The White House has fixed dates for post-quantum cryptography. Defense officials say the harder work is knowing what to protect, and finding the maintenance windows to do it.
The across-the-board cuts written into the 2011 Budget Control Act expired for discretionary spending in 2021, but the mechanism still reaches parts of the defense budget.
When Congress misses the spending deadline, a CR keeps the Pentagon open at last year's rates — and freezes most of the rest.
A wildland firefighter can be close enough to the incident command post that commanders see smoke rising from the same hillside, and still be impossible to locate.
The Pentagon's annual financial audit has ended in a disclaimer of opinion every year since the first departmentwide audit in 2018, most recently in November 2024, when the department could not fully account for its roughly $824 billion budget. Nine of 28 component sub-audits passed in fiscal…
The Pentagon buys from a defense industrial base — the network of organizations and facilities that supplies the department, per the Congressional Research Service — whose top tier is a handful of prime contractors. The 41 U.S. companies in SIPRI's ranking of the world's 100 largest arms…
The Department of Defense announced an Acquisition Transformation Strategy on November 7, 2025, that would replace the program executive offices at the center of Pentagon buying with "portfolio acquisition executives" empowered to decide and accountable for delivery, Defense Secretary Pete…
Declassification in the United States is governed by Executive Order 13526, signed December 29, 2009, which sets classification levels, declassification rules, and the boards that review refusals. The order's core bargain is an ending: under its automatic declassification provisions, most…
Oversight of the U.S. Intelligence Community runs through inspectors general armed with federal statute: the Intelligence Community Inspector General, an office within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, conducts independent audits, investigations, inspections and reviews across…
The Central Intelligence Agency's best-documented modern reorganization took effect in 2015, when Director John Brennan created ten mission centers and a fifth directorate for digital innovation, per a CIA release dated October 1, 2015. The structure put analysts, operators, and support staff…
A security clearance is a formal determination that a person is eligible for access to classified information, made after a federal background investigation and a separate adjudication decision by the sponsoring agency. The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency conducts most…
Congress oversees the intelligence community mainly through two committees — Senate and House intelligence panels — wielding an annual authorization, classified budget review and closed briefings. The FY2026 Intelligence Authorization Act was enacted December 18, 2025 as Division F of the…
The U.S. intelligence community's public threat picture arrives each year through the Annual Threat Assessment, published as the Director of National Intelligence's opening statement at open worldwide-threats hearings. On March 25, 2025, the Senate Intelligence Committee heard from the DNI, CIA,…
The 0–100 percent schedule, the combined ratings table, and the bilateral factor — and why two 50 percent ratings do not add to 100.
The PACT Act — the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act of 2022 — is perhaps the largest benefit expansion in Department of Veterans Affairs history, covering veterans exposed to burn pits, Agent Orange, and other toxic substances.…
The Post-9/11 GI Bill is the largest of the VA's education programs, and its dollar limits move every year: for the 2025-2026 academic year, effective August 1, 2025, VA raised the maximum tuition and fee amounts payable, per a Federal Register notice published July 3, 2025. The governing rules…
Burial in a VA national cemetery is open to veterans who did not receive a dishonorable discharge, to service members who died on active duty, and to qualifying spouses and dependent children, under eligibility rules published by the Department of Veterans Affairs and last updated May 6, 2025.…
Only about one in four US F-35s was fully mission capable in fiscal year 2025, per the Government Accountability Office's June 11, 2026 review: the fleet's mission capable rate fell from 67 percent in FY2021 to 44 percent in FY2025, and the full mission capable rate from 38 percent to 25…
A foreign military sale becomes public when the Defense Security Cooperation Agency posts a formal notification — in 2026, frequently as a Federal Register notice rather than a standalone press release. Ten such notices appeared on June 1, 2026 alone, including Transmittal No. 26-0Z, under a…
Ebbing Air National Guard Base in Fort Smith, Arkansas, is on track to host 36 F-35s and 12 F-16 aircraft once a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement is finalized, an expansion adding 271 personnel and 325 dependents, per an April 17, 2026 Talk Business & Politics report. The base has…
The Army met its fiscal 2026 active-duty recruiting goal four months before the September 30 fiscal year end, signing contracts with more than 61,500 future soldiers, per a May 23, 2026 Army announcement. The milestone is the service's third consecutive year hitting its enlistment target, after…
The biotech startup will brew military chemicals with engineered microbes, with commissioning set for late 2027.
Defense appropriations for fiscal 2027 entered the fall on a stopgap: House lawmakers advanced a continuing resolution on September 1, 2026, following the Senate, extending funding to December 11 and holding the Pentagon at fiscal 2026 levels, per published coverage of the vote. The full-year…
Federal IT modernization is caught between two facts: the Government Accountability Office reported in July 2025 that the 11 most critical federal legacy systems are up to 60 years old and mostly lack modernization plans; for fiscal 2027, the White House proposes no new Technology Modernization…
The Pentagon has reviewed only 4 of its 27 defense agencies and DOD field activities since 2018 and never reported the results to Congress, according to a Government Accountability Office report dated September 3, 2026. GAO issued four open recommendations and said the department provided no…