There has been no vocal opposition inside the Pentagon to a plan to allow transgender troops to serve openly, the department's recently departed personnel chief said Monday.

“I’ve never had a single person say to me we shouldn’t do this,” said Brad Carson, who left the Defense Department on Friday after an acrimonious confirmation hearing in February where senators slammed some of the Pentagon’s recent personnel reform efforts.

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In July, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said he plans to lift the military’s ban on transgender troops after a working group studies the effects. Reports over the summer suggested a final decision would be announced this spring.

When asked if the final decision would come before the end of the Obama administration, Carson said he expects it will be.

“This is a major social change,” Carson said at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event. “In six months, we’ve gone from no one was even talking about it to, boom, overnight, that it was going to happen and that you couldn’t be separated for it, and we’re going to do this working group to now this assimilation phase, if you will.”

There are “small matters” to resolve before releasing the final policy, Carson said, but no major opposition to the plan.

For example, members of the working group disagree about certain scientific and technical issues, Carson said.

“There are no substantive arguments,” Carson said. “There are modest disagreements about how to execute this. But there are things about, should you have the 10-year passport or the two-year passport be the gender marker change. These are very technical questions that don’t suggest any kind of massive pushback.”

Among the issues the working group discussed are how the policy will work in basic training, how it will work in deployment and whether the policy will be uniform or different for each service.

“It is a conversation that any seminar room in any university would be proud of,” Carson said. “People come in very well read, trying to understand the issue, asking good-faith questions.”

The Pentagon was also waiting for a RAND Corporation report it commissioned on prevalence, readiness and healthcare costs to be finished, Carson said.

Both the working group’s findings and the RAND report need to be reviewed and commented on by leaders before a final decision, Carson said.

Carson said he’s confident the policy will be consistent with military readiness needs and that transgender troops and their commanders will be able to implement it.

“As Secretary Carter has said, this will make us a better fighting force,” Carson said.