theft, Old Hickory Council’s OA operation is named “Wahissa Lodge”. While “wahissa” is likely a Lenape-derived word¹⁰, the agreement was signed with a group claiming Siouan heritage, a different branch of tribes that cannot ethically grant use of Lenape culture.

In granting this unethical, universal license, the signing tribe gets little in return: an annual written report and “best efforts” to support an annual tribe event.

The important point is how this agreement evades a key intent behind tribal agreements. It does not restrict the council to use of the signing tribe’s culture.

Indian Waters Council evades intent

Here’s another agreement, this time between the Indian Waters Council and a tribe¹¹:

Did you see that? It’s based on the same template! Look at the first bullet. The truck-sized loophole appears again, freely allowing resumption of OA’s 111 years of racist cultural theft. And the theft is laid out in the document, which indicates that Indian Water Council’s OA operation is named “Muscogee Lodge”. “Muscogee” is obviously a reference to the Muscogee people, yet this agreement was signed with an entity claiming Cherokee association.

Just stammer “honor” and “respect”, and the redface minstrel show resumes!

Indian Waters Council’s agreement with an allegedly phony tribe

It gets worse. The “tribe” Indian Waters Council signed with appears on the Cherokee Identity Protection Committee’s list of fabricated groups.

The Cherokee Identity Protection Committee, a collaboration of the three federally-recognized Cherokee tribes–Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Cherokee Nation, United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians–is a 2011 initiative to root out fake tribes. It compiled a list of 211 “fabricated groups” on what it calls a “Fraud List”.¹² The Cherokee Nation’s Principal Chief has called these groups “phony”.¹³

In this collaboration, these federal tribes “protect our elders and traditionalists by stopping these [fake tribes] and individuals from appropriating our culture, language and traditions.”¹⁴

These tribes later released an forceful 2020 joint statement condemning what they consider to be phony tribes. One section also eviscerates OA’s 111 years of redface minstrel shows¹⁵:

6)  We condemn all individuals and collectivities that ‘play Indian’ or ‘play Cherokee’ in all its forms, regardless of the intent.  This includes the widespread practice of forming fraudulent, so-called ‘state-recognized’ Cherokee tribes or nonprofit organizations that claim to confer Cherokee citizenship.  Non-Cherokees should never participate in Cherokee cultural expressions unless under the direct guidance of a Cherokee citizen.

Put differently, these tribes are concerned about entities that, just like OA’s redface minstrel show, use stolen, native culture for their own profit. By entering into a loophole-ridden agreement with a tribe the Cherokees consider fake, the Indian Waters Council is perpetuating the act that the Cherokee tribes find deeply harmful!

By entering into an agreement with an entity on a phony-tribes list, Indian Waters Council picked a side in a major dispute, and it picked the side the major Cherokee tribes find is eroding their tribal sovereignty.

Native people and their advocates have warned me about this. Deciding what counts as a legitimate tribe, or who is a Native American, is complex. It is outside the scope of Scouting to weigh in on this, but these tribal agreements force us to do so. Why, though? Why does BSA permit councils to pick sides in a dispute that has nothing to do with Scouting? How does this help BSA do Scouting better?

Northeast Georgia Council does “all of the above”

Northeast Georgia Council provides another example of the duplicity of OA culture.

This is the council’s tribal agreement¹⁶:

The childish font and that the council didn’t publish a signed agreement reveal the unseriousness of this document. The words confirm its defective.

First, this is yet another agreement with what the recognized Cherokee tribes have declared a phony entity. As per above, even if this entity is not a phony, by picking sides in this dispute, BSA enters a space it does not belong.

Second, this agreement does not limit the lodge to use of any one tribe’s culture. With its soft, aspirational language; avoidance of clear words or phrases like “must”, “limited to” “shall only”, or similar; and no compliance mechanism, this agreement does not restrict which Native culture Northeast Georgia Council may use.

Even worse, the first provision blesses OA’s 111 years of indigenous fraud as “a celebrated part of its programming”. That frames this agreement as continuity of OA’s racist pageantry, not a course correction.

Other provisions confirm the above:

• While provision 4 includes “more locally focused”, that is not a boundary, it’s just an aspirational emphasis.
• Provision 5’s aspirational language is undercut by “the traditions of those Native Americans who were and are a part of the geographic area shared by both parties”. This is a permission slip for Northeast Georgia Council to use any tribe’s tradition as long as its current or historical territory vaguely corresponds to the council’s territory or broader Cherokee territory, which historically overlapped multiple states.

North Florida Council also evades transparency

I have called for OA to require transparency on tribal agreements. I insist they be posted on council websites. This is necessary because 111 years of OA’s racist sins, combined with a culture that foments aggressive lies about OA’s sins, eviscerates trust. Non-public agreements are as good as no agreement. Also, OA is about appreciating tribes, right? Why would councils want to hide an agreement that confirms its genuine appreciation of a tribe?

North Florida Council validates my concern. I have received a firsthand account of this council from a concerned party who resides in the council. After learning that this council struck an agreement with a tribe, the concerned party asked a council-level person, who is one of several in a position to have access to this agreement, for a copy of it. The council person refused.

Why? Because it’s another defective agreement!

I want to be clear that the facts below are based on an account shared with me by the concerned party. This was apparently an oral conversation, so any quotes of the council person are paraphrased.

First, the tribal agreement is with yet another entity that the federally-recognized Cherokee tribes find to be phony!

Second, the council person conveyed the agreement has no end date, despite OA’s expectation that tribal agreements should “have a set duration”.¹⁷

Third, this agreement has that same, truck-sized loophole of the other agreements. The council person attested to a belief that the agreement allows North Florida Council to continue naming its OA operation using a word the council appropriated from the Seminole people. This council person then twists the knife, undermining the Seminole tribe’s ownership of its own culture by stating (paraphrased) “there are a lot of people who wear Seminole-style jackets as fashion items!”

The council person signed off from this conversation with a “trust me, bro”-style statement (again, paraphrased): “A Scout is Trustworthy. You can take my word for it and you don’t need to see the letter.”

Sorry, bro, after 111 years of OA’s racist sins and lying, nothing associated with OA is trustworthy. No public agreement is as good as the agreement not existing.

OA does not verify tribal agreements

BSA’s national OA office doesn’t verify these agreements. Councils only “attest” to the existence of an agreement.¹⁸ It’s more “trust me, bro”, captured in a checkbox on an annual form.¹⁹

In a conversation with a concerned person, a person affiliated with the National OA Committee implausibly conveyed that BSA does not have time to review tribal agreements. Sorry, that’s lazy. The National OA Committee is large, so they can review these agreements.²⁰ The committee just doesn’t wish to.

And I can understand why. The National OA Committee doesn’t do much work. For example, it took almost 5 years to revise children’s fantasy fiction!

But the problem cuts more deeply. If the National OA Committee reviewed these agreements, they wouldn’t pass muster. But OA needs these agreements. OA is addicted to its redface minstrel show. It can’t stop. That’s why:

• OA falsely claims reform while allowing loophole-ridden agreements.
• OA falsely claims tribal oversight while refusing to verify agreements.
• OA falsely claims “respect”, “honor”, etc. while continuing to steal Indigenous culture for use as institutional decoration.

Retire it!

OA is a fraud. OA is an embarrassment to Scouting.

It gets worse. OA isn’t even a program of BSA.²¹ It’s just a branded operation, mainly run by councils, that has crept so far outside its lane, it cannibalizes and displaces the actual programs, and it helps trap high schoolers in a middle-school program. It maps poorly to what Scouting even is.

Why is anyone bothering to save this?

OA must be retired. We must instead invest in the actual Scouting programs.

1. (this is provided as a representative example) National Bulletin, Order of the Arrow, Issue 1, Volume LXII, Spring 2015. See page 9 where someone associated with a different country’s Scouting movement proclaims that “Native American history and legacy is preserved and honored by the [OA] Scouts”. Given that this person doesn’t live in the USA and is likely unfamiliar with OA, he was likely to have been told the preserving-culture scam by the redface minstrel show’s actors. ↩︎
2. (this is provided as a representative example) Field Operations Handbook, Order of the Arrow, November 2025. Page 27 includes “Respect for American Indian culture, tradition, and heritage is a key component of Order of
   the Arrow programs.” ↩︎
3. AIA Policy, Order of the Arrow. See section titled “Do lodges or chapters need to change their names, totems, or other items that use American Indian names or terms?” This section upholds the longstanding practice of decorating facets of OA with stolen tribal culture. ↩︎
4. Order of the Arrow cleanliness audit. See the source data, linked below the graph. ↩︎
5. “Policy Update: Changes Regarding American Indian Programming“, Order of the Arrow website, September 24, 2024. ↩︎
6. Ibid. ↩︎
7. AIA Policy, Order of the Arrow. Throughout the policy, “local” is exclusively used to define geographic limits on the tribe’s location. ↩︎
8. AIA Policy, Order of the Arrow. See section titled “Will lodges be provided with a template or sample agreement needed to establish a relationship with their local tribe?” ↩︎
9. Ibid. ↩︎
10. Various clues suggest this is an Anglicized spelling of a Lenape word relating to goddess, beauty, or happiness. ↩︎
11. Muscogee Ensures Future of AIA Program, Indian Waters Council (via its website for its OA operation, named Muscogee Lodge) ↩︎
12. Matthew L.M. Fletcher, “Eastern Band Establishes Cherokee Identity Protection Committee“, Turtle Talk, October 17, 2011. While this article claims 212 entities, its data source lists 211. ↩︎
13. https://www.facebook.com/chiefhoskin/posts/faketribealert-the-phony-wolf-creek-cherokee-tribe-of-virginia-is-back-i-look-fo/355873679871080/ ↩︎
14. Ibid. ↩︎
15. “Cherokee Scholars’ Statement on Sovereignty and Identity“, Think Tsalagi ᎢᏓᏓᏅᏛᎵ ᏣᎳᎩ, February 13, 2020. ↩︎
16. A New Day… A New Era…, Northeast Georgia Council (through the website of its OA operation, named Mowogo Lodge) ↩︎
17. AIA Policy, Order of the Arrow. See section titled “Will lodges be provided with a template or sample agreement needed to establish a relationship with their local tribe?” ↩︎
18. AIA Policy, Order of the Arrow. See section titled “Who is responsible for maintaining the agreement between the lodge and the tribe?” ↩︎
19. AIA Policy, Order of the Arrow. See section titled “How often does the agreement with a tribe need to be renewed?” ↩︎
20. “National Order of the Arrow Committee“, from the Order of the Arrow website of the Boy Scouts of America. ↩︎
21. Rules and Regulations of the Boy Scouts of America, October 28, 2025. At the top of page 12 is “The youth programs of the Boy Scouts of America are Cub Scouts, Scouts BSA, Venturing, Sea Scouts, and Lone Scout.” ↩︎

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.

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 Scout¹, youth offices², patrols³, and adult training⁴. 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 theories⁵. Patrols became roster slots inside a bureaucracy of titled youth roles, layered reporting⁶, meeting scripts⁷, and committee procedure⁸. 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.⁹ 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 exercise¹⁰, 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 bureaucrats. 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
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• Untended Fire on Discord

1. This justification is typically in loose language, but a specific example is in BSA’s 2024 Report to the Nation, where Eagle Scouts are introduced as exemplifying character, leadership, and service. ↩︎
2. In the Troop Positions page of the Troop Leader Resources website, BSA lists the 16 different titled roles for Scouts BSA. These are titled roles in a child-sized corporate-bureaucracy simulation. ↩︎
3. In the Patrols page of the Troop Leader Resources website, BSA references the Brownsea Island experiment. There, BSA praises the patrol method as the “one essential feature” of Scouting. In the patrol method, patrols are largely independent, and Patrol Leaders are elevated, being mentored directly by the Scoutmaster. Ironically, BSA undermines this “one essential feature” with its corporate-bureaucracy simulation, which changes Scouts BSA from where “[t]he patrol is the unit of Scouting always” to the troop itself being the essential unit, with patrols buried under the bureaucracy. ↩︎
4. For most, Wood Badge is seen as the ultimate adult-training goal. Regrettably, Wood Badge has been undermined, reduced to mainly training on how to act as a corporate middle-manager and an extensive dress rehearsal of the Scouts BSA corporate-bureaucracy simulation. ↩︎
5. The White Stag initiative seems to have been especially influential on the Scouts BSA design. While its focus on the ways of corporate middle management has value, that is different than leadership. By confusing management with leadership, BSA has undermined its leadership training for youth and has misinformed generations of adult leaders. ↩︎
6. The Troop Structure page of BSA’s Troop Leader Resources website reveals that troops are a complex, youth-run bureaucracy. This contrasts starkly to the patrol method, still practiced nearly universally in the rest of the world, which generally only has patrols and Patrol Leaders and no child-sized bureaucracy. ↩︎
7. BSA’s model treats the troop meeting as a scripted, centrally coordinated procedure rather than as the natural expression of independent patrol life. Its Troop Meeting Agenda page of the Troop Leader Resources site illustrates this, describing the weekly troop meeting as something to be managed through “planning and preparation”, directs the Patrol Leaders’ Council to use a “Troop Meeting Planning Form” to keep the meeting “organized and productive”, and divides a standard meeting into prescribed components. The form further structures the meeting by activity, description, who will run each part, and time allocation. This is not objectionable merely because it is an agenda; the point is that the script is the central part of a bureaucracy-run agenda, subsuming independent patrols into a corporate simulation. ↩︎
8. In the Patrol Leader’s Council Monthly Planning page of Troop Leader Resources, BSA shows the committee layer that squashed patrol life. The page defines the Patrol Leaders’ Council as a monthly body that “fine-tune[s]” the troop program, composed of titled officeholders and attended by a scribe who takes notes and keeps minutes. It calls the PLC the troop’s “elected and duly appointed governing body” and assigns it responsibility for the “planning, preparation, and presentation” of the troop program, with a meeting agenda and planning worksheets linked below. This is youth administration, not leadership. Under this corporate-bureaucracy simulation, Patrol Leaders are pulled into a troop-wide committee procedure, and patrols are diminished as components of a managed troop program. ↩︎
9. 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. ↩︎
10. The Eagle Scout Service Project Workbook is a 32-page PDF that is often accompanied by additional materials. The Eagle candidate can easily spent many more hours on paperwork exercises than in the project itself. ↩︎

In any healthy nonprofit, the professional staff exists to serve the mission. Their value is measured by their effectiveness, their innovation, and their ability to deliver results for the movement.

For decades, the Boy Scouts of America (why SA is a bad name) has operated under a different set of rules, an employment model that functions like a medieval guild.

I call it the commissioned-bureaucrat system.

On the surface, it looks like a brotherhood of youth-service experts. But peel back the layers, and you find a career-protection racket. It is a system designed not to identify the best talent but to filter for compliance. It is a structure where loyalty to the bureaucracy outweighs competence, and where the primary objective shifts from growing the movement to preserving the status quo of the employees.

To understand why Scouting struggles to adapt to the modern world, we have to look at who is running it and the archaic system that put them there.

A primer on BSA’s employment lines

BSA has two categories of permanent employees: administrative and commissioned.

Administrative employees do customary corporate functions, like HR, technology, marketing, and finance.

The other employment line is the commissioned-bureaucrat system. This is generally for bureaucrats who directly work with the program and these bureaucrats’ chain of command.

Becoming commissioned

Part of becoming a commissioned bureaucrat is a training that’s about a week, typically at BSA’s Irving, TX headquarters. Once commissioned, the bureaucrat is essentially ordained, like how ministers are ordained in churches.

That framing isn’t accidental. Commissioning is treated as a credential that unlocks access, authority, and advancement across program-side bureaucrat roles.

The system’s phases

The commissioned-bureaucrat system has three phases:

1. Hazing: This is the District Executive role, an assignment heavily focused on numbers, called PDS goals. It is brutal, with low pay and often 60 to 80 hours a week. This phase runs off all but those most loyal to the bureaucracy. Those with leadership potential or valuable, distinct skills often exit BSA early.
2. Middle career: These are typically middle-tier bureaucrats. While often less brutal than the DE role, loyalty to the bureaucracy continues to be tested and rewarded. Those with leadership talent and valuable skills continue to be pushed out or sidelined, further shrinking the pool to bureaucrats optimized for internal compliance.
3. You’ve Made It™️: After enough years of proving one’s loyalty to the bureaucracy, remaining bureaucrats enter a “good ol’ boys” club. Such bureaucrats often land relatively well-paid, cushy, or prestigious roles. You’ve Made It™️ status often starts with the Scout Executive (council CEO) role.

This is not a leadership or talent pipeline. It is a career-protection system for bureaucrats.

Closed shop

BSA props up the commissioned-bureaucrat system through role gating. Its commissioned-bureaucrat roles are part of a closed shop. In addition to protecting careers of bureaucrats, it eliminates competition, starving BSA of diverse talent.

Most of BSA’s permanent, full-time, professional roles are gated to commissioned bureaucrats, including¹:

• District Executives (DEs), an entry-level sales and customer-service role that also does many miscellaneous duties
• A “year-round program position” or a “unit growth executive”
• Any other council or national-organization position that the national CEO (Chief Scout Executive) declares is gated²
• Any council position supervising a commissioned bureaucrat
• Council CEOs (also called Scout Executives)

Because of this gating, councils can only fill program-side roles from inside the commissioned-bureaucrat pipeline. Even though national has a higher percentage of non-commissioned employees than councils³, the commissioned-bureaucrat system still exerts outsized influence as it controls the feeder pipeline for program-related jobs and for upper-tier bureaucrat roles.

This kind of role-gating doesn’t just protect jobs. Because it concentrates power and decision-making inside a caste of bureaucrats, it reinforces institutional capture. I unpack the governance mechanics of that capture in BSA excludes the movement from governance.

Career protection

The implied promise for You’ve Made It™️ bureaucrats is lifetime employment. This promise is conveyed during commissioning, when bureaucrat-ordinands are paraded through the Chief Scout Executive’s office. Multiple commissioned bureaucrats have independently told me that the message is clear: Stay loyal, and you will be protected. Stay loyal long enough, and you may rise to the top.

Whether stated outright or conveyed by tradition and incentives, the result is the same: a caste for the most loyal bureaucrats, where protection trumps accountability.

Unsuited to roles

The extensive gating, career protection, preference for loyalty over competence, and bias toward internal compliance means many roles are filled by bureaucrats unprepared to succeed.

Notably, many of BSA’s top corporate roles are occupied by career bureaucrats. This creates a structural mismatch. The talents needed to thrive as an executive—vision, courage, strategic clarity, and a service posture toward the movement—are not talents that the commissioned-bureaucrat system cultivates.

That mismatch is why the halo product of the commissioned-bureaucrat system—insider Chief Scout Executives (national CEOs), sourced from the system—have always been a weak leader.

When your system rewards caretaking, compliance, and careerism, you will reliably surface caretakers, compliant managers, and careerists. These are yes-man bureaucrats, not competent leaders.

Protecting bureaucrats from accountability

A function of the closed shop is protecting careers of poorly performing You’ve Made It™️ bureaucrats.

Stories abound of the national organization protecting careers by warehousing failed You’ve Made It™️ bureaucrats in low-value roles until they can be placed back into a council. Not by coincidence, these low-value roles are often difficult to measure for impact, such as “Relationship Manager”. Such positions, where outcomes are vague, timelines are elastic, and accountability is easily blurred, are perfect for low-performing bureaucrats.

Sometimes national instead orchestrates lateral transfers of failed-out You’ve Made It™️ bureaucrats to equivalent roles in other councils. This preserves the bureaucrat’s career, not the Scouting mission.

Some allege this culture changed after the 2020 layoffs. I don’t buy it. Just recently, we’ve seen the same pattern: a council CEO who alienated volunteers and presided over huge fiscal losses, induced by a failed fundraiser, resurfaced in a different council as–wait for it–the lead fundraiser!

Combining career protection with ambivalence for competence foments a bad culture: disdain for the movement, acceptance of poor performance, and reflexive insulation of bureaucrats from consequences.

When careers must be protected at all costs, the organization cannot learn. When the organization cannot learn, it cannot change. And when it cannot change, it cannot survive.

What this system costs BSA

This system taxes BSA in several ways:

1. It drives away talent. People with leadership chops and modern skills leave early because the incentive structure punishes them.
2. It confuses ends and means. Fundraising and internal career preservation become the products. The movement is just a pretext.
3. It creates a leadership vacuum. The top tier is optimized for not rocking boats, not leading change, just for saying yes.
4. It undermines volunteer trust. Volunteers sense when they are being managed, not served.
5. It institutionalizes mediocrity. The system selects for survival inside the system, not for results in the real world.

The net of these harms is over 75 years of neglect of the programs and culture. No wonder the movement is tanking!

These taxes are not limited to the professional side. Remember how the commissioned-bureaucrat system captured the organization? Those who rise in volunteer ranks must do so through extensive fealty to the capturers–the commissioned bureaucrats. This fealty is demonstrated by acting like the bureaucrats. In other words, volunteers above the unit level are strongly encouraged to take on the culture of the bureaucrats, where prestige and protection of the volunteer’s appointment are the main aims. Seen as a threat, competent, high-performing volunteers are suppressed or not considered, which is why national volunteer committees are so bad, especially the perfidious National Scouts BSA Committee.

What BSA should do instead

If BSA wants a future, it must break its closed shop.

Here are pragmatic steps:

• Open hiring for all roles. All employees will be hired based on qualifications. While experience inside Scouting can be a plus, it is no longer a bludgeon to exclude external candidates.
• Eliminate the DE-hazing funnel. No role will be a brutal loyalty test for new employees. All employees are treated with dignity and value.
• The job is to provide value to the movement. All professional roles must create value for unit-level volunteers, the ones delivering the program.
• Enforce accountability. When people fail in a senior role, the default response must no longer be “transfer them somewhere else”.
• Abolish commissioning. Commissioning is just a skeleton key that lets a bureaucrat caste control the organization. Some roles may retain a required training component, but this is just an onboarding credential for a specific job family.

BSA’s future depends on leadership, accountability, and openness. The commissioned-bureaucrat system is engineered to suppress all three. It must be abolished.

1. All of this is defined in Rules and Regulations of the Boy Scouts of America, Oct. 28, 2025. ↩︎
2. Ibid. See Employment of Professionals subsection, Rules and Guidelines sub-subsection, page. 16. ↩︎
3. I am inferring this as a good deal of national’s functions are not in program delivery. Some examples include HR for all councils, IT for the entire organization, Scout Shops, and high-adventure bases. ↩︎

TL;DR: On October 28, 2025, the National Executive Board removed chartered organizations as automatic voting members of local councils. That matters because chartered organizations were the Scouting movement’s formal pathway into governance, even if that pathway was often unused. With it gone, BSA’s governance becomes even more self-selecting, more insulated, and more vulnerable to capture by commissioned bureaucrats.

BSA’s biggest structural problem isn’t a single policy. It’s that the movement–families, youth, and unit-level volunteers–is moated off from governance. This leaves BSA with little accountability to the movement.

This has led to capture, where staff incentives dominate organizational outcomes.

BSA’s National Executive Board just cemented this capture. BSA’s rules and regulations once gave the movement a voice in governance. In an October 2025 revision, the NEB removed this.

Thanks to capture, the BSA organization‘s overriding goal is not a vibrant, relevant Scouting movement. Instead, BSA’s main goal is career protection for senior, commissioned bureaucrats.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: BSA has many dedicated, productive professionals and volunteers. The problem is structural: culture eats strategy, and a small number of bad incentives can sustain bad outcomes, regardless of how many good people are trying to do the right thing.

BSA’s governance is neutered

First, a brief explanation on councils: BSA has a national organization and over 200 local councils. Local councils are like franchisees, each with a geographic monopoly to supervise program delivery. On with the story:

This is how BSA’s governance is supposed to work:

1. Many positions on council boards of directors are elected by council members.
2. Each council board appoints its national representatives.
3. Council national representatives elect the national board of directors, the National Executive Board (NEB).

Importantly, council boards are the entry point to BSA’s governance system.

I emphasized council members above. Many members, sometimes the majority, of a council’s board are elected by council members.¹ The remainder of council-board roles are mostly ex officio, meaning they are filled by virtue of one’s position within the organization. This includes council committee chairs, district committee chairs, and more.²

Let’s go back to council members, those who elect board members. Until October 2025, they were in two groups:

• Chartered Organization Representatives (CORs)
• Council Members at Large

Let’s talk about them.

Enter the chartered-organization model

In BSA’s chartered-organization (CO) model, Scout units are (on paper) an operation of community-minded organizations, such as churches and civic clubs. To become a CO, an organization signs a charter agreement (license) with BSA, which allows it to run a Scout unit.

Suppose First Presbylutheran Church becomes a CO, chartering Pack 123. Pack 123 is then a literal operation of that church, operating inside the church’s corporate veil. Everything Pack 123 does is the same as if a First Presbylutheran Church employee did it. The pack uses the church’s EIN.³

Running an operation that serves mostly external youth is a big responsibility. Enter the Chartered Organization Representative (COR). A COR is a member of the CO appointed to supervise the CO’s Scout units.

In practice, much of the above is a fiction. Few COs truly understand the contract they sign, and fully involved CORs are unusual. “Key relationships” are not uncommon. This is where the CO does little beyond handing over a building key and signing a paper once a year.

Unsurprisingly, CORs rarely showed up to council annual business meetings, where council board members are elected. Go ask any well-connected, council-level person about how many CORs show up at that meeting. All you will get is laughter. CORs didn’t show up!

Squelching the movement = institutionalism

Absent CORs mean the voice of the movement is absent from council governance. Without the movement’s voice, institutionalism prevails.

Recall that two groups used to elect board members: CORs and council members-at-large (CMALs). It appears that CORs outnumber CMALs by almost a 10:1 ratio.⁴ As CORs directly represent the movement, COR influence on board composition could have powerfully injected the voice of the movement into council governance.

With CORs absent from governance, electing board members is left to CMALs. Who appoints CMALs? Themselves. That’s right: CMALs themselves elect the next round of CMALs. You get a self-reinforcing dynamic where CMALs are effectively products of the institution. When products of the institution are the only ones who elect board members, this dynamic frees council boards from accountability to the movement!⁵

What flavor of “institutionalism” do we get? The one desired by those who dominate the institution: commissioned bureaucrats! As nearly all influential council-employee roles are gated to commissioned bureaucrats, the gravitational pull on council governance is toward the whims of the commissioned-bureaucrat system.

It doesn’t stop at councils. Institutionalist council boards appoint their own types as national representatives. These institutionalist national representatives elect their own type to the national board of directors.

At all levels, institutionalists conditioned to be responsive to the interests of the commissioned-bureaucrat system control BSA’s governance. This yields passive governance, often deferring to the whims of the commissioned-bureaucrat system. This is capture.

In a shocking turn, in October 2025, BSA cemented this capture.

What changed in October 2025

In the October 28, 2025 revision to the latest Rules and Regulations, the NEB stated that “chartered organizations will no longer be automatic voting members of the local councils”⁶.

If you’re a unit-level volunteer, here’s what that means in plain English:

• The movement already had weak influence in governance, courtesy of an obsolete ownership model for Scout units.
• Now the movement has little influence by design, because the only channel was removed.

This is not a minor procedural tweak. It’s a governance signal: BSA is formalizing distance between the movement (families, youth, and unit-level volunteers) and the institution (governance, bureaucrats, and support systems).

With this move, the NEB overturned at least 108 years of precedent. The earliest reference I can find is in BSA’s 1917 Constitution, which on page 33 states that “each chartered institution shall be entitled to elect one of its members … as a member of the local council”⁷.

Consequences of squelching the movement

BSA’s movement has been effectively squelched, subjugated to the interests of the bureaucracy, likely for at least 75 years⁸. Disregarding the movement used to simply be a practice. Now formalized by policy, the movement is officially no longer a priority.

This begets even more problems: mission drift, accountability void, alienation, neglect of programs and culture, and institutional mismanagement.

BSA has many, many professionals and volunteers who are productive, dedicated to the Scouting mission, and responsive to the movement. I celebrate you! But one bad apple can spoil the barrel. Scouting’s bad apples–fruits of decades of neglect of culture and programs–are driving the movement to oblivion. If we want another 100 years of Scouting, we must overcome this neglect. To get there, it is essential for us to improve governance.

Mission drift

The BSA organization has strayed from its mission. Courtesy of capture, in many ways, BSA is mainly an employment scheme for commissioned bureaucrats.

The movement often comes across as an inconvenience that commissioned bureaucrats have to deal with. We see this today with open hostility toward the movement over matters that have no merit except to maintain salary lines for bureaucrats, such as allowing councils to impose bureaucracy-preservation fees, maintaining far too many councils on the roster (inflates job roles for senior bureaucrats), or skyrocketing member fees that track skyrocketing, per-youth-member salary spend:

Disinterest in serving the movement isn’t new. Dr. Jay Mechling, author of On My Honor, reflecting on his experience in BSA in the 1970s-1990s, wrote:

The “professional Scouters,” the bureaucrats who work for the national office of the Boy Scouts of America, feel compelled to speak authoritatively about what is good or bad for children and adolescents without actually asking any young people what they think about it.⁹

Even today, the National Executive Board keeps allowing the national organization to flout the movement, such as:

• perpetuating religious bigotry
• permitting bureaucrats and volunteers to advance an absurd corpus of misinformation and folklore to beat down girls
• allowing bureaucrats to attack Cub Scout camping (the NEB met in the middle of this and took no public action)
• attacking feedback
• …and more.

It’s not just about malice. National’s lack of leadership talent–a product of a defective career-advancement system that prioritizes loyalty and protecting jobs–and ineffective governance opens a leadership vacuum. For decades, this vacuum has been filled by culture warriors, who squandered BSA’s treasure and goodwill. They used BSA as a tool in their societal wars on girls, gays, and God. This resulted in Pyrrhic victories, such as the landmark 2000 Supreme Court decision, Boy Scouts of America vs. Dale.

By casting a nationwide spotlight on BSA’s bigotry, this case kicked off a decades-long membership slump. Today, we are 82% below our peak market share of youth:

That slump compares poorly with The Scout Association (BSA’s peer in the UK), which is overwhelmed with demand.

This lack of leadership is also why national is just a collection of program-silos. With nobody to advocate for the movement as a whole, these program-silos optimize for their own interests and prestige.

Because BSA lacks effective leadership, inertia and neglect are the norms. This is why BSA was decades late to including girls. Even then, it took 8.5 years to cast off a misogynist-appeasement regime!¹⁰

BSA’s neglect is behind poor program designs. For example, our Scouts BSA program is stuck in an obsolete design that even Scouting’s founder, Robert Baden-Powell, rejected in 1918. This poor design infantilizes older Scouts, endangers younger Scouts, and undermines leadership training. Even worse, it undermines BSA’s most prestigious rank, Eagle Scout. Instead of meaningfully distinguishing high schoolers, 11-year-olds can earn it.¹¹ (Solutions for all this are defined in Move Forward: Save Scouting.)

Accountability void

BSA is notorious for a lack of accountability. It stems from the You’ve Made It™️ promise to its bureaucrats. Essentially, once one becomes a senior-enough commissioned bureaucrat and has a track record of loyalty to higher-up bureaucrats, that person enters a “good ol’ boys” network, and the system pulls out all the stops to protect careers, on both the front and back sides.

The front end of career protection is how many roles are gated to commissioned bureaucrats, causing roles to be filled by bureaucrats unprepared to succeed. For example, for many decades, all national CEOs from the commissioned-bureaucrat system have been poorly prepared for their roles, with predictably poor results.

The back end of the accountability void is a culture of protecting low-performing You’ve Made It™️ bureaucrats. Stories abound of them being shuffled into low-value roles, especially at national, until they can be placed in a different council.

To facilitate accountability void, the national organization adopted a culture of indifference about competence. Otherwise, protecting low-performing bureaucrats would not be possible.

Low expectations breeds repetitive failures, such as:

• A poor implementation of a rolling-membership scheme, which is likely behind recent membership losses.
• Even though it just emerged from a colossal, record-setting, SA-related bankruptcy, national chose a new corporate name that initializes to SA (sexual assault).
• National botched the rollout of coed troops. Instead of communicating to unit leaders, national routed messaging through favored elites, then through its bureaucratic hierarchy. For weeks after the decision, troop leaders nationwide reported incomplete and absent communications on how to move forward.

Passive governance sustains the capture that allows low performers to keep getting away with it.

This accountability void doesn’t end with commissioned bureaucrats. As national-level volunteer appointments are essentially appointed by the bureaucrats or by captured governance, selection is mainly informed by the same factor that landed bureaucrats their spots: demonstrating unwavering loyalty to bureaucrats.

This is why national committees are notorious for low output, poor performance, and passivity. They hide it with a lack of transparency.

For example, the National Order of the Arrow Committee has taken five years¹² just to revise children’s fantasy fiction (i.e., OA’s fake legend and the redface minstrel shows based on that legend).

Also, in watering down Cub Scout advancement, the National Cub Scout Committee largely divorced its program’s essentials from adventure:

Alienation

Unit-level volunteers are sidelined in BSA. Receiving little meaningful support from bureaucrats, they must navigate programs created or fomented by the bureaucrats and their volunteer allies: red tape, bloated documentation, lack of program focus, and obsolete program designs.

Regarding red tape and bloated documentation, the national organization permits runaway bureaucracies to manage crucial concerns. As an example, volunteers have to wrangle a 60,000-word, 101-page document, with five levels of subsections, just to do advancement. By diverting scarce volunteer resources to serve bureaucratic nonsense, BSA’s advancement system impinges access to Scouting’s key distinction: outdoor adventure.

Essentially, volunteers are the unpaid labor force for a bureaucratic class that views them with disdain. When unit volunteers burn out from the administrative burden, the bureaucrat system engenders a culture that blames volunteers for a lack of dedication. E.g., when observing that trapping high schoolers in a middle-school program is a recipe for boredom, volunteers are blamed for problems induced by national’s faulty program design. This incentivizes continued neglect of programs and culture, not fixing the broken processes or improving obsolete designs that drove them away.

Financial and corporate mismanagement

When the movement is excluded from governance, financial priorities shift from missional excellence to sustaining the bureaucracy. This manifests in deep secrecy surrounding council and national finances; the average volunteer has little visibility into how their dues and fundraising dollars are spent.

For example, if it wasn’t buried in the bare-minimum disclosures BSA makes, few would be aware that BSA has $186 million of outstanding bond debt for SBR¹³, a money-losing, white-elephant vanity project. That is on top of $213 million of other debts, mainly to pay bankruptcy attorneys.

It also leads to inflated salaries for You’ve Made It™️ bureaucrats. Scout Executives (council CEOs) often command high salaries. The average Scout Executive (SE) is paid $65 per registered Scout. You read that correctly–in the average council, the first $65 collected per Scout just goes to the SE’s salary! The top 20% of SEs rake in between $91 and $352 per Scout!¹⁴ This drains resources that should be improving camps or lowering costs for families.

Where does high SE pay come from? In a dwindling number of healthy councils, fundraising. However, it appears that most councils now assess bureaucracy-preservation fees on top of the $85 national membership.

Finally, the ultimate indicator of mismanagement was the organization’s bankruptcy. Triggered by sexual abuse lawsuits, the bankruptcy was decades in the making—a direct result of passive governance that excused rampant abuse, declined to address the flawed CO model, and insulated bureaucrats from the consequences of their (in)actions.

Today, BSA’s national organization is so fiscally fragile that, at the current member-loss rate, it may have less than a ten-year runway to liquidation.

The mission is not a priority

If the above isn’t enough, let’s review the current, NEB-approved institutional priorities of BSA:

Little of this is connected to serving the movement or overcoming over seven decades of neglect of programs and culture. Instead, it’s mostly bureaucrat games. Beholden to capture, governance’s priority is obedience to bureaucrats. This reveals a NEB that is mainly concerned with the institution, not with the Scouting movement.

This contrasts mightily with Baden-Powell’s vision. In response to a flunky’s proposal for a bureaucratic change, Baden-Powell rebuked him with, “WE ARE A MOVEMENT, NOT AN ORGANISATION.”¹⁵

The flunky’s proposal wasn’t bad. It was about standardization. But BP rebuked him because it was not tied to value for the movement. BP emphasized that all in Scouting are “working for the boy and not for me”.

Paths to reform

Fixing the BSA requires more than minor policy tweaks. It demands a dismantling of the structures that allowed the bureaucrat class to capture the organization.

First, we must abolish the commissioned-bureaucrat system. We must treat Scouting employment like any other job. Hiring must be based on skills and merit, not gated by ordination into a brotherhood. We need competent administrators, not career bureaucrats protected by a “good ol’ boy” network.

Second, we must abolish the chartered-organization system. This model is a grand fiction. It obscures liability and obstructs genuine ownership and accountability. We should move to a model where all units are operations of councils, with each unit governed by its own unit committee. Instead of charter agreements, councils would enter into affiliation agreements with community organizations. This maintains community affiliations while ending the shifting of responsibility and liability to third parties.

Third, the movement must have a direct stake in the organization, becoming a powerful force in governance. This starts with opening governance to the movement, giving it a major stake in selecting council boards and in determining strategic priorities.

Without these structural changes, the BSA will remain a zombie: wandering forward, eating resources, but lacking the soul and vision necessary to survive.

While changes are important, many more are needed. BSA shrinks annually because its core products are unappealing. Move Forward: Save Scouting describes many more pivots BSA needs to make to ensure another century of Scouting.

1. This is a loose estimate and can vary depending on characteristics of each council. However, with the 2025 changes to BSA’s Rules and Regulations, councils now have even more power to oppose the movement. ↩︎
2. More details were in the April 8, 2025 version of the Charter and Bylaws of the Boy Scouts of America, Article VI, Section 6, Clause 2. Importantly, 25-50 council executive board members were elected by the council members. I estimate that non-elected members, such as district committee chairs, council committee chairs, and a small number of other roles, would have totaled around 25 at most. ↩︎
3. It is unlawful for Scout units to use any EIN other than that of their chartered organizations. Partly due to bad guidance promulgated by BSA’s national organization, it is not uncommon for Scout units to use a separate EIN from their CO. ↩︎
4. Per a source at the national organization (thank you), as of fall 2025, and accounting for multiple registrations, across BSA councils there are almost 29,000 CORs and almost 3000 CMALs. ↩︎
5. While this paragraph is in present tense, it reflects the April 8, 2025 revision of BSA’s Charter and Bylaws (Article VI, Section 6, Clause 1 (p. 13)). This is the revision that immediately preceded the Oct. 28, 2025 revision. Not only does the Oct. 28, 2025 revision relieve councils of any need to give CORs any say in council governance, it requires no other path for the voice of the movement to be included in council governance. Capture is powerful, so without clear incentives, it is unlikely councils will voluntarily stray from institutionalist boards. ↩︎
6. Rules and Regulations of the Boy Scouts of America, October 28, 2025, p. i. ↩︎
7. Constitution and By-Laws of the Boy Scouts of America, February 26, 1917 (as amended to December 31, 1925), p. 33. See the Clause 6–Representation section. Because this is prominently conveyed as a 1917 edition, I assume that the ensuing eight years of amendments, major provisions are generally intact. ↩︎
8. An outcome of squelching the movement is bureaucrat culture becomes dominant, leading to bureaucracy being seen as a preferred model. A clear sign of this is how, between roughly 1940 and 1960, BSA abandoned leadership training and the patrol method in its Scouts BSA (nee Boy Scouts) program, replacing it with a youth-operated bureaucracy. This suggests that institutional capture at least goes back to around 1950 (midpoint between 1940 and 1960). ↩︎
9. Dr. Jay Mechling, On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth, University of Chicago Press, 2001. This book represents Dr. Mechling’s observations of Boy Scouts while he served as an adult leader for a California troop in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. ↩︎
10. The misogynist-appeasement regime was kicked off by Michael Surbaugh’s platforming of misogynistic tropes in his keynote at the 2017 National Annual Meeting, then responding to them by announcing the linked-troop model and bans on coed troops and dens. Rather than promoting inclusion, as originally announced, Surbaugh’s model sought to maximize gendered separation. The national organization justified with this a shoddy corpus of misinformation and folklore. A thorough rundown is in The case for equity and inclusion: Ending BSA’s specious coed ban. ↩︎
11. The shortest path to earning Eagle is 19 months. Therefore, if a Cub Scout earns Arrow of Light within five months of turning 10, that Scout could complete Eagle before turning 12. ↩︎
12. In the The National Order of the Arrow Committee could care less section of OA’s pretendian core ceremonies celebrate racist oppression, mock tribes, must be blown up is a letter that substantiates that OA has been revising its children’s fantasy fiction since at least 2021. ↩︎
13. See BSA’s 2024 IRS Form 990. On Schedule K, Part 1, it shows that BSA issued $225 million of bonds for SBR “[c]onstruction & equipping”. Schedule K, Part 2 shows that only $39,200,615 has been paid off. Ergo, almost $186 million remains. ↩︎
14. All Scout Executive salary information comes from SE Compensation, compiled by Ryan Tashma. ↩︎
15. Robert Baden-Powell, “The Hang of the Thing”, B-P’s Outlook, July 1921, p. 59. ↩︎

Per BSA’s data, 85% of Scouts are in unhealthy councils.

It’s no surprise. We’ve shrunk 84% below our peak youth count, and we’re still shrinking.

This could change with the positive vision in Move Forward: Save Scouting. However, national prefers failure, so it has different priorities like adopting toxic brands, perpetuating cultural theft, appeasing misogynists, attacking adventure, avoiding authentic leadership development, clinging to a money-losing amusement park, worshiping itself, sustaining a good-old-boy career system, scamming Eagle Scouts, infantilizing high schoolers, and attacking those who share feedback.

How councils are ranked

Using their operating margins (short-term and long-term), endowments (scale and growth), and liquidity (cash on hand), BSA classifies councils as:

• Healthy
• Stable
• Vulnerable
• At Risk

Maps

Here’s a static map with points scaled by counts of youth members¹ (scroll down for a crosswalk of council numbers to names):

The same data in Google Maps:

We need fewer councils

BSA has 236 councils. This means 236 Scout Executives, bureaucracies, corporations, boards of directors, support infrastructures, and more.

While Girl Scouts USA is not a benchmark, it is a valid comparison. Currently, GSUSA serves its 1.1 million members with 111 councils², with a mean of just under 10,000 scouts per council.

With 764,651 members across BSA, each of BSA’s 236 councils, on average, serves about 3,200 Scouts.

Compared to GSUSA, BSA has 112% more councils to serve 30% fewer youth. This means lower efficiency and a higher burden of bureaucracy and red tape per Scout. It also means many councils lack the critical mass to have an effective community presence, which hampers fundraising, recognition, and marketing. It’s hard to imagine how this helps deliver Scouting.

Even if we managed to reduce our council count by half, we’d still have 36% fewer Scouts per council than GSUSA.

Underlying data

The underlying data:

1. Count from April 2025. ↩︎
2. Girl Scouts: Facts and Figures, Girl Scouts USA. ↩︎