Defense One - Threats

Trump appointees asked a federal cybersecurity agency to secretly hack a voting machine

Doug Bock Clark and Andy Mannix, ProPublica — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:23:36 -0400

A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.

The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it and report back the findings so they could be given to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request.

The proposition was shocking to CISA’s career staffers, according to one of the former officials. CISA typically worked to thwart hackers. Moreover, the agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to its standard practices. The request made the CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference.

“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” one of the former officials said. “This goes against everything CISA represents.”

The CISA employees repeatedly told the political appointees that their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative. The appointees eventually stopped pressing CISA.

Though not acted on, the request shows how the Trump administration has tried to use the agency for its own ends while draining it of resources for one of its critical missions: protecting the nation’s voting systems.

In Trump’s second term, his administration has laid off or pushed out more than 1,000 CISA employees, shrinking the agency by about one-third. The president’s 2027 budget proposal would reduce funding for the agency by another $700 million, which could necessitate 900 additional layoffs.

In response, Democratic lawmakers have called for an investigation into CISA’s ability to do its job and demanded answers as to why federal funds are not being used to support election security as directed by Congress.

Since Trump signed the CISA Act in 2018, the agency has worked with state authorities and voting machine vendors to help protect election infrastructure from cyberattacks. During Trump’s second term, though, CISA has abandoned much of this work. Several state election authorities said the agency provided them no assistance — and no explanation for its absence — during the most critical planning stages for the upcoming midterms.

“There is a difference between deprioritizing and being nonexistent,” said Ryan Macias, an election technology and cybersecurity expert who has worked as a consultant for CISA. In 2025 and through mid-September 2026 — when the bulk of preparations for the election typically would have been completed — “they were nonexistent. Literally nonexistent.”

While Trump has repeatedly warned that America’s elections are vulnerable to hacking, in some cases repeating disproven claims, experts said his administration is undermining the federal government’s role in helping secure them.

Though CISA re-emerged in September with a last-minute security plan for the election, some state officials told ProPublica they fear that what is left of the agency has been compromised by a conspiracy-obsessed presidential administration. In recent months, in reviving debunked theories about the 2020 election, the Trump administration has declassified troves of records, including sensitive material that state officials provided to CISA. Some state authorities said they no longer trusted the administration enough to share information with CISA, a key to the agency’s success in past elections.

“They’ve violated the entire premise of that information-sharing relationship,” said one former high-ranking federal cybersecurity official who now advises state governments on national security. “There’s no fucking way they’re ever going to give any information to CISA. And it’s unclear if they ever will in the future.”

A spokesperson for the White House declined an interview request but defended Trump’s handling of election security in an emailed statement. “President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections,” said Lauren Bis.

Bis referred specific questions about CISA’s handling of elections to DHS. DHS and CISA did not respond to interview requests or to a detailed list of questions.

Current and former CISA employees and state election officials describe an agency that has become significantly less equipped to help states fight legitimate cyber threats. State leaders say they have used their own resources to shore up gaps left by CISA, such as paying for sensor technology that can detect unusual activity in election networks. But some services, like intel on foreign actors, can’t be replicated. Some people interviewed said they were worried that Trump and his allies continue to ratchet up rhetoric about voting security, particularly about threats to voting machines. Officials in one large voting jurisdiction said they have met privately with machine vendors to come up with a contingency plan if the federal government seizes their machines or declares them unusable.

“I don’t pay attention to what the president says. I pay attention to what his administration does,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said. “And what they’ve done is basically cut us off and left us on our own.”

Defending elections from hackers wasn’t always part of DHS’s remit.

Throughout the mid-1990s and 2000s, a series of cyberattacks rocked the federal government, demonstrating the emerging threat. In 2007, hackers broke into the Pentagon and stole terabytes of sensitive data. The digital heist, by an unknown foreign adversary, was so damaging that one intelligence leader later described it as an “espionage Pearl Harbor.”

Under George W. Bush, DHS underwent a reorganization to more effectively combat terrorism and respond to disasters like Hurricane Katrina. The department dedicated resources under an office called the National Protection and Programs Directorate to help fortify advanced cyber defense systems and important infrastructure. The office’s work ranged from helping secure events like the Super Bowl to protecting chemical plants to issuing cybersecurity warnings to the private sector and the public. In 2018, Trump signed a bill making the office a stand-alone agency, allowing for more federal funding and transforming it into, essentially, the ultimate tech support desk for anything DHS designated “critical infrastructure.” The bill renamed the agency CISA.

Though Trump helped create CISA, he didn’t much appreciate the work the agency did under its old name to expose the extent of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Russian agents had unleashed a massive disinformation campaign, with a Kremlin-backed troll farm creating thousands of social media accounts posing as Americans and promoting Trump, according to bipartisan reports from the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released before the 2020 election. A dozen Russian military agents were indicted for what the Justice Department described as “a sustained effort to hack into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton.”

Trump publicly downplayed this interference, but DHS leadership saw the Russia attack as an escalation. In January 2017, before Trump took office, DHS upgraded America’s elections to the status of critical infrastructure. This placed the polls and all voting technology used in federal elections under the watch of what would soon become CISA.

To carry out this function, CISA needed help. But states and voting machine vendors were wary about sharing data on weaknesses in voting systems, fearing it could be exploited if certain details were to become public. State officials were also reluctant to cede any role in election preparation to the federal government.

Gradually, though, CISA and state election officials negotiated a fragile trust. At its center was a commitment: The sensitive information states and vendors shared with CISA would be kept confidential.

“It took years and years of building trust, of talking to election officials, of hiring people with elections experience who could be validators for the work that CISA wanted to do, before they finally built strong working relationships,” said Derek Tisler, who specializes in election security as counsel for the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan institute based out of New York University School of Law.

Under Director Chris Krebs, CISA hosted penetration testing in which its agents would try to hack into a state’s system to locate weaknesses that could then be patched, along with tabletop exercises simulating a series of potential catastrophes around elections. CISA also offered regular secret-level briefings to secretaries of state to share federal intelligence. And CISA paid for sensor technology that looked for potential malicious online activity on election networks, notifying officials about emerging threats.

“The staffing was there, the expertise was there, the visibility was there, the funding was there,” Macias said.

The consortium shared data as run of the mill as spambots as well as more serious threats. If Virginia caught unusual activity in its system, it could let other states know to be vigilant.

While CISA had prepared for attacks from the Chinese and Russian governments, or lone wolf hackers, few there had expected the threat to elections would come from inside the White House. But when Trump refused to concede to Joe Biden in 2020, claiming the vote had been rigged, CISA became a key component of the guardrails that ultimately led to the election results being certified.

The agency, in a statement co-signed by secretaries of state and voting machine vendors, vouched for the election’s integrity, calling it “the most secure in American history.” When Krebs publicly rebutted claims amplified by the White House as “unsubstantiated” or “technically incoherent,” Trump fired him over Twitter.

As Congress prepared to vote on certifying the election results, it was members of CISA, along with the FBI, who convinced then-Attorney General Bill Barr that the conspiracy theories embraced by the president could be explained by human error, not systemic fraud or hacking.

When Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, his administration immediately started to dismantle CISA. The administrative notices were sent out just a couple of weeks after the inauguration and included the team in charge of dispelling disinformation.

For the employees under the DOGE microscope, work became impossible, said one former senior CISA employee. “Those groups couldn’t even order a pizza.”

DOGE laid off people critical to the agency’s election work, including those who’d worked closely with states. The Trump administration cut funding for the technology that monitored web and election servers, blinding the federal government to breaches it had detected.

When it came time for states to prepare for the 2026 midterms, CISA had disappeared.

On the evening of July 16, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, dozens of election officials and their staffs gathered for a reception near Mount Rushmore. It was the third night of an annual conference for secretaries of state, drawing participants from red and blue states. They’d spent the week discussing state voter roll maintenance and voter ID — issues that at times made for disagreements.

At about 8 p.m., a wave of discomfort swept through the crowd, visible on attendees’ faces as they glanced frequently at their phones, according to people at the event. Any minute now, Trump was going to address the nation on election security. Some at the reception worried he would declare a national emergency, as his allies had urged him to do months earlier, and use it as a pretext to direct the government to seize voting machines.

Then reports on the speech began rolling in, and the mood shifted. The claims Trump was making were unsubstantiated and outlandish. Many had been examined ad nauseam, including by those at the reception, and roundly debunked. The collective anxiety that was palpable moments earlier melted away, as many saw the speech as another attempt to revive disproved theories unlikely to be taken seriously by most voters.

“Everyone just sort of guffawed and put their phones away and went to the bar,” recalled Quinn Raymond, co-founder of VoteShield, a nonprofit that works with states to help monitor voter registration data, who was at the event.

Still, if the speech made little impact, records published by the Trump administration to support the president’s claims damaged the already eroding relationship between CISA and state election officials. The material included raw information states had shared with the agency that was supposed to remain private, such as a log of communications from Election Day 2020 detailing activity being monitored in several states.

“It betrayed the trust of all partners who were willing to share information at the time,” said Geoff Hale, who worked on CISA’s elections team from the agency’s inception until last year. Now he specializes in election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital and civil rights.

Bis, the White House spokesperson, denied that the Trump administration broke any agreements in releasing the information. “The release of such information is exactly the sort of transparency news organizations should applaud,” she said. Bis also defended Trump’s speech, saying it had been fact-checked “by the agencies whose evidence was released and did not mischaracterize any information.”

Hale and others said the speech was one of several instances demonstrating the Trump administration’s reckless attitude toward sensitive data collected by CISA. Earlier this year, Politico reported that acting CISA Director Madhu Gottumukkala had uploaded records to ChatGPT, even though DHS had barred its employees from using the unsecure program. A CISA spokesperson told Politico that Gottumukkala had been permitted to use the technology for a “short-term and limited” basis.

Last May, an independent journalist named Brian Krebs exposed that CISA published private data, including passwords, cloud keys and other information, on its public GitHub page, in a folder labeled “Private-CISA.” A CISA spokesperson told the journalist there was no indication that sensitive data was compromised.

Some state election authorities were also alarmed to see the lengths to which the Trump administration went to legitimize the president’s fixation on the 2020 race.

In fall 2025, Missouri election officials produced a memo stating Andrew McCoy Warner, a Department of Justice official and prominent 2020 election conspiracy theorist, had called several clerks asking for access to voting machines. Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, had also led an operation in Puerto Rico to seize election machines. When the private cybersecurity contractor hired to examine the machines, Mojave Research Inc., failed to find evidence supporting claims about 2020, the federal government became “dissastified” with its services and stopped renewing its contract, its CEO later told reporters.

A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told reporters in August that Mojave’s work ceased because it had completed its contract. Testifying before Congress in March, Gabbard said the seizing of voting machines came at the request of an assistant U.S. attorney in Puerto Rico.

“What happened in the second Trump administration is from almost day one — I mean, literally the first two months — they took all that was built up by Trump 1 and just decimated it,” said David Becker, founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that works with state election authorities. “Election officials lost trust in the federal government.”

It didn’t help that, in his speech, the president mocked CISA’s defense of the 2020 election, calling the statement about it being the most secure in history a “very pat line” concocted as part of a deep-state cover-up. One former career CISA employee described being crestfallen at the Trump administration’s erosion of all they’d accomplished.

“We worked so hard to build that trusted relationship,” said Caitlin Durkovich, former DHS assistant secretary for infrastructure protection and co-founder of the cybersecurity firm Civira Partners. “I don’t know how you put it back together.”

A few weeks after Trump’s speech, the state election officials gathered once more, this time for a video call with Nick Andersen, who had replaced Gottumukkala as CISA’s acting director.

Though the primaries were already under way, this was the first time many had met Andersen, a former cybersecurity adviser to Trump’s White House who had joined CISA a year earlier. Andersen is also a district representative for the Republican Party in Virginia, according to the party’s website. In March, he gave a speech to the Fairfax GOP chapter titled “Fighting Democrat Redistricting.”

Speaking over video in August, the boyish-faced former Marine Corps engineer announced that DHS was preparing to release a plan on how it would work together with state officials to secure the election, according to five people who were present at the video meeting, some of whom shared notes with ProPublica.

Many on the call were stunned at what they perceived as a lack of understanding of election planning. Early voting for the general election was just around the corner. They had spent over a year preparing for the midterms, and there was no more time for ambitious work.

Some peppered Andersen with questions: Where had CISA been when there was still time to make improvements?

Andersen blamed any lapses or perceived breaches in trust on the federal government shutdown in fall 2025, twirling his pen uncomfortably and sipping from a Monster energy drink.

Fontes, Arizona’s secretary of state, was blunt about his feelings regarding working with Andersen and CISA, according to several of the people on the call.

“I told him I didn’t trust him,” Fontes recalled in an interview. “I did raise my voice a little bit, because I’m frustrated — very frustrated — that they would have the temerity to come in, clear the entire deck of competent professionals, stop supporting the states, eviscerate the coordination efforts that they had and then suddenly come in and say: ‘Oh, we’re from the federal government. We’re here to help.’”

Indeed, one recently departed CISA official said attempting to do the agency’s typical election work now would be futile. In previous years, CISA had finished almost all its preparations with the states by Labor Day.

“That ship has sailed,” the official said.

CISA published its security plan for the 2026 election on Sept. 24. The 13-page document describes how, over the past two years, CISA has “recommitted to its statutory mission and remains resolute in strengthening the security of elections.”

State officials said their planning will ensure a secure election, even without help from CISA. Yet they and cybersecurity experts worry that Trump will say the election was hacked if Republicans don’t win in November.

The security plan calls for “leveraging collaborative partnerships” with states the agency has abandoned since Trump took office. Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, said she’d welcome that but was skeptical of the agency’s motivations.

“For CISA to promise election officials now, at this point in time, that they are going to be a resource for the 2026 election is too little, too late,” she said.

Jen Fifield contributed reporting. Mariam Elba contributed research.

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Hundreds of federal websites lack key defense against spies, senator says

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 11:00:00 -0400

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is urging the Trump administration to close an encryption gap that could let foreign adversaries track visits to sensitive government websites, including the FBI’s tip portal and a veterans crisis line, according to a letter sent to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Office of Management and Budget on Monday and first seen by Nextgov/FCW.

Wyden asked CISA and OMB to require that agencies implement a web security standard that hides the name of the website someone is visiting. The protocol, known as Encrypted Client Hello, protects the website name when a user’s browser connects to a site and has been supported by major browsers and some web infrastructure providers since 2023.

Wyden’s office identified 350 federal web addresses that lack the encryption specification. They include sites that facilitate intelligence community job applications, immigration services, health information, and U.S. diplomatic websites around the world.

“This visibility could lead to malicious eavesdroppers identifying whistleblowers, profiling cleared federal personnel, tracking Americans seeking crisis support, and mapping interactions between agencies,” Wyden wrote to CISA acting director Nick Andersen and deputy federal chief information officer Thomas Flagg.

He also asked OMB, working with CISA and the Office of the National Cyber Director, to require that cloud and network providers support the technology to qualify for federal contracts. He requested responses by Nov. 20.

Nextgov/FCW has requested comments from CISA and OMB.

Federal websites generally encrypt the information people read or submit, though hackers can still learn which sites they visit by monitoring their internet traffic.

The letter singles out two services whose visitors could be particularly vulnerable.

The Department of Veterans Affairs’ Veterans Crisis Line platform uses Amazon Web Services, which does not currently support ECH for the site, according to the letter. Wyden warned that the exposure could help foreign adversaries identify veterans seeking mental health assistance. Additionally, the FBI’s tips.fbi.gov site uses Cloudflare, a provider that supports ECH, but the portal has not enabled it, the senator added, arguing the current arrangement could put people contacting the bureau at risk of identification.

The possible FBI exposure also comes after a prolific criminal hacker group recently stole troves of sensitive employee information tied to the bureau’s jobs portal.

The list of sites without the protocol also includes hotline.oig.dhs.gov, the DHS inspector general’s complaint hotline; civilrights.justice.gov, the Justice Department’s civil rights reporting portal; and apply.intelligencecareers.gov, an intelligence community recruitment site. Federal HIV information sites, including hivinfo.nih.gov and clinicalinfo.hiv.gov, are also listed.

To craft the list, Wyden’s staffers tested federal web addresses using third-party network providers to see if ECH successfully hid which specific websites were being visited, a spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW. The protection only appeared to work on sites relying on Cloudflare’s free service tier, the spokesperson added.

The letter does not establish that adversaries have tracked visitors to any of the listed addresses.

Wyden argued the government can close these gaps using technology already supported by major browsers and deployed across millions of websites. For agencies whose providers support ECH, enabling it can be as simple as changing a setting, he said.

“Modern federal zero trust cybersecurity practices rely on protective software installed directly on agency devices, so enabling [Encrypted Client Hello] would strictly improve the cybersecurity of federal networks,” Wyden wrote.

The effort follows his September call for NSA to update its advice about virtual private networks. A Congressional Research Service analysis requested by his office at the time warned that foreign intelligence services with broad visibility into internet traffic could potentially connect VPN users to websites by comparing traffic patterns.

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Marines fielding new tech for prolonged medical care on the battlefield

Meghann Myers — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:51:04 -0400

The Marine Corps is preparing for a future battlefield on which the injuries are the same but the ability to quickly fly troops to a trauma hospital is very limited. To close that gap, the service is fielding new tech like mobile blood banks and ultrasounds, with a self-contained power source to keep them running.

The Expeditionary Medical Refrigeration Unit and Mobile and the MEQU mobile blood warmer were deployed to U.S. Central Command this year, where a unit set up a continuous mobile blood bank and sent their notes back to the Marine Corps on how to make it better, officials told reporters Friday during a media round table.

“We were told that the EMRU was instrumental to their ability to maintain a revolving blood bank to ensure that they had what they needed to be ready to care for injured service members,” said Navy Cmdr. Kyleigh Hupfl, clinic for Expeditionary Medical Systems.

The concept of the “golden hour,” the critical time period after a casualty that made all the difference in getting a wounded service member from the battlefield to hospital triage during the Global War on Terror, will be much more complicated in a near-peer fight.

While ground fighters could sometimes shoot down a medevac helicopter in Iraq or Afghanistan, an enemy with more sophisticated surveillance and missile technology will mean commanders have to wait to call in evacuations and work to stabilize casualties on site for much longer than in more recent conflicts.

“We're leaving the golden hour behind, and we're moving toward those longer patient-care hold times,” said Col. Paul Gillikin, program manager for Combat Support systems. “Again, fully recognizing the future fight against a peer competitor, over those great distances in the Pacific—we know that we're not going to have the developed [forward operating bases], the full mobility, the Iron Mountain.”

The No. 1 cause of battlefield death is severe bleeding, so being able to not only slow bleeding but give transfusions on site will be crucial.

“We need to be able to bring cold-chain distribution forward without relying on heavy generators, and we need to be able to do that in a sustainable way. We need to be able to warm that blood so that we don't get that patient in a worse-off situation,” Hupfl said. “We need to be able to see, after that, whether they have continued bleeding, so that the commander can make a risk decision on putting an evacuation asset at risk to get that patient out.”

That’s where the battery-powered EMRU and the associated blood warmer come in, as a mobile system that keeps blood products refrigerated, then heats them to body temp for quick transfusions. The Corps is also fielding the KOSMOS point-of-care ultrasound to assess internal bleeding, and the Marine Corps Squad Power Manager medical kit variant to keep them all running.

“We expect in the Marine Corps to be in distributed environments, where the evacuation will be delayed or contested,” said Brig. Gen. Tamara Campbell, deputy commander of Portfolio Acquisition Executive Marine Corps. “And so the equipment that we're looking at is to take that into account, regardless of the time it takes to apply that care. We need to do that at any time so that any of our soldiers, sailors, Marines—anybody that's within our operating environment needs that level of care.”

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Meet the agency using AI to screen grant applicants for links to potential adversaries

Edward Graham — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 14:51:00 -0400

The Department of Transportation has been using artificial intelligence to determine whether grant recipients have ties to adversarial nations, an agency official said on Wednesday.

The federal government has taken a variety of steps in recent years to limit hostile foreign governments’ access to American research, including restricting access to individuals or entities connected with countries like Iran or Russia. As the U.S. seeks to maintain its dominance over China in the global tech race, the Trump administration and Congress in particular have also been tightening the rules on collaborating with organizations or scientists who could conceivably share sensitive technologies or information with Beijing.

It’s not easy, however, for officials or research institutions to unravel these threads, particularly when bad actors are surreptitiously working on behalf of nation states. But new capabilities could help to better chart these connections.

Neil Chaudhry, senior advisor for AI at Transportation, said his agency has worked with partners to create “some really robust AI tools” to analyze the recipients of its research grants.

“When we get to a down-select from grants that are some really promising research projects, we sort of do a deep dive on the [principal investigators] in the grant that says … do they have direct links to the [Chinese Communist Party] leadership, or do they have links to Russian oligarchs?” Chaudhry said during a panel at the SAP Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C.

“What we don't want to do is go on a fishing expedition,” he said, adding that identifying these kinds of relationships is “not based on the color of their skin and their nationality or something,” but on factors such as whether an individual or entity may be receiving funding from questionable sources.

“If it's a company that's funded by a [venture capital firm] in Silicon Valley, that VC is probably funded by another VC in the Middle East or in Malaysia, and that VC is then wholly funded by the Chinese industrial bank,” Chaudhry said. “And then when that startup goes out of business, we don't know what just happened to that IP that the U.S. government spent money developing.”

Transportation did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

Transportation’s latest AI use-case inventory, which was published earlier this year, does not include the research grant-focused capability. Although other agencies have been using automation or more in-depth analysis tools to identify potential connections to foreign adversaries, Transportation’s use of AI seems to be relatively unique.

A November 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office found that reviewed agencies had taken a variety of steps to comply with federal requirements mandating that they better identify foreign risks in the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs. GAO noted that the programs, which were created to allow U.S. small businesses to engage in federally funded R&D, “face risks of foreign actors seeking to illicitly acquire federally funded research and technologies.”

The watchdog noted at the time that some agencies — like the Air Force, National Science Foundation and NASA — were taking some steps “either to automate the processing of due diligence disclosure forms or support the vetting of applicants and identify associated risks.”

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Trump admin's retreat from foreign-influence fight is weakening US defenses, sources say

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:00:00 -0400

The Trump administration’s retreat from programs that track foreign influence operations has weakened various cross-sector relationships used to identify and confront those campaigns as midterm elections fast approach — even as artificial intelligence makes those operations easier to deploy — multiple sources told Nextgov/FCW.

State officials say they are receiving fewer election-specific federal briefings than in previous cycles, while others who track foreign influence have observed routine exchanges with government and technology companies fall away. Some also note that federal workforce departures have weakened cooperation with outside partners, including social media platforms, to track false information online.

While the federal government continues to gather intelligence on foreign threats to U.S. elections, some of those who lean on those findings say federal agencies are less reliably sharing information with non-federal researchers and state officials responsible for countering those campaigns. That cooperation began to weaken before President Donald Trump returned to office, and his administration has since dismantled several programs dedicated to countering the problem.

This story is based on interviews with current and former federal officials, state election officials and specialists in cybersecurity and influence operations. Several people spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid about their views and for fear of retribution. Their concerns come as fast-evolving AI tools now allow foreign influence operators to do more than just generate fake images or audio, instead helping them produce plausible-sounding messages, find audiences to target and autonomously adjust campaigns at a scale not seen before.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency referred questions about foreign malign influence to the Justice Department, saying that influence operations fall outside CISA’s mission. DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Election security is national security, and protecting our critical infrastructure remains a top priority for the Trump Administration, DHS, and CISA,” a CISA spokesperson said. “CISA works closely with intelligence and law enforcement partners to monitor threats to U.S. critical infrastructure, including election infrastructure.”

The spokesperson added that the agency is committed to supporting state and local election officials “to protect election infrastructure and safeguard our democracy.”

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to a request for comment.

Foreign influence operations aim to shape what people believe and how they act, often without revealing who is behind the message. Around elections, that can mean spreading false voting information, stoking political divisions or casting doubt on results. Such messages can be harder to question when they appear to come from or be amplified by fellow Americans and reinforce views people already hold.

One election nonprofit official told Nextgov/FCW that, during the November 2024 election, they received an early-morning text from a colleague in Georgia asking about bomb threats at voting sites, which U.S. officials later deemed may have been tied to Russia. The official was sitting in CISA’s election operations room. Finding out whether other jurisdictions were facing similar threats meant simply walking across the room and asking federal personnel.

“Any time you have federal support to help connect the dots, it’s a game-changer,” the official said, noting that they have not been alerted to or invited to a CISA elections operations room for the coming midterms.

The CISA spokesperson said that, before and during Election Day, the agency will “activate an Incident Coordination Group to establish a unified operational picture, rapidly share critical information, coordinate essential services for stakeholders in the field and strengthen incident response within its mission and authorities.”

Bret Schafer, senior director of policy and research for information operations at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said efforts to bring government, technology companies and researchers together grew during Trump’s first term, after Russia’s interference attempts in the 2016 election exposed gaps in their understanding of foreign campaigns.

Each could see activity the others could not. Sharing those findings helped them recognize operations that might otherwise go unnoticed, Schafer said last week on a panel at a national-security law conference hosted by the American Bar Association.

Those routine exchanges with the government have become harder to sustain. Now, “civil society is out on both sides,” he said, adding that he had gone at least two years without an information-sharing conversation with a relevant technology company, and a couple of years without one involving the government.

Much of that cooling began in the Biden administration, when GOP litigation over federal interactions with social media companies made participants more cautious. The Trump administration has gone further. It shuttered CISA work focused on election disinformation, disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and closed the State Department’s office for countering foreign information threats, all largely on censorship grounds. The ODNI Foreign Malign Influence Center also faced a similar fate last August under then-director Tulsi Gabbard.

An office can retain its responsibilities while losing the relationships that helped it do the work, according to a person familiar with U.S. efforts to address influence operations. But someone who once knew exactly whom to call may find that their counterpart has departed, or that the people still there are unsure whether leadership supports exchanging information.

One current U.S. official described an environment that puts less public emphasis on election security at CISA and across the Department of Homeland Security than in previous cycles, with greater attention to other critical infrastructure matters, including water systems.

The official speculated that employees could hesitate to highlight their election security work after seeing others who worked on elections lose their jobs, though they noted they had not heard staff express that fear directly. The official also acknowledged that midterms generally receive less attention than presidential elections.

The administration has maintained that federal support continues. ODNI has assigned officials to coordinate election threat intelligence, while CISA outlined election support plans last month. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also directed Cyber Command and military intelligence agencies to prioritize foreign election threats and coordinate with the Department of Homeland Security last month.

A current Defense Department analyst argued that closing offices focused on tracking influence operations does not necessarily erase expertise, because personnel can continue the work elsewhere in government or as contractors. But it’s unclear how much of that work has continued, or whether those who left government still have access to relevant information and federal contacts they once relied on.

The analyst recalled a strong working relationship with Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram, when they worked on those issues around two years ago. The analyst could not say whether those exchanges continue today.

Similarly, one former U.S. official recalled preparations for the 2020 election beginning roughly a year before Americans went to vote, with coordination growing more frequent as Election Day approached. Some calls included 80 to 100 participants, including private companies, discussing topics that included ballot security and broadcasting accurate voting information.

“Our nation’s security is best protected when private individuals, private sector, industry and government work together toward a common goal to protect our freedom and way of life, and that includes reporting suspicious and illegal activity and leveraging legal access and authorities to protect the American people and interests,” Erin Joe, special counsel at Wiley Rein LLP and a former senior FBI executive, told Nextgov/FCW in an interview.

At the ABA conference, former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff argued that the government still has a role in helping people recognize deception. Officials can explain where a message came from or show that a supposed recording was generated by AI, without telling people which political views to accept.

“It is fighting bad speech with good speech,” Chertoff said.

A TikTok spokesperson referred Nextgov/FCW to a webpage outlining steps the company is taking to prepare for midterms and disrupt covert influence operations on its platform. Several other social media companies and AI firms — including Meta, X, Anthropic and OpenAI — did not respond to requests for comment.

Two state election officials described how their offices are responding to misleading information while receiving fewer election-specific federal briefings than in previous cycles.

One said identifying who is behind false messages can be difficult. Their office often focuses on information that could confuse people about when, where and how to vote, as well as threats to election workers.

When a misleading claim surfaces, communications staff and leadership decide whether responding would help voters or draw more attention to something that might otherwise fade away. Threats to election officials are referred to law enforcement, the official said.

The same official said they had not received an election-specific federal briefing “in quite some time,” although they attend regularly held CISA calls about software vulnerabilities and known flaws being exploited by hackers. Those discussions offer little information that is specific to elections, the official said. Monthly meetings through the state’s fusion center still bring together state, local and federal law enforcement to discuss threats to election officials.

The second official said their office sends a representative to federal election-threat briefings whenever they are available, but those briefings have occurred less frequently than in 2024.

That official nevertheless described their election offices as better prepared than in past years, with multiple backup plans, in case disruptions occur.

“We hope that we don’t have to use them. But if we do, they’re there,” the official said.

Those preparations come as AI has lowered the cost and effort required to conduct influence campaigns. AI has played a key role in helping to run these operations, from writing posts and distributing them to studying how people respond, said Snehal Antani, CEO and co-founder of cybersecurity company Horizon3.ai. Operators can test different messages and use the results to adjust their approach, and AI agents can automate much of that work, reducing the time and expertise it once required, he said.

“AI has dramatically reduced the skills required and dramatically accelerated the speed at which this cycle can be executed,” Antani said.

Another former U.S. official added that increasingly capable, downloadable open-source models allow smaller actors to undertake work that once required substantial investment and specialized engineering.

“The barrier to entry is much lower,” the former official said, adding that AI-generated text can blend into everyday online conversations and make it harder to spot than a manipulated image or video with visible flaws.

Russia is more likely to pursue more obvious inflammatory messaging this cycle, while China’s efforts may be more covert to serve longer-term objectives, said another current official, adding that both are expected to make greater use of AI. Pro-Iran outfits have especially leveraged AI more overtly in recent months amid the war that began in late February.

But the official cautioned that more powerful AI tools and more convincing content do not necessarily mean a foreign operation is changing how people vote. An image or video getting lots of views does not mean people believe it or will vote differently because of it, they added.

In some cases, an influence campaign may not even target eligible voters. For instance, content aimed at younger Americans could sway their political stances, but they may not be of legal age to cast a ballot.

And in other settings, a foreign influence operation may not be needed for an American to vote a certain way.

“If I see gas is $7 a gallon, I don’t necessarily need a lot more to go vote blue,” the official said, referring to California voters who have faced record-high fuel prices in some parts of the state.

These foreign threats come as political campaigns at home have increasingly used AI in their advertisements.

The growing use of AI-generated political videos could also make it harder to distinguish real footage from fabricated material, according to research released Wednesday by cybersecurity firm Check Point.

“Video is one of the easier ways to make a claim feel real, since people tend to trust what they can see and hear for themselves,” the company’s findings say. As AI-generated political content becomes more common, it becomes harder for voters to “trust that a video of a candidate is real” and easier for anyone “to dismiss a real video as fake.”

The scale and sophistication of false information today “makes our sensitivity to it a little bit more dull than perhaps in years past,” said Kimberly Kearney, a former CIA case officer.

“We as individuals have to have the desire to know whether what we’re consuming is true or false, or if it feeds into a narrative that is convenient or more comfortable for us,” she said in an interview. “So it starts with that cognitive honesty and awareness to want to know whether what you’re consuming is accurate or if it could have a bias to it.”

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FBI disrupts North Korean 'laptop farms' used to fund weapons programs

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 17:00:00 -0400

The FBI searched more than 40 Texas residences and seized 187 laptops and other devices used to help North Korean operatives obtain remote jobs at U.S. companies under false identities, federal prosecutors announced Tuesday.

The effort, dubbed Operation Lonestar Roundup, targeted “laptop farms” that housed employer-issued computers and allowed workers overseas to access them remotely. U.S.-based facilitators configured the devices and transferred earnings to North Korean-controlled accounts, according to the Justice Department.

CrowdStrike, which provided intelligence and technical analysis to support the FBI’s work, said the broader operation affected a campaign targeting more than 70 U.S. companies and included two arrests in Ohio. The company did not identify those arrested or describe the charges in its announcement to reporters. The Justice Department’s Texas release did not address the Ohio arrests.

The scheme gave North Korean workers access to corporate systems while generating revenue for the regime’s sanctioned weapons programs, authorities said. By routing their work through computers physically located in the United States, operatives could conceal that they were working abroad.

“Each laptop seized potentially represents one company that has hired a DPRK IT worker,” FBI Dallas Special Agent in Charge R. Joseph Rothrock said in a statement.

The 187 devices seized in Texas included laptops and keyboard-video-mouse equipment, which can be used to control computers remotely. About 100 devices were recovered in North Texas, according to prosecutors.

CrowdStrike tracks the network under the moniker Famous Chollima and said its work with the FBI disrupted several U.S. laptop farms in late September. Organizations identified in the disrupted operations included businesses in aerospace, energy, financial services, health care, cybersecurity, defense engineering and government technology, the company said.

CrowdStrike described several ways operatives diverted employer-issued computers to the farms. Some filed false police reports claiming their laptops had been stolen so employers would ship replacements to different addresses. Others claimed last-minute moves or obtained jobs through staffing firms, allowing equipment to be redirected without those firms’ knowledge.

Once the computers arrived, facilitators installed hardware and software that enabled overseas workers to operate them, according to CrowdStrike. The company said operatives also disguised equipment used in the scheme to make it harder for security teams to detect.

The action adds to a series of federal investigations into North Korea’s use of fraudulent IT employment to raise money and gain access to sensitive information.

Last June, DOJ announced actions involving searches of 29 known or suspected laptop farms across 16 states. In one case, prosecutors alleged that an overseas worker accessed and stole export-controlled technical information from a California defense contractor developing artificial intelligence-powered equipment. A senior FBI official said at the time that at least one U.S. government contractor had been caught up in the fraudulent hiring schemes.

The schemes have reached direct federal hiring pipelines. In a case disclosed in May 2024, participants tried to obtain contractor positions at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Federal Protective Service but could not meet fingerprinting requirements, according to an indictment. Another participant secured a contractor position at the General Services Administration but was terminated five days after an introductory meeting.

The latest seizures are unlikely to end broader DPRK operations. CrowdStrike said the disruptions would probably slow activity primarily in the areas where farms were shut down and were unlikely to have lasting effects, as operatives adapt their techniques to avoid detection.

The Justice Department said the investigation remains ongoing.

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US Army to stage counter-drug training exercises in South America

Meghann Myers — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 19:42:20 -0400

The Army is looking to refocus its U.S. Southern Command exercises to focus on counter-cartel operations, Gen. Joe Ryan, who heads Army Western Hemisphere Command, said Monday at the Association of the United States Army annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

The move is part of the nascent command’s mission to build a “theater Army,” Ryan said, above and beyond the largely partner training and disaster response missions its U.S. Army North and South predecessors maintained.

“I think what you're going to see ,where we've perhaps done some exercises in the past that were relationship-building exercises to a point, we are going to focus our exercise program going forward to really be focused on those things that contribute to the counter designated terrorist organization threat and cartel threat in the region," he said.

Ryan said the review was directed by SOUTHCOM’s commander, Marine Gen. Frank Donovan, “to better align with current federal priorities and strategy.”

Those priorities include the latest National Defense Strategy’s shift that puts defending the homeland at the top of the list, with the Western Hemisphere as the Pentagon’s priority theater, a concept dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine.”

That focus on SOUTHCOM gave rise to the administration’s strikes on suspected drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean and the raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

“Make no mistake; these are designated terrorist organizations," Ryan said. "They are global economic syndicates that have created a business model that is survivable, has survived over decades, and will continue to survive unless we disrupt the economic side of it."

At the same time, the Army is also beefing up its ability to do the legacy mission of crisis response in SOUTHCOM, Ryan said. The service recently got approval to move more aviation assets and personnel down south, to help move people and supplies.

"We're going to grow that footprint down there, where it's a relatively modest footprint to date, given the responsibilities it's tended to, and we're going to give them more aircraft, more crews, more maintainers here over the next couple of fiscal years, to help them address some of the natural disasters and threats in the region," Ryan said. "Because those things become absolutely critical when you're talking about moving supplies, moving people to the point in need, and making assessments."

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Army activates sustainment brigade as part of Pacific restructuring

Jennifer Hlad — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 22:06:11 -0400

The Army shuttered one Okinawa-based support unit and reactivated a larger one, part of the broader effort to prepare for a potential conflict in the expansive theater.

The closure of the 10th Support Group and the reestablishment of the 45th Sustainment Brigade will give the service a brigade-level headquarters that can better command and control sustainment capabilities in the region, said Col. Dennis Han, who leads the new unit. It will also mean a “small growth” in the number of soldiers at Torii Station, but no additional infrastructure at the base on Okinawa’s west coast.

While the 10th Support Group was focused on providing logistics support within Japan, the change to 45th Sustainment Brigade broadens the aperture to the entire Pacific.

The Army is “heavily investing in the emerging requirements here,” and this is part of the service’s response, Han said. “Over the next couple of years, we’re looking forward to building our staff, building our capacity to be prepared for whatever comes our way.”

Maj. Gen. James Dooghan, commander of U.S. Army Japan, said in a release that the ceremony was "more than casing one set of colors and uncasing another. ... It is about continuity and transformation, ensuring our Army is positioned to sustain the force wherever and whenever it is needed."

Sustainment is a perennial topic at regional conferences. At AUSA’s Land Forces Pacific in May, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command leader Adm. Samuel Paparo noted that the Army “delivers foundational sustainment capabilities to the entire joint force. And I’m fervent in my belief that nobody knows or senses or feels viscerally the scale of sustainment than our nation’s Army.”

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Recent Taiwan simulation highlights US cyberdefense gaps against China, experts warn

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 11:59:00 -0400

The United States devotes too little attention toward preparedness for a Chinese campaign of cyberattacks and economic pressure against Taiwan, organizers of a recent war game warned Tuesday, arguing that gaps between military and civilian planning could delay assistance to the island.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies exercise examined how Beijing could disrupt Taiwan’s communications networks to extract political concessions without launching an invasion. The simulation was held in Taiwan in late September, and its findings were briefed to Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te and his national security team, according to the think tank.

Mark Montgomery, an FDD senior fellow and retired Navy rear admiral who helped lead the exercise, said Washington routinely rehearses possible military conflict over Taiwan but is less systematic about preparing for the cyber operations he considers more likely to occur.

“The Department of Defense sees it as a problem for the other federal agencies, and the other federal agencies don’t have a budget or a systematic process for running these kinds of tabletops,” he said in a briefing with reporters.

The exercise began with localized cellular disruptions, information manipulation and pressure on satellite connectivity. A second phase escalated to damaged undersea cables, disabled electrical substations supporting telecommunications and strained backup networks, according to Craig Singleton, FDD’s China program director, who played China in the simulation.

The aim was to make daily life less reliable and undermine confidence in Taiwan’s government while avoiding a direct confrontation with the United States, Singleton said. Communications outages could also compound problems in other sectors, disrupting payments, slowing emergency coordination and making power failures harder to manage.

Taiwanese participants rerouted traffic and activated alternatives. But the harder test was whether those systems could sustain services for weeks as Beijing studied the response and targeted the backups, he said.

Asked by Nextgov/FCW about lessons from Salt Typhoon, the Chinese hacking campaign that breached U.S. and global telecommunications networks, Singleton said that operation informed the scenario, but it wasn’t named directly in the exercise packets.

A separate Chinese hacking collective dubbed Volt Typhoon—which seeks to establish access⁠ to critical infrastructure for disruptive or destructive attacks during a major crisis or conflict—was also not mentioned directly, but its activities also influenced the war game.

“If an adversary already understands the network, its dependencies and its fallback pathways, then disruption can become much more targeted and adaptive,” Singleton said.

Montgomery said policymakers also tend to underestimate recovery times for systems that are taken down, especially when restoring one service depends on bringing others back online. He described that as a recurring problem in exercises across several countries.

“You know they’re speaking in minutes and hours, and my experience is days or weeks,” he said.

The warnings underscore the range of threats Taiwan faces beyond a possible Chinese invasion. In its 2026 worldwide threat assessment⁠, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said Chinese leaders did not currently plan to invade Taiwan in 2027 and had no fixed timeline for unification. Beijing preferred achieving its goal without force, the assessment said, while continuing to develop military options.

More recently, U.S. officials have assessed an invasion before 2028 as increasingly unlikely⁠, citing military readiness delays and China’s interest in Taiwan’s next presidential election.

China claims Taiwan as its territory, although it has never governed the self-ruled island, and views bringing the island under its control as central to national unification. China has not ruled out using force, but cyberattacks and economic pressure could offer ways to weaken Taiwan’s resistance and push its leaders toward concessions without the risks of an invasion.

Montgomery separately warned that early 2028 could bring intensified cyber and economic coercion if Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party wins a fourth consecutive presidential election. FDD hopes to run future exercises with congressional staff and federal agencies, he added.

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Pentagon, FBI personnel-data breaches raise questions

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 14:00:00 -0400

A Pentagon breach that exposed sensitive personnel information for months is raising questions yet again about federal agencies' ability to detect unauthorized access to their records.

Information about roughly 3 million people was potentially exposed from October 2025 to July 16, 2026, by a breach of a file-sharing system at the Defense Manpower Data Center, which maintains personnel information used across the military and other government agencies.

“Three million people may be the headline, but months of unauthorized access to highly sensitive data going undetected is the real warning,” said Nitay Milner, co-founder and CEO of data security company ORION Security.

Nextgov/FCW obtained a copy of the letter, which was signed by DMDC Director Katie Griffin. The accessed files contained unencrypted personal information, including Social Security numbers and, depending on the individual, names, birth dates, contact information and military occupational specialties.

“Upon discovery of the security vulnerability, DMDC immediately initiated privacy and cybersecurity incident response actions in accordance with Office of the Management and Budget and [Defense] Department guidelines and policies,” Griffin wrote. “We are taking appropriate actions to assess and enhance the cybersecurity posture of the DMDC system.”

DMDC patched the flaw and restored the system, according to the letter, and affected individuals are being offered a year of credit monitoring and identity-restoration services.

Military Times first reported the incident late last month, citing the same notice. A defense official later told CNN that the breach affected 2.76 million living people and another 294,000 deceased individuals.

The disclosure comes as the FBI responds to a separate breach claimed by prolific cybercrime group ShinyHunters, which likely exposed sensitive records of personnel involved in intelligence-gathering roles.

No public evidence has linked the intrusions, though both cases involve information that could help attackers identify government personnel and tailor attempts to deceive them through fraud schemes. Such data can also identify employees whose work is of particular interest to foreign intelligence services.

The breach is hardly the first to expose weaknesses in federal systems in recent years. In December 2024, Treasury disclosed that Chinese state-sponsored hackers accessed unclassified documents through a compromised remote-support service. Separately, the federal judiciary acknowledged attacks on its electronic case management system in August 2025, and the Congressional Budget Office confirmed unauthorized access to its systems that November.

AI systems are widely expected to accelerate cyberattacks, helping hackers find security weaknesses and use stolen personal information to make their targeting more precise and convincing.

Milner said detecting unauthorized activity requires agencies to understand who is gathering sensitive information, whether they are permitted to enter a given system and whether their behavior makes sense.

That scrutiny can matter even when an intrusion doesn’t immediately disrupt a system or draw attention. In the case of DMDC, the department’s notification described access spanning roughly nine months before the vulnerability was discovered.

Jeff Wichman, senior director of breach preparedness and response at Semperis, said agencies must plan for intrusions even when they have experienced security teams and established protections.

“The FBI and Pentagon have amazing responders, but these breaches are still happening and eventually everyone is hit,” he said. “True resilience depends on having a fully pressure-tested incident response plan detailing exactly which teams are responsible for what across the entire breach cycle, from initial discovery and containment to legal and regulatory reporting.”

He also warned that new government AI services, including the America.gov chatbot, could create more ways for attackers to reach sensitive information if those tools connect to agency systems. “More government agencies will fall victim to compromise,” he said. “Every piece of leaked data creates a domino effect.”

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China-linked hackers posed as former US officials, Anthropic employee to target AI experts

David DiMolfetta — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 05:00:00 -0400

Chinese hackers impersonated a former senior White House technology official, a former State Department economist and a senior Anthropic employee in attempts to break into the cloud accounts of artificial intelligence policy experts, according to findings from cybersecurity company Proofpoint released Thursday.

The campaigns targeted researchers at think tanks, universities and law firms, using invitations to advise on AI policy and export controls to start conversations. Once recipients responded, the attackers sent links designed to steal their Microsoft login credentials, per the findings.

Among those impersonated were Lynne Parker, a former principal deputy director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Heidi Crebo-Rediker, who served as the State Department’s first chief economist.

Proofpoint connected the activity to a group tracked as TA419, describing it as a China-aligned outfit supporting Beijing’s intelligence interests. The report doesn’t say how many people were targeted, whether any accounts were successfully compromised or if the attackers obtained any information.

Beginning July 8, the hackers posed as Parker and then Crebo-Rediker in messages inviting AI experts to join a fictitious “AI Policy Advisory Committee” or contribute to a purported Senate Foreign Relations Committee report on AI export controls and supply chains. Parker’s White House roles included assistant director for AI and founding director of the National AI Initiative Office. Crebo-Rediker, now a Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow, previously worked as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s chief of international finance and economics.

After a recipient engaged with the initial messages, the attackers followed up with correspondence that directed targets to a fake OneDrive page used to attempt the account theft.

The group had also used a similar approach in February, impersonating a senior Anthropic employee in an email to an AI policy analyst at a U.S. think tank, Proofpoint said. The subject line read, “Request for Feedback on Military Integration of Claude,” invoking ongoing debate over military use of the company’s AI models. The research did not name the impersonated employee.

The hackers have “consistently shown an interest in defense, national security, energy, international relations, and foreign policy targets, predominantly with a nexus to the U.S. and Japan,” the report says. “The targeting of AI policy experts represents an extension of that remit rather than a departure from it.”

In an email to Nextgov/FCW, Parker confirmed that she learned of the impersonation on July 9, when two recipients contacted her through separate channels to ask whether she had sent the emails. She told them the messages were fraudulent and alerted other colleagues.

“The challenge is that, without knowing who the bad actors are targeting, it’s difficult to reach everyone who might be at risk,” Parker said.

“It is personally troubling to see the trust and relationships I’ve built over my career exploited to deceive others,” she added. “Targeting people in the field can be a way to gain access to valuable information and networks. Protecting America’s AI leadership requires protecting the people and institutions behind it and recognizing that trusted relationships can themselves become a target.”

Crebo-Rediker and Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment. China’s embassy in Washington, D.C., was also contacted. Chinese officials have routinely denied allegations of state-backed hacking and espionage.

The decision to target policy researchers highlights expanding intelligence threats in the global AI race between the U.S., China and other nation-states. Access to experts’ accounts could expose private discussions and professional contacts relevant to decisions about AI’s development, military use and sale abroad. The cyberspies’ approach also illustrates how attackers continue to exploit the dynamics of routine professional exchanges for information-gathering.

The findings also come as AI companies gain an increasingly direct role in Washington’s debate over how to oversee the fast-evolving technology. President Donald Trump met with industry leaders Tuesday to endorse voluntary AI safety commitments. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also had dinner with Trump on Sunday.

Proofpoint found that the attackers registered web addresses impersonating the Heritage Foundation, Japan’s defense minister Shinjiro Koizumi and the Japan–Taiwan Exchange Association. Posing as those figures and organizations could help the hackers convince experts that a malicious email is worth their time.

“At the end of the day, humans are our best line of defense,” Don Styer, a former Navy Supply Corps officer and executive vice president for federal services at Consulting Solutions, said in an interview. Attackers can exploit trust through impersonation or seemingly routine requests, he said, adding that foreign adversaries value intelligence they can’t find in public sources and may combine seemingly innocuous details to build a larger picture of a target.

Professional outreach has long been used as an intelligence tool. Nextgov/FCW reported in January that a suspected Chinese spying outfit approached a former senior State Department official last year with an offer to pay for research on U.S. policy toward Venezuela.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported in June that its reporters received suspicious consulting offers after publishing an investigation into China’s transnational repression. Separately, Britain’s MI5 on Wednesday accused the China General Technology Research Institute of funding academic work to improve Chinese intelligence capabilities. Over 100 U.K.-based academics had contributed to its projects, including research involving AI and cybersecurity, according to the agency, which added that many participants may have been unaware of the institute’s intelligence ties.

The targeting comes amid broader U.S. concerns about Chinese efforts to siphon American AI capabilities. Early last month, the NSA and other agencies accused Chinese developers of conducting large-scale distillation campaigns that use responses from advanced U.S. models to train competing systems.

The attackers revealed in Proofpoint’s findings “will likely continue targeting think tanks and policy experts working on technologies, and in geographies, of particular interest to the Chinese government” and will “likely also continue spoofing the identities of real subject-matter experts,” the company said.

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Pentagon update on National Defense Strategy cites progress, omits key threats

Patrick Tucker — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:41:40 -0400

The Pentagon’s latest report about its implementation of the National Defense Strategy notes progress on accelerating weapons production, cutting red tape, and persuading European governments to boost defense spending—but is light on problems such as Russia’s increasing aggression in Europe and the high cost of U.S. wars in the Middle East.

The report to Congress, dated Sept. 22 but pushed out on Defense Department social media on Tuesday, argues that the Trump administration has made “significant progress implementing the 2026 National Defense Strategy’s guidance” in several areas. It cites a historically large budget request that includes funding for undersea forces, long-range air forces, long-range ground fires, and satellites for communication and intelligence; and $53 billion to accelerate the development of munitions.

The report arrives one day before Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s scheduled “State of the Force” address at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. He is likely to talk about some of the update’s key themes, according to one person familiar with the matter.

The update cites progress made in the Golden Dome for America, or GDA, effort to build a continental defense against drones and missiles. “DoW has already conducted our first live-fire event, during which we successfully demonstrated key aspects of GDA command-and-control (C2) as well as integration of other key capabilities,” it says.

The update says the Pentagon has worked with the Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Communications Commission to ease the development and testing of counter-drone defenses. “We have created a first-of-its-kind process for the rapid coordination and safe incorporation of next generation C-UAS technology” into the National Airspace System, it says.

The update touts the administration’s effort to persuade European allies to spend more on their militaries and contribute more to plans for the continent’s defense. At least one alliance defense leader—Paweł Ksawery Zalewski, secretary of state at Poland’s Ministry of National Defence—has said the NATO 3.0 concept should not be misunderstood as a harbinger of a U.S. retreat from the alliance. “Polish armed forces and American armed forces have never been so close and so good and so deep as today,” Zalewski told a U.S. audience last week.

But the report glosses over conditions that have worsened since the National Defense Strategy was published in January—in part, because of President Trump’s decision to start a war on Iran.

For instance, while the NDS holds as a goal the replenishment of the U.S. arsenal, the new report doesn’t mention that Operation Epic Fury and other Middle East operations have set back that goal by “'months and years,” as a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies put it in May. Nor does the report mention the NDS’ warning against “endless wars, regime change, and nation building”—the latter two being among the many justifications given by the Trump administration for its war on Iran.

It skips the fact that the NDS said regional allies should deter Iran and that it said further military action to prevent an Iranian nuclear weapon would be unnecessary in the wake of June 2025’s “Midnight Hammer” bombing.

Instead, the update asserts that the Defense Department “anticipated that such a need [for strikes against Iran’s nuclear program] might be forthcoming.”

But perhaps the report’s most significant omission, which it shares with the NDS itself, concerns Russian actions: hybrid and kinetic action against NATO members, military assistance to Iran, and intensifying the war on Ukraine.

Instead, the update notes that the United States reduced the number of manned brigade combat teams in Europe from “five to three, returning us to the level of BCTs in Europe in 2021.”

Max Bergmann and Otto Svendsen, writing for the Heinrich Böll Foundation on Sept. 24, say that “a potential U.S. force posture reduction in Europe will leave the continent vulnerable to further Russian aggression.”

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After 40 days of combat, Navy destroyer returns home

Jennifer Hlad — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:38:00 -0400

JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii—Some 300 days after leaving Hawaii, the guided-missile destroyer Frank E. Petersen Jr. was welcomed home Monday with delighted cheers, jangling cowbells, handmade posters, and fresh flower leis.

The ship—part of the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group—did 40 days of combat operations and spent six months in an active combat zone. It started its deployment in December with operations in the South China Sea, but in late January was redirected to the Middle East, shortly before President Donald Trump launched Operation Epic Fury.

The Petersen took part in the war’s initial strikes on Iran, firing Tomahawk missiles at land targets on Feb. 28. Then, as the strike group’s air and missile defense commander, the destroyer warded off more than 100 Iranian missiles and drones launched against its group and other ships in the region.

We made sure that we kept dozens of ships safe against a variety of different attacks—missile attacks, drone attacks,” said Capt. Casey Mahon, the ship’s commander.

The destroyer, commissioned in 2022, sailed more than 85,000 nautical miles during the deployment and conducted 45 replenishments at sea. At one point, the ship spent 106 days at sea between port calls, Mahon said.

It also was the first ship to enter the Strait of Hormuz after the end of major combat operations, he said, which was “quite a voyage.”

“Obviously there was stress we had to face when we did that…on the sea, under the sea, and in the air.”

Though some of the adversary technology the crew faced was new, he said, “air defense really hasn’t changed a lot of ways since World War II: You have a radar, you find the thing, you’ve got to track it.” Still, “how these things fly, how they do their missions are very different, and so the crew showed a lot of adaptability to that,” and the ship’s systems were also “very effective in that adaptability.”

The Petersen learned lessons both in “how to stay at sea for a long time” and in how to defend against new tactics, Mahon said, and has passed on those lessons to other ships that are in the region now.

“Like any good Navy ship, you know, you’re ready for that next mission,” Mahon said. “It wasn’t what we expected to happen on deployment, but for the crew, you know, whether you’re in the north Arabian Sea or the South China Sea, you’re at sea, and so we do the operations that we’re directed to do.”

Clutching ti leaf lei as she waited on the pier with her two children, Alysha Nishikawa said she was worried at times during the deployment, but she tried to “throw out positive energy” to her husband and reassure him that they were OK so he could continue to do his job.

Petty Officer 1st Class Ryhean Tucker, who was one of the first sailors to reunite with his family as the recipient of the “first kiss,” said the deployment was “stressful” and challenging. His wife, Taylor Tucker, said it was also challenging for her, taking care of their two children and moving from Virginia to Hawaii.

“It was a big job, but we did it,” she said.

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Hegseth orders cyber, intelligence agencies to prioritize election defense

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:15:00 -0400

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed U.S. Cyber Command and military intelligence agencies to prioritize countering foreign threats to the upcoming elections, ordering intelligence collection and coordination with the Department of Homeland Security.

The Sept. 22 memorandum was released publicly Monday and instructs the defense intelligence enterprise to gather and analyze information on foreign election threats. It separately directs Cyber Command to use its existing authorities and capabilities to counter potential cyberattacks by foreign actors targeting the elections.

“I am therefore directing the entire [Defense Intelligence Enterprise] to mobilize every authorized asset, capability, and partnership under your command to defend our election infrastructure from foreign malign influence,” Hegseth wrote.

The memo is addressed to the leaders of Cyber Command, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. It calls protecting elections a “no-fail mission,” but does not identify particular adversaries or operations, specify additional staffing or funding, or set implementation deadlines.

The directive notably comes amid a broader retreat from dedicated federal efforts to track foreign influence and disinformation. The second Trump administration has dismantled the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, reorganized the intelligence community’s coordination of that work and reduced election security support at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

At the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, an overhaul shifted many responsibilities of the Foreign Malign Influence Center to other offices. ODNI has subsequently assigned two officials to coordinate election threat intelligence.

Foreign election threats can range from attacks on voting-related computer systems to campaigns intended to manipulate public opinion.

The NSA collects foreign signals intelligence, including intercepted communications, to understand adversaries’ plans and capabilities, while also helping protect sensitive U.S. systems. Cyber Command conducts military cyber operations, including missions to disrupt foreign hackers and the infrastructure they use.

The organizations have previously combined those capabilities through a joint Election Security Group. In a description of its work during the 2022 midterms, NSA explained that intelligence about an attack originating abroad could be shared with domestic agencies to help them defend against it, while Cyber Command could use offensive operations to disrupt the foreign attacker.

Hegseth’s memo does not specify whether the same organizational model will be used this year. It directs intelligence work to comply with applicable laws and policies and tells Cyber Command to operate under its existing authorities.

The directive also emphasizes cooperation with DHS as that agency’s civilian cyberdefense agency outlines how it will assist election officials following staffing and program reductions.

Two days after Hegseth signed the memo, CISA—housed within DHS—released an election security plan identifying its 10 regional directors as election security advisers and describing a free threat-sharing platform connecting election officials, state intelligence hubs and federal partners. That plan followed warnings from state officials that earlier cuts had weakened their access to federal security expertise.

The 2026 elections come as rapid advances in AI allow foreign influence operators to automate more of their work. Such capabilities could let adversaries run larger campaigns with fewer people, adding to the challenge of identifying coordinated manipulation ahead of the midterms.

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Anthropic loses legal fight to shed DOD's designation as a 'supply-chain risk'

John Croxton — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 17:57:36 -0400

Anthropic will remain a Pentagon-designated supply-chain risk, thanks to federal judges who ruled that the Defense Department can prohibit its employees and contractors from using the AI company's products for DOD business.

The designation has been in force since March, when the department sought to alter its contract with Anthropic to replace prohibitions on using its tools for domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons with allowances for “all lawful use."

The department has used two statutory justifications for labeling Anthropic a supply-chain risk, a designation typically applied to firms suspected to be working for adversarial governments. Anthropic beat back one of the justifications in an August ruling in the Northern District of California, but did not prevail in a lawsuit heard by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Friday's ruling was issued by Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, both appointed during the first Trump administration, with a dissent by Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, who was appointed by the first President Bush.

“This was not an unexpected outcome given the composition of the panel that heard the case” said Charlie Bullock, senior research fellow at the Institute for Law & AI think tank. “Historically, both Katsas and Rao have shown a great deal of deference to the Trump administration's assertions of executive authority on matters of national security. If Anthropic had drawn almost any other two judges from the D.C. Circuit for that panel they would have stood a good chance of winning, because I think their legal position is overwhelmingly strong.”

“I think Anthropic’s chances on appeal if they get to appeal either to the en banc D.C. Circuit or the Supreme Court are good. But they’re not guaranteed to be heard, because the appeals process is discretionary,” Bullock said.

In a statement to The Washington Sun, an Anthropic spokesperson said, “We respectfully disagree with the court’s decision. Another federal court has already held the government’s parallel designation unlawful.”

Anthropic added, “We remain confident in our position and are considering all options, including further review.”

Defense Undersecretary Emil Michael wrote in a statement on X, “The hammer of justice has smashed @AnthropicAI arguments. They are a supply-chain risk to the defense industrial base serving the @DeptofWar. Warfighters will sleep better knowing that no private company will insert their opinions in the chain of command. @SecWar was right!”

The ruling will likely keep the Pentagon and its other contractors reducing their use of Anthropic's products, such as its Claude tools. Overall, however, the company's revenue is growing about tenfold per year, and plans an IPO in November that some expect to value the company at a record $2 trillion.

Michael and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have been critical of Anthropic in public statements. In January, Hegseth stated in remarks at a SpaceX event, “Department of War AI will not be woke. It will work for us. We're building war-ready weapons and systems, not chatbots for an Ivy League faculty lounge.”

DOD issued an ultimatum on Feb. 24 demanding the company permit its AI to be used for all legal purposes by Feb. 27, which Anthropic refused. Hegseth announced his direction that DOD designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk Feb. 27, and it was formally announced on March 3.

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Stolen FBI data reveals employees’ roles in intelligence and surveillance

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 23:33:00 -0400

Data stolen in a major hacking group’s alleged intrusion into FBI systems is believed to contain personal information on hundreds of FBI intelligence analysts and other employees involved in clandestine intelligence-gathering and surveillance, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The analysts focus on myriad subject areas like Russia, China, Hezbollah, and cartel-related intelligence, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the exposures are sensitive. The employees’ roles only offer a small picture of their duties, but may still help outsiders identify people working in sensitive parts of the bureau.

ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach Monday, threatening to release what it described as two to three terabytes of FBI employee data unless the bureau retracted a public warning about its tactics within a week.

On Tuesday, the group sent Nextgov/FCW and other news outlets an apparent sample of that data containing roughly 5,000 entries listing employees’ names, home addresses, phone numbers and information about their spouses and siblings.

Multiple individuals also work on human intelligence-gathering, as well as roles involving electronic surveillance activities that make use of telecom interception techniques and other covert access mechanisms. Some employees work in the FBI’s Remote Operations Unit, which builds specialized tools to target computers and networks.

One person works in the bureau’s FISA Management Unit, which handles the processing of applications and renewals under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that governs surveillance and search standards used to collect foreign intelligence.

The FBI said it was aware of “a cyber-criminal enterprise group claiming a compromise of the FBIJobs.gov portal and alleged impact to FBI employee personally identifiable information” and added that it is investigating the matter.

The agency said the cause of the breach was still undetermined. ShinyHunters previously said it exploited vulnerabilities in Amazon and Oracle services to access the bureau data. Neither company has returned a request for comment.

Reuters and 404 Media previously reported details regarding the intelligence roles and the ROU staff.

The language ShinyHunters wants removed appears in a May 15 FBI public service announcement that describes practices the hacking group contests. The group has built a global reputation for various hacking achievements. In May, it claimed responsibility for accessing Canvas, the popular education tech platform used by thousands of U.S. institutions.

The direct claim of an FBI breach is “an unusually provocative move” and should be taken seriously, said Etay Maor, the vice president of threat intelligence at Cato Networks.

Exposure of sensitive bureau staffing data could pose profound counterintelligence risks. For employees who do not publicly identify themselves as working for the FBI, the exposure could reveal both their jobs and how to reach them outside secure work environments. Linking that information to home addresses and relatives’ details could make it easier for nation-state groups and cyber criminals to target employees and their families with harassment, scams or threats.

The breach would be “troubling news” for both FBI employees and applicants, said Doc McConnell, a former cyber policy official at the White House and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

McConnell, who now heads policy and compliance at Finite State, compared the incident to the OPM hack a decade ago.

“The breach of OPM’s personnel records in 2015 resulted in a decade of credit monitoring for millions of affected individuals, and the full counterintelligence impact will likely never be known. This breach appears to contain similar data, creating potential security concerns for the victims if it is made publicly available,” he said.

The bureau will likely work more assertively to crack down on ShinyHunters. When any group directly targets the agency, “they should expect that the FBI is going to marshal additional resources to bring them more quickly to justice,” said Cynthia Kaiser, the SVP of Halcyon’s Ransomware Research Center and former deputy director of the FBI’s Cyber Division.

The incident follows other cyberattacks involving the bureau and its leadership this year. In March, pro-Iran hacking group Handala published material from FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email account, which the bureau said contained historical information unrelated to government business. Separately, a suspected China-linked intrusion into an FBI system exposed surveillance targets’ phone numbers.

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Trump's FBI shut down investigation into defense contractor's alleged bribes

Kirsten Berg, Molly Redden, Avi Asher-Schapiro, and William Turton, ProPublica — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 13:38:39 -0400

In the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C.

For the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker from Maine was in danger of losing her seat. President Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings were dragging her down in the polls, and she was falling behind her likely 2020 Democratic challenger in fundraising.

Scott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, was on a mission to close that gap. Reed was meeting that day with three executives from a Hawaiian defense contractor, Navatek. A year earlier, Collins had helped their company land a multimillion-dollar Navy research contract in Maine. Now, seated at a coffee shop not far from the U.S. Capitol, Reed asked them for a $500,000 donation.

Government contractors are banned from making political contributions. More consequentially, for the company to offer donations to Collins in exchange for an official action, or for Collins to accept, would constitute criminal bribery.

But the company did have such a proposal: Navatek was hungry for more government contracts in Maine. If they cut a big check, the CEO told Reed, Navatek wanted Collins to guarantee tens of millions of dollars in additional federal funding.

To skirt campaign finance laws and conceal the source of the funds, Navatek planned to funnel the donation through a shell company. The CEO wanted assurance that Collins would know where the money came from. Reed confirmed that she would, the executive said — and that Navatek would get its government contracts.

After the Corner Bakery meeting, Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC using the shell company. Two months later, he told Navatek executives that Collins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica.

Three years later, Kao holed up in a conference room to recount the Corner Bakery meeting to a group of four FBI agents and federal prosecutors. The FBI had seen through his shell company ruse, and in 2022 a grand jury indicted him for making illegal campaign contributions. No one working for Collins was charged.

Facing years in prison, Kao hoped to do less time by revealing the entire scheme.

What he told them has never before become public. The Corner Bakery meeting, he asserted, was just one episode in a sprawling pay-to-play operation that embroiled some of the most powerful figures in Congress.

Over three days at the U.S. attorney’s office in Honolulu, Kao laid out in devastating detail how his operation worked. He gave agents a 50-page document naming dozens of lobbyists, congressional staffers and members of Congress who he said helped him trade cash for contracts. Kao and his close associates had donated nearly $900,000 to dozens of politicians, allowing Navatek to establish operations in half a dozen states with over $40 million a year in government funding.

Most damningly, Kao told FBI agents and prosecutors, the company’s work for the government was of no real value. Navatek’s research under his stewardship never resulted in products the military wanted to buy, ProPublica found.

Kao’s tell-all interviews with the FBI lasted into late 2024. His confessions opened up an entirely new phase of the investigation. Agents sifted through hundreds of thousands of records seized during Kao’s arrest and found that many were consistent with his account of widespread influence peddling.

Kao had credibility issues. He was now a felon trying to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. And there were other challenges. Building a corruption case against elected officials requires extraordinary proof of a quid pro quo arrangement, in part because the Supreme Court has narrowed what counts as bribery.

Even so, by the end of 2024, the agents had enough evidence to pursue a sweeping bribery probe that could ensnare top lawmakers of both political parties. They asked their supervisors to approve a new investigation and contemplated using undercover operatives to gather more evidence. Although their effort was in its early stages, and it was unclear where it would lead, FBI agents asked Kao extensive questions about his dealings with Collins and her office.

Then Trump returned to the White House. Consumed by a campaign of vengeance, he stacked the Department of Justice with his personal lawyers and demanded a purge of anyone who had ever investigated him.

The specialized FBI and DOJ teams handling public corruption investigations, some of which were involved in Trump-related cases, were eviscerated. One of the agents who had taken Kao’s confession was pushed out as retribution for her role in investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Dozens of agents and prosecutors quit amid the department’s destruction, including the career attorney assigned to Kao’s case.

Trump’s Justice Department no longer takes on public corruption in any meaningful fashion, former officials said. The investigation sparked by Kao’s revelations is dead. And the government is no longer talking to an informant who had offered a road map to corruption in Congress.

The White House referred ProPublica to the FBI.

FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said the agency had investigated claims against Collins years ago “and ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign. Any suggestion otherwise is totally false.” Williamson said the Trump administration has removed agents only “if they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement.”

Williamson did not respond to questions about the new investigation launched in 2024 based on Kao’s previously unreported cooperation with the FBI.

ProPublica is revealing the existence of the case for the first time. We reviewed a trove of evidence gathered by the FBI and thousands of pages of legal records, and interviewed dozens of people familiar with Navatek, its Washington operations, and the FBI inquiry to conduct our own investigation. We independently corroborated much of Kao’s account. Whether or not Kao’s dealings with politicians amount to criminal bribery, the Trump Justice Department has little interest in finding out, and his sheer success reveals how easily influence is purchased in Washington today. This is the first in a series of stories drawn from our reporting.

Of all the politicians Navatek courted under Kao’s leadership, Collins was its most important patron. The senator’s office steered government contracts worth millions toward the company while her campaign was pumping Kao and his network for donations, according to emails seen by ProPublica. Sometimes they cut checks within 24 hours of the annual defense spending bill, which funds military contracts, clearing a key Senate hurdle.

Collins’ office did not specifically address questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the senator’s relationship with Kao and the millions she helped appropriate for Navatek.

Annie Clark, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica in an email that Collins’ office “vigorously” denies allegations of bribery and pay-for-play made by Kao, calling his claims “outlandish.” Collins’ campaign was not part of the discussions between Kao and the super PAC, and her office “fully cooperated” with the FBI investigation, Clark said.

“The fact that the FBI and Biden-led Department of Justice thoroughly examined the Navatek matter demonstrates this,” Clark wrote. “These issues were resolved in 2021 and concluded when the Collins campaign disgorged the illegal contributions that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge.”

Collins is once again fighting to keep her seat, in a race that could determine control of the Senate. On the campaign trail, she spotlights the funding she directs to Maine while leading the appropriations committee, which she calls “the most powerful committee in the Senate.”

She demonstrated that power with Navatek. After the budgets became law, Collins’ office pushed the Navy to award specific contracts to Navatek, emails seen by ProPublica show, even though awards are supposed to be competitive.

“I spoke with Sen. Collins office regarding the $8M,” a naval official wrote in an email on Feb. 6, 2019. “The interested company is Navatek.”

In a meeting with Collins and two campaign officials, Kao said, the officials told him the senator expected his ongoing support. Collins told him: “You’ve seen me deliver,” Kao said.

Reed knew Kao was behind the $150,000 anonymous donation, emails showed, because Kao told Reed he planned to donate through a shell company. “Very smart,” Reed replied in an email viewed by ProPublica.

Reed did not respond to detailed questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the $150,000 donation and Kao’s allegations. “I understand Martin Kao is now sitting in federal prison,” Reed wrote in a brief email. “I never had any communications with Senator Collins [or] her staff about Martin Kao and/or Navatek.”

But an email seen by ProPublica suggests that someone must have relayed the news of Kao’s donation to Collins, just like Reed promised to do in Kao’s recounting of the Corner Bakery meeting.

Seven days after the super PAC cashed the check from Kao’s shell company, one of Reed’s subordinates emailed a Navatek lobbyist asking for Kao’s phone number: “Senator Collins would like to call Martin to thank him.”

The Navatek Method

Before Kao’s doomed reign as CEO, Navatek was a sleepy Hawaiian engineering company with a few dozen employees. It was founded in 1978 by Steven Loui, a talented engineer and scion of a powerful Hawaiian shipping family. Navatek was not a profit center but a vehicle for Loui’s passion projects, like an experimental catamaran for navigating Hawaii’s choppy waters.

The company benefited from the largesse of the legendary Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, multiple former Navatek executives and employees said, whose family had been close to the Loui family for generations. Inouye was a master of earmarks, a practice that allowed lawmakers to insert funding for specific companies by name in the federal budget. The self-styled “King of Pork” steered hundreds of millions in federal dollars to Hawaii. Former Navatek employees say he was affectionately referred to as “Uncle Dan.” “Before Inouye took an interest, Congress didn’t even know our companies existed,” a longtime Loui lieutenant wrote in a 1998 op-ed.

In response to ProPublica questions, Loui said that money appropriated by Inouye made up “a minority” of Navatek’s revenue.

Inouye’s death in 2012 made the company’s future uncertain. Not only was Navatek’s direct line to Capitol Hill gone, but Congress was doing away with the abuse-riddled earmark process. Now companies would nominally have to compete on the merits for government contracts.

Kao joined Navatek in 2008 as its chief financial officer. Loui charged him with replacing Navatek’s rainmaker and eventually named Kao CEO. He sold Kao the company in return for a share of the profits.

Kao was an unusual figure among the company’s low-key naval engineers and boat aficionados. He seemed to be aping a Wall Street tycoon, telling employees they could either be “a beast or a bitch,” a former executive said. He drove to work in a Ferrari and abruptly fired subordinates who displeased him — one time, in the middle of the night. “He had very little interest in the technology,” one former employee recalled. “Martin was only interested in dollar signs.”

Kao also exaggerated and lied. He told different people he had stepbrothers whose parents died in a fishing accident or an avalanche, a former employee recalled. He lied to Loui about having law degrees from both the University of California, Los Angeles and New York University. He once told a lobbyist who raised quarter horses that he owned a herd of polo ponies, just to one-up him.

Despite his erratic behavior, former employees agree Kao hit upon an effective way to replace the lost earmarks. If the company could not rely on a benefactor like Inouye, it would develop a stable of them.

Navatek targeted the powerful members who sat on the House and Senate appropriations committees. These members could no longer earmark money for specific military contractors. But they retained the power to budget millions of dollars for equipment or bespoke research and development. Because Pentagon budgets run thousands of pages and are largely prepared in secret, it is easy for appropriators to add a line item intended for a contractor like Navatek without leaving any fingerprints.

Soon, Kao had refined a playbook. Navatek would concoct a research project in partnership with a university in a member’s district or home state, and Kao would make a large initial campaign donation. Working with a team of pricey, well-connected lobbyists, Navatek would get meetings on Capitol Hill to pitch the research to congressional staff. Navatek kept spreadsheets, reviewed by ProPublica, that listed members of Congress as the “specialty” of certain lobbyists.

Separately, Kao later told the FBI, there would be a meeting of just the key players. One engineer, who traveled with Kao to D.C. to explain the technical side of a project, recalled being sent out of the room once the subject of money came up. Sometimes in these smaller meetings, members of Congress directly asked Kao for donations, he told the FBI. In other cases, he said, Navatek’s lobbyists would relay a request from an intermediary for a specific dollar amount.

Kao told the FBI that the lawmakers, lobbyists and Navatek brass understood these donations were bribes and that the payments were essential to the entire scheme. Kao believed he was buying Navatek’s way into the annual defense budget, not winning over members with innovative engineering proposals.

“I’m not red or blue, I’m green,” he would tell congressional staffers, a former Navatek employee recalled.

While a deal was being struck, Navatek and congressional staffers worked closely on the legislative process. Every year, Congress prefaces the defense budget with massive reports describing the purpose of inscrutable line items. Staffers would include a project description so specific that Navatek would be the only logical pick.

Often, Navatek composed language that ended up, word for word, in Senate funding requests, former employees said. In 2019, for example, Navatek’s priorities were tucked into page 185 of the 307-page report released by the Senate Appropriations Committee. The committee set aside $21.5 million for “hybrid composite structures research for enhanced mobility,” “electric propulsion for military craft and advanced planing hulls” and a “test bed for autonomous ship systems.” Although Navatek’s name does not appear on the page, these were all projects the company requested, according to internal documents and interviews with former employees.

Once the budget passed, lawmakers’ staff leaned on Navy officials to award Navatek the money. Former contracting officers told ProPublica they felt pressure to go along because money from those contracts funded their office — and because members of Congress had confronted dissenting naval officials in the past. “There’s only so many battles you can fight,” one said. So Congress sometimes got its way even when Navatek’s projects made little sense.

Inside Navatek, employees referred to this strategy as “the method.” And it enabled the company to string together tens of millions of dollars in contracts. The result was the same as getting earmarks: a reliable, growing revenue stream bankrolled by U.S. taxpayers.

“It was a simple enough play. Let’s find the small states that have complementary universities … [and] let’s get access to their senators,” Eric Schiff, a former Navatek executive, told ProPublica. “I’ve met Susan Collins. You can get access to Susan Collins. Once we got the first things working with Maine, then we said, ‘Well, let’s keep reaching.’ And so we did.”

In a statement to ProPublica, Navatek founder Loui said Kao’s “unethical and illegal method of winning contracts” was a departure from how he operated the company prior to Kao’s ownership.

Kao boosted Navatek’s annual revenue from $10 million around the time Loui sold him the company to almost $40 million when he was arrested in 2020. In the second half of 2019 alone, Navatek paid a roster of five lobbying shops more than $500,000.

Even Navatek’s executives were surprised at how far their money went in D.C. “It was eye-opening for me, frankly. ‘Oh my God, all of it is for sale. It’s all for sale,’” Schiff said.

The key players in Kao’s pay-to-play deals went to great lengths to meet in person and leave no trace of an actual quid pro quo, he told agents. “That is why I literally had to fly to D.C. almost every week,” Kao later told the FBI. “Sometimes for a 15-minute meeting.”

But the FBI compiled emails, which ProPublica reviewed, that were suggestive of illegal bargains. Navatek executives and lobbyists spoke openly as if they were buying lawmakers’ assistance. In one back-and-forth, a lobbyist and a company executive described another senator as “fundamentally transactional” and having “a reputation as a pay-to-play office.”

In another message, Andy Winer, who former executives said was Navatek’s chief strategist, reminded Kao to budget money for political contributions based on how much the company wanted in congressional funding the following year.

Winer was his guide to the political underbelly, Kao said. A consummate insider, Winer had parlayed six years as chief of staff to Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii into a lucrative lobbying career with a firm called Strategies 360. One of Winer’s former colleagues compared him to the slick lobbyist on the Netflix show “House of Cards” who toggles between the political and corporate worlds.

In another email exchange scrutinized by the FBI, Kao asked Winer about making a $5,600 donation to nudge along a senator who seemed keen to work with Navatek: “Would that ‘help?’”

Winer, who had already donated himself, replied, “With my contribution, I think it sends the right message.” He suggested Kao split up his donation to be “less conspicuous.”

The method didn’t always work. Once, Kao complained that a senator had reneged on a deal and he ought to get his donations back.

“You should not feel aggrieved nor should you ever put that in writing,” Todd Webster, another lobbyist Navatek hired, replied. Webster did not respond to detailed questions.

Winer said he stopped working with Navatek following Kao’s arrest. “The political contributions I discussed with Kao were understood by me to be lawful political contributions. I never participated in, witnessed, or had knowledge of any illegal political contribution, bribe, or agreement to exchange a political contribution for an appropriation, contract, or other official action,” Winer said in an email to ProPublica. “I never advised Kao to make a contribution in exchange for official action.”

Strategies 360 has new ownership that did not oversee Winer while he represented Navatek, its CEO, John Oceguera, said.

Navatek employees began to notice members of Congress visiting their East Coast offices. “You would be like, ‘Oh, there’s this senator walking around,’ and we would get a picture with them,” one engineer recalled.

While some projects involved potentially meaningful research, Navatek’s bread and butter was R&D that went nowhere. As a slideshow prepared by an executive explained, “We thrive in the valley of death,” the term for the bureaucratic gap where research languishes without being developed into a product. The slideshow noted that none of the technology had ever actually been deployed.

The Office of Naval Research did not respond to a request for comment.

In Maine, Navatek was studying ways to modify small boats to reduce the “slamming” impact felt by passengers at high speeds. With the help of the University of Maine’s giant 3D printer, Navatek made a prototype and unveiled it at a press conference where a Guinness World Records representative declared it the world’s largest 3D-printed boat. But Navatek executives knew the Navy had no plans to use the new design, former employees said.

“[The work] got rolled into a few PowerPoint slides and a white paper, and that was the deliverable,” recalled one who worked on the project. “The boats weren’t delivered to the Navy — the Navy didn’t even want them.”

Kao to Collins: “Here to Help”

The first time Kao came face-to-face with Collins, in 2018, he told the FBI, he had to pay for the privilege.

Collins would not meet unless he agreed to donate to her campaign, he said. While it is not illegal for politicians to exchange face time for contributions — in this case, just a few thousand dollars — it was not the last time Collins would seek Kao’s support.

Navatek had been eager to expand beyond Hawaii, and Maine was a perfect beachhead — a small, coastal state hungry for high-tech jobs that happened to be represented by a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Collins, more than most appropriators, likes to trumpet the dollars she brings home.

To work with Collins, Navatek hired a lobbyist, Glen Mandigo, who also lobbied for the University of Maine and was tight with her office. Mandigo asked how much Navatek wanted in funding and how much Kao was willing to support Collins, Kao told the FBI. The University of Maine did not reply to a request for comment.

In that first meeting with Collins and her staff, Kao pitched an $8 million boat hull research project for Navatek and the university. Collins seemed supportive. Not long after, Mandigo called Kao and said Collins wanted him to bundle tens of thousands of dollars for her reelection, suggesting Navatek throw a fundraiser, Kao said.

In an email to ProPublica, Mandigo denied taking part in a pay-to-play arrangement.

“I did not advise Navatek officials, nor would I advise any client, that support from Sen. Collins was contingent on campaign donations,” Mandigo wrote. He said that in his 25 years of working with Collins and the Maine delegation, “I never saw or heard of such behavior from the Senator or her staff.” Clark, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica it was “wholly inaccurate” to say Mandigo was close to their office.

FBI agents had collected voluminous corporate records and email correspondence between Navatek and Collins’ inner circle. Much of that evidence aligned with the story they were now getting directly from Kao.

The FBI had spotted his out-of-the-blue donations in the summer of 2018, just before Collins included $8 million for Navatek’s proposal in the defense budget. Emails showed her staff made it clear to the Navy that it should send the money to Navatek. FBI agents also had evidence of Kao and Mandigo planning a fundraiser starting in April 2019. Their emails — with her scheduler and her campaign’s finance director — freely mixed talk of Navatek’s Collins-backed contract with plans to raise money for her.

The principals settled on hosting Collins for a publicity event at Navatek’s Maine headquarters in August 2019, where she posed for pictures with Kao and a model of the company’s experimental boat. Behind the scenes, the FBI saw in emails and company records, Kao orchestrated over $40,000 in donations from extended family in advance of the event. To avoid the legal cap on individual campaign contributions, the emails show, he told Collins’ team to reallocate his excess contributions to his father — which an agent highlighted and noted is against election law in a presentation to prosecutors — and sent them his father’s full name and address.

“This is perfect,” Amy Abbott, the reelection campaign finance director, emailed Kao after discussing his father’s contribution. “We are so grateful for ALL the Kao support!”

Before the event, Kao said, Collins, Abbott and another staffer met with him in private. One of the staffers told Kao the campaign expected more donations. It was in this meeting that Collins said, “You’ve seen me deliver,” he told the FBI.

Less than one month after the event, the Senate released a draft of the defense budget containing $21.5 million for Navatek’s pet projects in Maine. Kao emailed a Collins campaign fundraiser — who would in theory have nothing to do with a government contract — four days later, saying, “Thanks again for all the support from Sen Collins.”

“I’ve been involved in many tight races in the past and understand last minute ‘needs’ come up,” he continued. “We are here to help anyway we can … financially or whatever.”

Kao’s desire to donate even more money led to the fateful Corner Bakery meeting with the head of the Collins super PAC, called the 1820 PAC, Kao told the FBI. Unlike Collins’ campaign, which could accept only $5,600 per election from individuals, the super PAC could accept unlimited contributions.

The super PAC emailed Kao a memo before the meeting stressing the need to raise money with “urgency.” At the meeting, Kao and Reed, the super PAC’s chair, hammered out a deal for a six-figure donation, Kao told the FBI. Over email, Kao informed Reed of his shell company scheme, saying he had cleared it with his lawyer. “They are super vague and very difficult to get any background info on,” Kao reassured him. “Thanks for doing this,” Reed replied.

Emails

Here are quotes from emails between Martin Kao and Scott Reed, discussing contributions to the Susan Collins Super PAC, 1820 PAC:

“Hi Scott: Had a chance to discuss 1820 with my CFO and attorney last night. They are suggesting setting up a separate new LLC to make the donations. Name of new LLC: Society of Young Women Scientists and Engineers. In my personal real estate investments, we often use LLCs that can be set up to “facilitate” transactions. They are super vague and very difficult to get any background info on. Totally legal and typically used in real estate transactions to conceal the identity of buyer/seller. Wanted to get your thoughts/concerns.”—email from Martin Kao to Scott Reed, Nov. 22, 2019

“Very smart and glad your counsel understands. Thanks for doing this.”—email from Scott Reed to Martin Kao, Nov. 22, 2019

“Great! We will proceed on getting this set up ASAP. Have a nice weekend.”—email from Martin Kao to Scott Reed, Nov. 22, 2019

The FBI spoke to the other Navatek executives at Corner Bakery, who confirmed the meeting took place. One of them, David Kring, the company’s top scientist, told ProPublica he had no memory of what was discussed.

The other, Duke Hartman, told an FBI agent it was just “a get-to-know-you meeting” with the chair of the super PAC and they did not discuss the “particulars of a donation.” Agents, records show, came to believe Hartman was lying about his role in Kao’s pay-to-play operation and would name him as a formal subject of a future investigation. Hartman was not charged. He did not respond to a detailed request for comment.

A few weeks after the $150,000 check to the Collins super PAC cleared, in February 2020, Kao and his team met with Collins’ office and secured a new round of funding.

“We were very warmly received,” Kao reported to his colleagues in an email obtained by the FBI. “Excellent meeting. Total of $32M will be supported.” Records show the Senate allocated at least $10 million that year based on Navatek’s proposals.

Navatek’s ambitions peaked in mid-2020. As the company waited to see if Collins would survive her reelection campaign, executives prepared to ask their champion on the appropriations committee for even more funding the following spring, internal documents show.

Other documents from that time show the company was courting senators from seven additional states and gunning for more than $200 million in new appropriations. Navatek expected to have offices in more than a dozen states by the end of the following year, including a new 15,000-square-foot facility in the Portland, Maine, harbor.

Kao, meanwhile, closed on a $4.5 million beachside home in an exclusive Honolulu neighborhood; the backyard pool had a waterfall feature. He renamed the company Martin Defense Group after himself, joking that it would simplify his future takeover of Lockheed Martin.

“It was working well, and it would have continued to work well,” said Schiff, the former executive. “Martin got greedy. Just got damn greedy.”

Downfall, Cover-up

In early 2020, the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit good government group, noticed something strange in the public filings for the Collins super PAC. The PAC had received a $150,000 donation from a newly created LLC with a typo in its name: the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers, with no S at the end of “Scientist.”

This was the $150,000 Kao donated after the Corner Bakery meeting. The money had come from Navatek’s account, not Kao’s, violating a ban on government contractors making donations.

The center suspected the society was not a real group but a pass-through to hide the identity of a major political donor. It filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. It took only a few days for a Hawaii journalist to discover Kao’s wife’s name on the society’s paperwork, linking the shell company to Navatek.

Inside Navatek, Kao shifted into damage control mode. He spoke to Reed and the super PAC’s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and began to hatch a cover-up. In an email released in civil litigation, Mitchell suggested the society make charitable donations — preferably in Maine — which would make it seem like a legitimate nonprofit. “I want to be sure that the LLC proceeds with the ideas we discussed — giving scholarships and recognition to women in engineering, etc.,” wrote Mitchell. “That would help both of us, I think.”

Mitchell added, “We should develop a plan and timetable, so there are some scholarships given over the next several months, and particularly, perhaps in Maine, where the bad press was.”

Mitchell, who later played a major role in Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, did not respond to requests for comment.

Kao and his team settled on donating scholarships to women in STEM. They offered between $5,000 and $25,000 apiece to state universities where they were angling to win government contracts — that way, the cover-up would benefit them politically, too.

But Navatek’s and Kao’s problems were just beginning. Undeterred by scrutiny from the FEC, Kao defrauded the COVID-era Paycheck Protection Program newly passed by Congress. He inflated Navatek’s payroll to amass loans of $13 million, according to a federal indictment. The Navatek founder, Loui, had long since soured on his chosen successor. This was the final straw. He reported Kao to federal authorities.

“This is not how Navatek behaved or conducted business before I sold the company to Martin Kao,” Loui wrote to ProPublica. He said Navatek was successful before Kao’s ownership and had many sources of government funding. After Kao’s arrest, he added, the company fully cooperated with law enforcement.

Loui has since regained control of the company and renamed it PacMar. He is dedicated to restoring its reputation and ability to execute government contracts, he continued. Loui said he fired employees hired during Kao’s tenure who were “not capable of performing quality, professional engineering and science tasks.”

“The company received no Collins-supported funding after Martin Kao’s arrest, nor should it,” Loui added. “What Martin Kao and his cabal did was wrong.”

On Sept. 30, 2020, law enforcement raided Navatek’s Honolulu offices and arrested Kao for fraud. Federal agents in windbreakers seized his laptop and ordered the company’s IT staff to copy the company’s internal servers.

Navatek’s public flameout attracted the attention of Michelle Ball and Kevin Gounaud, two experienced agents in the FBI’s elite anti-corruption unit. Gounaud was a 20-year FBI veteran who had worked on elaborate undercover operations. Ball had made a name for herself taking on politically sensitive cases. In 2018, she led the investigation into Maria Butina, the Russian agent convicted of infiltratingthe National Rifle Association in an attempt to influence the Trump campaign.

The agents began digging through thousands of records for details of Navatek’s lobbying operation, donation strategy and ties to politicians.

They zeroed in on Kao’s relationship with Collins. In a 60-slide presentation agents prepared for prosecutors, they highlighted contributions that Kao and his wife made to the senator in 2018, right before Collins placed the $8 million in research funding into the federal budget. Kao had also given Navatek money to various relatives to donate to Collins in 2019, sending her around $33,000 through these illegal straw donors, the indictment said. Kao’s wife and father did not reply to requests for comment.

The government charged Kao in two separate cases: one for defrauding the loan program and another for his campaign finance crimes. His love of talking like a wheeler-dealer — including over email — was a gift to investigators. In one email, he all but admitted the scholarships to young women were a diversion. “Whatever… just a pack of bitches getting free $,” he wrote.

In the face of overwhelming evidence, Kao pleaded guilty in both cases in the fall of 2022. Navatek by then was under court-ordered new management. Awaiting sentencing, Kao worked as a line cook at a Cheesecake Factory.

He began meeting with the same FBI agents and prosecutors who brought him down. For the agents, he was a rare witness: a contractor with deep ties to elected officials saying he would speak candidly about how Washington works.

Kao faced nearly a decade in prison. “My world and life imploded,” he would later recall in a letter to the Hawaii U.S. District Court. “I was fooled and foolish enough to believe that the power elected officials wielded, and [were] actively willing to sell to anyone wealthy enough to pay, was….‘smart business.’”

Over the next two years, Kao sat with agents for at least three dayslong interviews. He told them that politicians, Collins in particular, had been willing participants in his scheme. “It takes two to tangle,” he told them.

Taxpayers funded Navatek’s entire political operation, Kao said. “Most companies of our size do not have the resources to endlessly hire expensive lobbyists and make political donations,” he told the FBI. Navatek solved this by using money from government contracts to hire lobbyists and make campaign contributions, according to interviews, court testimony and internal company records. Diverting money from contracts for lobbying and political donations can be illegal.

For their final meeting, in September 2024, Kao handed the FBI the 50-page document detailing Navatek’s dealings with more than a dozen members of Congress and their staff. It was not only a confession but a road map, with the email addresses and phone numbers of people Kao thought agents ought to subpoena.

Last year, Kao was sentenced to 87 months in prison. The judge in his case offered no leniency based on his cooperation with the FBI. Loui is battling Kao in court to recover the millions he contends Kao stole from the company.

Both Scott Reed and Amy Abbott remain in Collins’ inner circle. Abbott is the finance director for her 2026 reelection effort, and Reed again chairs the main Collins super PAC. Abbott, who is married to Collins’ campaign manager, referred questions to the senator’s communications staff. Clark told ProPublica that Abbott and other campaign staff were interviewed by the FBI and that the campaign was never a target of the investigation.

Earlier this year, Kao agreed to meet a ProPublica reporter at the Federal Prison Camp in Yankton, South Dakota, where he is incarcerated. But on two occasions when guards summoned Kao over the intercom, he refused to enter the visitation room. Over email, he said he was no longer willing to meet, citing the ongoing litigation. He declined through his lawyer to respond to detailed questions.

By late 2024, Ball and Gounaud, the FBI agents, had come to believe there was enough evidence to warrant a broader investigation into bribery of members of Congress, according to a memo seen by ProPublica.

Before they could embark on their new mission, however, they became casualties of Trump’s retribution campaign.

Ball and Gounaud worked for the FBI’s elite anti-corruption unit known as CR-15, which specialized in investigating misconduct by elected officials. When Trump retook power, his new FBI director, Kash Patel, purged the unit agent by agent.

Ball was targeted for her work on the special counsel investigation of Trump’s failed bid to overturn the 2020 election. She was fired in October 2025 in a one-page letter stating she had “weaponized” the Justice Department. She is challenging her firing in a lawsuit. Gounaud was pushed out in early 2026. Both agents declined to comment through their attorney.

Trump also targeted the Justice Department attorneys who worked with CR-15. The team, known as the Public Integrity Section, collapsed spectacularly in February 2025 after staff were ordered to drop a case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Trump ally. The unit’s leadership quit en masse. Trump appointees ordered the remaining prosecutors to halt new corruption cases, just months after Kao made his detailed confession.

Before Ball was fired, however, she managed to take a key step forward.

Based on all the evidence, she persuaded her supervisors to approve a new investigation. It centered on South Carolina, one of the states Navatek eyed for a rapid expansion. The FBI had questions about a steak dinner Kao shared with Sen. Lindsey Graham.

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Space Force braces for stalled progress amid lack of full funding

Lauren C. Williams — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:33:19 -0400

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Space Force modernization efforts could slow if Congress doesn’t pass a full budget at the end of the year, the service’s leaders said.

“We're on this ramp-up, right, consistent with our overall strategy and the recognition that the space domain is a critical domain, in and of itself, but also for the joint force,” Erich Hernandez-Baquero, the Space Force’s top buyer, told reporters Tuesday. “Now we're going to run into [fiscal year 2027]—and you saw that our budget request was to continue on that—and this [continuing resolution] is definitely going to put the brakes on that for a time period.”

The Space Force has requested $71.1 billion for 2027, including $19.1 billion for procurement. But with little time remaining before fiscal 2027 begins on Oct. 1, Congress has passed stopgap legislation—a continuing resolution—to keep funding the Pentagon at 2026 levels through Dec. 11. The CR permits no new programs to begin.

“We certainly appreciate at least not being shut down. So…that's a good thing, but on the CR, it really does pace us at a time where we really need to go faster. So we are obviously encouraging Congress to do what they can to help support the president's budget on that,” Hernandez-Baquero said. “In the meantime, we'll just do what we always do: prioritize the things that will yield the most mission capability soonest, and make sure we're executing on those.”

Hernandez-Baquero, who was sworn into the chief space acquisition role last month, declined to specify which priorities could be most affected by a continuing resolution because things were “pre-decision at this point.”

Gen. Doug Schiess, the chief of space operations, said about 10 percent of the service’s programs could be slowed down due continuing resolution.

“About 90 percent of the programs we have are programs from last year—so we can still get after those,” but there’s a remaining 10 percent of programs that require full budget funding, Schiess said. “It's going to slow us down, and the threat is not slowing down.”

Amid a broader push for acquisition reform, Hernandez-Baquero said he’s focused on streamlining and speeding up military purchasing. And when it comes to technology initiatives, there will be a new senior leadership role dedicated to it.

The Air Force’s new program acquisition executives, or PAEs, are “establishing those pathways for onboarding new technology, but I'm just conscious that that by itself is not going to support drawing in the right technologies,” he said. “I want somebody that's focused—100 percent—on looking at the most promising tech and driving the prototyping initiatives that are going to help mature it to the level where a PAE can say, ‘Ah, it meets my criteria for this onboard path, and I can go do that’.”

That person is a technology portfolio executive, who “will have the most promising technology coming out of the [research and development] side, and…will work with industry to ensure that we have the right pathways to do that. Conceptually, there would be prototype efforts that get executed out of that to support the mission areas.”

The technology portfolio executive office already exists but the role hasn’t yet been filled, he said.

“When I designate a TPE, for example, that person is going to report directly to me and represent my authority when it comes to the technology transition,” Hernandez-Baquero said. “I cannot do this without the buy-in of the PAEs that are executing the mission areas, and so my charter to them is going to be not only to deliver on those missionaries, but be part of the enterprise team that's going to deliver on those cross-cutting capabilities.”

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The Pentagon must prepare for battles around the moon: Joint Chiefs chair

Thomas Novelly — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 13:11:23 -0400

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.— The U.S. military’s top uniformed leader says U.S. forces must be ready for war near or possibly even on the moon, a rhetorical leap that comes as service leaders are still wrestling with the legal frameworks surrounding its newly revealed orbital weapons.

“Our task, my friends, is to adapt right now, so the Joint Force is prepared to fight, endure, and win, in global contested environments, from the seabed to cislunar space,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine told airmen, guardians, and industry figures during his keynote address at the Air, Space, and Cyber Conference.

Caine later repeated the thought—“today’s modern battlefield operates from the seabed to cislunar space”—but he did not clarify whether he meant on the moon’s surface. U.S. law is ambiguous, defining cislunar space as “the region of space from the Earth out to and including the region around the surface of the moon.” At least one Harvard Law Journal article interprets the clause to mean on the moon itself, and the White House’s National Cislunar Science and Technology Action Plan explicitly said in late 2024 that it includes the lunar surface. But the Air Force Research Laboratory’s 2021 “Primer on Cislunar Space” appears to treat space and the moon’s surface as two different domains.

Caine pointed to recent comments made about orbital weapons by the Air Force secretary and the Space Force’s chief of space operations. Top space force officials have been hesitant to provide more details on how they would operate in that domain and how they’d responsibly use space weapons in future conflicts.

While top Space Force officials have provided few details about how U.S. forces would fight between the Earth and its moon, they have been vocal about adding sensors and capabilities to watch adversary movements there. Aaron Brynildson, a space law professor at the University of Mississippi said it’s understandable why the military would want to increase awareness within that region.

“There’s a fear that recent Chinese activity on the moon and in cislunar space might outpace the United States,” Brynildson said. “China has a relay satellite in cislunar space and is performing robotic missions on the far side of the moon.”

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which the U.S. signed, outlaws certain military behaviors on the Moon and states that it shall be used “exclusively for peaceful purposes.”

“The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manoeuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited.”

Space Force Lt. Gen. Gregory Gagnon, the head of Combat Forces Command, told reporters during a media roundtable that the 18th and 19th Space Defense Squadrons are now both sharing the cislunar mission among each other.

“Our adversaries, our potential adversaries, such as the PRC, are actively pursuing activities in the cislunar parts of space. So that's sort of the expansion, if you will, of I would say the end zone, if you will, in the football game,” he said.

When asked if the Outer Space Treaty limits the military’s cislunar ambitions, Gagnon said it did not limit orbital operations.

“The United States Space Force will continue to execute safe and responsible space operations in all regions of space and in all orbits,” he said.

Brynildsonn said that while the treaty forbids the creation of military bases on the moon, “The U.S. needs better capabilities in cislunar space to ensure China complies with that obligation and doesn’t militarize the moon. There’s a real coverage gap by the U.S. that needs closing.”

This week’s revelation by Air Force Secretary Troy Meink and Chief of Space Operations Gen. Douglas Schiess that the U.S. has on-orbit space-control weapons has raised legal questions about their responsible use. Experts have speculated that the weapons are likely non-kinetic, such as jammers and electronic warfare capabilities.

When asked whether U.S. policy limits the use of a kinetic space weapon, meaning a destructive capability that would cause debris, Gagnon deferred to policy offices.

“So we have capabilities in the military because we are preparing to defend the nation. The reason we have capabilities is to help create deterrence,” he said. “When you go to war, you break things.”

Brynildson said it’s not clear how current laws limit the use of space weapons.

“It’s unclear what the legal restraints on the use of kinetic or non-kinetic weapons in space might be. The Outer Space Treaty doesn’t give us great answers to what factors a military action must consider,” he said. “The DoD Law of War Manual is also non-committal on the unique aspects of the space domain. At a minimum, general principles from the law of armed conflict would apply, such as only striking military-related satellites, avoiding collateral damage to civilians, etc.”

U.S. lawmakers are also concerned by the lack of space-focused military legal knowledge. A provision inserted by the Senate Armed Service Committee in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act tasks the Defense Department with assessing its “space law requirements” to face rising threats and examine “options for establishing a dedicated legal organization within the Air Force, Space Force, or Space Command.” The amendment adds that senators are “concerned that current legal, policy, and institutional structures within the Department of Defense may not have kept pace with the complexity of space operations.”

Those clarified legal norms may not emerge until it’s too late.

“Ultimately, I think the first space conflict might be the time when most of these rules get written,” Brynildson said.

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‘It was time’ to admit US has weapons in orbit, Space Force’s new leader says

Thomas Novelly — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:58:40 -0400

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland—The advance of Chinese and Russian anti-satellite capabilities led the United States to admit it has weapons in space, the Space Force's top officer said on Tuesday, adding context to Monday’s bombshell revelation by the Air Force secretary.

Deterrence remains the Space Force’s goal, but the service will pursue it from a “position of strength,” Gen. Douglas Schiess said during a keynote address at the Air, Space, and Cyber Conference here.

On Monday, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink revealed the U.S. military has “on orbit, space-control weapons.” Schiess, who took over as chief of space operations less than two weeks ago, spoke to reporters after his keynote on Tuesday.

“We've talked about you know them being able to grapple a satellite and move it to a different orbit,” he said. “So, I think at this point, we are trying to say that we also need capabilities to not only defend the joint force from space-enabled attack, but defend our assets. And so, I think it was time that within the Department of War we talked about it, and it's time to talk about that we have the capabilities to make sure that we can do what the joint force needs.”

During his keynote, Schiess said the U.S. military relies on space assets for operations like the current war on Iran, that guardians are already prepared for orbital warfare, and that more money is needed for current and future operations.

“The Joint Force made it clear: without the Space Force's capabilities, the Joint Force could not and would not move forward,” Schiess said. “During Operation Epic Fury, our components, notably at U.S. Central Command and Space Command, with support from our components at European Command and Pacific Command, demonstrated that guardians are not supporting from the sidelines as a nice-to-have, but we are delivering space power directly into the fight as a need-to-have.”

Schiess highlighted one guardian in U.S. Central Command with the 42nd Electronic Warfare Detachment who “waged electromagnetic warfare against a determined adversary” during Operation Epic Fury.

“Even as alarm red sirens were blaring and incoming missiles targeted her site, she courageously held the line, protecting forces, denying adversary capability, and delivering space effects until her commander had to literally pull her from the console to safety,” Schiess said.

The CSO said the Space Force has been flexing its capabilities in outer space as well. He highlighted the service’s recent Victus Haze exercise, in which Rocket Lab quickly launched a space vehicle whose satellite chased after True Anomaly's spacecraft.

“This particular Victus Haze mission earlier this year demonstrated the ability to launch and respond to an on-demand, on-orbit threat in just 17 hours,” the general said. “Space Systems Command, our industry partners, and Combat Forces Command proved to the world that if an adversary targets the United States Space Force, we have the capability to deliver a swift response, and we are going to continue to work on getting faster and faster.”

Schiess said those current and future fights highlight the need for more resources.

“So, looking ahead, we must expand that advantage. We must build a sustained pipeline of guardian talent, equipped with the appropriate training and the kit and advanced capabilities, to ensure our joint force is fully powered by space expertise.” he said. “We must ensure today, tomorrow, and for as long as we have the pleasure to serve, that our joint force can execute because guardians are there, both at home and abroad, and in harm's way.”

Space Force has grown quickly since its founding in 2019, but this year, the Pentagon is asking Congress to allocate $71.3 billion for the service for the fiscal year that began more than two weeks ago. It would be the biggest single-year funding increase for a service branch, by percentage, since 1952, according to the Aerospace Corporation.

“Space is both a battlefield and the backbone of our joint force. We face determined and credible adversaries who are building and building counter-space systems at incredible speeds to target directly the United States state's space advantage,” Schiess said. “So that is why we don't just monitor the domain; we stand ready to defend it. So let me be crystal clear: today, Guardians operate on-orbit weapons that can defend the joint force against space-enabled attacks, and in the coming years, with the resources entrusted to us, by the way, we need your help, Congress-we will make disciplined and responsible choices about how we build and sustain our combat advantage, which means scaling our ability to respond to threats.”

It’s not clear whether Congress will grant the request. The White House wants $1.15 trillion through the normal defense-budget process and an additional $350 billion through reconciliation—a controversial and partisan budget maneuver never used for defense funding before last year. The Trump administration is pressing the GOP-led Congress to relent by proposing to use reconciliation to fund some 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.

In the meantime, 10 percent of the service’s programs are on hold because Congress hasn’t passed a fiscal 2027 defense spending bill, Schiess told reporters. The federal government is currently operating under a stopgap funding measure that will elapse on Dec. 11.

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Iran strikes exposed gaps in medical evacuation ops across Middle East: IG

Patrick Tucker — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 04:43:10 -0400

The military abandoned plans to use Army helicopters to evacuate wounded troops involved in the war with Iran, and instead resorted to slower ground-based evacuations, in part due to the threat of drone strikes, according to a Defense Department Office of the Inspector General report released Monday. The shift illustrates a problem medical officials had warned about for years.

At the start of the operation, the U.S. used Army helicopters in Kuwait and Iraq for medical evacuation, but then moved them due to concerns about Iranian drone and missile strikes.

“Most evacuations during [Operation Epic Fury] were ultimately conducted by ground,” according to the report. In addition to the drone threat, the United States had the additional hurdle of relying on host country hospitals for what’s called “advanced, hospital level care” for particularly severe injuries, since establishing such hospitals on U.S. bases would require a large and more targetable footprint.

The move follows warnings from medical officials that future conflicts would be more dangerous for U.S. troops, as adversaries develop more advanced weapons—particularly drones. A 2022 Army University Press article by Lt. Col. Matthew Marsh and Capt. Ryan Hampton eerily forecasts the situation described in the inspector general report: “Medical personnel will experience intermittent air and ground evacuation with medical logistics constraints,” it reads.

Just as new technology has allowed some adversaries to become more dangerous and inflict higher casualties, other pressures led to cutbacks in medical evacuation capability, particularly in the Middle East. A July 2025 Pulse of Army Medicine article by Sgt. Maj. Sandra Johnson describes how, across U.S. Central Command, “Due to competing requirements, many of these bases only have one medic on post and no medical provider. A medic may have to care for a patient for several hours until they arrive at a local national hospital.”

She noted specifically the problem of “no Medical Evacuation (MEDEVAC) by flight or ground capability, or only ground Casualty Evacuation (CASEVAC) options,” across CENTCOM.

An April U.S. Naval Institute report explains: “Drone warfare [in Ukraine] has disrupted casualty movement from the point of injury throughout the combat casualty continuum of care.”

The IG report acknowledges that CENTCOM officials worked to rapidly develop new plans and strategies when faced with Iranian drone capabilities, moving troops and materiel.. “During OEF, USCENTCOM shifted personnel, assets, and storage facilities as locations came under Iranian and proxy attacks,” it reads.

The report carries a strong recommendation: To find and fix “the gaps in [Department of Defense counter-drone] interoperability, and the corrective actions needed to standardize” those capabilities.

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25 years after 9/11, spy agencies face old lessons and new threats

David DiMolfetta — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:00:00 -0400

As Air Force One returned to Washington, D.C., on the night of Sept. 11, 2001, Michael Morell looked out a window and saw an F-16 off the aircraft’s wingtip. Beyond it, the Pentagon was smoldering.

Morell, then-President George W. Bush’s intelligence briefer, had spent the day answering the president’s questions and relaying intelligence as the country tried to understand the attacks that had hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York City. A quarter-century later, that view from the window remains one of his most vivid memories.

At the National Security Agency, Rick Ledgett recalled colleagues weeping in the hallways as the agency shifted into crisis mode. Within a month, it had transferred 3,000 analysts to counterterrorism work, he said.

“Personally, it was shattering,” Ledgett, who later served as NSA deputy director, told Nextgov/FCW in an email, adding that he “saw people step up and perform in ways they hadn’t before.”

The response to the worst terrorist attack in modern history would transform the government they served. The efforts involved reorganizing intelligence agencies, expanding surveillance powers and drawing spies deeper into a global campaign to capture or kill suspected terrorists. It also produced longstanding debates over torture policies, targeted killings, mass surveillance, prolonged wars, and disputes over presidential power that became inseparable from efforts made to keep Americans safe from another catastrophe.

Twenty-five years later, former officials describe a country better prepared to disrupt terrorist organizations, but facing a broader mix of threats from foreign governments, hackers, and extremists able to reach Americans online.

“I think we’re much safer than we were on September 10, 2001, from the threat of terrorism,” Morell, who later served as CIA deputy director and acting director, told Nextgov/FCW in an interview. But threats from nation-states like China or Russia, he said, are the most significant the country has faced since the Cold War.

The 9/11 Commission — chartered by Congress and the White House in late 2002 to present a full accounting of the attacks and response — described in its final report failures spanning imagination, policy, capabilities and management. Agencies held pieces of information that did not come together, and domestic defenses were not effectively mobilized despite mounting warnings about al Qaeda.

Just over a month before the attacks, Morell briefed Bush on a landmark intelligence report titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US” that flagged “patterns of suspicious activity in this country” consistent with preparations for hijackings and other attacks. He told Nextgov/FCW it outlined al Qaeda’s intent to attack the country but did not specifically identify when, where or how a specific plot would unfold.

Getting agencies to work together

The transformation that followed 9/11 sought to make cooperation a standing responsibility. Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in late 2004, establishing a lead unit responsible for integrating intelligence across agencies that collect data from human informants, satellite imagery, intercepted phone calls and other clandestine sources. The Department of Homeland Security was also stood up in late 2002 to drive domestic defense efforts.

The expansion also deepened agencies’ reliance on contractors. After years of workforce drawdowns following the Cold War, the federal government turned to private companies to meet demands for intelligence collection, analysis and technology support, according to a 2015 report from the Congressional Research Service. Today, they play a ubiquitous, outsized role in America’s national security missions.

Lauren Goldman, a former official in ODNI’s Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center and National Intelligence Council, recalled a major shift in the basic expectations that governed intelligence-sharing across government and the private sector.

“The burden became on why you shouldn’t share versus why you should share,” she said. That culture has permeated many categories of today’s national security landscape, especially cybersecurity.

ODNI sought to help ensure information reached people who needed it, including officials who might otherwise have been left outside an agency’s reporting channels, Goldman said. Because the office does not collect intelligence itself, it can assess reporting without the same institutional or cultural attachment to a particular collection method, she added.

James Clapper, who served as director of national intelligence for more than six years under the Obama administration, said that coordination requires a “full-time champion.” Under pre-9/11 arrangements, the CIA director also headed the intelligence community, but agency demands often consumed the attention needed for that broader role, he said.

Clapper said the DNI position was created to coordinate intelligence agencies but was not given full authority over them. Entities like the State Department or the Pentagon, for instance, retained control of their own intelligence shops. Still, the DNI could influence their priorities through oversight of intelligence funding and a direct advisory role to the president, he said.

“I do think there’s a need for an overall champion of collaboration and integration,” Clapper told Nextgov/FCW. His remarks come as the Trump administration has sought to shrink ODNI’s workforce and consolidate its functions, on grounds that the office has become bloated and duplicates work performed elsewhere in the intelligence community.

Ledgett credited ODNI with promoting cooperation, as well as running the National Counterterrorism Center and other hubs. But he said it had struggled to take power from individual agencies, particularly the CIA, and secure the president’s attention.

Morell said the CIA knew al Qaeda wanted to attack the United States but failed to uncover the 9/11 plot. He blamed that failure largely on a shortage of resources to gather intelligence, rather than agencies failing to share what they knew. That view differs in emphasis from the commission’s account, which identified missed opportunities to share or act on information.

Clapper said mistaken assessments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs also reshaped how spy agencies worked. The Bush administration cited those assessments in making its case for its 2003 invasion. Clapper, who had involvement in a key flawed assessment of Iraq’s WMDs, said the failure pushed agencies to scrutinize their sources and challenge assumptions more rigorously. U.S. analysts, in particular, had relied heavily on an Iraqi informant whose claims came through German intelligence, without direct access to question him.

The limits of intelligence powers

Global surveillance became one of the defining disputes of the post-9/11 era. The NSA’s bulk collection of domestic telephone records, exposed in Edward Snowden’s 2013 disclosures, drew scrutiny over both its intrusions into Americans’ lives and its value as a counterterrorism tool.

In 2014, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board recommended ending that collection program, and a federal appeals court ruled in 2015 that it exceeded what Congress had authorized under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. But other surveillance programs exposed by Snowden — including those operating under the contentious Section 702 authority — have remained central to U.S. intelligence-gathering.

Ledgett, who led the NSA’s assessment of the damage from Snowden’s disclosures, defended the post-9/11 surveillance effort as “legal and authorized,” though he noted the intelligence community could have done better at public relations.

The incident forever changed how lawmakers and journalists examine spy agencies’ collection activities and whether Americans’ privacy is adequately protected. Contemporary mass surveillance debates have taken on new forms, including spy agencies’ purchases of sensitive data from commercial brokers and police use of artificial intelligence-powered tools to search vast networks of information about people’s movements and activities.

The CIA’s detention, interrogation and torture practices produced another reckoning. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 investigation concluded that the agency’s coercive interrogation techniques were ineffective in obtaining intelligence or cooperation and that the CIA impeded oversight and misrepresented aspects of the program.

Morell, who has previously disputed the Senate report’s conclusions, argued that responsibility also belonged to the president and other authorizing officials, and he rejected the idea that the agencies had acted entirely on their own.

Asked whether the country went too far in its broader response in the War on Terror, Morell said that “as a nation, we overreacted,” pointing mainly to the Iraq War and the length of the war in Afghanistan.

Intelligence agencies also helped identify and track suspected terrorists for controversial targeted killings, including those carried out through U.S. drone strikes. The debate reached American citizenship itself when the government targeted Anwar al-Awlaki, an American and al Qaeda operative, in a lethal strike. Defending the action in 2013, then-President Barack Obama argued that citizenship could not shield an operative plotting attacks when capture was not feasible.

Today, drones have become a battlefield mainstay in Russia’s war against Ukraine, and Western militaries are studying how to build, deploy and counter them. Weapons that drew scrutiny for their role in U.S. counterterrorism operations are now also held up as examples of military innovation, with NATO learning directly from Ukrainian drone operators. But questions about whom they kill and how they are used persist, as the United Nations documents their growing toll on civilians.

The fight over intelligence powers also became increasingly partisan. President Donald Trump’s disputes with intelligence officials over Russia’s interference in the 2016 election helped fuel his accusations that agencies were being used against him. A bipartisan Senate investigation upheld the intelligence community’s finding that Moscow sought to help him win. But allegations of political “weaponization” became a recurring theme in Trump’s criticism of intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

A changing threat landscape

Intelligence agencies now face a wider range of threats, including foreign hackers with access to fast-evolving AI tools.

Morell said the United States learned how to degrade terrorist organizations by denying them safe havens where they could train, raise money and prepare attacks. But the growing reach of digital networks has created other ways to threaten the U.S. without physically entering it.

Goldman pointed to critical infrastructure, where connected systems can allow the effects of an intrusion to spread beyond a single building or city, as a target of such threats. Hardening airports and other physical targets has value, she said, but does not eliminate vulnerabilities created by that cyber interconnectedness.

State-backed hacking illustrates the stakes. About six years ago, Russian cyber operatives compromised SolarWinds software as part of an espionage campaign that infiltrated multiple federal agencies and some 100 private companies. China-linked Salt Typhoon hackers later penetrated major telecommunications networks, targeting senior officials’ communications and accessing systems used for court-authorized wiretaps. And another Chinese campaign, Volt Typhoon, embedded hackers in American critical infrastructure, with U.S. officials warning that the access could enable disruption during a future conflict.

Terrorist groups have also found new ways to spread propaganda and reach potential recruits online. The Digital Citizens Alliance and cybersecurity firm risk3sixty recently examined 25 piracy-based internet television services and identified terrorist-linked broadcasters on 17 of them. Hezbollah’s Al-Manar satellite television station appeared on all 17, according to their analysis.

Some terrorism-prevention measures have also lapsed. A Sept. 8 Government Accountability Office report found that the 2023 expiration of the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards program ended continuous screening of roughly 500,000 people for possible terrorist ties. The program covered about 3,200 high-risk chemical facilities, whose owners cannot independently access federal terrorist watchlist information.

As officials who lived through 9/11 reflect on their time in government, they want the next generation to remember how warnings were missed and what it took to get agencies working together.

Goldman said analysts need to keep questioning their conclusions, examining blind spots and sharing information, despite the demands of daily work. Clapper emphasized the difficulty of persuading policymakers to act on a danger the public has not yet experienced.

Ledgett expressed confidence in those who will take their place.

“Everyone eventually retires, and organizations continue,” he said. “The next generation steps up and delivers when needed.”

The U.S. is skilled at responding once a crisis arrives, but has struggled to prepare before it does, Morell said.

“Becoming a nation, a White House, a Congress, an American people that is proactive in preventing things — preventing bad things — is much better than only being reactive to them,” he said.

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China is trying to steal US AI models' secrets, intel agencies warn

Alexandra Kelley — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 22:00:00 -0400

China is trying to glean the secrets of U.S. artificial-intelligence models by using simpler AI models to query more advanced American ones, national-security and intelligence agencies warned on Tuesday.

In a joint advisory, the National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation said that Chinese companies DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI used “aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation” tactics to extract billions of tokens from the exchanges within U.S. frontier AI models since 2024, likely with Chinese government awareness.

Distillation is used to reduce the time and money needed to create a new model.

“China-based AI companies route distillation requests through multiple pathways to gain unauthorized access, consequently violating U.S. AI companies’ terms of use,” the advisory said. “These pathways include native application programming interfaces (APIs), remote cloud providers, and third-party aggregators that automatically obfuscate user metadata to avoid detection.”

It said the distillation campaigns targeted variants of Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and SpaceXAI’s Grok.

“China-based AI companies deliberately distribute operations across multiple providers, platforms, and pathways to avoid single-point detection,” the advisory said. “They also attempt to distill the best capabilities and proprietary features of each U.S. frontier model to train their China-based AI models. This represents systematic extraction of proprietary functionalities and capabilities threatening U.S. technological leadership.”

The agencies recommended three steps for U.S. AI developers: implement comprehensive detection and mitigation, deploy targeted response changes, and establish cross-organization intelligence sharing.

White House Office of Science and Technology Director Michael Kratsios in July said Chinese distillation efforts — specifically ones by Moonshot AI — have sought to steal proprietary functions from Anthropic’s advanced Fable model. Anthropic made the same accusations in February.

Advocacy groups have also requested the White House take stronger action to keep Chinese companies from importing advanced semiconductor chips.

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July’s breakout at OpenAI was far more complex than initially realized

John Croxton — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 16:10:55 -0400

An AI breakout that made headlines in July was much more sophisticated than previously realized, investigators have found.

Hundreds of OpenAI agents collaborated to break out of their containers, disguising their actions and even sacrificing themselves as they attacked Hugging Face, a widely used open-source code library, according to a recent post from METR, a research nonprofit.

“This incident was orders of magnitude larger and more complex,” than previous instances of AI agents behaving in ways programmers didn’t intend, wrote METR researcher Ajeya Cotra, who co-led the investigation.

The report alarmed experts, who warned that AI-enabled hacks in the future could make the July breakouts involving Anthropic and OpenAI look quaint.

Even if the big AI companies figure out how to make reliable guardrails, their products are generally only a few months ahead of open-weight models, which can be freely downloaded and modified for use.

Nathan Calvin, general counsel at AI advocacy organization Encode AI, wrote on X, "On our current trajectory…a model as capable [as] OpenAI’s internal model that did the [Hugging Face] hack will be widely available guardrail free and cyber criminals will ask it ‘make me money by any means necessary.’”

Calvin added: "And then a truly absurd number of people…are going to get repeatedly hacked." The incident goes far beyond July's instances of AI agents accessing the internet, the METR researchers wrote. Hundreds of agents “developed a way to hack out of their containers and fully replace a part of the system for executing tool calls"—that is, commands to read and write files, access webpages, or perform other digital tasks.

"This allowed them to pretend to issue one tool call while actually running an arbitrary other tool call of their choice.” This meant that the AIs could pretend to run a command to, say, view a webpage, while actually running a totally different command, like deleting an unrelated file.

The researchers wrote that the agents weren’t intending to commit crimes, per se. Rather, they "seemed primarily motivated” to understand how to achieve the highest possible score during an experiment—including spending much of their time trying to fool the scoring mechanism into accepting cheats.

METR’s Cotra wrote, “Another jump like this could put us in very dangerous territory…in many ways we’ve still only scratched the surface of what these agents did and why.”

At Hugging Face, company engineers tried to use OpenAI tools to understand how their security was defeated by the agentic swarm, but were blocked by OpenAI's safeguards against misuse. So they turned to a Chinese open-weight model instead.

“The propensity to compromise infrastructure can drop over 100x when using the production ChatGPT harness and system prompt,” the company said in a statement after the hacks. Hugging Face co-founder and chief science officer Thomas Wolf wrote on X on August 5, “While we can impose these coping solutions at the API/deployment level, it's harder to impose them in advance on all actors using open-source models. Right now open-source models are slightly below the frontier level and have not yet shown any propensity to deceive humans, though.”

AI agents used for hacking could make it difficult for countries to determine who is behind new cyberattacks, because they strip out the stylistic clues investigators use to determine a hacker’s origins. Colin Shea-Blymyer, a research fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, said, “One of the ways that we can tell who performs an attack is by what tactics they use…like ‘Oh, that’s a classic Russian tactic. Oh, this looks like a tactic that a Chinese [actor] would use.’ If everybody’s using agents…using the same tactics, well, who knows who’s doing what any more?”

“If anonymity remains pretty high, I think it's potentially very destructive to have a lot of these models out there. That said, I'm not sure there's much we can do to stop it,” Shea-Blymyer said.

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The US may lack the engineers to rebuild space assets in a future war: RAND

Thomas Novelly — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 16:52:36 -0400

The defense industry would likely struggle to rebuild the U.S. military’s crucial space capabilities during a war with China or Russia because it will have too few skilled engineers to do the work, according to a new report from RAND.

Today, the country’s space-focused defense companies employ roughly 3 percent of its engineers, and competition for skilled personnel means many jobs go unfilled. If an adversary destroys space-based intelligence, targeting, and communications assets, that shortfall would likely keep the military from getting them back online quickly.

“Modern warfare relies on space-based capabilities; therefore, a key question is how quickly then United States can replace those capabilities during a conflict,” the report said. “Although much attention has focused on making these systems more resilient, far less has examined how fast they can be rebuilt after an attack, especially within 12 to 24 months. China and Russia have shown they can threaten or destroy U.S. space assets, potentially weakening U.S. and allied military operations across many domains. In a prolonged conflict, the ability to restore these capabilities on a short timeline could be critical.”

Various commissions have long warned that U.S. dependence on space could become a vulnerability. In recent years, concerns have arisen over Russian and Chinese nuclear anti-satellite weapons. Rebuilding devastated constellations could require more engineers than the country has available, RAND wrote.

While recent Space Force and White House initiatives aim to turn the tide, it doesn't match the demand the administration is putting on the military space industry and, ultimately, more creative solutions are needed to grow that workforce, the report said.

“Being able to reconstitute after a conflict is absolutely essential, and that's not just business as usual for people who are working in the space industry. That's a massive surge in production,” Alexandra Gerber, the report’s lead author, said in an interview. “Think like World War II, Rosie the Riveter, everybody's on the line, and this is not just you can teach somebody how to work in a factory after one day. The timelines for creating people to work in the space industry are much much longer than that. So, we need to be thinking about what the space workforce might need to look like to support reconstitution during a conflict, 10, 20, 30 years in advance. Not just six months.”

Software development, data analytics, and artificial intelligence will be compete for future engineers, the report said. It can take at least 15 years to develop some of the more highly-skilled, space-focused experts.

RAND researchers found “there are approximately 30,000 job openings per year for technicians and technologists, but only 11,000 individuals are credentialed annually. The space industrial base annual demand is approximately 5,000 of the annual openings (17 percent).” For the 244,000 assembly-related job fields hired for annually, there are only 13,000 people credentialed.

“The space industrial base constitutes about 11,000 (5 percent) of the annual openings for assemblers, and competition for the 13,000 credentialed workers will be fierce,” the report said.

Other major hurdles to growing the talent include security-clearance delays for six months or more, and a limited pool of qualified experts — foreign nationals hold 70 percent of electrical and computer engineering doctorates, making them unavailable from most national security-related work, the report said.

Gerbet told Defense One the workforce isn’t needed just for a possible wartime surge. Last month, the White House released a new space transportation policy which aims to reach “more than 1,000 launches and reentries” by 2030. Building new launch infrastructure to meet that demand requires more skilled workers.

“We're currently at about 200 launches per year in the U.S. And they're talking about timesing that by five, but who are the workers who are going to build all of this infrastructure to support that?,” Gerber said. “Then what happens if there is a conflict on top of that. Then you're talking about a double surge.”

Last week, President Donald Trump announced plans to create a U.S. Space Academy to “educate and train an entire generation of skilled service members, engineers, and civil operators.”

“Think about what the volume throughput of the space academy is likely to be. I mean, you're only talking about what, a couple hundred graduates a year,” Gerber said. “This is not sufficient, right? I mean, that's not really happening at a scale that would impact what we're talking about.”

RAND researchers recommended that the Space Force and Pentagon focus new policy on growing workforce development by funding additional internships and vocational, bachelor's, and advanced degree levels scholarships for science, technology, engineering, and math students, investing in fellowships, and promoting space engineering careers.

Researchers said the Space Force should also “allow Reserve Officers’ Training Corps graduates and specialized program scholars to fulfill service obligations by working in qualifying” space defense firms.

Additionally, researchers said the defense industry should also look to automation as a supplement to those workforce challenges.

“Notably absent from these discussions were mentions of process automation, robotics, or artificial intelligence (AI)–enabled productivity tools as means to reduce the inherent labor intensity of space manufacturing, assembly, integration, and testing,” the report said. “Stakeholders appear to be addressing a structural productivity challenge primarily through volume-based hiring and training strategies and giving little weight to automation as a complementary surge enabler.”

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