Scout wars: Girl Scouts Accuse Boy Scouts of Recruiting Girls to Increase Membership

Long plagued by declining membership, the Boy Scouts are considering a campaign to recruit in a previously untapped market: girls.

The Girl Scouts aren’t having it.

A feud between the two largest scouting organizations broke into the open Tuesday when the president of Girl Scouts of the USA called the Boy Scouts’ “covert campaign” to recruit girls “reckless” and “unsettling” in a letter obtained by BuzzFeed News. A Girl Scouts spokesman confirmed the letter in an email to The Washington Post.

“We were disappointed in the lack of transparency as we learned that you are surreptitiously testing the appeal of a girls’ offering to millennial parents,” Girl Scouts President Kathy Hopinkah Hannan wrote in her letter to Boy Scouts President Randall Stephenson. “Furthermore, it is inherently dishonest to claim to be a single gender organization while simultaneously endeavoring upon a co-ed model.”