Bureaucracy Times

All the news fit to be declassified.

Category: Market Mechanics

  • Fed Minutes Reveal AI Boom Is Becoming a Monetary-Policy Problem

    The Federal Reserve once viewed artificial intelligence primarily as a potential productivity engine. Its latest meeting minutes show policymakers confronting another side of the boom: AI investment is contributing to inflationary pressures, enormous borrowing demands and higher costs across the economy.

    The artificial-intelligence boom has grown large enough that the Federal Reserve is no longer merely wondering how much more productive it might make the American economy.

    Officials are now considering how much inflation it might create along the way.

    Minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee’s September 15–16 meeting show artificial-intelligence investment threaded through the Fed’s assessment of inflation, business investment, wages, corporate borrowing and even Treasury yields. Most significantly, some policymakers explicitly connected AI-related demand with the case for higher interest rates.

    The committee unanimously raised the federal-funds target range by a quarter percentage point to 3.75 to 4 percent at the September meeting. All participants supported the increase, citing inflation that remained elevated, a labor market near full employment and an economy continuing to expand at a solid pace.

    The rate increase itself was already known.

    The minutes reveal considerably more about what was happening underneath it.

    An AI boom with an inflation bill

    Fed staff estimated that headline personal consumption expenditures inflation reached 3.8 percent in August, while core inflation remained at 3.4 percent.

    The causes were not confined to the familiar suspects.

    Staff attributed the increase largely to previous tariff increases, higher energy and input costs resulting from geopolitical developments and an increase in prices for technology-related consumer goods associated with the AI buildout.

    FOMC participants went further.

    They said surging AI-related investment was contributing to inflationary pressures and noted that effects from the AI buildout appeared to be increasing in core goods even as the effects of earlier tariff increases faded.

    Businesses were also encountering higher transportation and input costs. Some policymakers warned that AI investment could become large enough for aggregate demand to outpace aggregate supply, creating additional upward pressure on prices.

    That concern matters because the Fed is confronting an economy that has stubbornly refused to provide the traditional justification for easier monetary policy.

    Unemployment fell to 4.1 percent in July and August. Payroll gains accelerated in August. Consumer spending strengthened. Business investment remained robust.

    And once again, AI was part of the explanation.

    Fed staff said the AI buildout was supporting substantial increases in business investment and fueling imports of high-tech capital equipment.

    In other words, the same investment boom promising greater productive capacity tomorrow is adding demand to an already strong economy today.

    From productivity story to policy consideration

    That tension has become progressively more visible in the Fed’s public record.

    Earlier this year, AI frequently appeared in Fed discussions as a source of potential productivity growth and economic disruption. By June, policymakers were discussing strong demand for AI infrastructure as a source of upward pressure on technology and electricity prices and considering whether unusually strong investment could contribute to persistent inflation.

    By July, the Fed’s Monetary Policy Report was documenting rising prices for semiconductors and other data-center components alongside growing demand for industrial metals and AI-related manufactured goods.

    The September minutes move the discussion another step forward.

    Some participants worried that the longer inflation remains above the Fed’s 2 percent target, the greater the possibility that higher inflation becomes embedded in expectations and wage and price decisions. Others were concerned that AI-related demand could produce broader price pressures rather than remaining confined to technology markets.

    Then comes perhaps the most consequential passage in the minutes.

    A couple of participants said a higher policy rate would help prevent sector-specific price increases caused by energy disruptions and AI-related demand from spreading into more persistent inflation.

    That does not mean AI caused the September rate hike. The minutes provide no basis for such a conclusion. Persistent underlying inflation, energy prices, geopolitical instability, tariffs and continued economic strength all figured into the committee’s deliberations.

    But the minutes establish something more subtle and potentially more important: Federal Reserve policymakers are now explicitly considering AI-generated demand when determining how restrictive monetary policy needs to be.

    AI is competing for capital, too

    The effects are not confined to consumer prices.

    The Fed’s market discussion points toward another consequence of the enormous sums being spent on AI infrastructure: competition for capital.

    Treasury yields rose about 35 basis points across the two- to 10-year portion of the yield curve during the period between meetings. Higher expectations for monetary policy and strong economic data accounted for part of that increase.

    But market commentary identified another factor: heavy private-debt issuance being used to finance AI infrastructure.

    According to the minutes, that borrowing was contributing to competition for capital and was among the factors associated with higher Treasury term premiums and yields.

    The scale is significant enough that the Fed separately discussed the corporate debt issued by AI “hyperscalers.” Yield spreads on that debt remained wide because of the large volume being issued and the relatively long duration of the securities.

    At the same time, companies benefiting directly from AI infrastructure investment were outperforming the broader stock market.

    The result is an unusual economic feedback loop.

    AI companies and their partners spend heavily on data centers, chips, electricity infrastructure and other equipment. That investment supports economic growth and corporate earnings, but also increases demand for goods, skilled labor, energy and capital. Those pressures can raise prices and borrowing costs. Persistent inflation then gives the Federal Reserve reason to keep interest rates higher.

    Higher rates, in turn, raise borrowing costs throughout the rest of the economy.

    Housing provides a particularly stark contrast. While financing remained broadly available to larger businesses, the Fed described conditions as restrictive for mortgage borrowers and small businesses. Home-purchase borrowing remained depressed.

    The AI investment boom, in other words, is occurring in an economy where access to capital is far from uniform.

    Pay now, productivity later

    None of this means the Federal Reserve believes AI will ultimately be bad for the economy.

    Quite the opposite.

    Participants generally expect AI investment to increase productivity and potential economic output in coming years. But they also acknowledged considerable uncertainty about the size and timing of those benefits. Some additionally warned about cybersecurity and other risks associated with rapid AI adoption that could offset productivity improvements in certain circumstances.

    That creates the central paradox buried in the September minutes.

    The American economy may eventually receive a substantial productivity dividend from artificial intelligence. But building the infrastructure necessary to produce that dividend requires enormous amounts of capital, equipment, energy and skilled labor today.

    And the Fed has to conduct monetary policy in today’s economy, not the economy AI proponents expect several years from now.

    Fed staff now expects inflation to decline gradually and finally reach the central bank’s 2 percent objective in 2029. Its inflation forecast for 2026 through 2028 was revised upward from July, while its outlook for economic activity and the labor market strengthened. Staff also concluded that inflation risks remained tilted to the upside.

    Most FOMC participants consequently believed another rate increase would probably be appropriate before the end of the year, although they emphasized that future decisions would depend on incoming economic data.

    The committee’s September statement summarized the situation much more simply: economic activity remained solid, capital investment was robust and inflation remained elevated.

    The minutes released weeks later supply a detail missing from that abbreviated public account.

    Artificial intelligence is no longer sitting somewhere off in the Fed’s economic forecast as a hypothetical future productivity revolution.

    It is already showing up in prices, investment, corporate borrowing and financial markets.

    And now it is showing up in the interest-rate discussion.

    Sources

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  • The Government That Isn’t: How America Outsourced Its Regulators

    The New York Stock Exchange, as any diligent reader of an SEC filing will notice buried in the letterhead, is an LLC. Not a bureau, not a commission, not a branch of anything resembling the federal government. It is a subsidiary of Intercontinental Exchange, a publicly traded company with shareholders who would very much like a return on their investment.

    And yet the NYSE writes rules, in this case NYSE Rule 1210, that determine how long a stockbroker who fails a licensing exam must sit in the penalty box before trying again. It publishes those rules through the Federal Register. It submits them to a Commission with the word “Securities” in its name. It behaves, in every visible respect, like a government agency, because Congress decided in 1934 that it should be allowed to.

    This is the self-regulatory organization, or SRO, and it is one of the more elegant tricks in the American regulatory playbook.

    Rather than build a federal bureaucracy large enough to police every trading floor and brokerage in the country, Congress simply deputized the industry to police itself, with the government reserving a veto and a badge. The result is a hybrid creature that cashes private paychecks while wielding public authority, and that hybrid nature is exactly why nobody quite knows what to call it when asked.

    A Regulatory Agency That Turns a Profit

    The legal architecture is straightforward enough on paper. Section 6 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 requires securities exchanges to register with the SEC and to adopt rules governing their own members, rules that must, among other things, prevent fraud and manipulation and promote “just and equitable principles of trade.”

    The SEC’s own historical account of this arrangement traces the impulse back to a practical concession, one first voiced by an Assistant Secretary of Commerce in 1963, that direct government regulation of markets “on a wide scale” was simply too unwieldy to attempt (SEC Historical Society). Better, the thinking went, to let the exchanges regulate themselves, with Washington holding a leash.

    That leash is real. Under Section 19 of the Act, an SRO must submit every proposed rule change to the SEC, which is precisely the mechanism on display in Release No. 34-106460, the filing that prompted this piece; NYSE proposing to shave FINRA’s own qualification exam waiting periods down to match, filed under a provision that lets “immediately effective” changes take hold while the Commission merely watches from the wings (SEC Release No. 34-106460, File No. SR-NYSE-2026-44).

    The SEC can suspend an SRO rule within 60 days if it senses trouble. It rarely bothers. FINRA, the successor to the old National Association of Securities Dealers and now the primary regulator of broker dealers nationwide, occupies the same strange perch, a nonprofit corporation that nonetheless carries the statutory power to fine, suspend, and expel the very firms that fund it through membership dues.

    Cornell’s Legal Information Institute puts the arrangement in blunter terms than the SEC ever would, noting that Congress built in “more stringent oversight” precisely because lawmakers recognized the conflict of interest lurking inside the design, the fox, as the encyclopedia entry puts it, guarding the chicken coop (Cornell LII).

    The fox has so far kept the coop reasonably tidy, though the 2008 financial crisis and a steady drizzle of enforcement settlements suggest the guarding is more aspirational than absolute.

    The Robe Wears the Badge Too

    Securities markets are the flashiest example, but they are far from the only industry that gets to write its own rulebook.

    Ask a lawyer who regulates lawyers and the honest answer, in most states, is other lawyers, operating under a license from the state’s highest court. The Washington State Bar Association, to take one plainly worded example, “operates under the delegated authority of the Washington Supreme Court” to license and discipline the state’s attorneys, administering exams, maintaining records, and running the entire professional discipline system “without public funding” (Washington State Bar Association).

    California’s arrangement is stranger still. The State Bar there was established by statute in 1927 as a public corporation, yet the state’s own Supreme Court has insisted, in litigation over just this question, that the legislature’s involvement “does not alter or affect its constitutional and inherent regulatory authority over the bar” (State Bar of California).

    Nobody in Sacramento is quite sure whether the State Bar is a government agency, a private association, or some administrative changeling that shape shifts depending on which court is asking.

    The justification offered for this arrangement, at least by the people who benefit from it, is that self-regulation preserves judicial independence from the other two branches, a genuinely serious argument dressed up, not incidentally, as a professional cartel’s best defense of its own gatekeeping power.

    The American Bar Association’s Model Rules make the same case for lawyers that the SEC once made for stockbrokers, namely that the industry, not the state, should hold the whip, and that the whip will somehow be wielded more wisely for it.

    Medicine, Accounting, and the Long Tail of Delegated Trust

    The pattern repeats across American professional life with a consistency that ought to unsettle anyone who assumes a license means a government inspector signed off on it. State medical boards, composed overwhelmingly of physicians, license and discipline doctors under authority delegated by state legislatures.

    Accounting has its own version in state boards dominated by CPAs. Even arbitration, that quiet corner of civil law where most consumer and employment disputes now go to die, runs through the American Arbitration Association, itself recognized as an SRO with statutory duties under securities law (Wikipedia, Self-regulatory organization).

    In every case the pitch is identical, that professionals understand their own profession better than a generalist bureaucrat ever could, so let them write the rules, subject to a government stamp that arrives after the fact and rarely gets withheld.

    What ties the securities exchange to the state bar to the medical board is not statutory language, which varies wildly, but a shared bet that the regulated industry, given the pen, will regulate itself more competently and more cheaply than the government could manage alone.

    Sometimes that bet pays off in exactly the dull, bureaucratic fashion intended, a waiting period trimmed from 30 days to 15, filed, published, forgotten. Other times the fox remembers what it is.

    The Ledger So Far

    None of this is secret and none of it is new; the SEC’s own historians trace SRO structures back more than two centuries and treat the arrangement as a settled compromise rather than a scandal (SEC Historical Society).

    But settled is not the same as scrutinized, and an institutional structure that quietly licenses lawyers, disciplines brokers, and adjudicates arbitration claims, all while carrying letterhead that says “LLC” or “Association” rather than “Department” or “Bureau,” deserves more attention from the public it nominally serves than a stray footnote in a Federal Register notice.

    The government did not disappear when it delegated these powers. It simply changed its clothes.

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  • FTC Questions Who Really Controls College Accreditation

    The Federal Trade Commission has waded into the normally sleepy world of higher-education accreditation with a fairly provocative question: What happens when the institutions being regulated have substantial influence over the organizations doing the regulating?

    It turns out that question leads somewhere interesting.

    The FTC this week endorsed a Department of Education proposal intended to make it easier for new higher-education accreditors to enter the market and for colleges to change accreditors. The Commission argues that the existing system can restrict competition, increase costs and protect incumbent institutions from new educational models.

    That matters because accreditation is considerably more consequential than the word makes it sound.

    The Education Department describes accreditors as gatekeepers to more than $100 billion in federal student aid every year. Colleges generally need accreditation from a federally recognized organization for their students to participate in Title IV federal aid programs.

    The people guarding that gate, however, frequently come from the institutions standing behind it.

    The FTC’s 21-of-27 Example

    In its comments supporting the proposed rule, the FTC pointed to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.

    According to the Commission, 21 of Middle States’ 27 commissioners are administrators or faculty members at colleges and universities.

    That could sound like an unusually cozy arrangement until you start looking at the other accreditors.

    Bureaucracy Times did.

    The result suggests Middle States is less an exception than an illustration of how American accreditation was designed.

    The New England Commission of Higher Education openly describes itself as a “peer-based” membership association. Its commission consists of faculty and administrators from affiliated institutions alongside public representatives.

    Then there is the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, better known as SACSCOC.

    Its organizational structure makes the relationship particularly easy to see.

    The SACSCOC College Delegate Assembly includes one voting representative from every accredited institution. That representative is the institution’s chief executive officer or designee.

    Those representatives elect the organization’s 77-member Board of Trustees.

    The board, in turn, takes final action on the accreditation status of applicant, candidate and member institutions.

    According to SACSCOC’s own organizational materials, the trustees are primarily administrators and faculty members from member institutions, although 11 seats are reserved for public members.

    In other words, colleges send representatives to an assembly that elects the board of the organization responsible for deciding whether colleges remain accredited.

    Nobody appears to be hiding this arrangement. It is the arrangement.

    Peer Review or Competitive Barrier?

    There is a perfectly legitimate reason for structuring accreditation this way.

    American higher-education accreditation has historically been built around peer review. The theory is straightforward: professors, administrators and university presidents presumably know more about evaluating universities than a federal bureaucracy does.

    Accreditors also include public representatives and impose conflict-of-interest requirements intended to prevent commissioners from simply protecting their own institutions.

    But the FTC is now asking a different question.

    What happens when peer review also becomes market regulation?

    Accreditation standards can determine what facilities a college needs, what qualifications faculty must possess, what programs institutions can offer and, ultimately, whether students attending those institutions can receive federal financial aid.

    The FTC argues that incumbent institutions therefore can have an economic interest in accreditation requirements that make it more difficult or expensive for competitors to enter the market.

    The Education Department has reached a similar conclusion. Its August proposed rule says a small group of accreditors has dominated higher education for decades and proposes simplifying federal recognition of new accrediting organizations while making it easier for institutions to switch accreditors.

    The public comment period closed September 21.

    We’ve Seen This Movie Before

    The FTC also points to the American Bar Association as a cautionary example.

    That comparison comes with some history.

    The Justice Department sued the ABA in 1995 over its law-school accreditation practices, alleging that legal educators had used the accreditation process in ways that restricted competition. The case ended in a consent decree requiring changes to ABA practices.

    More than three decades later, the ABA’s accreditation authority is again being challenged.

    Texas has ended its reliance on ABA accreditation for determining which law-school graduates can sit for its bar examination. Florida has also moved to expand accreditation options, while federal competition officials have encouraged efforts to reduce states’ exclusive reliance on the ABA.

    That history gives the FTC’s current intervention considerably more weight.

    This isn’t merely a philosophical debate over who should evaluate colleges.

    It is an antitrust question about who gets to enter the education market and who gets to establish the price of admission.

    A Very Expensive Gate

    None of this establishes that commissioners are improperly favoring their own institutions, and institutional participation in accreditation governance is not evidence of misconduct.

    But the structure creates an unusual accountability loop.

    Colleges are evaluated by accrediting organizations substantially governed by people drawn from colleges. Those organizations establish standards colleges must satisfy. Accreditation then helps determine whether those colleges’ students can tap into more than $100 billion in annual federal student aid.

    The FTC is essentially asking whether a century-old peer-review system has also become a mechanism for incumbents to influence the rules confronting potential competitors.

    That is a considerably different question from whether accreditation is necessary.

    And after looking at who actually sits around the accreditation table, it is a question worth asking.

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  • The Word That Decides Every Drug Sentence in America Was Never Actually Defined

    Every criminal penalty attached to a controlled substance in the United States, whether it is a marijuana possession charge or a fentanyl trafficking case, traces back to a single phrase in the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. “Potential for abuse.” It is the first of eight factors the Food and Drug Administration is required to weigh when deciding whether a drug belongs in Schedule I with heroin or Schedule V with cough syrup. According to a new GAO report released this week, FDA has never written down what the phrase means.

    Not “hasn’t gotten around to it lately.” Never. Fifty six years into the statute, the agency responsible for the single most consequential judgment in American drug law, the one that decides whether you face a misdemeanor or a mandatory minimum, is operating on what its own officials describe to GAO as “professional judgment.” There is no criteria document. There is no process memo. There is a phrase in a 1970 statute and a room full of scientists doing their best.

    The Machine That Has No Manual

    To be fair to FDA, the underlying machine is genuinely intricate, and GAO’s report lays it out in more detail than anyone outside the agencies has probably ever gotten. When DEA wants to schedule, reschedule, or deschedule a substance, it is required to request a scientific and medical evaluation from HHS, which farms the actual work out to FDA’s Controlled Substance Staff. FDA runs what the statute calls an eight factor analysis, weighs the evidence, and sends a recommendation back. Under a 2024 Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel opinion, that recommendation is legally binding on DEA right up until DEA opens formal rulemaking, at which point DEA still owes it “significant deference.” In practice this produces a strange kind of choreography. GAO reviewed 208 substances DEA acted on between 2020 and 2025, found that DEA was required to request and consider an HHS evaluation for 95 of them, and confirmed DEA did so every single time, aligning with HHS’s recommendation on all 84 substances where a final decision had been published by the study’s cutoff.

    So the system, mechanically, works. Two agencies coordinate, mostly agree, and rarely fight. What GAO actually found alarming was not the disagreement rate. It was that neither agency has bothered to write down how any of this is supposed to happen. DEA has no policy assigning roles or responsibilities within its Diversion Control Division for any of the four scheduling pathways it runs. When GAO asked why, DEA’s answer amounted to a shrug dressed up as confidence, that the statute is already clear and the staff are qualified scientists with advanced degrees who do not need a manual. FDA’s defense was gentler but structurally identical, that each evaluation is so individualized a written policy might not fit, so staff learn the eight factor analysis through what the agency calls “person to person training.” Meaning if the two or three people who currently know how it is done retire in the same fiscal year, so does the institutional memory.

    A Definition Nobody Bothered to Write

    FDA officials told GAO directly that the absence of a written definition of “potential for abuse,” including what counts as a “high” potential for abuse, creates real problems when a substance does not cleanly resemble anything already scheduled. They cited xylazine, the veterinary sedative now showing up as a street drug additive, as a case where the lack of a legal or policy definition left staff improvising. This is not a hypothetical gap. It is the actual criterion federal law uses to sort substances into schedules that carry radically different criminal exposure, and the agency charged with applying it admits, on the record, that it is filling the void with judgment calls rather than standards.

    GAO’s other finding compounds this. FDA also maintains a memorandum of understanding with the National Institute on Drug Abuse describing how the two consult on scheduling science. That MOU is over forty years old and refers to FDA offices that no longer exist. Nobody had gotten around to updating it either, until GAO asked. Both agencies confirmed to GAO that the document is out of date and needs revising, which is its own small monument to how long a stale piece of paper can sit in a federal filing system before anyone with the authority to fix it notices.

    None of this is abstract. The report notes that DEA’s own request for an HHS evaluation of xylazine sat with FDA for three years before a recommendation came back, and DEA still had not finished its own review as of this spring. In the meantime the substance keeps showing up mixed into street fentanyl, and DEA has told GAO it now wants Congress to just legislate a schedule for xylazine directly, because the existing statute cannot cleanly cover the ranch hands and slaughterhouse workers who have a legitimate reason to be near the stuff. When the agency responsible for classifying a substance decides the classifying process itself does not fit the substance, the honest response is not to route around it quietly. It is to ask why the process is built the way it is in the first place, which is precisely the question GAO’s report keeps circling without ever quite being allowed to ask it directly, because GAO’s job is to audit process, not to interrogate the statute Congress wrote.

    Two Recommendations and a Very Small Concession

    GAO’s fix is almost aggressively modest. It asked DEA to write down its roles, responsibilities, and procedures for the four ways it schedules substances. It asked FDA to write down how staff should conduct the eight factor analysis and, specifically, how to define potential for abuse, including relative to other substances. It asked FDA and NIH to update their four decade old MOU and add a clause requiring someone to look at it again periodically. That is the entire ask. Not new authority, not a change to the statute, not even a change to who decides what. Just a request that the agencies write down what they are already doing, so the next generation of staff does not have to reinvent the standard from scratch every time someone retires.

    Justice and HHS both agreed to all three recommendations, which is the part of this story that should trouble anyone paying attention rather than reassure them. HHS’s written response promises FDA will draft a new policy describing how to conduct the evaluations that determine, among other things, whether someone’s fentanyl analog carries a Schedule I sentence or no sentence at all. That policy does not exist yet. It has never existed. The system that puts people in federal prison for decades has been running, by the agencies’ own account, on trained judgment and institutional memory rather than a rule anyone could read, challenge, or hold an official accountable to. GAO did not find that DEA and FDA were reaching wrong answers. It found something quieter and, in its way, more damning: nobody can say, on paper, why the right answers were right, or whether the next official asked the same question will reach the same one.

    Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office, Drug Scheduling: DEA and FDA Should Strengthen Policies and Procedures for Scheduling Controlled Substances (GAO-26-108623, September 2026).

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  • Who Decides When a Quantum Computer Actually Works?

    The Quantum Genesis Files, Part Four

    Washington has spent years funding quantum computers, testing them and listening to companies explain what their machines can do. Now DOE is building an apparatus to decide when one of them has actually delivered.

    Building a fault-tolerant quantum computer is difficult.

    Determining that someone has built one may prove surprisingly complicated too.

    That problem sits quietly underneath the Department of Energy’s new Quantum Genesis Q Competition.

    DOE wants private companies to demonstrate quantum computers with at least 100 logical qubits, hundreds of millions of fault-tolerant operations and scientific applications worthy of the Department’s research mission.

    Reach those milestones and substantial federal money becomes available.

    But first somebody has to verify the milestones.

    That means determining whether logical qubits are really behaving logically, whether error rates are low enough, whether operations can be repeated reliably and whether a supposedly useful scientific computation actually represents something conventional computers cannot reasonably accomplish.

    DOE has decided not to leave those judgments entirely to the companies building the machines.

    The Department is building referees.

    The $45 Million Referee

    When DOE announced the Quantum Genesis Q Competition on September 17, the $215 million competition naturally received most of the attention.

    Sitting beside it was another announcement.

    DOE plans to spend up to $45 million establishing a Quantum High-Performance Computing Validation and Verification Testbed through its National Laboratories.

    Fourteen million dollars is available from fiscal year 2026 funding. The remaining planned funding depends upon future congressional appropriations.

    Its assignment is remarkably broad.

    DOE says the testbed must be capable of characterizing and validating the entire quantum-computing stack.

    That includes physical hardware.

    Quantum gates.

    Logical architectures.

    Algorithms and applications.

    Classical control systems.

    The testbed will support the Q Competition, meaning companies seeking milestone payments will face something more substantial than a review of specifications supplied by their own engineers.

    DOE wants independent evidence.

    The Department is effectively spending money to answer a question that has followed quantum computing almost from its beginning.

    What exactly should count as success?

    Qubits Make Terrible Scoreboards

    Traditional computers are comparatively easy to describe.

    Processor speeds, memory, storage and standardized benchmark tests can provide imperfect but reasonably understandable comparisons.

    Quantum computers are another matter.

    Two machines can contain similar numbers of physical qubits while having dramatically different capabilities.

    One architecture may produce excellent individual gate fidelity while struggling with connectivity.

    Another may possess more qubits but suffer from errors that limit useful circuit depth.

    A machine may perform impressively on one specialized benchmark and considerably less impressively on another.

    Even the same quantum processor can produce different results depending upon calibration, software, circuit compilation and the expertise of the person operating it.

    That makes simple qubit counts a particularly poor substitute for useful performance.

    The federal government has known this for years.

    And some of its laboratories have been trying to solve the measurement problem long before Quantum Genesis existed.

    Sandia Has Been Building Yardsticks

    At Sandia National Laboratories, the Quantum Performance Laboratory has made quantum-computer assessment its business.

    The laboratory develops methods for measuring how quantum hardware actually performs.

    Its researchers study failure mechanisms, devise performance metrics, build predictive models and create protocols for testing experimental processors.

    They also develop and maintain pyGSTi, an open-source software package used to characterize quantum processors.

    Most importantly for Quantum Genesis, Sandia says the laboratory provides quantum-hardware assessment capabilities directly to DOE and the federal government.

    That makes Sandia’s work particularly relevant to the new competition.

    The Quantum Performance Laboratory has been publishing research on subjects such as randomized benchmarking, gate-set tomography, application-oriented benchmarks and fault-tolerance thresholds for years.

    Those terms may sound painfully specialized.

    Their purpose is relatively straightforward.

    A manufacturer can say a quantum processor performs at a certain level.

    Someone else needs a scientifically defensible way to check.

    Sandia has spent years developing the ruler.

    Oak Ridge Tried Measuring the Machines

    Oak Ridge National Laboratory approached the problem from another direction.

    Its Quantum Computing User Program has provided researchers access to commercial quantum computers from multiple companies.

    That arrangement allowed scientists to do something especially useful.

    They could compare machines.

    In 2023, Oak Ridge researchers reported what the laboratory described as the first independent comparison of leading quantum computers.

    The team examined 24 quantum processors.

    They then compared their results against performance figures promoted by vendors including IBM, Rigetti and Quantinuum.

    The exercise demonstrated precisely why verification matters.

    Most machines performed reasonably close to the vendors’ reported capabilities.

    But researchers had difficulty reproducing the highest advertised performance figures consistently.

    That did not mean the vendors were lying.

    Oak Ridge’s researchers explicitly cautioned against that conclusion.

    Manufacturers know their machines extraordinarily well and can optimize their hardware in ways ordinary users may not reproduce.

    That distinction may sound minor.

    For Quantum Genesis, it is enormous.

    DOE is not paying for the performance a manufacturer’s best engineers can coax from a carefully optimized demonstration.

    It is trying to determine whether a machine represents a scientifically useful computing capability.

    Those are not necessarily the same standard.

    DARPA Is Asking an Even Harder Question

    The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has developed its own verification system.

    DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative is trying to determine whether any current quantum-computing approach can reach what the agency calls utility-scale operation by 2033.

    Its definition is intentionally economic as well as technical.

    The computational value of the machine must exceed its cost.

    Companies move through three stages.

    Stage A asks whether the company has a plausible concept.

    Stage B requires a detailed research and development plan, identification of technical risks and prototypes designed to reduce those risks.

    Then comes Stage C.

    At that point, a government verification-and-validation team determines whether the proposed utility-scale computer can actually be constructed as designed and operated as intended.

    DARPA describes the program as independent third-party verification.

    That distinction matters.

    The agency is not trying to crown the best quantum company.

    It says explicitly that the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative is not a competition intended to narrow the industry to a predetermined group of winners.

    Multiple approaches could succeed.

    One could succeed.

    None could succeed.

    The job of the government evaluators is to determine which claims survive examination.

    Two Federal Finish Lines

    DARPA and DOE are therefore examining related questions with different finish lines.

    DARPA is asking whether a company can build an industrially useful quantum computer by 2033.

    DOE wants scientifically relevant fault-tolerant quantum computing beginning around 2028.

    DOE’s target is tied to scientific utility.

    DARPA’s is tied to utility at industrial scale.

    The distinction creates an interesting federal experiment.

    A company could theoretically demonstrate a machine valuable for certain DOE scientific applications before proving that the same technological architecture can become economically useful at industrial scale.

    That makes Quantum Genesis something other than a miniature version of DARPA’s program.

    The agencies are measuring different stages in the evolution of the technology.

    They are also developing independent government expertise rather than accepting industry roadmaps at face value.

    The Government Is Learning How to Say No

    That may be the least glamorous but most important part of the entire Quantum Genesis story.

    Federal quantum policy has spent years asking how government can accelerate the technology.

    Fund research.

    Create national centers.

    Connect companies with laboratories.

    Purchase commercial hardware access.

    Support domestic manufacturing.

    Develop algorithms.

    Train scientists.

    Those activities help technology move forward.

    Verification serves a different purpose.

    It gives the government the ability to say no.

    No, that qubit count does not demonstrate useful performance.

    No, that benchmark does not prove fault tolerance.

    No, that scientific calculation does not yet represent meaningful advantage.

    No, that roadmap has not sufficiently addressed the engineering risks.

    Or eventually, perhaps, yes.

    Without an independent ability to make those judgments, a government quantum program risks becoming dependent upon the companies seeking its money to explain whether their own machines deserve it.

    DOE appears determined to avoid that arrangement.

    From Laboratory Instrument to Federal Infrastructure

    The Department’s ambitions extend beyond the current competition.

    Its 2026 roadmap envisions quantum processors eventually becoming part of DOE’s broader scientific-computing infrastructure.

    That means quantum machines would operate alongside conventional high-performance computers rather than replacing them.

    Researchers could move portions of scientific workloads onto quantum processors when those processors offer an advantage.

    DOE ultimately envisions a dedicated Quantum Computing User Facility built around that hybrid model.

    That changes the stakes of verification.

    The Department is not merely evaluating prototypes for a technology prize.

    It is potentially deciding what equipment eventually belongs inside the federal scientific-computing enterprise.

    DOE already operates some of the most powerful conventional supercomputers in the world.

    If quantum processors are going to become another instrument in that infrastructure, the Department needs to know not merely whether they work.

    It needs to know when they are useful.

    The Bureaucracy Behind the Breakthrough

    Quantum computing is often presented through images of exotic hardware, gold-colored cryogenic equipment and promises about calculations that would take conventional supercomputers longer than the age of the universe.

    The less photogenic part of the story involves measurement protocols, error models, validation plans, benchmark suites and federal scientists asking manufacturers to run the test again.

    That may ultimately matter just as much.

    The Quantum Genesis Q Competition is attempting to push private companies toward a fault-tolerant machine.

    The new DOE validation testbed will try to determine whether they get there.

    Sandia has spent years developing quantum-performance measurements.

    Oak Ridge has spent years putting commercial processors in front of independent scientific users.

    DARPA has built a staged process for dissecting company roadmaps and eventually verifying complete systems.

    Different agencies and laboratories are approaching the problem from different directions.

    But they are converging on the same principle.

    Extraordinary technological claims require considerably more than extraordinary press releases.

    They require somebody with a ruler.

    The Race Begins

    That brings the first four Quantum Genesis Files full circle.

    Part One followed the decade of DOE research that preceded the new $215 million competition.

    Part Two followed the federal money that helped construct the broader quantum ecosystem.

    Part Three mapped many of the companies and architectures already familiar to federal laboratories and evaluators.

    And Part Four arrives at the people responsible for deciding whether any of it actually works.

    The next major event is October 19, when applications for the Quantum Genesis Q Competition are due.

    Until then, we do not know who will enter.

    We do know considerably more about the track on which they will run.

    The federal government helped finance portions of the underlying science.

    Its laboratories helped test the machines.

    Its agencies are supporting manufacturing.

    Its researchers developed benchmarks.

    Its scientists are building verification tools.

    And now DOE has attached money to the finish line.

    For a technology famous for existing in multiple states at once, Quantum Genesis has reached at least one surprisingly definite condition.

    The government is no longer merely asking whether useful fault-tolerant quantum computing is possible.

    It is preparing to measure it.

  • Meet the Quantum Runners Washington Already Knows Quite Well

    The Quantum Genesis Files, Part Three

    This article follows Part Two of The Quantum Genesis Files.

    DOE has opened a new race toward fault-tolerant quantum computing. Many of the companies capable of running it have already spent years inside federal research, testing and validation programs.

    The Department of Energy’s Quantum Genesis Q Competition has not yet told us who will compete for its planned $215 million.

    Applications do not close until October 19.

    But Washington does not need introductions to many of the companies developing the kinds of machines DOE wants.

    IBM quantum computers have been used by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

    So have machines from Quantinuum, IonQ and Rigetti.

    DARPA is separately scrutinizing proposed fault-tolerant systems from IBM, IonQ, Quantinuum, Atom Computing and QuEra.

    Microsoft and PsiQuantum have advanced even further into a government verification program.

    Several companies have participated in Department of Energy research centers or collaborated with DOE laboratories.

    And some received major Commerce Department quantum awards only days before DOE announced Quantum Genesis.

    This does not tell us who will apply.

    It tells us something else.

    The federal government has already spent years getting to know much of the field.

    IBM

    Start with perhaps the most familiar name.

    IBM’s approach uses superconducting quantum processors, an architecture DARPA describes more specifically as modular superconducting processors.

    IBM is currently in Stage B of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, where the company must develop detailed research and development plans, identify technological risks and propose prototypes capable of reducing those risks.

    That is hardly IBM’s first federal quantum relationship.

    DOE’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility has provided researchers access to IBM machines through its Quantum Computing User Program.

    The relationship dates back years.

    DOE documented an Oak Ridge Quantum Computing Testbed Pathfinder project beginning in 2017 that partnered with IBM and IonQ while developing methods for evaluating quantum processors. The project carried funding of approximately $1.55 million per year for five years.

    IBM also participated in multiple DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Centers established in 2020.

    The relationship has therefore included research, hardware access, benchmarking and participation in DOE’s national quantum-center network.

    Then there is manufacturing.

    On September 16, the Department of Commerce finalized an award of up to $1 billion to Anderon, a newly created IBM subsidiary, for a quantum semiconductor foundry.

    One day later, DOE announced Quantum Genesis.

    None of this establishes that IBM will apply for Quantum Genesis.

    It does establish that if IBM does appear at DOE’s starting line, the company will hardly be a stranger to the federal government.

    Quantinuum

    Quantinuum presents an even denser relationship map.

    The company develops trapped-ion quantum computers using what DARPA describes as a quantum charge-coupled device architecture.

    It is also in DARPA’s Stage B.

    Oak Ridge currently purchases access to Quantinuum systems for scientists participating in its Quantum Computing User Program.

    At ORNL’s 2026 Quantum Computing User Forum, Quantinuum joined IBM, IonQ and IQM in providing workshops and presentations directly to researchers.

    The company’s federal connections extend beyond DOE.

    On September 8, the Commerce Department finalized an award of up to $100 million to address manufacturing bottlenecks involved in scaling fault-tolerant trapped-ion computers.

    The work includes integrated photonics, specialized semiconductor components and optical technologies.

    Sandia National Laboratories also announced a collaboration with Quantinuum in August to evaluate quantum technologies, including the company’s Helios system.

    Put together, the federal relationship covers access, evaluation, manufacturing research, laboratory collaboration and DARPA scrutiny of the company’s pathway toward a useful fault-tolerant computer.

    That is a considerable amount of government familiarity with one architecture.

    IonQ

    IonQ gives us another trapped-ion runner, but one following its own technological path.

    The company has longstanding connections to Oak Ridge.

    DOE’s earlier Quantum Computing Testbed Pathfinder listed IonQ alongside IBM as a project partner.

    IonQ was later added to Oak Ridge’s Quantum Computing User Program, and DOE researchers today can request access to IonQ hardware through the program.

    IonQ has also reached Stage B of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative.

    There is another connection through the broader DOE research-center ecosystem.

    Christopher Monroe, one of IonQ’s founders, has served as a research lead within the DOE-funded Quantum Systems Accelerator.

    That center is led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with Sandia National Laboratories as its lead partner. Its mission includes developing scalable quantum systems, benchmarks and error-corrected technologies.

    The relationship is disclosed and consistent with the explicit purpose of DOE’s quantum centers, which were created to connect national laboratories, universities and private industry.

    But it illustrates why mapping this ecosystem is more informative than simply listing government awards.

    Money is only one kind of federal exposure.

    Researchers, laboratories, hardware, intellectual property, benchmarking and scientific collaborations form another.

    Microsoft and PsiQuantum

    Microsoft and PsiQuantum occupy an unusual position because DARPA has already moved them beyond the stage reached by most of the companies in its current benchmarking initiative.

    Both came through DARPA’s Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing program, the pilot effort later expanded into the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative.

    In February 2025, DARPA selected Microsoft and PsiQuantum for its Validation and Co-Design stage.

    That stage has the same technical objectives as Stage C of the larger initiative.

    This is where government verification becomes particularly serious.

    DARPA’s independent team evaluates whether the proposed system can actually be constructed as designed and operated as intended.

    Microsoft is pursuing a topological approach to quantum computing.

    It also has longstanding DOE relationships, including participation in the Oak Ridge-led Quantum Science Center and previous quantum research collaborations with national laboratories.

    PsiQuantum is taking a dramatically different route.

    Its architecture uses photons.

    Commerce finalized an award of up to $100 million for PsiQuantum on September 8, targeting photonic materials, single-photon detectors and ultra-low-loss packaging.

    PsiQuantum therefore sits in an interesting federal position.

    DARPA is examining whether its architecture can become an industrially useful computer.

    Commerce is helping address manufacturing problems associated with that architecture.

    DOE is now offering performance incentives for fault-tolerant quantum computers.

    Again, those are separate programs.

    Together, they reveal how many different federal doors a single quantum technology can pass through.

    Atom Computing and QuEra

    The neutral-atom branch gives the government’s portfolio yet another architecture.

    Atom Computing and QuEra are both in DARPA Stage B.

    Instead of superconducting circuits or trapped ions, these companies use arrays of neutral atoms as qubits.

    That distinction matters because nobody yet knows which architecture, if any, will ultimately prove easiest to scale into a useful fault-tolerant computer.

    DARPA explicitly acknowledges the problem.

    Unlike classical computing, quantum computing has no single dominant architecture.

    Its Stage B cohort therefore spans neutral atoms, trapped ions, superconducting systems, silicon spin qubits and photonic technologies.

    The government is not comparing slightly different versions of the same computer.

    It is evaluating fundamentally different ways of building one.

    Rigetti

    Rigetti provides an example of how the federal roster changes as technology develops.

    The company builds superconducting quantum computers.

    Oak Ridge previously contracted for access to Rigetti processors through its Quantum Computing User Program. DOE researchers used Rigetti hardware alongside IBM systems for early benchmarking and scientific experiments.

    Rigetti also entered Stage A of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative.

    It does not appear on DARPA’s currently published Stage B list.

    That distinction is worth preserving.

    Federal participation is not a permanent stamp of technological approval. Programs change, contracts change, vendors advance at different speeds and government evaluators can reach different conclusions.

    At the same time, Commerce has made a new investment.

    Its quantum initiative identified up to $100 million for Rigetti to address scaling problems in superconducting systems, including readout electronics and next-generation cryogenic architectures.

    The federal relationship therefore continues even as its form changes.

    Google and the Rest of the Field

    Google Quantum AI entered DARPA Stage A in September 2025 with its superconducting transmon architecture.

    Google has also participated in the DOE-funded Quantum Systems Accelerator’s industry ecosystem alongside IBM and Microsoft.

    But Google illustrates another reason this series should resist turning the federal quantum landscape into a simple leaderboard.

    Different companies appear in different programs for different reasons.

    DARPA is looking for credible paths toward utility-scale quantum computers.

    DOE research centers pursue basic and applied science.

    Oak Ridge purchases commercial access for scientific users.

    Commerce is attacking manufacturing bottlenecks.

    Quantum Genesis is establishing milestones for scientifically relevant fault-tolerant systems.

    Participation in one does not guarantee participation in another.

    Absence from one does not necessarily mean a company is technologically irrelevant.

    Oak Ridge Has Been Taking Notes

    Perhaps the most revealing institution in this entire network is not a company.

    It is Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

    Its Quantum Computing User Program began in 2017.

    The program has purchased commercial quantum-computing subscriptions rather than forcing researchers to rely upon vendor demonstrations.

    Scientists can run workloads on different architectures.

    They can compare results.

    They can study error behavior.

    They can determine which machines are useful for which scientific problems.

    In 2023, Oak Ridge researchers reported what the laboratory described as the first independent comparison of leading quantum computers.

    They examined 24 processors and compared their results against performance figures promoted by vendors including IBM, Rigetti and Quantinuum.

    That is important history for Quantum Genesis.

    DOE is not suddenly confronting a collection of mysterious machines whose manufacturers must be taken at their word.

    Parts of the Department have spent years learning how to test them.

    Oak Ridge’s current program gives users access to IBM, IQM, IonQ and Quantinuum resources. The laboratory says it has purchased subscriptions to those vendor services and manages access for approved scientific projects.

    Its annual user forums bring researchers and vendors together directly.

    The 2026 forum included workshops from IBM, Quantinuum, IonQ and IQM.

    DOE is therefore simultaneously a research sponsor, customer, scientific user and evaluator within portions of the commercial quantum market.

    That arrangement is not hidden.

    It is the program.

    Nobody Has Won Yet

    After mapping these relationships, one conclusion becomes difficult to avoid.

    Washington has built a portfolio rather than placed a single bet.

    Superconducting processors remain in the mix.

    So do trapped ions.

    Neutral atoms remain in the mix.

    Photonics remains in the mix.

    Silicon and other spin-based approaches remain under examination.

    Microsoft is trying something considerably different with topological qubits.

    Some companies have received direct federal awards.

    Some provide hardware access to government scientists.

    Some participate in federally funded research centers.

    Some undergo DARPA verification.

    Several occupy multiple categories simultaneously.

    None of that establishes who will win DOE’s Quantum Genesis competition.

    It does show that when applications arrive on October 19, federal evaluators may recognize quite a few names.

    The government helped fund portions of the underlying science.

    Its laboratories worked with commercial hardware.

    Its researchers developed benchmarks.

    DARPA began examining whether company roadmaps could survive technical scrutiny.

    Commerce started financing manufacturing bottlenecks.

    DOE is now constructing another validation system and offering financial rewards for demonstrated fault-tolerant performance.

    The runners have been assembling for years.

    So have the referees.

    Sources: DARPA Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, Stage B selections; DARPA, Microsoft and PsiQuantum selected for Validation and Co-Design stage (February 2025); Commerce, Quantinuum CHIPS R&D award (September 8, 2026); Commerce, PsiQuantum CHIPS R&D award (September 8, 2026).

    That leaves one final piece of the system to examine.

    Who determines that a quantum computer has actually crossed the finish line?

    Part Four of The Quantum Genesis Files will follow the benchmarks, laboratories and federal verification programs responsible for answering that deceptively difficult question.

  • Before DOE’s $215 Million Quantum Race, Washington Had Already Spent Years Building the Track

    The Quantum Genesis Files, Part Two

    DOE’s new quantum competition carries a $215 million headline. Follow the federal money backward, however, and the starting line begins to look considerably more expensive.

    The Department of Energy’s new Quantum Genesis Q Competition offers private companies the chance to compete for as much as $215 million by demonstrating increasingly capable fault-tolerant quantum computers.

    That sounds like a large federal bet on an emerging technology.

    It is.

    It is also nowhere near the beginning of the betting.

    As Part One of The Quantum Genesis Files established, DOE spent more than a decade developing the research, benchmarks and scientific objectives behind the competition. Following the money reveals a parallel story.

    Before Washington opened a $215 million race to build a scientifically useful fault-tolerant quantum computer, it spent years financing the research centers, laboratories, industrial partnerships and manufacturing capabilities surrounding the companies now developing those machines.

    And September has been particularly busy.

    Nine days before DOE announced Quantum Genesis Q, the Department of Commerce finalized several major quantum-computing research awards.

    One day before DOE’s announcement, Commerce finalized another worth as much as $1 billion.

    The starting gun may have fired on September 17.

    A substantial amount of public money was already on the track.

    Start With $1.25 Billion

    The easiest place to begin is inside DOE itself.

    In 2020, the Department committed up to $625 million over five years to establish five National Quantum Information Science Research Centers.

    The centers were placed at Argonne, Brookhaven, Fermilab, Lawrence Berkeley and Oak Ridge national laboratories.

    They were not government laboratories working alone.

    DOE assembled multidisciplinary partnerships involving universities and private companies. When the centers were announced, the Department said its $625 million commitment was accompanied by another $340 million in contributions from private-sector and academic participants.

    The centers pursued quantum computing, networking, sensing, materials and other technologies necessary to move quantum information science toward practical applications.

    Five years later, DOE decided the experiment should continue.

    In November 2025, the Department announced another $625 million for the five centers over the next five years.

    That gives the two generations of the program a maximum announced federal value of $1.25 billion.

    That number requires an important qualification.

    It does not mean DOE deposited $1.25 billion into five laboratory bank accounts.

    The original program was funded over multiple years and subject to appropriations. For the current renewal, DOE identified $125 million in fiscal year 2025 funding and explicitly said later funding remains contingent upon congressional appropriations.

    Still, $1.25 billion represents the scale of DOE’s announced commitment to the center program across its first two generations.

    More important for Quantum Genesis is what the centers have been asked to accomplish.

    DOE says the renewed centers will work on error correction, quantum networking, modular computing, algorithms, quantum-classical workflows and other problems standing between today’s machines and useful quantum computers.

    Those are remarkably familiar problems.

    They are also among the problems companies entering Quantum Genesis must overcome.

    Then Commerce Arrived With a Checkbook

    DOE is not the only department financing the quantum ecosystem.

    On September 8, the Department of Commerce finalized a collection of CHIPS research and development awards aimed at quantum technology.

    Quantinuum received an award of up to $100 million.

    The work addresses manufacturing bottlenecks involved in scaling fault-tolerant trapped-ion quantum computers, including integrated photonics, cryogenic semiconductor controls and optical components.

    That description is worth lingering over.

    Nine days later, DOE announced a competition intended to accelerate fault-tolerant quantum computers.

    Commerce is helping finance some of the manufacturing technology necessary to build them.

    Quantinuum was not alone.

    PsiQuantum received up to $100 million for research addressing photonic quantum-computing challenges and semiconductor manufacturing.

    Commerce also finalized awards of up to $100 million each for Rigetti and D-Wave.

    GlobalFoundries received an award of up to $375 million to establish domestic manufacturing capabilities supporting quantum technologies.

    Then came September 16.

    Commerce finalized an R&D award of up to $1 billion for Anderon, a newly formed IBM subsidiary.

    The purpose is to establish a new quantum semiconductor foundry.

    The next day, DOE announced Quantum Genesis Q.

    The chronology is striking, although chronology by itself does not establish that the awards and DOE competition were coordinated.

    The programs also do different things.

    Commerce is addressing semiconductor manufacturing, supply chains and industrial-scale technological bottlenecks. DOE’s competition is trying to demonstrate scientifically relevant fault-tolerant quantum computing.

    But those objectives occupy different floors of the same building.

    One agency is helping develop the manufacturing base.

    Another is offering milestone money for machines built from the resulting technological ecosystem.

    The Government Is Funding More Than One Horse

    There is another reason not to treat these programs as interchangeable.

    Washington has not selected a single quantum-computing architecture and poured everything into it.

    Quite the opposite.

    Quantinuum develops trapped-ion systems.

    PsiQuantum is pursuing photonic quantum computing.

    IBM and Rigetti develop superconducting approaches.

    IonQ works with trapped ions.

    Atom Computing and QuEra pursue neutral atoms.

    Microsoft has pursued a topological approach.

    The federal government has maintained relationships with companies working across these competing technologies.

    DARPA provides perhaps the clearest illustration.

    Its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative is evaluating whether proposed quantum architectures can eventually reach what DARPA calls utility-scale operation, meaning their computational value exceeds their cost.

    The companies that have reached Stage B include IBM, IonQ, Quantinuum, Atom Computing and QuEra, along with several other developers using superconducting, ion, neutral-atom, silicon and photonic approaches.

    Microsoft and PsiQuantum have progressed even further through the predecessor program that became part of the initiative.

    This is not simply government subsidy.

    It is also government due diligence.

    DARPA is attempting to determine which proposed architectures can actually scale.

    DOE is now constructing a separate validation and verification system around Quantum Genesis.

    The government, in other words, is simultaneously helping develop quantum technology and building mechanisms to determine whether that technology performs as advertised.

    The Accounting Gets Messy Quickly

    This is where the temptation to produce one enormous federal quantum spending number should be resisted.

    DOE’s research centers are not the same thing as Commerce’s manufacturing awards.

    DARPA verification programs are not the same thing as DOE laboratory research.

    Private cost sharing is not federal spending.

    An award of “up to” $100 million is not necessarily $100 million already disbursed.

    Planned outyear funding dependent upon future appropriations is not money already spent.

    And Quantum Genesis itself illustrates the problem.

    DOE advertises as much as $215 million for the Q Competition, but only $2.5 million is identified as fiscal year 2026 funding. Most of the advertised amount depends upon future appropriations.

    The separate validation and verification laboratory program carries another planned $45 million, with $14 million identified for fiscal year 2026 and the remainder likewise dependent upon future funding.

    Adding every announced maximum into a single total would produce a dramatic number.

    It would also produce bad accounting.

    The more useful conclusion is that federal support for quantum computing operates through overlapping layers.

    Basic research.

    National laboratories.

    University partnerships.

    Industry research centers.

    Hardware access.

    Benchmark development.

    Prototype testing.

    Manufacturing research.

    Semiconductor supply chains.

    Independent verification.

    And now direct performance incentives.

    Quantum Genesis sits on top of those layers rather than replacing them.

    A Billion-Dollar Annual Research Enterprise

    The broader federal numbers reinforce that point.

    Quantum information science is no longer an obscure research line buried inside one agency’s science budget.

    Federal QIS research and development spending grew dramatically after passage of the National Quantum Initiative Act in 2018, involving DOE, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Department of Defense, NASA and other agencies.

    By the middle of this decade, annual federal QIS research spending was operating around the billion-dollar scale.

    That money covers far more than quantum computers. Quantum communications, sensing, networking, materials and basic science are also part of the federal QIS portfolio.

    But it establishes the financial environment in which the current quantum-computing race developed.

    The companies competing to produce useful machines are not emerging into an untouched marketplace.

    Many have spent years working with federal laboratories, participating in federally funded research centers, supplying hardware access, joining government benchmarking programs or receiving other federal research support.

    Some now have substantial manufacturing awards as well.

    That does not mean Washington has secretly chosen a winner.

    The evidence currently suggests almost the opposite.

    The federal government appears to have deliberately maintained exposure to several competing architectures while attempting to build the scientific expertise necessary to determine which ones succeed.

    It is less a single wager than a portfolio.

    From Funding Science to Buying Results

    That distinction helps explain why Quantum Genesis represents a meaningful transition.

    Much of the government’s earlier quantum spending supported research.

    The new competition attaches substantial financial incentives to measurable performance.

    DOE wants logical qubits.

    It wants fault-tolerant operations.

    It wants scientific demonstrations.

    And it wants independent verification that those milestones have actually been reached.

    The federal government therefore appears to be moving from helping create a quantum-computing ecosystem toward asking that ecosystem to deliver a machine.

    That makes the $215 million competition less interesting as an isolated spending announcement and more interesting as a potential harvest point.

    Washington has financed research centers.

    It has supported laboratory partnerships.

    It has purchased access to commercial quantum systems.

    It has funded benchmarking.

    It is investing in domestic quantum manufacturing.

    It is building verification infrastructure.

    Now it wants results.

    The next question is who arrives at that starting line.

    Because once the federal funding programs are mapped onto the companies themselves, a surprisingly dense network emerges.

    Some prospective competitors have worked with DOE laboratories for years.

    Some participate in DOE research centers.

    Some are undergoing DARPA validation.

    Some have just received major Commerce awards.

    Some check several of those boxes at once.

    Part Three of The Quantum Genesis Files will map those companies individually and examine how much of the federal quantum ecosystem already sits behind the runners in DOE’s new race.

    Sources: DOE, $625 million for National Quantum Information Science Research Centers (2020); DOE, $625 million renewal for quantum centers (November 2025); DARPA Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, Stage B selections; Commerce, Anderon (IBM subsidiary) CHIPS R&D award up to $1 billion (September 16, 2026).

  • The $215 Million Quantum Race That Took Washington a Decade to Build

    The Quantum Genesis Files, Part One

    DOE wants a fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2028. The competition announced this week is only the newest piece of a federal research, benchmarking and industry partnership effort years in the making.

    The Department of Energy wants someone to build a quantum computer that actually works.

    Not merely one with an impressive number of qubits attached to its name. Not another experimental machine capable of demonstrating that quantum computing remains theoretically fascinating. DOE wants a fault-tolerant computer capable of performing useful scientific work, and it wants the first generation of that machine demonstrated by 2028.

    On September 17, DOE announced the Quantum Genesis Q Competition, offering up to $215 million in planned funding to private companies capable of reaching a series of increasingly difficult milestones.

    The headline number is substantial. The history behind it is considerably larger.

    The competition is the latest step in an effort DOE has been developing for more than a decade, moving gradually from asking whether quantum computers could be useful for federal science to preparing an independent government apparatus capable of determining whether industry has finally built one.

    From Physical Qubits to Useful Ones

    Quantum computing has suffered from an inconvenient problem for anyone trying to explain its progress. Qubit counts sound impressive without necessarily telling anyone how useful a machine is.

    Physical qubits are notoriously susceptible to errors. Environmental interference, imperfect controls and the delicate nature of quantum states can corrupt calculations long before a useful computation is completed.

    A logical qubit attempts to solve that problem by encoding quantum information across physical qubits using error correction. The objective is not simply to possess more qubits. It is to possess qubits reliable enough to keep calculating.

    DOE’s new competition therefore targets machines with at least 100 logical qubits capable of performing hundreds of millions of fault-tolerant operations.

    Companies reaching that threshold will be eligible to share a $100 million incentive pool. DOE has established another $50 million pool for competitors reaching 150 logical qubits and another $50 million for systems reaching 200.

    Before any of that happens, Phase I offers individual competitors up to $1.5 million for earlier milestones.

    There is, however, an important budgetary asterisk.

    The $215 million is planned funding, not $215 million already sitting in an account waiting to be distributed. DOE says only $2.5 million comes from fiscal year 2026 funding. The remainder is dependent upon future congressional appropriations.

    Applications are due October 19.

    DOE Did Not Arrive Here Overnight

    To understand why DOE thinks a machine like this might exist by 2028, it helps to travel back to Bethesda, Maryland, in February 2015.

    DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program convened a Workshop on Quantum Computing for Science.

    The question then was much more fundamental.

    Could quantum computing technologies eventually address computational problems relevant to DOE’s scientific and energy missions?

    The resulting report examined quantum simulation, physical sciences, applied mathematics, linear algebra, graph theory and machine learning. More importantly, it identified how much research still stood between quantum computing as an intriguing technology and quantum computing as a useful scientific instrument.

    That distinction has driven much of what followed.

    DOE convened a Quantum Testbeds Stakeholder Workshop in 2017. It subsequently funded quantum testbeds, application research and the Accelerated Research in Quantum Computing program. In 2023, another Basic Research Needs workshop in Quantum Computing and Networking examined problems including algorithms, benchmarking, verification and error resilience.

    The vocabulary evolved as the machines did.

    Eventually the question was no longer whether quantum computing might matter.

    It became how the government would know when it did.

    The Blueprint

    That evolution culminated this year in DOE’s Blueprint for DOE Quantum Supercomputing.

    The Blueprint was developed by DOE laboratories with what the Department describes as significant contributions from academia and industry. It establishes a strategy for developing fault-tolerant quantum computers capable of solving scientific problems beyond the reach of even the most powerful conventional supercomputers.

    DOE calls that threshold scientific utility.

    That phrase is important because it changes the measurement of success.

    A machine does not become scientifically important merely because a manufacturer announces another qubit record. DOE’s target is useful computation.

    The Blueprint calls for initial scientifically relevant quantum-computing capabilities by 2028, followed by larger production-scale systems in the 2030s.

    DOE then formally launched Quantum Genesis in June, organizing the initiative around three components.

    One is the Q Competition now underway.

    Another is a planned National Quantum Supercomputing User Facility intended to give American scientists access to advanced quantum systems and integrate those machines with DOE’s conventional high-performance computing infrastructure.

    The third is research into scientific applications that could actually make use of the machines.

    In other words, DOE is not envisioning quantum computers replacing its supercomputers.

    It wants them working together.

    Trust, but Verify the Qubits

    There is another part of this week’s announcement that received considerably less attention than the $215 million headline.

    DOE simultaneously announced a Quantum High-Performance Computing Validation and Verification Testbed Lab Call.

    The Department plans to provide another $45 million to its National Laboratories to establish tools for independently evaluating the machines entered in the competition.

    Of that amount, $14 million is FY2026 funding. The remainder, like most of the Q Competition funding, depends upon future appropriations.

    The validation program is supposed to examine virtually the entire quantum computing stack, including physical hardware, quantum gates, logical architectures, algorithms, scientific applications and classical control systems.

    That means DOE is doing something considerably more interesting than offering prizes for impressive specifications.

    It is building the referee at the same time it organizes the race.

    Competitors will have to demonstrate their machines to government evaluators rather than simply provide their own performance claims. DOE wants verification of logical error rates, gate performance, computational depth and scientific workflows.

    The arrangement represents the culmination of another thread running through DOE’s quantum research.

    Government researchers have spent years developing benchmarks, testbeds and performance-assessment techniques precisely because competing quantum architectures can be extraordinarily difficult to compare.

    DOE now intends to apply that expertise to machines competing for federal money.

    A Computer Looking for a Scientific Problem

    The Department has already identified the general territory where it expects quantum computing to matter.

    Chemistry is one obvious candidate. Molecules themselves obey quantum mechanics, making sufficiently complex molecular systems extraordinarily difficult to simulate using conventional computers.

    Materials science presents similar opportunities.

    DOE also identifies plasma physics, high-energy physics, nuclear physics and applied mathematics among the potential beneficiaries.

    But the Department is trying to avoid building an exotic machine and only afterward asking scientists what they might do with it.

    Quantum Genesis instead calls for scientific applications to develop alongside the hardware. National Laboratories, universities and industry partners are supposed to identify problems that can eventually become demonstrations of scientific utility.

    That is an important departure from treating quantum computing primarily as a hardware competition.

    The machine and the scientific mission are supposed to meet somewhere in the middle.

    The Starting Gun Is Not the Beginning

    Seen in isolation, the September 17 announcement looks like a new $215 million federal technology competition.

    Seen against the documentary history, it looks more like the moment DOE decided that more than a decade of research had advanced far enough to start demanding results.

    In 2015, DOE was assessing whether quantum computing could meaningfully serve its scientific mission.

    By 2017, it was studying testbeds and methods for comparing technologies.

    By 2023, benchmarking, verification and error resilience had become explicit research priorities.

    The 2026 Blueprint established scientifically useful fault-tolerant computing as the objective and 2028 as the initial deployment target.

    Now money is attached to the milestones.

    Even the money, however, requires some perspective.

    Quantum Genesis does not begin with this week’s $215 million announcement. DOE explicitly says the initiative builds upon longstanding federal investments in quantum information science, including the National Quantum Information Science Research Centers created under the National Quantum Initiative.

    Those investments, along with programs elsewhere in the federal government, have helped build the laboratories, researchers, partnerships, technologies and companies that now make a competition like Quantum Genesis possible.

    That raises a different accounting question.

    When companies line up to compete for DOE’s $215 million, how much federal support will already be standing behind them?

    That is where the quantum race gets considerably more interesting.

    Sources: DOE, Quantum Genesis Q Competition announcement (September 17, 2026); DOE, Quantum Genesis initiative launch (June 2026); DOE, Blueprint for DOE Quantum Supercomputing; DOE ASCR, Workshop on Quantum Computing for Science (February 2015).

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  • The Federal Budget Works Until 2056, Provided Social Security Keeps Paying Benefits After Its Trust Fund Runs Dry

    The Congressional Budget Office has published its latest look at the federal government’s finances over the next three decades.

    The numbers do not improve with scrutiny.

    Under CBO’s February 2026 long-term projections, federal debt held by the public rises from roughly 101 percent of gross domestic product in 2026 to 120 percent in 2036. By 2056, it reaches 175 percent of GDP.

    That is an extraordinary number. Yet buried inside the spreadsheets supporting the projection is another problem that arrives much sooner.

    Social Security’s largest trust fund runs out of reserves in 2032.

    The combined Social Security trust funds follow in 2033.

    And CBO’s long-term federal budget projection generally assumes scheduled Social Security benefits continue to be paid anyway.

    That does not make the projection wrong. It does, however, make understanding what CBO is actually projecting rather important.

    CBO describes its long-term budget outlook as an illustration of what federal finances and the economy would look like over the next 30 years if current laws generally remained unchanged. It is a baseline, not a prophecy.

    The distinction becomes particularly important when Social Security enters the spreadsheet.

    The Revenue Line Barely Moves

    CBO published a separate workbook containing its 2026 long-term Social Security projections as a supplement to its broader Long-Term Budget Outlook data.

    Reading the two together provides a clearer picture than either does alone.

    One of the most striking findings is what does not happen.

    Social Security tax revenues do not collapse.

    In 2026, CBO projects Social Security tax revenues equal to approximately 4.51 percent of GDP.

    By 2030, the figure is approximately 4.53 percent.

    In 2036 it remains about 4.52 percent.

    Even in 2056, Social Security tax revenues are projected at roughly 4.46 percent of GDP.

    The revenue line is remarkably stable.

    The spending line is not.

    Scheduled Social Security outlays equal approximately 5.26 percent of GDP in 2026.

    They rise to about 5.61 percent in 2030.

    By 2036, that figure reaches 5.91 percent.

    By 2056, scheduled outlays remain around 5.79 percent of GDP.

    That produces a persistent structural gap between dedicated Social Security tax revenues and scheduled benefits.

    In 2026, that difference amounts to approximately 0.75 percent of GDP.

    By 2030 it exceeds 1 percent.

    In 2036, it reaches approximately 1.38 percent.

    The basic problem is therefore not disappearing revenue. It is a system whose scheduled expenditures increasingly exceed the dedicated tax revenues supporting them.

    The demographic explanation is not particularly mysterious. In CBO’s 2026 demographic outlook, the agency projects that the population will continue aging while growth slows substantially. Beginning in 2030, CBO expects deaths to exceed births annually. The number and age distribution of Americans directly affect both the workforce paying Social Security taxes and the population receiving retirement benefits.

    The economy, meanwhile, continues growing.

    CBO’s Social Security tables project nominal GDP increasing from roughly $32.3 trillion in 2026 to approximately $96.5 trillion in 2056.

    Taxable payroll rises from about $11.3 trillion to $32.6 trillion.

    This is not a projection built around economic collapse.

    The economy becomes much larger.

    The financing gap survives anyway.

    Then the Reserves Disappear

    The trust fund numbers make the timeline considerably less abstract.

    CBO projects the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund ratio at 1.53 in 2026. It falls to 1.07 in 2028, 0.60 in 2030, 0.36 in 2031 and 0.12 in 2032.

    Then the number disappears.

    CBO projects that the OASI trust fund will be exhausted during fiscal year 2032. When the Disability Insurance trust fund is included, combined Social Security reserves are projected to be exhausted in 2033.

    Those findings are also laid out in CBO’s March 2026 testimony to the Senate Budget Committee on Social Security’s finances.

    Trust fund exhaustion does not mean Social Security suddenly has no money.

    Payroll taxes and other Social Security revenues continue arriving after the reserves disappear. The problem is that those revenues would not be sufficient to pay all scheduled benefits.

    CBO’s supplemental spreadsheet shows just how large that difference could become.

    If benefits after trust fund depletion were limited to amounts payable from available Social Security revenues, combined OASDI benefits would be approximately 23 percent below scheduled benefits in 2034.

    The reduction reaches roughly 24 percent during several subsequent years.

    The situation is even sharper when OASI is examined independently. CBO’s tables show payable benefits approximately 26 percent below scheduled benefits in 2033, 28 percent below in 2034 and 2035, and 29 percent below in 2036 and 2037.

    Those are not predictions that Congress will cut Social Security benefits by those amounts.

    They illustrate what the financing mechanism can support if scheduled benefits are compared with revenues available after reserve depletion. CBO’s Social Security testimony specifically describes this as a payable-benefits scenario and emphasizes the uncertainty surrounding long-term projections.

    And that distinction leads directly into one of the stranger features of the federal government’s long-term budget projections.

    Two Futures Inside the Same Spreadsheet

    For purposes of its federal budget baseline, CBO generally assumes that Social Security will continue paying scheduled benefits.

    Its Social Security analysis simultaneously calculates what benefits would look like if payments were instead limited by available program revenues after trust fund exhaustion.

    Both calculations are useful.

    They are also very different futures.

    In one, scheduled benefits continue after the reserves financing the existing gap have disappeared.

    In the other, payable benefits fall substantially below scheduled benefits.

    Congress does not have to accept either outcome untouched. Lawmakers could change taxes, alter benefits, transfer money, restructure portions of the program, adopt some combination of those approaches, or pursue other legislative changes.

    CBO is not predicting what Congress will do.

    It is displaying the arithmetic of what happens under specified assumptions.

    That distinction becomes increasingly important because Social Security is only one part of the government’s larger fiscal problem.

    Interest Eventually Costs More Than Social Security

    According to CBO’s 2026 Budget and Economic Outlook, federal debt held by the public reaches approximately 120 percent of GDP in 2036.

    The annual federal deficit reaches roughly $3.1 trillion that year, equal to about 6.7 percent of GDP.

    Then the interest bill becomes a problem of its own.

    By 2056, CBO projects net federal interest spending equal to approximately 6.9 percent of GDP.

    Social Security spending is projected at roughly 6 percent.

    Put differently, under CBO’s long-term baseline, the federal government eventually spends a larger share of the entire national economy servicing its debt than it spends on Social Security.

    Interest does not provide retirement benefits, build roads, purchase aircraft, inspect food, or prosecute crimes.

    It services previous borrowing.

    And as debt accumulates, interest becomes another source of deficits, which can require additional borrowing, which produces additional interest.

    By 2056, debt held by the public reaches 175 percent of GDP.

    Yet the most consequential decisions may arrive more than two decades before that endpoint.

    The Fiscal Collision Arrives Earlier Than 2056

    The timelines from CBO’s two workbooks can be placed beside each other.

    Social Security already spends more than its dedicated tax revenues in 2026.

    The OASI trust fund is projected to exhaust its reserves in 2032.

    Combined Social Security trust fund reserves are projected to be exhausted in 2033.

    By 2034, payable combined benefits would be roughly 23 percent below scheduled benefits if payments were limited by available Social Security financing.

    By 2036, federal debt reaches approximately 120 percent of GDP while the annual deficit reaches 6.7 percent.

    Then the debt and interest burden continue climbing for another 20 years.

    The Social Security financing decision does not wait for the broader debt problem to arrive.

    It gets there first.

    That makes the headline number of 175 percent debt-to-GDP somewhat deceptive as a measure of when the problem becomes important.

    Washington does not have 30 years before it encounters the arithmetic.

    According to CBO’s own projections, one of the largest federal programs reaches its financing crossroads within roughly seven years.

    And Then Reality Changed Five Days Before Publication

    There is one final wrinkle in CBO’s 30-year outlook that demonstrates just how carefully these projections should be interpreted.

    CBO released its long-term outlook data on February 25, 2026.

    The agency included an unusual but important qualification.

    Its projections did not incorporate the budgetary or economic effects of the Supreme Court’s February 20 ruling concerning tariffs.

    Five days.

    CBO produced a federal fiscal projection extending three decades into the future while acknowledging that a major event occurring five days before publication had already changed part of the landscape underlying the baseline.

    That is not a criticism of CBO. Producing long-term economic projections requires freezing assumptions at some point. Otherwise, the spreadsheet would never leave the building.

    It is, however, an excellent demonstration of what a baseline actually represents.

    And we no longer have to speculate about whether the omitted tariff developments were financially meaningful.

    In an August update to its tariff projections, CBO estimated that trade-policy changes through July 31 would increase cumulative federal deficits during fiscal years 2027 through 2036 by approximately $900 billion compared with the agency’s February baseline.

    About $700 billion of that difference comes from larger primary deficits. Another $200 billion comes from additional debt-service costs.

    CBO said the increase was largely driven by the removal of tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act following the Supreme Court decision. The administration subsequently imposed other tariffs, but CBO projected that those would generate less revenue than the tariffs removed after the ruling.

    That $900 billion should not simply be pasted onto CBO’s 2056 debt number. Tariff policy affects revenue, prices, trade, economic activity and debt-service costs, and the policies themselves have changed repeatedly.

    But the episode provides a useful reminder.

    Thirty years is a very long time in federal budgeting.

    Apparently, five days can be enough.

    The Spreadsheet Is Not the Future

    None of CBO’s projections establish that federal debt will equal exactly 175 percent of GDP in 2056.

    CBO itself warns that its baseline projections are subject to considerable uncertainty and that future legislation, administrative actions, judicial decisions and economic developments could produce markedly different results.

    They do not establish that Congress will allow scheduled Social Security benefits to exceed dedicated financing indefinitely.

    Nor do they establish that lawmakers will permit payable benefits to fall roughly one-quarter below scheduled amounts after trust fund depletion.

    Those are policy questions that remain unresolved.

    What CBO’s spreadsheets do establish is the scale of the arithmetic confronting whoever eventually has to resolve them.

    Social Security’s dedicated revenue remains relatively stable while scheduled expenditures exceed it. Trust fund reserves absorb the difference for a while. Those reserves eventually disappear.

    At roughly the same time, the broader federal government is running persistent deficits, accumulating more debt and devoting an increasingly large share of national economic output simply to paying interest.

    CBO can project that process all the way to 2056.

    Congress does not have the luxury of waiting that long to decide what happens next.

    Sources: CBO, The 2026 Long-Term Budget Outlook (February 2026); CBO, The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036; CBO, The Demographic Outlook: 2026 to 2056; CBO, Social Security’s Finances: March 2026 Senate Budget Committee testimony; CBO, August 2026 update on tariff revenue effects.

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  • The Judge Gets Her Sixty Votes, the Country Gets a Quorum Call It Didn’t Need

    The Senate spent Tuesday doing what the Senate does best, which is confirming a lifetime appointment by a vote count that would embarrass a homeowners association. By 52 yeas to 43 nays, Senators invoked cloture on the nomination of Angela Veronica Colmenero to be United States District Judge for the Southern District of Texas, which means Colmenero has effectively already won a seat on the federal bench for as long as she cares to keep it, with the formal confirmation vote merely a formality due by Friday. Nobody on the floor bothered to explain why they were voting the way they were. Nobody had to. That is what cloture is for.

    The Rest of the Menu

    If judicial confirmations are the entree, everything else Tuesday was garnish. Senators also advanced cloture, 70 to 21, on an amendment to the Protect College Sports Act, a bill that exists because Congress has apparently decided that name, image, and likeness litigation is a more pressing use of floor time than anything involving an actual federal agency. Two bills passed by unanimous consent, one modifying the boundary of the Vicksburg National Military Park and one conveying a reversionary land interest in Sacramento; both are the legislative equivalent of clearing out a junk drawer, and neither will trouble a headline writer. The Senate also agreed to a pair of commemorative resolutions, because a body that cannot pass appropriations bills on time can always find the votes to recognize a heritage month.

    Buried in the “New Public Laws” notice, easy to miss and clearly meant to be, was Public Law 119-110, better known as S. 307, addressing sexual harassment and sexual assault of Bureau of Prisons staff by the people BOP is paid to incarcerate. It was signed on September 16 and only logged in Tuesday’s Congressional Record, which tells you something about the pace at which Congress documents its own work. That a law protecting federal correctional employees from assault by inmates needed to be written at all is the kind of institutional admission that deserves more than a passing line item, and it is the kind of story this publication intends to come back to once the implementation record exists to judge it against.

    The Meeting That Isn’t Explained

    The single most interesting sentence in the entire Daily Digest was also the least detailed. The Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs will hold a business meeting Wednesday “to consider the request to direct Senate Legal Counsel to file an application seeking immunity.” Immunity for whom, in what proceeding, and why the request needed to be phrased with the specificity of a ransom note, the digest does not say. Congress is under no obligation to tell the public what its committees are up to before they do it, and on Wednesday it will not. We will be watching to see who walks out of SD-342 needing a lawyer less than they did walking in.

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