To Reform the Pentagon Bureaucracy, Permanently Defund the Think Tanks Which Feed It
A look at former Army Secretary Christine Wormuth’s career outside government shows the interconnections—and their consequences.
This report originally appeared in Restoration News and is reprinted with permission.
A look at former Army Secretary Christine Wormuth’s career outside government shows the interconnections—and their consequences.
Restoration News recently reported that Biden Army Secretary Christine Wormuth had, in the blunt words of a Heritage Foundation report, "priorities [that] do not address warfighting proficiency." These included a focus on management at the expense of warfighting and an emphasis on psychology rather than command fitness. Flowing from there were focuses on DEI, transgenderism, and climate change.
Digging into Wormuth’s history shows that these focuses are not coincidental—they flow directly from Wormuth’s career outside of the Pentagon.
Tracing Wormuth’s influences reveals the omnipresence of non-governmental organizations—NGOs—specifically think tanks, which not only predicted her priorities but shape Pentagon policy more broadly. These operators are the top level of the administrative agencies, government contractors, and government-funded universities that we know as the "deep state." Investigating their influence suggests that truly reforming the Pentagon means not just pausing NGO funding, as President Trump has done. It means making that pause permanent when it comes to these think tanks and the roughly fifty others which dominate establishment Washington.
The Making of a Career Bureaucrat—And the Institutions that Made Her
Wormuth made her career serving in the Defense Department as a civil servant in the Clinton and Obama Administrations, rising to the position of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy from 2014 to 2016. In between she served twice at Georgetown’s Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS); at the Atlantic Council’s Arsht Center for Resilience; and at RAND Corporation. These three organizations are among the top ten think tanks in Washington measured by the donations they receive from the federal government and defense contractors. (RAND is first, the Atlantic Council third, CSIS sixth.)
All three date back to the beginning of the Cold War. They are part of the top layer, the "scientific-technological elite," of the "military industrial complex" that Dwight Eisenhower warned would create a rotating cast of operators who would become "merchants of death" operating for profit and power.
Last year, Restoration News reported these organizations "were major players in supporting foreign policy "missteps" abroad, especially in Cuba, Vietnam and Iraq—justifying them using the manipulation of language and psychology as well as surveillance. Restoration News chronicled how, as the Cold War ended, these institutions expanded their focus: promoting "universalizing ‘global norms’ helping make people ‘equal’ regardless of government, history, or ideology." A closer look at Wormuth’s three NGOs show that these trends continue to play out today.
Globalism and Diversity Shape Today’s Military-Industrial Playbook . . .
At these organizations, the "globalist" thrust of today’s institutional elite is everywhere in evidence. Tellingly, the Atlantic Council’s Arsht Center for Resilience is now called the Climate Resilience Center and has a Global Chief Heat Officer linked to the U.N. The Atlantic Council, which hosts the center, is committed to making "diversity, equity, and inclusion thrive" so its employees can "collaborate as global change agents."
CSIS doesn't just have a Human Rights Initiative and a Humanitarian Agenda, which are features of Washington since the Fifties. It also has a Diversity and Leadership in International Affairs program, which aims "to take a full-scope approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)." And it has a Sustainable Development and Resilience Initiative: a "research and education effort" which focuses on "public and private investments that advance economic development, democratic governance, and resilience in the face of climate change impacts in ways that are prudent, market-building, and highly effective."
Until last week, RAND had a Chief Diversity officer in its top echelon. Today, the same official, Rekha Chiruvolu, who is clearly a DEI professional since her job before RAND was an eight year stint as Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, holds a position at RAND called "Opportunities and Engagement." Also in the last week, the webpage announcing her original hire as "Chief Diversity Officer" as well as a related tweet have been scrubbed, and Chiruvolu appears to still work at RAND but has been removed from leadership listing—but Restoration News has pictures from before the scrubbing. Rand is run by an ardent proponent of lab grown meat whose research on the topic was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Rand receives funding from the Gates Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a major backer of the Affordable Care Act. And it has links to the Pardee School at Boston University, which Restoration News has reported is a center of rapprochement with the communist Cuban regime.Archived image from the now scrubbed RAND website
. . . Along with Psychology and Language Games
There are continuities from the pre-globalized deep state era: the underlying links between money and power as well as the use of psychology and language manipulation for social control.
CSIS’s Chairman is Thomas Pritzker, a development contractor who profited from the Iraq invasion—and a member of the powerful Democratic Pritzker family. The founder of the Arsht Center for Resiliency is the widow of Lyndon B. Johnson’s former White House counsel and a major Democratic donor in Washington and Miami.
One of the key promoters of Social Emotional Learning (SEL), which Restoration News has exposed for its use of trauma-based psychology to exercise control over children, is one of RAND’s notable figures. RAND’s Chairman of the Board is the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama; he is also a co-author, along with fellow Bush-Obama alumnus and CSIS non-resident expert Michael V. Hayden, of a 2020 Washington Post op-ed critical of President Trump’s purported closeness to Moscow.
Ex-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the mover behind the 51 intelligence operators including Hayden signing the infamous letter which used language manipulation to cast doubt on the validity of Hunter Biden’s laptop contents, has links to CSIS. The main drafter of that letter, Marc Polymeropoulos, is a senior nonresident fellow at The Atlantic Council.
How the Money Flows
These institutions’ priorities and those of their operators are dictated by their funding sources—defense contractors, foreign governments, and the U.S. government. In fact, RAND received more than $1 billion from the U.S. government and contractors between 2014 and 2019:
Nearly all of this came from U.S. government sources; specifically, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ($110 million), the U.S. Army ($245,880,000), the U.S. Air Force ($281,400,000), and the rather broad category described as "Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense and other national security agencies," ($391,720,000). RAND is overwhelmingly reliant on U.S. government funding. For example, in fiscal year 2019, $295 million of RAND’s $357 million in total revenue came from federal agencies.
The Atlantic Council received funding from the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Marines, as well as from twenty-seven different defense contractors, among them Raytheon and Boeing, for a total of $8.6 million. (Its contributors also include foreign defense ministries.) Contributors giving $250,000 and up to CSIS include the governments of the United States, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Donating between $100,000 and $250,000 is, among others, the United Nations.
Zooming out from Wormuth’s three organizations to the top fifty think tanks in Washington reinforces this picture. Cumulatively, the Defense Department, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Air Force are the top three government funders of these organizations. From the private sector, it’s Northrup Grumman, Raytheon and Boeing. Implicitly, the bureaucrats and contractors funding these think tanks have a great deal of sway over what they produce. For example, the Center for a New American Security, second of the top ten think tanks in terms of federal and contractor funding, receives heavy funding from Northrup Grumman. It has also produced reports promoting Northrup Grumman’s B21 bomber without acknowledging that it’s receiving the funding.
What Products are these Institutions Producing?
These think tanks shape policy priorities along the lines of their funders in more subtle ways.
A look at RAND’s annual report gives a sense of its priorities. Highlighted early are the facts that its staff of 1,225 hails from 50 countries and that 52 percent have doctorates. This means they have benefited from liberal immigration policies set up by the Kennedy-Johnson Administration and expanded by George H.W. Bush. It also means they owe their careers to academic institutions which receive heavy funding from multinational corporations and the federal government.
Further reading reinforces the global nature of RAND’s priorities. RAND’s main 2024 focuses included "advancing equity in healthcare," "spotlighting Ukraine’s war against disinformation," "preventing childhood deaths from diarrhea," "taking the pulse of American education"—the latter initiative off funding from the Gates Foundation, which Restoration News has reported is a major backer of SEL and CRT.
The Atlantic Council and CSIS have similar focuses. The "featured" reports from the Atlantic Council cover Gaza, Iraq, Ukraine. Outside of three reports on China and two on Latin America, the most recent twenty reports cover (sometimes more than once) Turkey, Egypt, the horn of Africa, the country of Georgia, the Eastern Mediterranean, Jordan, Syria, Morocco, Kurdistan and Russia. Doing the math: Only a fourth of the Atlantic Council’s most recent research focuses on the Trump Administration’s major areas of concern. CSIS, meanwhile, has a regular events series which focuses on Africa, the Koreas, nuclear energy, disability inclusion in foreign policy, cloud services, and "critical technology."
Not all of the analysis these institutions put out trends in the same direction: two years ago, Rand released a landmark report recommending a more peace-oriented approach to the war in Ukraine. But most of their recommendations and programs match the priorities of their funders. These funders—whether government bureaucrats or large corporate players—have no interest in reducing our footprint overseas or cutting down on top-down initiatives from management. The reason for this is logical and self-interested: These large-scale, top-down projects require outside consulting with think tanks and nonprofits.
And do they benefit our Armed Forces?
Christine Wormuth’s stint as Army Secretary suggests that the people minted in these institutions push policies that will benefit them. From cost cutting to analytics, mental health to harmful behaviors, recruitment strategies to climate change technology, Wormuth’s policies fit hand-in-glove with Defense Department consultation with organizations like RAND, Atlantic, CSIS, and the like.
And Wormuth is not the only one. Looking at the biographies of our past four Secretaries of Defense alone show that every one of them is tied into this network. Ashton Carter was a former physicist tied to technology consultancies; Mark Esper was a former defense contractor CEO; James Mattis was connected to the Hoover Institution, the centrist-conservative think tank also on the Top 50 list; and Lloyd Austin was—like Esper—connected to Raytheon.
The argument these institutions make for their own relevance relies on cost-cutting for the Pentagon as well as strategic assistance and improvement. But, on closer examination, both arguments are flawed. One of RAND’s self-listed "achievements" in 2024, for example, was that its work "preparing the Tanker Fleet for Future operations" led to a "$30 billion cost spike avoided between 2028 and 2038." But what does this really mean? It means that RAND selected specific data in order to project the cost of future tanker fleet operations, then supplied its own cost-cutting recommendations to this data it had selected, then subtracted the new projected cost from the original, and called it a victory.
Equally illusory are the claims these organizations make that they’re meaningfully assisting in improving the effectiveness of our Armed Forces. In the past 10 years, as Restoration News has reported, the number of crashes in the Air Force have risen thanks to loss of men, bureaucratic rules, and decline in morale. What these organizations are actually improving is the prospects for their funders: indeed, the tragic Army aircraft crash on January 29, 2024 came just weeks after Lockheed demonstrated its superior technology with just such an aircraft.
Cutting the NGOs . . .
Attacking this problem from the Pentagon means taking several steps. The first is to stop civilians like Wormuth from moving between think tanks and the Pentagon and bringing the think tanks’ priorities with her. Fixing this means Secretary Hegseth extending his order barring soldiers from taking positions with contractors to apply to civilians like Wormuth—and add NGOs and think tanks receiving government funding into the mix.
The second is to remove Pentagon funding and patronage from those nonprofits which are primarily funded by outside sources: ones like CSIS and The Atlantic Council. When it comes to Rand, which is almost completely reliant on the United States government, the question is: Can it be reformed with the stick of withholding funding to provide actual analysis? Given its ties to players like the Pardee School as well as the CVs of its leadership, and given its recent decision to do a runaround on the White House by changing the name of its Chief Diversity officer, this seems unlikely. What’s more, it’s perfectly possible for the U.S. government to fund the Heritage Foundation to do similar research without having to work to overhaul Rand. So, most likely, Rand should be defunded.
The third is to investigate the contracting practices the large players funding the NGOs—Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed: the operators who, as an earlier Restoration News report showed, have monopolized Pentagon contracting since the 1990s to the detriment of the Armed Forces. Making change here is the most difficult, because shifting to a leaner, less monopolized process might cause serious short-term pain to blue collar laborers employed by these firms. (It has done this in the past.) But, without this step, the fundamental imbalances Dwight Eisenhower saw—that policy won’t be run for the good of the country but the good of government-backed contractors—won’t change.
. . . and the Pushback
If anyone can take these steps, it’s Pete Hegseth, who has said that "our job is lethality and readiness and warfighting" and that his job is "serving the troops, the warriors of this department." Tellingly, Hegseth’s ventures into the nonprofit world weren’t in the field of analytics or technology—they were helping veterans.
But achieving the goal will mean facing intense pushback: not just from metrics managers but, judging by Hegseth’s difficult confirmation, from Republican senators like Collins, Murkowski, and McConnell. The media will also be avid critics. Those players—from the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, who spearheaded the media reporting on Hegseth’s personal and financial life, to CNN’s Natasha Bertrand, the reporter who disseminated the "spies who lie" letter—are all similarly "tapped in" to the institutional players who feed anonymous leaks from inside Washington. It won’t be surprising if reports soon start surfacing, at their hands, alleging that cuts to NGOs have made America less safe and reduced our standing in the world.
In reality, of course, none of this is true. From Vietnam through Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, these NGO’s and their powerful backers have helped create the problems they now purport to solve—and that’s not even to mention their last thirty-five years of pushing policies which hurt our soldiers.
Breaking this cycle means wielding the full authority of the Pentagon—and Pete Hegseth is eminently qualified to do just that.