Washington, D.C. — With the highly-consequential 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) currently being drafted in Congress, the American Economic Liberties Project today released a memo outlining antimonopoly policy proposals to include in the NDAA to reintroduce competition back into the defense industrial base, federal contracting and the market for services offered to servicemembers and veterans.

“The 2025 NDAA is a crucial opportunity to begin unrigging our broken defense procurement policy, which today favors consolidated prime contractors at the expense of taxpayers, servicemembers, and our national security,” said Morgan Harper, Director of Policy and Advocacy at the American Economic Liberties Project. “It is by now a well-known fact that decades of out-of-control consolidation have weakened America’s defense industrial base at a time of rising geopolitical tensions. But this consolidation has also allowed increasingly powerful prime contractors to influence the rules around federal procurement to further stifle competition and resiliency throughout the supply chains. The policies outlined in this memo are straightforward, much-needed proposals to begin turning the page.”

The memo outlines several proposals to reintroduce competition and crack down on wasteful corporate extraction across the defense industrial base, as well as in markets for services offered to servicemembers and veterans. Some proposals include: closing a loophole to ensure transparent pricing disclosure for sole-sourced contracts; limiting “progress payment” government financing to contractors to incentivize better performance; lowering the threshold at which contractors must disclose estimated costs; reinstating the “paid cost rule” to require contractors to actually pay subcontractors in cash before requesting government reimbursement; creating a “right to repair” for weapons systems; restoring TRICARE coverage for independent pharmacies; and instituting a Section 230 exemption to allow social media companies to be held responsible when they fail to take action against scams targeting service members and veterans.

Read the full memo, Antimonopoly Proposals for the National Defense Authorization Act, here.

Learn more about Economic Liberties here.

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The American Economic Liberties Project works to ensure America’s system of commerce is structured to advance, rather than undermine, economic liberty, fair commerce, and a secure, inclusive democracy. Economic Liberties believes true economic liberty means entrepreneurs and businesses large and small succeed on the merits of their ideas and hard work; commerce empowers consumers, workers, farmers, and engineers instead of subjecting them to discrimination and abuse from financiers and monopolists; foreign trade arrangements support domestic security and democracy; and wealth is broadly distributed to support equitable political power.