Defense One - Policy

Pentagon cyber strategy expected as soon as next week, sources say

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:00:00 -0400

The Defense Department is expected to release its anticipated cyber strategy early next week, according to three people familiar with a plan that officials argue will more tightly integrate digital operations into U.S. military campaigns.

One predicted the strategy would be released Tuesday, though the other two said the date could change. All three spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the release.

The strategy has been under development for months by the office of Katie Sutton, the assistant defense secretary for cyber policy and principal cyber adviser to the secretary. It will be the department’s first overarching cyber framework since 2023 and is expected to be accompanied by an action plan.

Officials initially said it would be completed during the summer. Sutton told lawmakers in April that the strategy would seek to build “the most capable, lethal and agile cyber force in the world,” able to defend military networks, gain strategic advantage, and give the president more options to deter or defeat adversaries.

The plan is expected to center on three priorities Sutton outlined to Congress: integrating cyber capabilities across every domain of warfare, gaining an advantage over adversaries, and reorganizing the military’s cyber forces to improve their skill and agility.

A job posting on the website of defense and technology provider Parsons seeks support for the Pentagon’s cyber policy office and says the strategy’s action plan contains about nine strategic initiatives and 34 lines of effort. It’s not clear when the role was posted, and the specific initiatives’ contents are not disclosed in the description.

The approach would aim to further move cyber operations into routine military planning, meaning tools that can disrupt an enemy’s communications or computer systems would be planned alongside airstrikes and other conventional operations. Officials have cited recent Trump-era operations in Venezuela and Iran as examples of this integration.

The strategy will also translate the White House’s March cyber strategy into more specific military priorities and investments. That document pledged to deploy the government’s entire toolkit of offensive and defensive cyber capabilities, disrupt threats before they reach U.S. networks and impose greater consequences on foreign hackers.

The posture is not entirely new. The Pentagon’s 2023 strategy embraced “defend forward,” an approach that calls for confronting malicious cyber threats closer to the source of their operations. The new strategy is expected to emphasize delivering cyber options to combatant commanders and integrating them with conventional military power.

Artificial intelligence is also expected to feature prominently. Sutton said in June that the strategy would set a “clear and specific vision” for enabling AI across the cyber force, supported by coordination among Cyber Command, the Pentagon’s chief information office and its Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office.

The Pentagon and National Security Agency have been expanding access to commercial models that can find vulnerabilities and automate parts of cyber operations. NSA Deputy Director Tim Kosiba said last week that the agency wants access to “all the models” and is holding discussions with leading developers.

The efforts, broadly, are closely tied to Cyber Command 2.0, the Pentagon’s overhaul of how it recruits, trains and employs cyber personnel. The initiative emphasizes greater specialization and purpose-built teams, along with a Cyber Innovation Warfare Center intended to bring commercial technology directly to operators for testing.

The strategy arrives as officials continue grappling with myriad cyber threats to U.S. systems, including an apparently extensive Iran-linked campaign to access water systems and other critical infrastructure around the nation. The Defense Department has also begun an accelerated migration to quantum-resistant encryption, with a goal of protecting its highest-impact systems by 2030.

The administration separately moved last month to let vetted U.S. companies conduct government-approved operations against foreign cybercriminal groups. The initiative also raises questions about how the departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Defense will divide responsibilities and avoid interfering with one another’s cyber operations.

Contact Dave DiMolfetta on Signal: did.99

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Stopgap funding bill temporarily extends key cyber info-sharing law

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 15:12:00 -0400

The House approved a continuing resolution on Tuesday that funds federal agencies through Dec. 11 and extends key federal cybersecurity authorities and tech programs past their Sept. 30 expiration date, including the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015.

The legislation, part of a broader package that President Donald Trump is expected to soon sign to avert a fiscal year 2027 government shutdown before the midterm elections, temporarily prevents the cyber information-sharing law from sunsetting at the end of the month when the federal budget resets.

That law provides liability protections to private sector companies that voluntarily share cyber threat intelligence with agencies like the NSA or the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Efforts to secure a long-term reauthorization for the law have faced repeated delays over the past year despite broad support from officials and industry. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chair Rand Paul Paul, R-Ky., has routinely pushed back on clean extensions of the law.

The key liability protections in the CISA 2015 law are designed to shield firms from lawsuits and regulatory penalties when sharing threat information with the government. That data often includes personal or proprietary information tied to individuals and companies affected in cyber intrusions.

Industry groups have consistently warned lawmakers that allowing the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act to lapse would create legal risks for companies sharing breach data, leading to a drop in private sector threat disclosures. Federal cyber officials have similarly stated that the loss of statutory authority would disrupt real-time threat intelligence sharing across public and private networks.

The spending measure extends several other federal IT and cyber authorities scheduled to expire on Sept. 30, including the Technology Modernization Fund, which provides capital for civilian agency IT upgrades. Around $5 million is authorized for the fund to continue approving and financing new agency tech modernization projects. Also extended is the Federal Cybersecurity Enhancement Act, which authorizes the National Cybersecurity Protection System for federal network intrusion detection.

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House defers potential shutdown with a stopgap spending bill

Jory Heckman — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 15:00:00 -0400

The House approved a stopgap spending bill on Tuesday that will keep the federal government funded through early December, taking a government shutdown off the table until after midterm elections this fall.

The House voted 370-48 to pass a continuing resolution that will keep the federal government funded through Dec. 11.

The continuing resolution includes a provision that temporarily blocks the Office of Management and Budget’s proposed rule that would put federal grant funding under review by political appointees. It also includes language that would prevent the Trump administration from transferring funds from other programs to Border Patrol.

The Senate passed the stopgap spending bill in a 90-6 vote in July before leaving for its summer recess.

Federal employees dealt with the longest government shutdown in history last year, followed by the longest partial shutdown, which affected the Homeland Security Department. Both shutdowns led to federal workers missing paychecks.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters Tuesday morning ahead of votes that Congress is “going to avoid the threat” of another government shutdown.

“On this CR we'll take up, it simply holds funding steady at current levels through Dec. 11, as Republicans work to complete the full-year appropriations process,” Johnson said.

The stopgap spending bill gives Congress more time to reach a deal on a comprehensive spending package for fiscal 2027. So far, the House has passed three of 12 spending bills that make up a comprehensive spending plan. The Senate has passed none.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., said, “The fiscal-year deadline is outpacing the work that remains” but that the continuing resolution will ensure constituents “will continue to get the services they need.”

“This will allow Congress time to get past the November elections, and allow us time to assess and move forward with further appropriations measures in November and December,” Cole said.

House Appropriations Committee Ranking Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn. said the CR is a “marked improvement” from an earlier version that would have kept the government funded through Dec. 4 but would not have blocked OMB’s proposed rule.

“The continuing resolution we are considering today is in no way a substitute for the full-year funding process. It is merely a means to complete this important work while averting a lapse in government funding,” DeLauro said.

The House passed the previous Dec. 4 CR largely along party lines, with Republicans overwhelmingly voting in favor. House Democratic leaders rejected the earlier stopgap spending bill, but House Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., said this latest version would receive “broad bipartisan support."

Vice Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus Ted Liu, D-Calif., said he would vote for the CR, “even though doing CRs is a stupid way to run government.”

“It is not a good way to run our federal government. But it's the only alternative that's gonna be put before us,” Lieu said.

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‘Change agent’ Army secretary resigns

Patrick Tucker — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:41:32 -0400

Dan Driscoll, whom President Donald Trump in 2024 hailed as “a disruptor and change agent,” has resigned as secretary of the Army.

The move was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. A source directly familiar with the matter confirmed the news and said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s purging of generals who were tied to Driscoll’s innovation and transformation efforts was a primary cause for the resignation.

“Driscoll brought up concerns with the administration surrounding Army transformation and readiness, and Hegseth's blocking those efforts, specifically by firing the generals who were responsible,” the source said.

A former Army Ranger who led a platoon with the 10th Mountain Division, Driscoll graduated from Yale Law School and worked in investment banking before the White House tapped him as the Army’s top civilian leader.

In the post, he worked closely with a tight set of uniformed military leaders to push a reform agenda across the Army. Those leaders included: Army Chief Gen. Randy George; Gen. David Hodne, commander of Transformation and Training Command; Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus; and Gen. Christopher Donahue, commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa—all of whom Hegseth has pushed out or removed.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I, in a statement, said that he did not welcome the news. “I am alarmed that Secretary Driscoll’s leadership of the Army stands in stark contrast to Secretary Hegseth’s disastrous tenure atop the Defense Department.”

“We cannot fucking wait.”

Driscoll launched his reform agenda, the Army Transformation Initiative, in May 2025—an agenda informed, at least in part, by Ukraine’s experience rapidly innovating new technologies to resist Russia’s invasion.

“When you look at Ukraine, [they] have not accepted the current version of a thing as sufficient, and they have MacGyvered and come up with whatever they have to do to get to an outcome they need,” he told Pentagon reporters last November.

The key elements of Driscoll’s agenda included integrating artificial intelligence into decision making; pushing more purchasing, equipping, and equipment modification powers down the chain of command, closer to actual warfighters; deploying modernized drone formations; and addressing what he described as a “gap” in counter-drone technology.

“I am publicly on record saying we are learning a lot from them, and we are changing a lot of the lessons that they have taught us,” he said of Ukraine’s military.

In a peppery AUSA address last October, Driscoll described the urgency of transforming the United States Army. “We will win with silicon and software and not our soldiers’ bodies… No one can predict the next war, but we cannot wait, we cannot fucking wait to innovate until Americans are dying on the battlefield.”

Following the ouster of Gen. George, new acting chief Gen. Christopher LaNeve ordered a battalion that had been working with Ukrainians to integrate lessons learned from drone warfare to return to being a traditional infantry battalion.

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Here’s what Trump’s new ‘Space Academy’ could mean for the US military

Thomas Novelly — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 16:32:46 -0400

President Donald Trump’s mandate for a new “Space Academy” puts defense leaders under a NASA-led initiative that could mean military service requirements for the future school's graduates.

Trump signed the executive order on Friday at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston during a ceremony where he presented the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the four crew members who are to take the Artemis II spacecraft around the Moon. It appoints a commission, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Air Force Secretary Troy Meink and chaired by NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, to “strengthen the nation’s space workforce” by planning for a new national academy.

“Given the rapid growth of the U.S. Space Force and commercial space industry, and the expansion of our ambitions to the Moon and far beyond the Moon, it’s clear we will need to educate and train an entire generation of skilled service members, engineers, and civil operators,” Trump said at the ceremony.

The idea of a Space Academy isn’t new, but one defense expert told Defense One it’s unclear how a new institution would further the administration’s military space-related ambitions. The Space Force does not lack for recruits, although its civilian workforce was cut during last year’s federal workforce purge. Currently, the Space Force commissions new officers through the Air Force Academy, ROTC, or Officer Training School. Friday’s executive order instructs the commission to consider imposing military-service requirements on academy graduates.

The order calls for an evaluation of “service obligations for graduates, including service in the armed forces” and explores “prerequisites for applicants, including citizenship status, security clearances, and government employment or military status.”

Air Force officials declined to comment and clarify details of the executive order. White House spokespeople did not immediately respond when asked for details and how a Space Academy would interact with the armed services and officer-commissioning pathways. The commission has 120 days to submit a report to Trump “proposing key details” to establish the Space Academy.

A White House fact sheet said the Space Academy will “combine rigorous technical education with leadership development and public service, preparing graduates for careers supporting America’s military, civil, and broader space enterprise.”

“In the years ahead, we will return NASA astronauts to the lunar surface, build the Moon Base, get underway on nuclear power, ignite the orbital economy and launch more missions of science and discovery,” NASA’s Isaacman said in a news release. “I have no doubt that so much of the future talent that will graduate and contribute to these exciting endeavors will be educated at the United States Space Academy.”

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the conservative think tank’s playbook for the Trump administration, pitched the idea of creating a “Space Force Academy.”

“Explore creation of a Space Force Academy to attract top aero–astro students, engineers, and scientists and develop astronauts,” the playbook read. “The academy could be attached initially to a large existing research university like the California Institute of Technology or MIT, share faculty and funding, and eventually be built separately to be on par with the other service academies.”

Todd Harrision, the American Enterprise Institute’s defense budget and space expert, called the executive order “out of left field” and fears it will further muddy civilian and military roles.

“NASA, the Space Force, and the intel space agencies—they all have very well-defined lanes and responsibilities and areas of expertise,” Harrison said. “Intermingling them like this does not sound like a good idea.”

Harrison also questioned the idea of a government-run “Space Academy” when there’s world-class private and public universities that produce top-notch aerospace and engineering students. The Space Force recruits from such schools under its University Partnership Program.

Trump’s push to bolster space-related careers comes as the Space Force works to rebuild its civilian workforce after the administration’s hasty cuts last year.Officials have been aggressively trying to hire talent to manage a requested $71.3 billion service budget, which would be the largest year-on-year increase, by percentage, for any military service branch since 1952, according to a report from the Aerospace Corporation.

The Space Force hasn’t struggled to hit its uniformed recruiting goals. Service leaders have pitched plans to double the number of its guardians. Harrison said it’s not clear how the Space Academy aligns with those realities.

“It’s not consistent with the other workforce changes the administration has been making,” Harrison said. “It doesn’t appear there is a clear need for this. The other thing too is … they’re going to need authorization and funding from Congress to actually do this. So, what is their plan there?”

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Senior officers advised Hegseth to keep civilian-protection program. He axed it anyway

Megan Rose and Hannah Allam, ProPublica — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 12:35:21 -0400

Shortly after taking office last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth polled the nation’s top commanders about cutting a program designed to protect civilians during U.S. military operations.

Hegseth had bet senior officers would endorse his view that focusing on civilian security was “woke” and out of step with “maximum lethality,” current and former defense officials told ProPublica.

Instead, every commander rebuffed the idea.

The poll from early 2025, which has not been previously reported, cemented top-level military support for Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a relatively new program adopted after years of heavy civilian tolls in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. As part of its mission, CHMR (pronounced “chimmer”) stationed personnel within major regional commands. Officials tried to develop a picture of life on the ground in combat zones to aid decision-making on military strikes and avoid or minimize civilian harm.

In the poll, Hegseth gave commanders three options: cut 65% of staff but keep the effort operational, continue with only a small centralized office in Washington, or eliminate the program.

Nine commanders chose the first option to preserve the enterprise as much as possible, according to a memo reviewed by ProPublica. Leaders of two commands, one overseeing the nuclear arsenal and the other focused on cyber threats, declined all three options, asking to maintain the full program.

Leaders at U.S. Central Command, the Tampa, Florida-based center that oversees military action in the Middle East, pressed to keep its full CHMR staff of 16. Eliminating or scaling back the effort would “result in decreased efficiency of U.S. lethal operations due to an increased risk of target misidentification and reduced battlespace awareness,” a memo reviewed by ProPublica said.

Erik Kurilla, the Army general who was then in charge of Central Command, and several other senior officers directly involved in combat operations had appealed to Hegseth to keep the program. They explained that it was a valuable tool, another retired general said — but “that intent was overridden.”

Hegseth gutted the effort, leaving only a handful of people to carry out the mission. It was stripped of almost all of its funding, even as the U.S. launched new campaigns in Somalia, Yemen and Iran. One official summed up the Hegseth approach as: “Bombs away!”

Hegseth’s early exchanges with the generals made clear that the civilian harm program had no future in his reimagined “Department of War.”

“No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement,” Hegseth would later tell a gathering of hundreds of generals and admirals.

But now, after U.S. missile strikes have killed hundreds of civilians in Iran and Yemen, episodes that drew global criticism and questions from Congress, the program could soon be partially revived.

The about-face would mark a rare reversal in a department that hasn’t tolerated dissent under Hegseth and President Donald Trump. Last year’s military memos detail a delicate pushback that may preserve at least the framework of the civilian security campaign.

Current and former defense officials described the evolution of the civilian security program on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration.

The Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment about the poll or the program’s revival.

Casualties, Outrage

The first major military operation of Hegseth’s tenure — an air campaign in Yemen in the spring of 2025 — killed 153 civilians and wounded 243 others. The majority of the deaths came from just two strikes, ranking them among the deadliest for civilians the Pentagon has acknowledged in modern warfare, said Airwars, a British watchdog that tracks civilian harm from military operations. The toll was confirmed in the Pentagon’s 2025 annual report for civilian casualties, The Washington Post first reported.

Hegseth described the Yemen operation at the time as a “clear, limited mission executed with ruthlessness, full stop.”

By the time the U.S. began attacking Iran the next year, the Pentagon’s civilian protection program was down from a little under 200 people to around two dozen, some working only part time, the current and former defense officials said. Central Command, which said it needed a minimum of nine of its 16 staffers to function, was left with one person.

On the first day of the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran, a U.S. airstrike hit a school in Minab, a city near the Strait of Hormuz, killing more than 100 children and igniting international outrage.

The Shajarat al-Tayyiba Primary School is in ruins in Minab, Iran, on March 31. Hamid Vakili/Anadolu via Getty Images

Hegseth and the commander in charge of the Iran operation, Adm. Brad Cooper, were questioned about the strike before Congress. Hegseth said the U.S. does not target civilians and would investigate. Early reports on that investigation, yet to be publicly released, have said outdated U.S. intelligence led to the attack on the school.

Democratic senators and humanitarian groups questioned whether the cuts to the civilian protection personnel also contributed to the school tragedy.

In a letter to Hegseth in April, 11 senators said the school strike, as well as other deadly attacks on civilians in Iran, reflected “the administration’s broader disregard for the strategic, legal, and moral imperative to minimize civilian harm,” noting the dismantling of civilian harm reduction efforts. “This is a concerning pattern and raises questions about whether the administration is upholding international law and the laws of war,” it said.

Previously, a Pentagon spokesperson declined to answer questions from ProPublica about the letter, saying it would “respond directly” to Congress.

Concerns were voiced by military leaders before Hegseth largely eliminated the operation. One exception is the Department of the Army, headed by a civilian appointee, which agreed with getting rid of CHMR entirely.

Leaders at Central Command told Hegseth’s top staff in a memo that CHMR “enhanced our precision and accuracy, making us more lethal.” The memo added, “The operational and strategic value of this work is widely recognized.”

At the same time, the Joint Staff echoed the commanders’ sentiment. According to correspondence reviewed by ProPublica, the Joint Staff disagreed with the Army acting secretary, who said in a February 2025 memo that the program was redundant and recommended Congress repeal the law that set it in motion.

As pressure has built from both Congress and within the military to restore the program, the Defense Department appears to have backpedaled.

In April, Elbridge Colby, the Defense Department’s undersecretary of policy, sent a follow-up memo about the civilian-protection enterprise to Hegseth. This time, there was only one proposal on the table: reboot the program, albeit at reduced staff levels with 70 full-time people.

In that memo, Colby wrote that maintaining 35% of CHMR would address investigations into civilian harm, reports to Congress and payments to those harmed.

The same commanders Hegseth polled earlier endorsed the move, several defense officials told ProPublica.

The proposal would allow all regional commands to reconstitute their civilian-harm-reduction staff, and the Virginia-based Civilian Protection Center of Excellence for training, data, and research would move from under the Army to the Joint Staff. The move, officials say, gives the mission more heft and eases collaboration with the Navy and Air Force, which are at the forefront of the administration’s campaigns.

“If not for the combatant commanders,” one defense official said, the program would be “dead.”

The harm-mitigation effort makes up a tiny fraction of the Defense Department’s billions in spending. The center near the Pentagon had an annual budget of $7 million, officials said, with the cross-command total for all civilian security work estimated at around $80 million before the cuts. Officials expect a refashioned program to operate on a smaller budget.

Military leaders steeped in lessons from the post-9/11 “forever wars” repeatedly have affirmed harm mitigation as an asset on the battlefield. Civilian casualties undermine U.S. objectives and help boost insurgent recruiting, analysts say.

The Pentagon had formalized CHMR in 2022, detailing steps to protect noncombatants and investigate reports of casualties. Commanders had publicly championed the program in congressional testimony and defense journals. The current head of European Command, Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, co-wrote a paper calling it a “watershed” development.

In some cases the staff acted as a “red team” pushing back on strikes and the possible collateral damage. The center of excellence focused on institutionalizing best practices, training service members and collecting data on civilian harm.

Those efforts and “operational effectiveness are the same thing,” one retired general told ProPublica. “They’re two sides of the same coin.”

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As US preps for more space launches, WH orders integration with air-traffic control

Edward Graham — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:37:00 -0400

A new space-transportation policy released by the Trump administration Thursday aims to build the infrastructure needed to rapidly increase U.S.-led rocket launches in coming years, including links to the nation's modernizing air traffic control systems.

President Donald Trump’s strategy sets a goal of supporting “more than 1,000 launches and reentries” by 2030, largely through working with commercial companies to build sites across the country.

This will require the Pentagon and NASA to work together to “operate Federal launch and reentry ranges and facilities in a transparent manner that accommodates government and non government users,” Trump's memo said.

Other relevant agencies will also need to be involved in these discussions, the strategy adds, to develop and publish range schedules that can “maximize efficient use of range resources for commercial users” and “optimize launch capacity.”

To facilitate more space launches in U.S. airspace, the memo directs the Transportation Department—with the Pentagon and NASA—to “implement a plan to integrate space launch and reentry management into airspace and traffic control modernization efforts” and “designate priority airspace for critical space launch corridors” within 180 days of the policy’s release.

Under Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration has been driving the administration’s effort to overhaul the nation’s outdated air traffic control systems.

The modernization initiative was announced by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy in May 2025 after several high-profile airspace incidents, including the deadly collision of an Army Black Hawk helicopter and a commercial airliner near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport that January.

While the project includes some brick-and-mortar upgrades at U.S. airports and related facilities, most of the effort is focused on updating outdated air traffic monitoring and communications systems.

The One Big Beautiful Bill, which was signed into law in July 2025, allocated $12.5 billion for the modernization effort. Five months later, Transportation officials said they would need an additional $20 billion.

It remains to be seen what steps will be needed to integrate the administration’s strategy with the air traffic control modernization effort, and whether or not this will have any impact on the project’s timeline.

The FAA announced in December that it awarded Peraton a $1.5-billion contract to serve as the project’s prime integrator, although Politico reported on Thursday that officials within the agency were growing frustrated by the company’s management of the massive systems overhaul.

In April, Duffy said, “We’re on track to have this project completed before President Trump leaves office.”

Asked for comment, Transportation directed Nextgov/FCW to a Friday press release that announced the agency’s request for public comment on where new space launch facilities should be built, as well as how it should go about setting aside “priority airspace” for future launches.

Neither Transportation’s request for information nor its press release includes details about how the space transportation policy would be integrated with the agency’s air traffic control modernization project.

An FAA spokesperson similarly pointed to Transportation's release and said the agency is "seeking input on how increased launch cadence can be integrated into the U.S. airspace system."

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Lawmaker pushes for AI containment language in FRONTIER Act

Alexandra Kelley — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:29:00 -0400

A Democratic lawmaker hopes to include language prescribing large language model containment practices in pending House legislation on artificial intelligence in the wake of the OpenAI models' attack on Hugging Face networks.

Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., gave updates on the House’s AI-related legislative plans during a Center for Strategic and International Studies event Monday. He said the OpenAI models’ breach from containment environments during routine testing has prompted potential updates to the pending FRONTIER Act, which was introduced in July by Reps. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., and Lori Trahan, D-Mass.

“There's a lot of things that we're trying to fine-tune in the bill, and we're going to be working on that in September,” Subramanyam said. “A lot of what we're doing in the bill is encouraging third parties to be involved with the companies along the way, to make sure there's containment in place. It's assumed in the bill that we're going to be doing a lot on containment, but one of the things I'm going to be working on is trying to see if we can get explicit containment prescription guidelines in the bill to do that.”

Currently, the bill’s language features risk mitigation efforts that hinge on independent safety evaluations and assessments of the lifecycle of a given model, including training and deployment, along with auditing ongoing compliance efforts. It also explicitly mandates the creation of a vehicle to report critical safety incidents related to AI models.

Subramanyam, who on Aug. 10 joined fellow lawmakers in signing a letter asking for OpenAI to disclose more information about the containment breach, said the window for Congress to act is closing.

“I'm hoping that by the end of the year … we, as a Congress and as a federal government, have at least worked towards solving the big concern about an AI model getting out and going a little crazy and doing a lot of harm to a lot of people,” he said.

Subramanyam added that he is actively looking for feedback on the best ways to codify containment strategies outside of voluntary participation from large AI developers.

Leadership at Hugging Face voiced support for a standardized incident reporting method as well. Ian Reynolds, the AI public policy manager at Hugging Face, also said at Thursday's CSIS event that it would be helpful for lawmakers and policy officials to improve the path to incident reporting on future agentic misalignment.

“We need better standardized disclosure and transparency requirements in this space to help build broader ecosystem resilience,” Reynolds said.

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NSA's non-disclosure agreements lack whistleblower-rights provisions: watchdog

Erich Wagner — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:00:00 -0400

The National Security Agency routinely fails to inform employees of their rights under whistleblower protection laws when they sign non-disclosure agreements, the intelligence agency’s inspector general concluded this week.

Although the NSA is not subject to the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, Congress has since 1988 used annual appropriations laws to compel the agency to follow most of its rules. The exceptions are those enforced by the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which lacks jurisdiction to review matters involving counterintelligence and foreign intelligence.

But according to a report from the NSA inspector general, most of the agency’s non-disclosure agreements lack the required reference to federal whistleblower protections, meaning that its employees “may not be aware” of their rights to disclose violations of law or instances of waste, fraud and abuse.

“We identified five unique NSA-developed NDAs. One of the five NDAs, NSA’s Security Agreement, did not include the current required whistleblower provisions but did include language related to whistleblower protections and had some statutory references,” the inspector general wrote. “The remaining four NDAs made no mention of whistleblower protections . . . Additionally, the OIG identified another five agreements that were not titled or identified as nondisclosure agreements but implied nondisclosure obligations and did not include the required whistleblower protection provisions.”

The report comes as the Trump administration considers promulgating a standardized NDA for use across government. The proposal has drawn bipartisan criticism for the chilling effect it could have on employees who witness misconduct while on the job. The critics include Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who requested the inspector general’s review.

The watchdog also found that the process by which NSA employees obtain access “compartmented information” include more nondisclosure provisions that similarly lack the needed whistleblower protection language.

“The subject matter experts we spoke with explained that individual offices develop their own access agreement brief sheets using a template, and an affiliate’s acknowledgement of one of these electronic brief sheets serves as the nondisclosure agreement,” the report states. “In interviews with SMEs, two opened brief sheets of their own and noted that the required provisions were not present. We reviewed the template and noted that it lacked inclusion of the required whistleblower protection provisions.”

The inspector general recommended creating a process to ensure all nondisclosure policies, forms and agreements include the statutorily mandated whistleblower protection language, as well as assigning the task to an official within the agency.

NSA concurred with the IG’s recommendations and said it planned to assign compliance to the agency’s chief of staff.

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The Russian hurdle in Trump’s new offensive cyber program

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:26:00 -0400

President Donald Trump’s new plan to enlist private companies to help disrupt cybercriminals abroad may face a fundamental problem when it comes to Russia: distinguishing criminal hackers and state-backed operatives.

Russian intelligence services have long tolerated, protected or intermittently recruited financially-motivated hackers without exercising full control over them. That dynamic gives Moscow easier access to hacking talent, and it complicates a major carveout in Trump’s new directive that excludes groups part of or directed by a foreign government, experts and former U.S. officials say.

“The line between government control, government-affiliated and government-acknowledged is certainly blurry in Russia,” said Michael Daniel, president and CEO of the Cyber Threat Alliance and a former White House cybersecurity coordinator under President Barack Obama. “Determining the exact relationship between malicious actors and the Russian government has long been a challenge and is often impossible.”

A White House memorandum signed last week paves the way for vetted U.S. companies to conduct cyber surveillance and operations that manipulate, disrupt and destroy systems used by foreign criminal groups. Companies would work under contracts with the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security, and every operation would require written approval.

The memo says eligible targets cannot be “an institutional part of a foreign government” or “wholly operated under a foreign government’s direction.” It then instructs officials to assume a group is not part of, or wholly controlled by, a foreign government unless “clear intelligence” establishes that connection.

Such intelligence collection from spy agencies like the National Security Agency and CIA can help firms determine targeting criteria, though it may not be enough for Russia’s ever-evolving cyber landscape.

“Russia’s cyber web is opaque and always shifting, blurring lines between government and cybercriminal, with no single rule for understanding each and every relationship,” said Justin Sherman, CEO of Global Cyber Strategies, a Washington, D.C.-based research and advisory firm.

Some of that ambiguity is intentional and allows the Kremlin to expand the pool of hackers it can covertly draw upon, Sherman said. It also reflects broader and pervasive corruption conditions inside Russia.

U.S. companies may have insights about those groups but lack the broader intelligence available to the government. Federal agencies, meanwhile, can only share or declassify so much, he said. “Private companies have critical insights in some ways and limited in others,” Sherman said. With an incomplete picture, “you’re bound to get it wrong some of the time.”

Simple indicators don’t necessarily settle attribution questions, he added. Ties with the FSB — Russia’s Federal Security Service that succeeded the Soviet Union’s KGB — do not by themselves prove that a criminal group is state-directed, nor does a Russian intelligence service’s use of tools developed by criminals establish continuous government control.

“Simple, bumper sticker ideas for deciding if a Russian cybercriminal is a state actor or not will often collapse in practice,” said Sherman.

Past cases illustrate how those relationships can work. In 2017, the DOJ charged two FSB officers with directing and protecting criminal hackers involved in the breach of Yahoo. Prosecutors said one of the hackers also conducted separate intrusions for personal profit. The Treasury Department has similarly said Maksim Yakubets, the alleged leader of the Evil Corp cybercrime organization, worked for the FSB and was tasked with projects on behalf of the Russian state while his organization carried out financially motivated attacks.

“The Russians haven’t been strangers to using private sector proxies to get what they want, as long as they’re not attacking them,” said Chris Painter, a former State Department cyber coordinator and White House cyber official. He questioned how a company could determine where a particular group falls along that continuum when the answer is often not immediately apparent, even for well-resourced governments.

The new policy is the latest step in an offensive cyber posture the administration has been building for the last year. Trump’s national cybersecurity strategy, released in March, called for “unprecedented coordination” between government and industry on offensive and defensive missions. It pledged to “unleash the private sector” by creating incentives for companies to identify and disrupt adversary networks.

But that set-up remained unclear for months. National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross said shortly after the strategy’s release that he was “not talking about private sector, industry or companies engaged in a cyber offensive campaign.” Instead, he described companies sharing information and capabilities that would enable the government to respond.

Some industry executives interviewed by Nextgov/FCW in April nevertheless predicted that the government would eventually contract with companies to support cyber operations. They also raised unresolved questions about legal authorities and how experts would define the fine line between creating obstacles for adversaries and hacking them offensively.

The administration moved further in May when its counterterrorism strategy explicitly identified offensive cyber operations as one of the tools Washington could use against threatening groups and the states that support them. That document offered scant details about how such operations would work.

Sherman argued that the U.S. shouldn’t let uncertainty about Russia’s cyber links stop it from taking action. The United States is overdue to reconsider assumptions about restraint and do more to counter Russia’s offensive cyber activity, he said, but a more aggressive posture does not make the underlying attribution decisions any easier.

Daniel said that ambiguity could give Washington leverage. Moscow could either let an operation against known criminals go unanswered or object and risk exposing its ties to them.

“The U.S. could use this formulation to call the Russians’ bluff — either acknowledge a relationship or let the group take the damage,” he said. But maintaining that bind would require the United States to choose its targets carefully. If a company inadvertently struck clandestine personnel from Moscow’s intelligence and security agencies, he added, the operation could create substantially greater consequences.

Cybercriminals routinely operate through hijacked servers and systems belonging to unwitting third parties, meaning companies carrying out hacks may have to distinguish targeted criminals from the infrastructure they have compromised.

“A lot is left to be determined on how the oversight is going to work, how the targeting is going to work,” Painter said. “That’s all supposed to be decided in 60 days,” he said, referring to the timeline the new policy must be developed by.

Painter said the best version of the program would be a tightly controlled process in which the government uses intelligence provided by companies and its own agencies to select legitimate targets. Companies would likely want written assurances that the government had approved a target and that their actions were covered by the program, he said.

The public directive does not explain how responsibility would be divided if a contractor followed an approved plan and the underlying intelligence proved wrong. Much of the operational process will also be governed by a classified annex.

Coordinating government decisions and private-sector activity in something approaching real time will itself be difficult, Daniel said.

“I don’t know of any analogous precedent,” he added.

A DHS spokesperson did not respond to questions about how the administration would distinguish Russian cybercrime groups from state-linked actors or who would bear responsibility if a target were misidentified.

The department “looks forward to implementing President Trump’s directive to combat cyber-enabled transnational crime threatening Americans and our businesses,” the spokesperson said.

“Last year alone, cyber-enabled Transnational Criminal Organizations stole more than $20 billion directly from Americans through rampant fraud, ransomware, and extortion schemes,” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said when asked the same line of questions. “The Trump administration is mounting an aggressive campaign to disrupt these illicit syndicates and dismantle them at the source.”

The Justice and State departments did not provide comments. Russia’s embassy in Washington was also contacted.

The prospect of operations against pro-Russia cybercriminals carries a possible diplomatic dimension. Trump has continued direct engagement with Russian President Vladimir Putin and has sought to broker an end to the war in Ukraine. The two leaders agreed in July to maintain contact and speak again.

The administration has previously adjusted its cyber posture during negotiations with Moscow. Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., who chairs the House Armed Services Committee’s cyber panel, confirmed last year that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a brief pause in U.S. Cyber Command operations against Russia as the administration pursued Ukraine talks.

The memorandum requires coordination with the State Department, suggesting diplomatic consequences will be considered before an operation is approved. It does not say publicly how officials would weigh disrupting a Russian cybercrime group against other negotiations with the Kremlin.

“If there’s a decision made that says we’re being careful with Russia now because we’re in some sensitive talks, that will play into it,” Painter said. Companies could also “paint the target on themselves” and face Russian retaliation if their involvement became public, he added. Even if a company is required to keep its role secret, it wouldn’t prevent an adversary or another party from exposing it.

“I understand what they’re trying to do, and if it has really robust oversight, and including targeting and review and oversight of what they’re doing, it might work fine,” Painter said. “But there’s so much of a chance of that going wrong.”

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Bill expanding paid leave for feds pared back in Senate

Erich Wagner — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 17:54:59 -0400

Legislation aimed at improving the amount of paid leave federal employees are eligible each year took another step forward as Democratic senators introduced companion legislation shortly before Congress left for its August recess.

In June, a bipartisan group of House lawmakers introduced the Comprehensive Paid Leave for Federal Employees Act (H.R. 9261), a measure that would provide feds with up to 12 weeks each year of paid family leave, to be used to attend to a serious health condition or care for a spouse, child or parent. It also would cover absences needed in connection with a family member’s deployment into active-duty military service, or to help a family member who has been the survivor of domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking.

And last month, Sens. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, and seven other Democrats introduced their own version of the bill (S. 5168). That measure also extends 12 weeks per year of paid family leave to federal workers to deal with a health condition or a family member’s health condition and to attend to a family member’s military deployment, but it excises the provision relating to victims of domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking.

“Right now, our laws are forcing federal workers to make the impossible choice between caring for their families and keeping their jobs,” Schatz said in a statement. “Our bill will provide federal workers with 12 weeks of paid leave, giving them the time they need to take care of their own health and their loved ones.”

Paid family leave and other provisions relating to federal workers has recently been a tougher sell for the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol. In 2019, as lawmakers considered providing 12 weeks of paid parental leave to federal workers each year via the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, the House’s version of the legislation also included family leave, only for the Senate to balk during negotiations between the chambers.

Likewise, the House has included a provision blocking President Trump’s anti-union executive orders’ implementation at the Pentagon in both last year’s NDAA and the one currently under consideration. The Senate stripped the provision from their version of the bill last year.

Despite the more pared-back approach, the Senate’s family leave bill has still attracted the support of several unions and other federal employee associations.

“Expanding paid family and medical leave ensures federal employees never have to choose between caring for themselves or a loved one and serving the American people,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees. “This legislation will strengthen the federal workforce, improve employee retention, and help the government remain a competitive employer for the dedicated public servants our nation depends on.”

“Federal employees should never have to choose between caring for their loved ones and paying their bills on time,” said National Treasury Employees Union National President Doreen Greenwald. “The Comprehensive Paid Family Leave Act would provide federal workers with the flexibility and support they need during some of life’s most significant moments. As the federal government works to attract and retain talented public servants, providing comprehensive paid family leave is both the right thing to do and a smart investment in the workforce.”

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As warfare becomes engineering, the era of the digital mercenary dawns

Patrick Tucker — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 20:28:52 -0400

Private cyber firms will be allowed to take action against foreign threats under a new White House policy, another step into a future where tech developers are ever more closely entwined with military operations, which now evolve faster than governments can keep up.

Under the policy, announced Wednesday, the U.S. government will pay private cybersecurity companies to “manipulate,” “degrade,” “disrupt,” and “destroy” foreign adversary computer networks. The U.S. government historically reserves the right to take those sorts of actions, although they increasingly do so with help from front-line private workers.

The companies will undergo vetting, be supervised by the departments of Justice and Homeland Security, and be forbidden to take actions that could “result in the loss of life or serious injury,” according to the presidential memo.

“The United States just revived privateering for the digital age,” wrote Jeff Gray, who led training for DHS’s emergency response team and currently leads incident response training with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

The phrase recalls the 17th and 18th centuries, when governments issued letters of marque that allowed swashbuckling sea captains to attack foreign merchant ships. That official authorization is what distinguished men like Captain Kidd and Henry Morgan as “privateers,” not pirates. But when they lost that marque, many, like Kidd, went on to be pirates anyway.

Gray acknowledges that the term isn’t a perfect fit; for one thing, letters of marque are granted by Congress, not the president. Nevertheless, he says, “The government is authorizing private actors to conduct offensive cyber operations on its behalf, under its control. That's privateering.”

The memo says hiring private hackers is only logical: “American businesses’ innovative capabilities have historically been underutilized” to “secure a critical offensive cyber advantage for the United States.”

Russia has been doing this sort of thing for years: enlisting, or coercing, private companies and groups to carry out cyberattacks against Western targets.

One cybersecurity exec said the policy makes sense, especially as AI gives adversaries more tools.

“There will be more cyberattacks for sure, so I do think you want to expand the takedown activity as well,” said the executive, a founder of a prominent U.S. cybersecurity firm that works with the U.S. government.

AI-assisted cyberattacks rose 89 percent in 2025, according to a February report from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike.

Gray also described the strategy as “strategically sound.” But he expects it to provoke a short-term increase in attacks, and over a longer timeframe, to cause adversaries to shift tactics, accelerate operations, and gain additional “cover” to hide their operations.

Finally, Gray noted that law-enforcement agencies have long hired private firms for this sort of work, particularly taking down botnets. “The work is still the same. But the environment just got more complicated,” he said.

The cyber exec agreed. “Instead of a law-enforcement person pushing the button, it will be a private-sector person,” said the company founder. “I expect every Israeli cyber startup to jump at the chance.”

Cyberops and physical war

The policy is the latest indication that software weapons are evolving to be as crucial as hardware on the modern battlefield—and that is putting private coders and weapon designers closer to real-world operations. In Ukraine, for example, engineers with drone maker Shield AI and other contractors work closely with soldiers, sometimes under fire, to modify weapons based on digital attacks.

The job of fighting is, more and more, becoming a job of engineering, said one former senior defense official we spoke to in 2025, just after Donald Trump returned to office. The official said that the Pentagon’s new leaders were considering a plan to let drone makers and other tech companies conduct operations under company-owned, company-operated agreements.

The idea was not without precedent. SpaceX operates the Starlink satellites that connect U.S. troops, rather than allowing U.S. personnel to do so. And under the first Trump administration, the Pentagon paid Anduril to maintain and update drones in the field, deploying along with special operations forces.

The official said putting engineers in the field is essential to getting new capabilities to the front lines faster.

“A lot of these technologies,” they said, are “super exquisite, they're fragile, they're very technical. The people that built them are the ones that know how they work.”

Having the weapons’ makers observe and even operate their products in the field reduced red tape in getting new designs approved, changed, or deployed.

The official last year acknowledged that most defense firms don’t operate that way, and federal law outlines boundaries on what defense contractors can and can’t do (engaging in combat is in the "can’t do" column). But ultimately, they said, “If you want capability in 2027 the only way you're going to get is if this happens.”

In April, CENTCOM hired Shield AI to provide intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance to U.S. forces with its V-BAT drone, under a contractor-owned, contractor-operated arrangement.

Brandon Tseng, Shield AI’s co-founder, said of the agreement: “We aren’t just bringing the V-BAT product and service to the Navy; we’re bringing a world-class team with a wealth of operational experience and the ability to produce undeniable outcomes for our warfighters.”

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Intel ops are underway at Space Command’s nascent Alabama HQ

Thomas Novelly — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:24:35 -0400

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Less than a year after President Trump reversed a Biden-era decision to keep U.S. Space Command in Colorado, space intelligence operations are being conducted in existing offices at Redstone Arsenal while a permanent headquarters is built on base.

By year’s end, SPACECOM plans to have roughly 200 of the 1,800 Colorado-based positions at the Army base. Roughly 50 of those employees are already conducting missions with the command’s Joint Intelligence Support element, or JISE, which is already doing analysis for space operations and coordinating with allies. Those analysts are also coordinating with colleagues working, at least for the next few years, at Space Command’s existing headquarters in Colorado.

“We've designed our facilities with collaboration spaces and with the collaboration tools that allow our personnel here in Huntsville—of course, those numbers are growing—to work back with our people in Colorado Springs to execute our missions,” Whiting told reporters on Wednesday. “So far, our folks are crushing that, and I'm very proud of how they're performing.”

Reporters toured the up-and-coming facilities and saw the progress of the new headquarters on Wednesday during the Space and Missile Defense Symposium here. While the personnel moves and construction projects will not be complete until 2032, military officials said that the combatant command remains focused on its mission.

In April, Gen. Stephen Whiting, Space Command’s leader, hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Joint Intelligence Support element on base. Wednesday’s tour was among the first access allowed to media outlets.

“Make no mistake, the JISE leading this charge serves as a symbol of our commitment to ensuring mission needs are executed flawlessly throughout this move,” Brig. Gen. Nathan Rusin, who leads the USSPACECOM Intelligence Directorate, said in an April press release.

In 2021, in the last weeks of his first term, Trump announced that Space Command would move its headquarters from Petersen Space Force Base in Colorado to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. Several congressional probes followed. In July 2023, President Biden reversed the decision and said it would stay in Colorado.

An April 2025 Defense Department Inspector General’s probe wondered why the 2023 basing decision was made by the White House instead of Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall. The service secretary told lawmakers in 2023 he thought “the projected cost savings, together with the availability of potential mitigation measures, outweighed the operational risks that had been identified” for moving the command to Alabama.

But a May 2025 Government Accountability Office probe showed that if SPACECOM headquarters were to remain in Colorado that “new military construction would be needed to support the headquarters’ operations” and that officials “faced ongoing personnel, facilities, and communications challenges” in setting up a permanent facility out West.

Whiting told reporters that the goal is to have half of SPACECOM at Redstone Arsenal by 2028 with a full move-in completed by 2032. The command’s joint operations center, the main command-and-control hub for space warfare missions, will remain in Colorado until the completion of the new headquarters.

“The opportunity for U.S. Space Command is that we get a purpose-built command and control headquarters out of this, we did not have that in Colorado,” Whiting said. “So to get this facility is going to be an incredible accelerant to our mission.”

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New Marine commander takes the helm in the Pacific

Jennifer Hlad — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:39:12 -0400

MARINE CORPS BASE HAWAII—The Marine Corps’ “future lies in the Pacific,” Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said Tuesday as Lt. Gen. James Glynn transferred command of roughly two-thirds of the service to Lt. Gen. Roger Turner.

Glynn is a “once-in-a-generation” talent whose “efforts under a constrained budget, doing things across the expanse of the Indo-Pacific” have been “truly Herculean,” Smith said at the U.S. Marine Corps Forces Pacific change of command ceremony here. But Turner, who comes to the command from the Okinawa-based III Marine Expeditionary Force, also has “spectacular” leadership skills, technical ability, and interpersonal skills, Smith said.

“We’re a Pacific-facing nation, and we put our best and brightest out here,” he said.

Adm. Samuel Paparo, who leads U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, echoed that sentiment minutes later.

“We live in incredibly dangerous times, and we live in incredibly dynamic and exciting technological times. Our nation is under threat like it hasn’t been in generations, and it requires hard, innovative, smart, determined people in order to meet the challenges of the time,” he said.

Glynn has been “so key in transforming the Marine Corps,” and “meeting the challenge of the times,” going from “leading a formation of 40 in Desert Storm in 1991 to leading a formation of 84,000 in 2026,” Paparo said.

As commander of III MEF, Paparo said, Turner has already “changed the face of the United States Pacific Command,” “enhanced deterrence,” and “never given up an inch, and gained ground. It is the most Marine thing that you can do.”

Glynn and Turner graduated from The Basic School together, but “absolutely no one” 37 years ago was saying “there goes the next two commanders of Fleet Marine Forces Pacific,” Glynn said.

Now, as Glynn steps into retirement, he said he stayed in the Marine Corps as long as he did “because I like to fight. I like to fight in this outfit, because we win. And who doesn’t like to fight for a winner?”

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‘There is no Golden Dome’ unless Congress prioritizes funding, general warns

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:25:54 -0400

HUNTSVILLE, Ala.—The sprawling Golden Dome missile-defense program is in peril because the White House decided to seek the vast majority of its 2027 funding via a controversial budget maneuver, the program’s leader said Tuesday.

Gen. Michael Guetlein didn’t explicitly call out the administration’s decision to propose using reconciliation to fund about 97 percent of the program’s $17.5 billion request. But the Space Force four-star did say it creates a “tough budget environment" as lawmakers remain cool to the administration’s request for a third partisan-led defense-funding measure.

“If they don’t figure it out, there is no Golden Dome,” Guetlein told attendees at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium, “because there is no funding.”

His public cry for help contrasts sharply with the mysterious gag order imposed by Pentagon leaders at last year’s symposium.

And it comes, Guetlein said, as the program makes good progress. He said that 90 percent of the roughly $24 billion allocated for the missile defense program through last year’s reconciliation effort has been obligated. He also said there’s been two “phenomenally successful” tests tied to the effort, and that contracts have been awarded for many of the key parts, such as space-based interceptors, radars, and data networks.

The general also warned that progress could stall without consistent funding.

“So if there's no additional funds, we have to continue to leverage the enormous amount of investment that [Congress] already gave me in reconciliation in FY 25-26, and then leverage that going forward,” Guetlein said.

One of Golden Dome’s cornerstone capabilities—space-based boost-phase interceptors— could be too costly for the final architecture. Physicists have said such a scheme would require thousands or even tens of thousands of armed satellites to provide 24/7 defense against even a handful of incoming missiles.

In April, Guetlein told the House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee that if building and deploying satellites armed to down enemy missiles early in flight can’t be done affordably or at scale then “we will not go into production.”

On the sidelines of the symposium, Guetlein told reporters that he hadn’t seen anything from the defense industry to change his mind on the affordability of space-based interceptors, but added he was impressed with what he’s seen.

“All of the providers that are part of the competition are progressing exceptionally well,” the general said, adding that he expects those companies developing the technology to progress to the next stage, which involves building the on-orbit capability. He declined to say how Space Systems Command plans to test those interceptors.

Guetlein told reporters that the Defense Department is already planning for contingencies if they don’t secure the requested funding in the 2027 budget, but said no final maneuvers have been settled on.

“There are discussions within the department about how to go forward because we have diversified execution of a lot of these capabilities, and a lot of these capabilities are already requested by combatant commands,” Guetlein said. “There are some alternatives that we can pursue. We have not made any decisions on any pathway.”

He said, as an example, that some of the capabilities in the Golden Dome program are also being funded by the Space Force, and added that the service could continue to work on those systems.

Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said it isn’t likely that Golden Dome would have to raid various service budgets to continue its progress.

“I think that Congress would prioritize Golden Dome funding and find it another home, either through a supplemental bill, a smaller reconciliation package, or tuck it into a higher base budget,” Harrison said.

Earlier this year, Golden Dome’s price tag had already swelled $10 billion over the original $175 billion goal, and the potential long-term costs have already been the focal point of criticisms.

In the absence of a publicly released architecture, Congressional Budget Office analysts crafted an estimate for a national missile defense system based on Trump’s “Iron Dome for America” executive order. The watchdogs calculated it would cost $1.2 trillion to “develop, deploy, and operate” for 20 years.

Guetlein has since gone on defense, publicly pushing back on that trillion-dollar figure and saying that the analysts “did not estimate the architecture that we're building.”

During his panel at the symposium, Guetlein acknowledged Golden Dome’s steep price tag, but averred its necessity.

“That’s a lot of money. That’s one of the biggest systems that we’ve ever put together as a nation,” he said. “We got to keep it affordable.”

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How Congress is reshaping the administration's FY27 budget

Shaun McDougall, Forecast International — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 20:21:24 -0400

The start of the 2027 fiscal year is less than two months away, and in typical fashion, the annual defense budget is in limbo. Three out of Congress' four defense committees have released markups that adhere to the Trump administration’s $1.1 trillion topline request. None has addressed the White House's proposal to spend another $350 billion through the unusual use of reconciliation funding, though discussions are underway for a smaller reconciliation package that could include money sought in a supplemental request for operations in Iran and other priorities.

The administration's decision to seek funding for many of its top priorities through the reconciliation process—until last year, it had never been used for defense appropriations—creates a "terrible risk," as Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, put it earlier this year. Congressional resistance to the idea of using novel funding mechanisms could mean that various programs get far less money than the adminstration wants.

Per Forecast International's U.S. Defense Budget Spotlight dashboard, the biggest drops would be seen in defense industrial base and equipment investments contained in the Defense-Wide accounts, such as:

$54.6 billion for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group
$40.6 billion for Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment
$30.5 billion for equipment funded through the Office of the Secretary of Defense
$30 billion for Defense Production Act purchases
$20 billion for the Office of Strategic Capital Loan Program
$17.1 billion for the Golden Dome missile defense initiative

Infographic by Jorge Morejon

The White House also sought to buy many munitions through reconciliation, a choice rendered fraught by the subsequent decision to launch the war on Iran and expend much of the Pentagon's stockpile. For example, the reconciliation portion of the request contained $10.9 billion for Patriot interceptors and $10.5 billion for Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) interceptors. The administration also aims to use reconciliation to backfill other programs, such as the F-35, KC-130J, and several shipbuilding programs.

Acquisition adjustments

Dozens of programs across the services would see their funding adjusted under the legislation released by the House and Senate armed services committee and the House Appropriations Committee (HAC) legislation. The Senate Appropriations Committee has not released its markup. House appropriators recommended the biggest variance from the administration request: a $10 billion cut for procurement programs and a $2.2 billion plus-up for research, development, test and evaluation.

Discretionary research budgets came out ahead in all the defense bills so far: proposed increases of $2.2 billion by the HAC, $1.1 billion by the SASC, and $687.2 million by the HASC. All three committees recommended additional funding for Army and Navy research, to varying degrees, while the adjustments for the Air Force’s account were mixed. The HAC and SASC proposed to add $1.7 billion and $1.6 billion, respectively, while the HASC recommended a net reduction of $480.9 million. Meanwhile, every committee cut the Space Force’s research budget, from as little as $201.4 million by the HASC to as much as $3.1 billion by the HAC. Defense-Wide research was also cut by nearly $1 billion by the HAC and SASC, while the HASC proposed to add $558.1 million. The Air Force’s E-7, the Navy’s F/A-XX fighter, and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) are poised to benefit from congressional adjustments, while efforts like the hypersonic Conventional Prompt Strike and the Space Force’s Automate Sat C2 effort may lose funds.

The graphic below shows total procurement and RDT&E funding adjustments by branch across the three defense bills that have been released so far.

Infographic by Jorge Morejon

On the procurement side, one of the standout performers is Army aviation, which did not benefit from the overall influx of money in the FY27 request. Despite the record size of the request, Army aviation funding declined in FY27 compared to FY26 levels and was $1 billion less than originally planned by the previous administration. Driven by ongoing transformation efforts, the request reduced funding for key programs, including the UH-60 Black Hawk and CH-47 Chinook. The HASC and HAC aimed to reverse some of those cuts, recommending increases of 27 percent and 47 percent, respectively, for Army aircraft procurement. However, the SASC recommended further reductions, trimming the service’s aircraft account by 7 percent. Following the initial release of the FY27 request, the Pentagon said it was open to revisiting its proposed aircraft reductions for the Army, and additional funding is expected to appear in the final version of the defense spending bill. Outyear spending plans may also be more favorable to Army aircraft.

The SASC pushed for a 12 percent increase in Air Force missile spending, a move the other committees did not match. That adjustment stems from an additional $845 million for the service’s Family of Affordable Mass Missiles (FAMM) program, which aims to field a range of new low-cost cruise missiles. House appropriators did recommend an extra $300 million for FAMM, which would offset a lack of reconciliation funding for the program. However, the committees reduced discretionary Army and Navy missile funding across the board.

The White House asked for a boost for Navy shipbuilding this year, but lawmakers demurred. The SASC and HAC proposed reducing the shipbuilding account by 5.1 percent and 5.8 percent, respectively. The SASC removed $1 billion requested for the BBG(X) battleship, as well as $2.4 billion for CVN refueling overhauls. The submarine tender program was also cut by up to half. House appropriators recommended stripping approximately $2.2 billion for the service’s P-8A maritime patrol aircraft.

Topline with caveats

Even without reconciliation, all the budget proposals released by congressional defense committees so far sign off on a $1.1 trillion discretionary budget request, which is around $242 billion more than the FY26 base budget and $91 billion more than the total FY26 enacted level. The latter included around $152 billion from the initial reconciliation bill signed in July 2025. The result is that many of the appropriation accounts that faced discretionary cuts in the congressional markups are still funded at higher levels than in previous years, and the administration expects future base budgets to to exceed $1 trillion.

At the same time, the administration’s efforts to quickly increase production of munitions, drones, and missile defenses, among other priorities, may have to be tempered. Reconciliation requires only a simple majority in both chambers, several Republican lawmakers said they do not see enough support to pass a $350 billion reconciliation bill. Meanwhile, the defense industry is already struggling to keep up with growing demand.

The GOP has been working on a smaller reconciliation bill that includes $60 billion for the Pentagon. If adopted, that funding would primarily support initiatives contained in the Iran war supplemental request, particularly munitions replenishment. At the same time, the House and Senate have drafted continuing resolution proposals with the understanding that a final discretionary defense budget will not be passed until after the mid-term elections, meaning the FY27 budget process is far from over.

Editor's note: This post has been updated to correct a data discrepancy in the underlying legislative text. The HAC's topline procurement cut is $10 billion, with a P-8A reduction of approximately $2.2 billion.

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The government was ready to expand its voting-security work. Then it pulled the plug

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:00:00 -0400

LAS VEGAS — After spending roughly six weeks analyzing Dominion voting systems used in Puerto Rico’s 2024 elections, Mojave Research came back to the Trump administration with findings that startled its researchers.

The systems contained at least a dozen high- or critical-severity software vulnerabilities. Passwords were reused, firewalls were disabled and basic cryptographic protections were poorly implemented. And in Puerto Rico, active cellular hardware modems opened additional pathways into underlying software that was thought to be isolated.

But the small cybersecurity firm found no evidence that any of those weaknesses had actually been exploited, or that votes had been changed. The company still wanted more time to be certain.

Federal officials initially seemed willing to give them considerably more of it. The company was asked to grow the team working on the effort from roughly 10 people to about 60, according to CEO Jason Wareham.

Chief Technology Officer Manbir Gulati also said Mojave received an authorization to proceed with a follow-on effort, hired personnel, and was given funding to acquire equipment for examining more voting systems ahead of the November midterms. A contracting officer had even been brought in to finalize the new agreement, Gulati said.

Then, as Mojave prepared to move ahead, the work was abruptly shut down.

Wareham and Gulati recounted the episode on Friday at DEF CON hacker convention’s Voting Village, where they publicly unpacked their technical findings before sitting down with a small group of reporters and onlookers.

Their account fills in new details about a federal effort that grew out of the Trump administration’s broader focus on voting machines and election interference, and the political pressures that emerged when Mojave’s findings did not support claims of election manipulation.

The ODNI request

Mojave never set out to become an election security provider. Its involvement began last year through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under then-director Tulsi Gabbard, where it was already performing unrelated technical work for the agency when officials approached the company about examining voting machines and data obtained from Puerto Rico.

Reuters reported in February that the May 2025 operation was tied to an effort involving ODNI and the FBI to investigate allegations that Venezuela had hacked Puerto Rico’s voting systems, though Gabbard’s office denied that Venezuela drove its work and said the examination was focused on technical vulnerabilities. The probe produced no clear evidence of Venezuelan interference.

Wareham said at DEF CON that ODNI asked whether his team of reverse engineers and forensic specialists could travel to Puerto Rico and capture an image of a voting system that had actually been used in an election, without the vendor overseeing the process. He agreed, thinking it would be a relatively small addition to Mojave’s existing contract.

The assignment instead dropped Mojave into a much larger skirmish over American elections. “Ultimately, I made the worst decision of my life in a business context,” Wareham said.

President Donald Trump has spent years falsely maintaining that his 2020 loss was stolen and the product of widespread fraud and foreign interference, claims that have been rejected by courts and officials in his own administration. A 2021 intelligence community assessment found no indication that a foreign actor attempted to alter ballots, vote tabulations or any other technical aspect of the election.

Since returning to office, Trump and allies have revived investigations into the 2020 contest and pushed election security back to the center of his administration’s agenda. Gabbard’s ODNI was one part of that effort, hauling off and analyzing voting systems from Puerto Rico and later becoming involved in a federal investigation of 2020 election records in Georgia.

Wareham said the ODNI officials directly overseeing the company’s technical work wanted the research to continue. Both he and Gulati described the ODNI staff they worked with as professionals who wanted to protect the security of election systems.

The resistance, Wareham said, came from a separate White House collective that was repeatedly dissatisfied Mojave had not produced evidence supporting claims that the 2020 election had been manipulated.

“There was a separate group — let’s call them White House-adjacent — who was dissatisfied,” he said. “They were dissatisfied overall that I was not willing to name and shame at that moment” and declare that Trump had actually won the 2020 election.

Asked whether he believed Mojave’s government work was axed because it failed to find the “smoking gun” some officials wanted, Wareham said: “I believe that was part of the termination, yes.”

Reuters reported in April that Kurt Olsen, a prominent 2020 election-denier and Trump adviser involved in efforts to investigate the election, pressed Mojave to broaden its work in search of evidence that could support those claims.

Olsen, who now works at the Justice Department, turned against the company when its research failed to uncover evidence that the Puerto Rico machines had been hacked. He advocated terminating its work and accused Mojave of secretly receiving money from billionaire George Soros, a frequent target of right-wing conspiracy theories, the news agency reported. ODNI has said Mojave’s contract ended because the company completed its voting-machine analysis.

Wareham said an ODNI official informed him while Mojave was preparing to expand its work that the company had been accused of receiving Soros funding. The allegation prompted him to compile a detailed accounting of the young company’s funding sources within three days and send it up the government chain. Asked who he was told had made the accusation, he said an ODNI official reported to him that it was Olsen.

“One, I’m not funded by George Soros,” Wareham said. “Two, it would be great to be funded by George Soros because I would probably not be here, I’d be on a yacht.”

The company kept moving forward. Wareham said Mojave briefed the White House on some of its findings around September. The firm believed it was heading toward a broader effort to remediate vulnerabilities before the midterms and conduct a deeper analysis for signs that the weaknesses it discovered had ever been actually abused.

Then came the record-long government shutdown. Wareham said that on the day he expected an expanded contract to move ahead, Mojave instead received a stop-work order and no additional funding.

“I think the government shutdown was all that was required, really, to have some folks that I didn’t know were still in the game, again, White-House adjacent, to take their shot,” he said. Wareham stopped short of saying he had direct proof that White House officials ordered Mojave removed because of its findings, but said “it was reported to me it was Kurt Olsen” who led the efforts.

The White House, ODNI and Olsen did not return requests for comment.

Identified vulnerabilities

Mojave had found many issues with the machines it examined. Gulati described the Puerto Rico system during the Voting Village presentation as “deeply insecure,” saying it did not meet the security bar he would expect from “an average low-risk application, let alone critical infrastructure.”

Researchers identified at least 12 major vulnerabilities in commercial software installed on the system, Gulati said. Mojave successfully executed five of them. None were newly discovered flaws, and fixes were already available — in some cases well before the system was used in the election.

Other weaknesses were rooted more deeply in how the system was built and deployed. Some passwords could be easily cracked and others were embedded directly into software. Firewalls were turned off on critical systems and ports were left open. Gulati was particularly critical of the system’s cryptography, which he described as being “in shambles.”

The company does not believe every problem it found necessarily stopped at Puerto Rico, as its formal review covered only one system from one manufacturer in one jurisdiction. Gulati suspects the issues could extend beyond a single voting machine company, though Mojave has not examined enough systems from other manufacturers to establish that.

“I don’t expect that the problems are unique to them,” he said. “I think many manufacturers probably exhibit the same problems.”

Mojave produced an approximately 100-page document of the Puerto Rico findings. Gulati said Mojave has been in discussions with Liberty Vote — which acquired Dominion’s election business last year — and that Liberty told the researchers it does not plan to make changes before November.

Liberty said it has not received Mojave’s report.

“Liberty Vote is not in receipt of any such report so, therefore, we cannot provide any comment,” a spokesperson said. “As always, Liberty Vote is committed to advancing the future of secure American elections.”

No evidence of vote tampering

Looking at the systems headed into the midterms, Gulati said, “I do know that as of now, the state that we have described is going to be pretty similar to what will be deployed in November.”

Despite the extensive findings, Gulati repeatedly returned to what the researchers did not establish: “We found extensive and largely unacceptable weaknesses,” he said in the presentation. “But we did not find evidence that those weaknesses were actively exploited or that votes were altered.”

That distinction has drawn renewed attention as Trump and his allies again focus on election matters.

Last month, the president used a prime-time White House address to release newly declassified intelligence he said showed China interfered in the 2020 election. Among several disclosures, Trump pointed to intelligence showing Beijing had acquired personal information on roughly 220 million American voters. But the documents did not show China altered votes or gained the ability to manipulate voting systems.

Gulati echoed those conclusions Friday when asked about the declassification.

“The China thing isn’t really much of anything,” he said, arguing that a large amount of the voter information at issue could be obtained commercially and should not be confused with access to election systems in ways that can manipulate votes.

“There is no evidence that I know of that says China successfully or any other country has successfully infiltrated our systems and manipulated votes in any way,” he added.

Wareham called the 100-page document a preliminary report and said the firm had wanted another six months to a year to dig deeper into the underlying data.

Gulati said the company’s interactions with the ODNI employees overseeing that work were markedly different from the political pressure the researchers later encountered. “We were never pressured to put anything in our reports that was untrue or politically leaning in a certain way,” he said of those officials.

Wareham said Friday that Mojave itself has pushed for its report to be made public for roughly a year and has recently been told it could soon emerge through a Freedom of Information Act request. Nextgov/FCW could not immediately determine the origin of the FOIA requester. As of publishing time, ODNI’s FOIA logs are available up until January 2025.

“I’m a little annoyed that we are very close to midterms and we had a whole year to freaking figure this out,” Wareham said.

With their government work scrapped, he announced at the Voting Village that he had filed paperwork to create the Machine Assurance Institute, seeking to bring together cybersecurity researchers and election technology companies to examine and independently verify voting infrastructure.

“We wanted to be the national security answer, and put to bed, finally, discussions about prior elections and/or accusations of voter fraud,” said Wareham. “Because, believe it or not, I find it fairly national security-destabilizing to constantly accuse each other of cheating.”

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Did AI blow a $450M Army contract decision? Company lawsuit says yes

Christian Robles — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 11:34:00 -0400

Trax International Corporation is asking the U.S. Court of Federal Claims to direct the Army to reevaluate bids for mission support services at White Sands Missile Range — in part because the department allegedly misused AI to determine the contract award.

Trax's complaint, filed in late July, alleges that the Army used AI that hallucinated multiple times, creating the false impression that the company's bid was weaker than rival Southwest Range Services’ successful bid of roughly $450 million. The Government Accountability Office denied Trax’s bid protest in May.

The lawsuit claims that records the Army provided to GAO did not explain whether assigned strengths for the Southwest Range Services bid came from a human at the Source Selection Evaluation Board or an AI tool.

The suit also claims that the Army conceded that one of the weaknesses it identified with Trax’s bid is unsupported by documentation. In fact, the suit said, the purported weakness is a “classic AI hallucination, with made-up references to TRAX’s proposal, that no one on the [Source Selection Evaluation Board] checked.”

“Given the $29.4 million price premium associated with [Southwest Range Services’] proposal, there is a reasonable possibility that the removal of this Weakness could have changed the award decision,” the lawsuit states.

The Army declined to comment on the ongoing litigation.

Trax is not the first contractor to publicly allege that an agency has wrongfully used AI to evaluate contract bids.

Salient CRGT alleged that a Defense Department subagency improperly used AI, rather than human employees, to evaluate bids. The Government Accountability Office dismissed the allegation in a decision dated Jan. 5, 2026.

Contractors will likely continue to scrutinize federal agencies’ use of AI in evaluating bids, according to David Timm, a partner at Burr & Forman.

In a recent Washington Technology op-ed, Timm raised concerns that few civilian agencies are reporting the use of AI in bid evaluations as “high-impact.” That means agencies have either not implemented minimum risk practices or have not publicly disclosed them if they have, he told Nextgov/FCW in an email.

The Defense Department has said that it used AI to help evaluate bids in several recent solicitations. But if agencies don’t widely disclose this, it could become harder for contractors such as Salient CRGT and Trax to successfully argue the government misused AI.

“More bid protests are likely to come as the ungoverned and undisclosed use of GenAI tools results in errors throughout the procurement, but if agencies do not comply with the [Office of Management and Budget] rules it will complicate how contractors prove their allegations,” Timm wrote in the op-ed.

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How many worked for DOGE? New data emerges, but many agencies stonewall

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:52:42 -0400

At least 206 people worked for the Department of Government Efficiency, but much remains unknown about the Trump administration's government-overhaul effort because federal agencies refused to fully cooperate with a Congressionally-ordered inquest.

In a new report published on Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office said it was largely unable to determine whether DOGE employees completed required ethics training and paperwork. GAO looked specifically at employees who worked for DOGE in the Executive Office of the President or were detailed from EOP between Jan. 20, 2025, and Jan. 31, 2026.

GAO identified 206 such people and that at least 128 of them had left by Jan. 31, 2026.

At least 27 were special government employees who were limited to serving 130 days during any one-year period. One prominent SGE was Elon Musk, the former de facto head of DOGE, whose companies received billions of dollars in federal contracts during his government service.

Investigators were not able to determine the appointment type, such as Schedule C political appointee or noncareer Senior Executive Service, for more than 150 of the personnel because many agencies did not provide the requested information.

“This total includes the 127 [U.S. DOGE Service] employees who held titles as digital services experts or consultants within USDS,” according to the report. “Although USDS has stated that USDS positions last no more than 4 years, we were unable to determine whether these USDS employees or other personnel had held such time-limited appointments.”

In total, 10 agencies and the EOP did not respond to requests from GAO for records that these DOGE employees participated in ethics training and completed financial disclosure reports.

“As a result, we are not able to determine the total number of DOGE personnel who held positions within EOP who received trainings or who completed financial disclosures at those 10 agencies or at EOP,” investigators wrote.

Nine agencies, covering 64 DOGE employees, did submit information about whether the staffers did such training and reports. But GAO argued that much of the documentation was incomplete. For example, the Agriculture Department provided an “ethics-related presentation” for Trump appointees but didn’t offer evidence for when, or if, the DOGE staffers received the training.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

While “the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization” terminated on July 4, pursuant to the executive order establishing it, GAO pointed out that the directive permanently renamed an existing White House office as the U.S. DOGE Service.

“Since the EO does not call for the termination of the broader USDS entity, it is possible that USDS and personnel at federal agencies could continue to do work that advances some of these initiatives after the temporary organization’s termination,” investigators wrote.

DOGE spearheaded many of the civil service reductions that took place last year, resulting in a decrease of more than 350,000 to the federal employee headcount.

GAO in April reported that the Treasury Department and DOGE did not follow all security protocols with respect to granting access to government payment systems.

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Senate confirms Clayton as Trump’s next intelligence director

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 21:17:00 -0400

The Senate on Tuesday night confirmed Jay Clayton to serve as President Donald Trump’s second permanent national intelligence director, replacing an acting chief whose leadership alarmed Democrats and disrupted efforts to renew a major foreign surveillance program.

Clayton was confirmed in a 51-47 vote. He will oversee the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which coordinates the work of the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies and serves as the president’s principal intelligence adviser.

His confirmation ends Bill Pulte’s roughly six-week tenure as acting director, during which the Trump loyalist presided over repeated personnel cuts and faced accusations that he was politicizing the intelligence community. Pulte said Tuesday that ODNI had completed a fifth round of cuts without disclosing details of who was affected.

Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, served as a Securities and Exchange Commission chairman during Trump’s first term. His nomination was initially viewed by some Democrats as a stabilizing alternative to Pulte. Democrats had pushed the White House to nominate a permanent intelligence director and agreed with Senate Republicans to move Clayton’s confirmation process quickly, hoping to curtail Pulte’s time in the role.

But Clayton shed much of that prospective support during his confirmation hearing this month, when he repeatedly declined to say directly that former President Joe Biden won the 2020 election. The Senate Intelligence Committee advanced Clayton’s nomination last week in a 9-8 party-line vote, with every Democrat and Democratic-aligned independent on the panel opposing him.

Clayton also faced scrutiny over subpoenas his office issued to New York Times journalists in an effort to identify the sources behind reporting on security shortcomings of Trump’s new, Qatari-donated Air Force One.

During his July 15 hearing, Clayton defended the Justice Department’s handling of the investigation and said he was comfortable that prosecutors had followed the proper process. The department withdrew the subpoenas days later, however, after a federal judge sharply questioned government attorneys about how they had obtained reporters’ phone records and whether they had complied with legal safeguards intended to protect journalists.

Clayton also signaled that he wants the intelligence community to devote more attention to the connections between economic competition and national security, an emphasis informed by his time overseeing U.S. financial markets.

“National security and economic security are synonymous,” Clayton told lawmakers. Understanding the economic consequences of major events and their broader effects, he added, should be a larger part of what the intelligence community provides policymakers.

His arrival could also revive negotiations over Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the government to collect the electronic communications of non-U.S. citizens located abroad without a warrant.

The authority statutorily lapsed in June after Democrats joined other lawmakers in blocking a largely unchanged renewal package, citing Pulte’s installation as acting intelligence director. Democrats had argued that they would reconsider an extension once the Senate confirmed a permanent official to lead the intelligence community.

Intelligence collection under Section 702 has continued despite the expiration, with providers still complying with government requests to furnish communications for spy agencies, House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., told Nextgov/FCW last week, but he added that, at any moment, “they can decide to challenge the validity of the request” and he is “very concerned” by that possibility.

Asked whether a Clayton confirmation would help get votes necessary to legislatively reauthorize Section 702, Himes said, “I think that certainly helps.”

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Unions ask for injunction restoring collective bargaining at Defense

Erich Wagner — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:00:00 -0400

A pair of federal employee unions on Monday urged a federal judge to issue a preliminary injunction restoring their collective bargaining agreements with the Defense Department, arguing that Secretary Pete Hegseth failed to follow the Trump administration’s own process for implementing two executive orders banning organized labor at most federal agencies.

Earlier this month, the American Federation of Government Employees and National Federation of Federal Employees sued the Pentagon over the April termination of their collective bargaining agreements, a move that the Defense Department said was aimed at complying with President Trump’s March 2025 executive order barring collective bargaining for two-thirds of the federal workforce on national security grounds.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for Maryland, focuses not on the legality of Trump’s edict, but rather whether Hegseth fulfilled his obligation to conduct “reasoned decision-making” under the Administrative Procedure Act when he ordered CBAs be terminated with just 24 hours’ notice.

“The Hegseth memorandum did not point to any facts showing that any of plaintiffs’ CBAs, much less all of them, were inconsistent with national security,” the unions wrote. “DOD agencies had voluntarily agreed to these CBAs. Nor did the Hegseth memorandum consider the obvious alternatives to immediate mass termination of all CBAs, such as refraining from terminating CBAs until litigation about [the executive order] runs its course, allowing CBAs to expire pursuant to their own terms, or identifying only those specific parts of CBAs that the secretary determined to be inconsistent with national security . . . The Hegseth memorandum was the opposite of the reasoned decision-making that the APA requires before final agency action.”

The unions said that the Defense Department did not even follow a template for terminating union contracts issued by the Office of Personnel Management in February, seemingly designed to address the APA’s requirements for agencies to explain policy changes and consider the reliance interests of stakeholders. Instead, Hegseth wrote simply that the actions were “required” in order to comply with Trump’s order.

“The OPM termination template reinforces that CBA terminations are discretionary and must comply with the APA’s requirements for reasoned decision-making,” the unions wrote. “The OPM template indicates that agencies should specify that, after the issuance of the EO, the agency ‘considered whether to terminate any CBA, in whole or part, as it pertains to those bargaining unit employees who fall within the EO’s scope.’”

Since the contracts’ termination in April, management officials have told union members that their union “does not exist any longer,” and some employees have been required to sign documents attesting that they lack union representation. Employees in disciplinary proceedings are denied access to union representation, managers are unilaterally changing employees’ work schedules with little notice, and the labor groups’ membership is on the decline.

“Plaintiffs face an existential threat because workers are afraid to engage in any union activity or are confused about their right to do so,” they wrote. “DOD is telling plaintiffs’ members and prospective members that they are ineligible to join unions and that their unions ‘do not exist.’ Plaintiffs cannot successfully retain or recruit members under such circumstances, and union membership is declining. These harms are irreparable.”

Since its initial filing earlier this month, AFGE and NFFE’s case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, a jurist who was nominated to the federal bench by both presidents Obama and Trump.

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Hegseth’s conflicting statements, evasions drain lawmakers’ patience, support

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:50:25 -0400

Given a rare chance to press top Pentagon leaders, senators from both parties on Tuesday pleaded with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to outline a strategy for the U.S. war on Iran or simply to defend his previous statements about it. Hegseth responded at times combatively or evasively.

The meeting highlighted growing frustration over the costly war and the Trump administration’s multiple and shifting rationales for it—all of which appear to be reducing lawmakers’ appetite for the White House’s unprecedented $1.5 trillion defense-spending request.

Lawmakers are not the only ones frustrated with Operation Epic Fury. Last week, 68 percent of the public said the war was “not worth fighting,” according to an Ipsos poll. Wednesday brought fresh numbers from Politico showing that just one-third of self-identified MAGA voters approve of the war—a 13-point drop in two months.

At the hearing, Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said that the drops don’t reflect differences in concern about a potential Iranian nuclear arsenal, but rather disapproval of how the White House has gone about trying to prevent it.

“This radical Iranian regime should never possess a nuclear weapon. I think we agree on all of these core basic points,” Coons said. “I think your first strategic mistake was to not consult the American people and Congress and make a clear case for the reasons behind this war. There have been many, lots offered.”

Perhaps the most telling portion of the hearing came toward the end, when Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., read Hegseth’s previous public statements back to him verbatim and then asked Hegseth to recommit to the statement.

Ossoff: “You said, quote, ‘Operation Epic Fury was a historic and overwhelming victory.’ You said Iran's military had been rendered, quote, ‘combat-ineffective for years to come,’ and you stated we had, quote, ‘achieved every single objective.’ Were those accurate statements?”

Hegseth answered that U.S. strikes had decimated Iran’s Air Force, Navy, and industrial base, but acknowledged that the country was still developing and launching drones and missiles. “So we never expected they would stop having capabilities to shoot. The question is at scale against opponents like the United States of America.”

Ossoff repeated the question, seeking a declarative yes or no that did not come. He continued, “On March 8, day nine of the war, on 60 Minutes, you assured the American people of Iranian surrender. Does that remain your prediction?”

Hegseth replied, “Iran will never have a nuclear weapon to threaten the United States of America. That has been the objective, and it remains so.”

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., put the consistency and credibility issue to Hegseth more bluntly.

“The reason why [voters] are so upset with you and this administration is because the words you have used in the past don't add up,” she said. “About Iran, specifically, you said that we had obliterated, quote unquote, Iran's ability to create nuclear weapons. The president made the same claim. Yet eight months later, in 2026, the president launched an act of war, claiming Iran was within two weeks of having a weapon. So when you say two very different things, the American people don't know who to believe or what to believe.”

She went on to reframe the issue in terms of growing economic uncertainty among voters, merely seeking consistent answers as they are asked to make sacrifices. “They just know they can't afford their health care; they can't afford their food; they can't afford housing, and our farmers are continuing to suffer. So, which is true? Was it obliterated or wasn't it?”

Even some staunch supporters of President Trump and his agenda lost patience with Hegseth’s inability to articulate a clear goal for ending the war and the consequences of the United States leaving it before a favorable outcome could be reached.

One such Trump ally, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., asked Hegseth whether Iran would be able to restart its nuclear program if the United States concludes operations too soon.

Without providing a clear yes or no, Hegseth answered that Iran had not given up its nuclear ambitions even though their nuclear sites had been obliterated.

Kennedy interrupted the response with a shout: “We need straight answers!”

That lack of straight answers is hurting not only the White House but also senators' ability to meet the administration’s historic budget request.

Budgeting is very much a part of the discussion among the most loyal members of the President’s voting base. Some 37 percent of self-identified MAGA voters now say they would support the war only if it does not increase costs, according to Wednesday’s Politico poll, a number up from 29 percent in May.

Coons observed broad bipartisan support for the budget’s main pillars: $21 billion to sustain forward-deployed forces, pay increases, and other readiness items; $46 billion to replace munitions stockpiles, develop new supply lines for solid rocket motors, and new counter-drone defenses, and others. There is enthusiasm for the Defense Department’s acquisition reform and bringing in new technology players. But lawmakers had little insight into how the White House was spending funds that Congress had already given it to meet those goals.

“Mr. Secretary, your question says: Without these supplemental funds, we will face critical shortfalls that threaten our ability to pay our service members and sustain global operations without disruption. You've been asked repeatedly—there's $75 billion appropriated but unobligated—can we really not avoid critical short-term shortfalls? What does that mean about the budget management within the department in terms of unexpected and unbudgeted wars, first, Operation Southern Spear and then Operation Epic Fury?”

Hegseth answered that the funds previously allocated under the Big Beautiful Bill would be spent by September. That the U.S. military was receiving everything it required “in spades.” The $1.5 trillion budget request “and any additional funding that comes,” was related to efforts to modernize the force.

Coons observed that those were “Two quite different things. A $1.5 trillion base budget request and a now $67 billion supplemental.” The September date was “news to him.”

At various points, lawmakers turned their attention to Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, to make the Pentagon’s case where Hegseth could not. They lavished credit and praise on Caine for carrying out U.S. policy, however confusing they found that policy to be, and then called on him to affirm that China, Russia, and Iran were working together.

“There is no doubt that they are aligning,” Caine responded.He also compared the giant 2027 budget request to the work done by George C. Marshall to mobilize the U.S. military for World War II, then to transform the War Department into what would become the postwar Defense Department.

“I view this as a future investment to buy down risk, similar to what I said Marshall fought through in those heady days in 1940, where the need to invest capital early to deliver scale is an opportunity that I hope we don't miss.”

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At Europe’s largest airshow, US lawmakers sound alarm over Pentagon-budget gridlock

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:33:55 -0400

FARNBOROUGH, UK—U.S. lawmakers sounded alarms about the fate of this year’s Pentagon budget while attending Europe’s largest airshow and said the Trump administration’s top defense priorities, including the Golden Dome missile defense program, are in peril.

A bipartisian congressional delegation at the Farnborough International Airshow told reporters on Monday that the gridlock surrounding this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, an Iran war supplemental, and additional funding measures likely portends acontinuing resolution: a stopgap funding measure to keep the government open at the current year’s spending levels.

“We're not going to get an NDAA bill done anytime soon,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said. “Anybody, no offense to anybody, anybody who thinks we're going to do an NDAA in the midterm needs to back off the crank. It's not going to happen.”

Kennedy later said, “We'll get the NDAA done” and “I hope we’ll have a CR to continue the budget, but after that, I really don't know.”

Political infighting about the defense budget comes as President Donald Trump has pushed European countries to provide for their own defense and to buy American weapons. Given the gridlock in Washington, the administration has proposed to make heavy, partisan use of an unusual budget maneuver called reconciliation.

“There's a concern that if you start doing defense and reconciliation, it can create a bad habit, and I get all of that,” Kennedy said on the sidelines of Farnborough. “But the military needs money, and the only way to get it to them in this environment is through reconciliation.”

Some $350 billion of the administration’s initial $1.5 trillion defense budget request relies on reconciliation, which allows funding legislation to be passed by a simple majority. The sum includes major defense priorities such as munitions, shipbuilding, and autonomous warfare efforts. Congress has since whittled the reconciliation amount to $60 billion, mostly to support the war in Iran.

“I'd go a little bit heavier on the defense money, but that's just me. I'll take it if that's the best we can do,” Kennedy said.

Democrats disagree.

“I think it does set a dangerous precedent, and I think the Appropriations Committee, both Democrats and Republicans, have been pretty clear with the department about that, about concern that if this is a priority, it should go in the base budget,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., said in a sideline gaggle with reporters. “There isn’t going to be a third reconciliation package, so anything that's in there is not going anywhere.”

Golden Dome

Republican lawmakers are also casting doubt on using reconciliation to pass one of the Trump administration’s biggest defense priorities: the sprawling Golden Dome missile defense program.

A mere $400 million of the $17.5 billion the Pentagon is seeking for Golden Dome comes from the baseline budget, and the remainder from reconciliation funds. Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., told reporters at Farnborough the secretive missile defense investment “is needed” but is concerned with the administration’s partisan funding maneuvers.

“I'm worried it's in reconciliation, because I don't know if that's going to happen or not,” Fischer said.

Todd Harrison, a defense budget analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, said there’s other avenues outside of reconciliation to get the Golden Dome funding the admin wants.

“I think this is one of the priority items in reconciliation [that] they will find a way to work into a funding bill,” Harrison said. “If not this one, then the base budget or something else.”

Kennedy, like Fischer, said the missile defense system is needed but added that there’s other more pressing priorities.

“It's going to be expensive,” Kennedy said of Golden Dome. “Will we get it done in this Congress? I wouldn't bet my house on it. And if I were betting your house on it, it'd be a maybe.”

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‘Makes no sense’: Firing of Ukraine’s defense minister sparks protests, outcry among allies

Patrick Tucker — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:04:26 -0400

Mikhailo Federov was not the first or even the second defense minister fired by Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy—but he is the first whose dismissal has drawn protests around the country, wall-to-wall coverage in Ukrainian media, and condemnation by foreign allies who fear that sacking the politically popular Federov will undermine hard-won gains in the country's fight for survival. In any case, the move reflects central questions about the war and how to win.

On Wednesday, Zelenskyy fired Fedorov over his feud with Gen. Oleksandr Syrskyi, the much-maligned commander-in-chief of the armed forces. The president framed his decision as an obvious one.

Fedorov was “making procurements at his own discretion, rather than following the requests of the General Staff and the military,” Zelenskyy told other Ukrainian officials later on Wednesday, according to state media. “This specifically applied, for instance, to the procurement of artillery shells.”

On Thursday, Federov called a press briefing as one of his last acts in office. He said Syrskyi refused to acknowledge the new realities of war, much less present new solutions.

“War has changed completely. Drone technology and command systems change multiple times a year. We cannot rely on what worked two years ago,” he said.

He also criticized Syrskyi as “not ready to discuss problems openly face-to-face. Instead, he prefers to attend backroom meetings and weave intrigues.”

Federov then offered several suggestions for improving Ukraine’s military effort, including adding more forward drone assault forces and replacing Syrskyi.

After four years of largely defensive operations, Ukraine began to go on offense this year. Ukrainian forces have launched long-range strikes deep into Russia, while using robot-led ground assaults that have recaptured territory and frustrated Russian resupply while risking fewer Ukrainian lives. s.

Fedorov played a critical role in that turnaround, according to one government military analyst who asked not to be named.

For example, the analyst said, Federov was key to the effort to convince SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to ensure that the Starlink satellite communications service could be used by Ukrainian troops, but not Russian ones.

Beyond that, the analyst said, the former defense minister had a good plan to win.

“The theory of victory that Fedorov espouses has key elements that pave the most realistic path for Ukraine to achieve a qualitative military edge and render Russian superiority obsolete,” they said.

Former senior U.S. military officials, former senior Ukrainian military officials, military analysts, and most of the other sources who spoke to Defense One echoed the sentiments of the protesters and many pro-Ukraine voices on social media.

“It makes no sense,” said one former senior U.S. official who worked on Ukraine issues.

A second analyst, who works with the Ukrainian and U.S. governments, said, “The generals hate [Fedorov] the way generals hate civilians with better ideas than their own.

“A bad sign,” offered a third analyst.

“This is very bad,” said the former senior Ukrainian military official.

A former senior U.S. official said that the decision fit an unfortunate pattern in which the Ukrainian president favors loyalists over reformers.

“Sadly, while Zelenskyy is in many ways an exceptionally talented wartime leader, his Achilles heel is his preference for absolute loyalty among subordinates. This has led him to keep corrupt officials in place…for far too long after their misdeeds were common knowledge, and also to sack competent reformers who weren’t as beholden to him personally,” they said.

One prominent analyst and tech entrepreneur close to the Ukrainian government put it more colorfully: “Zelenskyy’s usual shit.”

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Space Force faces budget uncertainty as leader plans exit next month

Thomas Novelly — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:50:38 -0400

LONDON—The U.S. Space Force’s soon-to-be retired top officer urged support for his service’s programs, the same day as House lawmakers said they would approve only a fraction of the funds the Trump administration requested for major space efforts.

Space Force Gen. Chance Saltzman, the chief of space operations, told international military leaders at the Global Air and Space Chiefs’ Conference here on Tuesday that space is, undoubtedly, a warfighting domain. Invoking American poet Robert Frost, he said, “We must frame our choices around how to have military advantage, and for better or worse, the path we choose will make all the difference.”

Saltzman said during his speech that he will retire next month. The White House has tapped Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess to replace him, as first reported by Defense One in April. Schiess is scheduled to appear for a confirmation hearing by the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

But elsewhere on Capitol Hill, lawmakers say they will not fully comply with the Trump administration’s request to fund important priorities through reconciliation—a partisan-controlled budget maneuver rarely used for defense spending before last year. That could leave the Space Force far short of the money it wants.

The White House has asked Congress for $1.15 trillion through the normal defense-budget process plus another $350 billion through reconciliation. The latter amount would fund major Space Force programs, such as the Air Moving Target Indicator and the space data network, and the vast majority of funds for the Golden Dome missile defense program.

On Wednesday, Republican House leaders said they would support a reconciliation bill of just $60 billion.

Saltzman didn’t say whether a smaller reconciliation package would harm the service, but said during a roundtable interview on Wednesday that “I stand behind” the service’s budget request and added it was “a dramatic increase in resourcing requests for what I think are vital” space capabilities.

“I think these things are always negotiations between the executive and the legislature. That's the way the system works,” Saltzman said. “I stand behind the requirements and the resources that we requested, and now over to Congress to determine what that appropriation looks like.”

During his speech, Saltzman told the military leaders in the room that they have to be steadfast during political division.

“In the hyper-political environment we find ourselves, with partisan politics created divisions between a multitude of stakeholders, I remind myself that military institutions in our democracies, particularly military leadership, serves as the ballast in the ship. While it may feel like the ballast slows progress as the ship of state attempts to quickly move towards its goals, the ballast creates stability when the inevitable storms arise,” Saltzman said. “We, as military leaders in our democracies, must remember our roles. Think long-term, offer our military experience to decision makers, and do what we can to provide the stability and be a calming presence."

Saltzman has served as the head of the Space Force since his confirmation in September 2022. Under his tenure, the service’s budget swelled from $26 billion to a this year’s $72 billion request, while its ranks grew to roughly 11,000 guardians. The service has also seen some of its highest public recognition to date for the role its service members have played during operations in Venezuela and Iran this year.

The Global Air and Space Chiefs’ Conference follows a prickly NATO summit earlier this month, during which President Trump threw barbs at European allies.

Saltzman, during his final public speech, pushed a message of unity among allies.

“We are stronger as a team of nations than any one of us as an individual,” Saltzman said. “There is far too much evidence over the last 80 years or so to argue otherwise.”

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