By Doug Truax, USMA’ 92 | Restoration News
Congressional Republicans spent the past year vowing to voters that they would stand with President Trump’s America First warfighting agenda.
Now, with the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in hand, they’re revealing their true colors: the Swamp has absolutely no intention of following through on those campaign promises.
Less than a week after the White House released a National Security Strategy built on a clear, coherent America First vision, Capitol Hill produced an NDAA that fails to eliminate DEI mandates or open-ended global troop commitments.
This bill not only fails to codify the President’s most important military reforms—it protects the Deep State’s priorities on DEI, gender ideology, and racial discrimination in clear defiance of Trump’s mandate from the American people.
The truth is that these Senators and Congressmen are betraying the America First movement’s core principles and defying Trump’s own National Security Strategy—even as they shamelessly market themselves as loyal MAGA warriors on the 2026 campaign trail.
And as a West Point grad and former Army Ranger, I’d be stunned if the President goes along with it.
President Trump was elected on a platform of re-warriorizing a military hollowed out and demoralized by years of Democrat-led decay. He put War Sec. Pete Hegseth in place to revive our warfighting spirit and prepare the Armed Forces to win the next major conflict.
That’s the vision that inspired me to launch RestoretheMilitary.com to help them finish the job—and it’s why I’m urging the President firmly and plainly: Do not to sign this NDAA. Our country can’t afford another fumble… particularly one of this scale.
I have a different vow to congressional Republicans. You have another thing coming in 2026 if groups like Restoration of America have anything to say about it.
Credit where credit’s due: the proposed legislation takes a few steps in the right direction.
The bill redirects resources toward restoring our shipyards, rooting out Chinese influence in military manufacturing and the ROTC program, and combating drug cartels along our southern border. Congress sensibly scuttled proposals to establish equipment reserves for Ukraine and Israel—judging that our own forces need those supplies more than foreign countries—and decided against funding for IVF, ensuring healthcare resources aren’t diverted toward that controversial program.
And, of course, the NDAA takes shots at Democrats’ divisive hobby horses—like gender transition programs and males in girls’ athletics at service academies, both of which damage unit cohesiveness and morale.
But those baby steps hardly outweigh the mountain of self-inflicted errors and unnecessary giveaways to the Democrats, who, let’s remind ourselves, were voted out of office over these very issues.
Take DEI, an “immoral discrimination program” that Trump pledged to make “completely and totally illegal” on Day One—and did so.
Earlier versions of the NDAA gave teeth to his pledge to de-woke West Point and other service academies. Then Republicans defanged it.
Now we have a bill that virtue signals to the pro-merit Right while cementing the Left’s lie that “diversity is our strength” firmly in place.
In 2021, Trump argued teaching “twisted” Critical Race Theory is tantamount to “psychological abuse” meant to “brainwash” students and cadets. He’s dead right.
An older text of the NDAA would’ve scrapped funding for such Marxist indoctrination. Then Republicans inexplicably guaranteed funding for CRT programs in Annapolis, the Army War College, and other military institutions.
Why?
Servicemen remember Joe Biden’s devastating 2021 COVID vaccine mandate, which Democrats weaponized to destroy countless lives and careers. “There should never have been a mandate . . . [they] should have been given a choice,” Trump said one month before Election Day 2024. Once in office, he heroically reinstated many of those servicemen with back pay and a formal apology.
An earlier draft of the NDAA shared this spirit—prohibiting the War Department from issuing such ludicrous COVID mandates in the future. Republicans nixed that, too.
In July, Sec. Hegseth—responding to reports that Microsoft had utilized Chinese engineers for War Department cloud systems—wisely ordered the Pentagon to “take immediate actions to ensure . . . that all information technology capabilities, including cloud services . . . are reviewed and validated as secure against supply chain attacks by adversaries such as China and Russia.”
Hegseth knows combating the threat from Communist China is a pillar of the MAGA movement. Congressional Republicans apparently don’t. They scrapped from the NDAA a simple requirement that national security agencies seek out threats from foreign tech used by federal authorities.
One wonders who, exactly, that benefits.
There are still more bad calls:
Blocking a ban on funding for sex-change surgeries in the military.
Extensive funding to Middle Eastern countries that threatens to suck America back into endless wars.
An intelligence-sharing agreement with Ukraine’s corrupt and untrustworthy government.
Restrictions on the commander-in-chief’s ability to shift troop deployments in Europe and South Korea as needed, even as he’s negotiating a durable peace between Moscow and Kiev.
As for ensuring the military uses merit, not race or sex, in promotions and assignments—Republicans removed that, too.
Recall Hegseth’s confirmation hearing pledge: “That will be part of one of the first things we do at the Pentagon—reviewing that in a gender-neutral way, the standards ensuring readiness and meritocracy [are] front and center.”
Who even needs Democrats when we have “MAGA” Republicans to champion affirmative action in the military?
It’s been business as usual for too long on Capitol Hill. Too many in Congress still don’t understand that Americans voted for real, authentic, no-holds-barred change. They won’t be satisfied by anything less. But that’s what this bill gives us: Far less than the nation and its warriors deserve.
It’s the same lesson for those who point out that lawmaking is an ugly process. It certainly can be messy… but a few good apples don’t justify a cart full of rotten fruit. Do better.
This bill is too dangerous to become law. President Trump, you must veto the NDAA and guide us toward a new vision of a restored military—because we simply can’t trust the Deep State to do it for us.
_
Doug Truax is a West Point graduate, former 4ᵗʰ Infantry Division Army Captain, Ranger, and successful entrepreneur. He is the volunteer, unpaid founder and CEO of Restoration of America, Restoration PAC, and the Restoration of America Foundation.
First published on Restoration News
Leave a Comment