A prospective airman was properly barred from serving in the U.S. Air Force because he had undergone bariatric surgery, the D.C. District Court ruled.

Jacob Guthrie passed all of the tests to join the Air Force in 2023. However, when he revealed that he had undergone weight-loss surgery one year earlier, his high-flying dreams were grounded.

The Department of Defense denied three of his requests for waivers of the policy.

The rationale is that the surgery causes “permanent anatomical changes that require strict dietary compliance, thereby potentially interfering with operational deployability.”

Guthrie filed a lawsuit against Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the Air Force’s secretary and commander of air education.

Guthrie claimed a violation of his Fifth Amendment rights to equal protection and due process. The district court granted Hegseth’s motion to dismiss the case.

Guthrie had asserted that his situation resembled those of “individuals with other chronic but stable and manageable medical conditions, including orthopedic repairs, cardiac stents, and controlled endocrine disorders.”

Magistrate Judge Matthew Sharbaugh explained that Guthrie had not alleged the absence of a rational basis for the policy.

“Even acknowledging that reasonable minds could disagree on whether and to what extent an individual’s post-surgical dietary restrictions might complicate a service member’s deployability, it is not difficult to conceive of circumstances in any number of military settings that might do so. In other words, DoD’s assessment is at least rational,” the judge wrote.