Trump Restores Presidential Fitness Test Award With Tuesday Memo
President Donald Trump will sign a presidential memorandum on Tuesday restoring the presidential fitness test award, bringing back a school-based benchmark that the White House says was phased out during the Obama administration. The move revives a competitive program that had been replaced with a model focused more on health than athletic performance.
Trump and the White House plan
The memorandum is intended to pave the way for the administration to restore the test and awards at all American schools. Trump first signed an executive order last year to reestablish the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition and the Presidential Fitness Test, and the signing this week will include members of that council.
National Fitness Foundation board members Bryson DeChambeau, Gary Player, Amani Oruwariye and Noah Syndergaard are also expected to attend. The award being restored emphasizes measurable athletic performance standards, bringing the program closer to earlier versions of the test.
Obama-era change
The original Presidential Physical Fitness Test was phased out during Barack Obama’s second term and replaced with the Presidential Youth Fitness Program under the Let’s Move initiative. That program focused, in the words used to describe it, “primarily on assessing health versus athleticism for America’s youth.”
Critics at the time said the test put too much weight on competition and could discourage less athletic students. The new order returns the federal emphasis to performance, not just participation, across school settings.
Fitness politics and data
The broader context is hard to miss. More than 21% of Americans ages 2 to 19 were classified as obese between 2021 and 2023, and 7% had severe obesity, according to CDC data cited in the rollout.
The White House also tied the effort to a longer history: the President’s Council on Youth Fitness was first established by Dwight D. Eisenhower after studies showed American children were less physically fit than European peers, and schools began administering a fitness test under John F. Kennedy. For schools, Tuesday’s memo restores a performance standard that has been absent since the Obama-era shift.
The return of the award gives the administration a way to turn that broader policy push into something schools can actually administer again. For students, it means the presidential fitness test is moving back toward a place in American school life, with the award and the testing framework both set to return under Trump’s signature.
