We construct a decomposition of the identity operator on a Riemannian manifold M as a sum of smooth orthogonal projections subordinate to an open cover of M . This extends a decomposition of the real line by smooth orthogonal projection due to Coifman, Meyer [9] and Auscher, Weiss, Wickerhauser [3], and a similar decomposition when M is the sphere by the first two authors [4].