Throughout this week, the Washington Examiner’s Restoring America project will feature its latest series titled “Reforming the Deep State: Reining in the Federal Bureaucracy.” We invited some of the best policy minds in the conservative movement to speak to the issues of what waste, fraud, abuse, and unaccountability exist throughout the federal government and what still needs to be done. To read more from this series, click here.

Amid the War Department leadership’s emphasis on speed, efficiency, and the warrior ethos and White House Office of Management and Budget‘s creative financing to claim a $1 trillion defense budget in 2026, the true cost of our security remains unclear.