A Roadmap For DOGE Cuts at the Department of Defense

The Department of Government Efficiency is right to look into waste, fraud, and abuse at the Department of Defense, and the first place to look is in the dollars being misdirected away from warfighting capabilities.

The U.S. Military has struggled to meet demands for actual warfighting equipment, such as ships, fighter jets, and munitions. Many of these projects experience consistent delays and cost overruns. This makes it all the more astounding that so much of the DOD’s budget goes toward “research” that props up left-wing causes.

For example, the DOD awarded a new round of $46.8 million in grants to the Minerva Research Initiative—broadly defined as supporting social science research to improve basic understanding of how “social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces shape security and conflict”—in August 2024.

This new grant round represents an expansion of the program, which the Pentagon estimated in 2011 would receive about $50 million in defense grants over five years. Not only is this program redundant considering the over $300 million spent on University Research Initiatives between the Army, Navy, and Air Force, many of those in academia consider it ill advised.

Since the inception of the Minerva Research Initiative in 2008, social sciences professors have heavily criticized it, saying military funding should not mix with social science research. Many researchers already report being suspected of working for U.S. intelligence agencies when they perform research abroad and receiving money from the DOD will do nothing to dispel these suspicions.

Beyond all reservations about the mixing of military and academia, the Minerva Research Institute simply does not advance the country’s warfighting capability as much as the procurement of ships, aircraft, and munitions would.

Take, for example, Future Fish Wars: Chasing Ocean Ecosystem Wealth,” a project that claims to analyze the economic and national security impact of climate change on fisheries. This project relies on the assumption not only that catastrophic man-made climate change exists, but that it affects the migratory patterns of certain species of fish.

“Climate Change and Great Power Competition,” for which the Air Force Office of Scientific Research awarded grants between 2022 and 2025, endeavors to create a model of great power politics based on changes in resource allocation brought about by climate change.

Whether or not the subject of these projects constitutes any real problem that the world faces, they certainly do not provide any advancements in warfighting capabilities. These examples represent a larger problem in defense spending. Money put towards the Minervia Research Initiative and other irrelevant projects would be better spent fielding equipment that helps us win wars while we leave the social science research to other government agencies, universities, or private industry.

There are many more examples of this kind of wasteful spending. In December 2021, then-President Biden signed an executive order requiring that the federal fleet only acquire zero-emission vehicles by 2035, which includes military vehicles.

The Global Engagement Center, established in 2016 and recently closed in the National Defense Authorization Act, aimed to expose foreign misinformation but was used against the American people. Reporter Matt Taibbi exposed the GEC through the Twitter Files for censoring information “describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon” and the lab leak theory.

The Department of Education’s National Resource Centers have provided federal grants to regional studies programs since the 1950s, some of which unfortunately goes to woke universities with partisan left-wing agendas. George Washington University receives funding from the NRC for its Middle East Studies, which will soon host an event on March 6 titled, “Implications of Trump’s Ethnic Cleansing Plan for Gaza.” The Department of Education also recently canceled $350 million in woke spending that funded ideologically driven Regional Educational Laboratories and Equity Assistance Centers, which supported divisive training in “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” critical race theory, and gender identity.

The DOD awarded $758,000 to the University of Missouri System to encourage science, technology, engineering, and math students to pursue a career in the Navy, but reports showed part of the funding went to supporting “equity-focused programmatic goals” and underrepresented minorities. Initiatives such as these may be better suited to organizations whose purpose is not to enhance the lethality of our military.

While our military strength diminishes, that of our adversaries grows. As the U.S. Navy retires many of its aging ships and cuts the procurement of a Virginia-class submarine, and while the Air Force cuts its procurement of F-35 fighter jets, China continues to strengthen what is already the world’s largest naval fleet, where quantity is a quality all of its own. Additionally, combining China’s air force and naval assets, the Chinese Communist Party has the largest aviation force in the Indo-Pacific.

DOGE has a treasure trove of material to analyze when it comes to wasteful spending within military spending.

DOGE could start by scrutinizing spending reports, contracts, and grants awarded to universities and other such institutions to analyze whether they truly enhance the warfighting capabilities of the American military. Identifying projects that overlap between military branches would reduce redundant efforts and save valuable time, resources, and money. The resources saved should then be reallocated to the procurement of ships, planes, and munitions, helping America to rebuild the edge over our adversaries that we need.

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