Project 2025's DOD Blueprint: More Spending, Less Oversight, and a China-First Posture That Bypasses Accountability
Project 2025's DOD chapter calls for dramatic spending increases and a China-first force posture while framing internal accountability reforms as culture war correction — leaving the Pentagon's chronic audit failures, contractor capture, and civilian-control ambiguities entirely unaddressed.
Project 2025 opens its DOD chapter by correctly identifying real dysfunction: a two-tiered accountability culture that protects senior officers, wasteful spending, and poor program discipline. But its prescribed cure — strip 'equity agendas,' expand the nuclear arsenal, spend more — is diagnostic malpractice. The document never once mentions the DOD's unbroken string of failed financial audits, the most concrete evidence of institutional unaccountability in the federal government. The Costs of War Project at Brown University documents that Pentagon spending has ballooned past $850 billion annually, with a substantial share flowing to large defense contractors, yet Project 2025's 'financial transparency' priority contains no structural enforcement mechanism — no independent audit trigger, no clawback authority, no IG empowerment. Demanding accountability while refusing to name the auditing failure is not reform; it is theater.
The chapter's geopolitical architecture — China as the singular threat, Taiwan denial defense as the organizing mission, nuclear arsenal expansion as a requirement — locks the United States into a maximalist posture that the restraint literature consistently shows produces worse strategic outcomes at greater cost. The Costs of War Project calculates that post-9/11 wars cost over $8 trillion and killed hundreds of thousands; Project 2025 draws no lessons from that record. Instead, it calls for allies to 'step up' while the U.S. simultaneously expands its own commitments, a formula that historically increases entanglement rather than burden-sharing. A genuine restraint doctrine would define the specific denial threshold for Taiwan, cap the forward-deployment footprint, and require a public cost-benefit analysis before any new force posture expansion — none of which appear here.
Most damaging from an accountability standpoint is what the chapter omits entirely: whistleblower protection, intelligence community independence, and the boundary between lawful civilian control and partisan command capture. The chapter was authored by Christopher Miller, a former Acting Secretary of Defense installed in the post-election transition period, and its framing of 'nonpoliticization' applies exclusively to progressive social policy inside the military, not to the far more dangerous pattern — documented most directly by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's 2004 report on pre-Iraq WMD analysis — of senior leadership retaliating against analysts and officers who deliver unwelcome strategic findings. Purging DEI offices while leaving intact the structural conditions for politicized intelligence is not depoliticization; it is selective politicization with a different ideological sign.
A serious accountability reform for DOD would start with three concrete measures grounded in existing oversight architecture: (1) mandate a clean audit opinion as a precondition for any budget increase above inflation, with the DOD Inspector General empowered to flag non-compliant program offices to Congress automatically; (2) codify and strengthen Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act procedures so that analysts who dissent from politicized threat assessments have a protected channel to congressional intelligence committees; and (3) clarify in statute — not merely in tradition — that orders from the President that violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice or the War Powers Resolution do not constitute lawful commands, preserving the constitutional civilian-control framework that Project 2025 gestures toward but leaves structurally undefended.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 4: Department of Defense (pp 123-126)"— 90 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise Primorac asserts that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) must be reformed, writing, “The Biden Administration has deformed the agency by treating it as a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systematic racism.” If the recommendations in the following chapters are adopted, what Skinner says about the State Department could be true for other parts of the federal gov - ernment’s national security and foreign policy apparatus: The next conservative President has the opportunity to restructure the making and execution of U.S. defense and foreign policy and reset the nation’s role in the world. The recom - mendations outlined in this section provide guidance on how the next President should use the federal government’s vast resources to do just that. — 91 — T he Constitution requires the federal government to “provide for the common defence.” 1 It assigns to Congress the authority to “raise and support Armies” and to “provide and maintain a Navy” 2 and spe…"