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

2. Executive Office of the President · Minor

Put the NSC in charge of drafting and reviewing all formal national strategies

Partially done

52 2. Executive Office of the President

“The NSC should take a leading role in directing the drafting and thorough review of all formal strategies: the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy, the Nuclear Posture Review, the Missile Defense Strategy, etc. In particular, the National Defense Strategy, which by tradition has evaded significant review, should be prioritized for White House review by the NSC and OMB.”

What has happened

  1. Partially done

    A second of the four named strategies now exists, and it places itself under the first. The 2026 National Defense Strategy was published by the Department of War on 2026-01-23 and states in its introduction that "[c]onsistent with the direction as laid out in the National Security Strategy (NSS), the Department of War (DoW) is" pursuing the four lines of effort it sets out — the subordination to the NSC's own document that the Quote's hierarchy describes. Still `partial`, for two reasons the document itself supplies. The particular thing the Quote singles out is not there: the words National Security Council, NSC, Office of Management and Budget and OMB appear nowhere in the strategy's 34 pages, so nothing records the White House review of the NDS by the NSC and OMB. And two of the four named strategies are still unwritten — the strategy discusses nuclear modernization and Golden Dome for America in its lines of effort but is not, and does not announce, a Nuclear Posture Review or a Missile Defense Strategy, and neither appears in the Federal Register in the window.

  2. Partially done

    One of the four named strategies has been produced under this arrangement. The 2025 National Security Strategy, dated November 2025 and released in early December, is a White House product setting out the administration's principles, priorities and regional strategy — the NSC's own document, and the top of the hierarchy the Quote describes. NSPM-1 gives the NSC staff the standing to do the rest: it makes them responsible for "long-term strategic planning" and for advising on "integrated domestic, foreign, and military policies". But no published National Defense Strategy, Nuclear Posture Review or Missile Defense Strategy has been issued in the window, and nothing records the NSC-and-OMB review of the National Defense Strategy that the Quote singles out.

Research log

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

Research notes

The NSS PDF carries only “November 2025”; the release date is taken from Lawfare’s same-day piece of 5 December 2025, which is why that Secondary item is cited alongside the Primary document.

Correction, 2026-09-06. The 2026-08-27 event’s closing sentence said that “no published National Defense Strategy, Nuclear Posture Review or Missile Defense Strategy has been issued in the window”. That was true of the federal records we keep and search and is no longer true of the world: war.gov’s front page links the 2026 National Defense Strategy directly, at https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/23/2003864773/-1/-1/0/2026-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY.PDF (PDF title “2026 National Defense Strategy”, creation date 2026-01-23). The strategy was fetched and read in full and is now a second partial event; the first event’s wording is left as the record of what was known then.

Reach of the remaining negative: the NDS itself names no Nuclear Posture Review and no Missile Defense Strategy; war.gov’s front page links only the NDS and the FY26-30 Department of War Strategic Plan among strategy documents; and a search of the Federal Register and White House presidential actions we keep for “Nuclear Posture Review”, “Missile Defense Review” and “Missile Defense Strategy” returns one unrelated Unified Agenda notice. That bounds publication, not the existence of a classified review.

war.gov publishes no site map, so there is no complete index of its documents to enumerate.

Action
other
Object
National Security Strategy, National Defense Strategy, Nuclear Posture Review, and Missile Defense Strategy
ID
63