Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

4. Department of Defense · Notable

Audit military academy curricula and eliminate tenure for academic professionals

Partially done

104 4. Department of Defense

“Audit the course offerings at military academies to remove Marxist indoctrination, eliminate tenure for academic professionals, and apply the same rules to instructors that are applied to other DOD contracting personnel.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    The closest the record comes to the tenure limb, and it does not reach it. *Strengthening the Effectiveness of Our Senior Service Colleges* directs the Under Secretary of War for Personnel and Readiness to stand up a Senior Service College Task Force and run "a 90-day review of the SSCs' educational standards in time for the 2026-27 academic year", ensuring "their **faculty** and curricula remain laser focused on national security, strategy, high standards, history, meritocracy, and overall excellence", with "a full review of SSC curricula". Faculty are named as an object of review; no instrument eliminates tenure for academic professionals, and none applies DOD contracting-personnel rules to instructors. Under §3b that is a review naming the object, so the tenure limb stands at a directive and the item's rung is unchanged. This is the task force and the draft-memorandum trail the read queue raised: the task force exists and is Primary; the tenure memorandum does not exist on any readable allowlisted source.

  2. Partially done

    The review produced cancellations, and both memoranda are readable. *Rebuilding the Warrior Ethos in Professional Military Education* (2026-02-06) discontinues "all graduate level Professional Military Education, fellowships, and certificate programs between Harvard University and the Department of War for active-duty Service members" from the 2026–27 school year and orders Components to evaluate every graduate program at Ivy League universities "and any other universities that similarly diminish critical thinking and have significant adversary involvement". *Aligning Senior Service College Opportunities with American Values* (2026-02-27) then eliminates named Senior Service College fellowships — its Tab A lists **93 SSC fellowships canceled at 22 institutions**, from Harvard (21 students) through MIT, Georgetown, Yale and Princeton to the Brookings Institution, the Atlantic Council and the Council on Foreign Relations — and its Tab B names 21 proposed replacements against criteria including "minimal public expressions in opposition of the Department". Course offerings removed, by name and by count. Still nothing on tenure or on contracting-personnel rules for instructors.

  3. Partially done

    The FY2026 NDAA sec. 901(f)(1)(F) bars the Secretary of Defense from developing, implementing, distributing, publishing, establishing or purchasing a training course relating to diversity, equity or inclusion — a statutory bar that reaches academy and war college course offerings. The other half of the Quote is untouched: no instrument eliminates tenure for academic professionals or applies contracting-personnel rules to instructors.

  4. Partially done

    The audit limb, ordered and scoped by the Department itself. The Secretary of War's *Department of War Military Education and Training Standards 60-Day Review*, read in full, directs "a comprehensive 60-day, 'Education System Curricula and Training School Standards Review,' including all Military Service Academies, military educational institutions (MEIs), and military training schools": the Service Secretaries and the Chairman each review their MEI curricula, the Service Secretaries also review training school standards with emphasis on The Basic School, Airborne School, Ranger School and Basic Underwater Demolition School, and each must "report any changes to program standards since 1990 and make recommendations on whether to restore any standards that have been lowered since that time", reporting to the Under Secretary of War for Personnel and Readiness. That is the audit of course offerings the Quote asks for, on the academies by name. It says nothing about tenure and nothing about applying contracting-personnel rules to instructors.

  5. Attempted

    EO 14151 orders every agency to terminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs, offices and positions. A directive reaching the service academies among everything else; no course offering had been changed yet.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Three limbs, not two: audit the course offerings, eliminate tenure, and apply contracting-personnel rules to instructors. The first is delivered — ordered on 2025-09-30, executed in the February 2026 cancellations. The second and third are untouched.

Searched 2026-09-06. We looked for the senior service colleges task force and the reported draft memorandum ending civilian faculty tenure. The task force is real and Primary (Strengthening the Effectiveness of Our Senior Service Colleges, 2026-03-12, the fifth event above); it reviews faculty and curricula and eliminates no tenure. The draft tenure memorandum was not found — we searched media.defense.gov and war.gov for tenure, faculty and PME memoranda, and read the four Secretary of War education memoranda that do exist (2025-09-30, 2026-02-06, 2026-02-27, 2026-03-12) in full. None mentions tenure. The earlier note that these documents were “on Department of War and paywalled pages we could not read” was wrong about the Department of War half: media.defense.gov can be read.

This item sits in the page 103–104 personnel cluster, whose shared instruments are EO 14151, EO 14183, the FY2026 NDAA titles V, VI and IX, and the Secretary of Defense’s 2025 personnel memoranda — nearly all of which live on Department of War pages that refuse automated reads. One negative search covered the whole cluster.

Action
eliminate
Object
military academy course offerings and faculty tenure
ID
175