Watchdogs Sue Hegseth over Secret Defense Advisory Panel

When the Pentagon wants to hand over long-range military strategy to the very contractors who profit from it, it rarely invites the public to watch. On November 2, 2026, three government watchdog groups filed a joint federal lawsuit in the US District Court for the District of Columbia against the Department of Defense, Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael. The suit, filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Public Citizen, and the Project On Government Oversight, accuses the department of running an unlawful shadow advisory apparatus dubbed “Project Meridian: The Future of Warfare.”

Project Meridian did not emerge through the standard bureaucratic channels. Hegseth established the group through an internal memorandum on September 30, 2026, the same day he used a “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico to outline a sweeping military reorganization. The initiative gave a handpicked circle a 120-day mandate to chart military planning ten to thirty years down the road, targeting artificial intelligence, autonomous weaponry, robotics, biotechnology, and space systems. Hegseth explicitly ordered the panel to study the battlefields of the future, identify which weapons and technologies warfighters will need to harness to dominate in these environments, and propose actionable solutions to start developing, testing and fielding these capabilities such that America will have overmatch for the 21st century and beyond.

To run this effort, Hegseth and Michael bypassed traditional civilian advisory structures. They installed tech billionaire Elon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, alongside Palmer Luckey, the founder of defense contractor Anduril Industries, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich as co-leaders. Nearly all of the twenty-one participants on the roster come from the private sector, and more than a dozen of them hold major, direct financial stakes in companies competing for contracts in automated warfare and algorithmic combat.

The legal mechanism at stake is the Federal Advisory Committee Act, a post-Watergate statute enacted in 1972 specifically to stop private commercial interests from operating as secret, unaccountable cabinets within executive agencies. The law requires federal advisory groups to file an official charter, open their proceedings to the press and public, preserve and publish detailed minutes, and maintain a balanced range of viewpoints. Project Meridian ignored every one of those mandates: no public charter was filed, meetings were barred to outsiders, and working materials were shielded from disclosure.

The Defense Department is legally barred from getting advice in secret, by defense contractors with enormous potential conflicts of interest, Donald K. Sherman, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said in a statement accompanying the court filing. But that’s exactly what Project Meridian is doing—soliciting private counsel from contractors about military capacity including the president’s largest political benefactor. The Federal Advisory Committee Act sets clear requirements about transparency and avoiding conflicts of interest, and Project Meridian must either comply or stop operating.

The Pentagon’s defense relies on an old bureaucratic sleight of hand. Department officials and Hegseth claim that Project Meridian is an unclassified, independent technical study managed by the MITRE Corporation, a federally funded research and development center, rather than an official advisory committee bound by statutory open-government rules. Gingrich defended the operation in an interview, insisting the panel was merely drafting a blueprint by late January 2027 to build bipartisan consensus for systemic national security modernization. But outsourcing administrative paperwork to a federal contractor does not magically exempt the Pentagon from the law when the participants deliver direct policy advice to Cabinet officials behind closed doors.

This arrangement is not an academic debate over administrative procedure. When this publication recently reported in “The Pentagon Watchdog Shields SpaceX from Scrutiny,” the issue was an inspector general looking away while a vital commercial vendor throttled satellite access. Project Meridian goes one step further. It elevates Musk and Luckey from vendors into policymakers, positioning them to determine which weapons platforms the Pentagon will purchase for the next three decades.

Project Meridian would outsource design of grand military strategy to two extremist Pentagon contractors, Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey, said Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen. Very predictably, they will recommend more spending, much more spending, on more AI-enabled weaponry. That would simultaneously make the world more dangerous and starve funding for domestic and human needs. The law demands balance on advisory committees, precisely to prevent connected insiders like Musk and Luckey from writing policy at the expense of the public.

The lawsuit followed an ignored warning. On October 29, 2026, the Project On Government Oversight sent a formal demand letter to Hegseth, Michael, and James D. Freeman II, the advisory committee management officer for the department. The letter demanded the immediate appointment of an independent accountability expert to satisfy the statutory balance requirement by October 30. The Pentagon let the deadline lapse without a word.

The federal government should not be outsourcing its vision on ‘the future of warfare’ to a panel dominated by individuals that stand to profit from it, said Isabel Munilla, interim executive director of the Project On Government Oversight. For decades, the weapons industry has benefited from its outsized influence over the Pentagon, driving billions of taxpayer dollars on costly weapons systems that overpromise and underdeliver. Stacking Project Meridian with industry leaders will further skew national security policy toward corporate priorities, and away from the public interest.

With the panel scheduled to deliver its final procurement roadmap to Hegseth by late January 2027, the watchdog groups are asking the federal court to halt all committee proceedings and dissolve the project unless it opens its doors, discloses its documents, and complies with the law. The Justice Department now has to explain in open court why a billionaire contractor should be allowed to design the Pentagon’s shopping list in the dark.