Bureaucracy Times

All the news fit to be declassified.

Category: Federal Agencies & Oversight

  • The Design Standard NNSA Lowered to Keep Its Plutonium Factory on Schedule

    Of the five construction projects that the National Nuclear Security Administration has ever bothered to isolate into their own contract line items, the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility is the newest and the biggest. According to a new GAO report on how NNSA uses these line items, the facility got its own cost-plus-award-fee line in 2023, its own tailored performance evaluation, and, according to officials, a fee plan that took a group of thirty to forty staff and contractors to put together. The theory, as always, was that isolating the deliverable would isolate the accountability.

    What GAO’s own separate assessment of NNSA’s major projects found, published the same month, is that the agency has spent the last two years quietly lowering the bar the project has to clear rather than raising the pressure on the contractor to clear it.

    The Standard NNSA Lowered for Itself

    In October 2024, NNSA adopted what it calls a second revised tailoring strategy for the plutonium facility’s Main Process Building, according to GAO’s February 2026 assessment of NNSA’s major projects. The strategy folded the scope of three other projects into the Main Process Building, and it did something considerably more interesting to the government’s own rulebook. It let NNSA establish a formal cost and schedule baseline once the design was only sixty percent finished, instead of the ninety percent DOE’s own project management order otherwise requires. It also let construction begin before that baseline existed at all.

    NNSA approved ten early procurement and site preparation packages under this looser standard, intended to get lower risk work started while the design was still being finalized. According to GAO, the agency could not fully execute even that plan, because the contractor kept falling behind on delivering the design packages that were supposed to accompany the work. Officials told GAO they are still struggling to hire qualified design engineers and that the contractor continues to miss performance targets. The project’s final design review, originally set for March 2026, has slipped to September 2026. When the contractor submitted its package for an independent cost estimate in May 2025, GAO found it was insufficient to actually conduct the estimate; NNSA is waiting on a resubmission in early 2026, at which point officials hope the design will finally be close to the ninety percent maturity the agency waived in the first place.

    The cost, meanwhile, has done what cost usually does at Savannah River. NNSA’s own fiscal year 2026 budget justification puts the Main Process Building at over twenty two billion dollars, against a preliminary range of $6.9 billion to $11.1 billion that NNSA itself published at the project’s first major milestone. Officials told GAO the September 2035 completion date, already the later end of that earlier range, may slip further. A revised cost and schedule estimate is not due for internal NNSA approval until September 2026.

    A Building With a Prior Conviction

    None of this is Savannah River’s first attempt at doing something complicated with plutonium in that same footprint. The plutonium facility is being built inside and around the shell of the site’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, a program NNSA spent roughly fifteen years and more than eight billion dollars on before mothballing it in 2014. That project, too, started with a modest number. DOE estimated MOX construction at $1.6 billion in 2004. By 2013, GAO was confirming that NNSA had quietly added another two billion dollars to the estimate even as the facility was supposedly nearing completion, after years of the agency declining to disclose a rebaselined figure publicly. The facility never processed a gram of commercial fuel. NNSA converted the shell into the plutonium pit factory it operates today.

    There is a version of this story where the agency learned something from the MOX years and applied it to the pit factory. The tailoring strategy GAO documented in the new report suggests the lesson NNSA actually absorbed was narrower: that a hard design-maturity threshold is an obstacle to be waived when the schedule is inconvenient, not a floor to be held.

    Now Firing the Contractor, Unrelatedly

    Whatever the line item and its fee plan were supposed to buy NNSA, it apparently was not enough confidence in the incumbent. Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the Fluor led joint venture that has run the site since 2008 and is building the plutonium facility, received a project management rating of less than adequate in its fiscal year 2024 performance evaluation, according to a review DOE released in February 2025, which cited the absence of a credible overall project schedule. In February 2026, NNSA released a request for proposals for a standalone follow-on management and operating contract for the entire Savannah River Site, worth an estimated sixty one and a half billion dollars over a potential twenty years and four months, a competition NNSA’s own announcement frames as separate from the plutonium project specifically but that plainly reflects an agency no longer content with how its current contractor performs. NNSA extended the incumbent’s contract through September 2027, worth an additional $2.3 billion, explicitly to preserve workforce continuity while the recompete plays out, which is its own small admission that the agency does not trust the transition to go smoothly either.

    The new M&O contract, whoever wins it, will not just run the plutonium factory. It also covers the storing, processing, and long term management of the nuclear materials and waste that Savannah River exists to handle, all under the same undocumented, case by case logic GAO’s line item report says NNSA still uses to decide which pieces of that work get isolated into their own accountability structure and which pieces stay folded into the general M&O scope where waived standards and quiet rebaselines are harder to see. A cost-plus-award-fee line item and a thirty person fee plan gave GAO something to point to when NNSA needed to demonstrate it was taking the plutonium facility seriously. It did not stop the agency from lowering its own design standard to keep pouring concrete, and it did not stop the government from concluding, two years after handing the project its own line, that the company running it needs to be replaced.

    Sources: GAO, NNSA Contract Line Items: Agency Should Document Criteria for Use and Capture Lessons Learned (GAO-26-108409, September 2026); GAO, NNSA Construction Projects: Cost and Schedule Performance (GAO-26-107777, February 2026); GAO, Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility: DOE Needs to Provide More Consistent and Timely Cost Information (GAO-13-283, 2013). Related: $308 Million to Keep the Lights On in a Building From 1945.

  • Federal Programs Help People With Disabilities Find Work. The Handoff Can Take Months.

    The federal government has programs designed to help people with intellectual and developmental disabilities find and maintain jobs.

    It also has procedures for deciding which program is supposed to pay for that help.

    Sometimes the second part gets in the way of the first.

    A new Government Accountability Office report examining disability employment services in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Washington found that providers encountered administrative confusion, reimbursement delays and gaps in services as individuals moved between state Vocational Rehabilitation programs and employment supports financed through Medicaid.

    In one particularly striking example, a Washington provider association told GAO that funding authorizations for job-placement contracts that should take a week or less could instead take six to nine months because of staffing shortages.

    For someone who is ready to work, that is a rather long administrative definition of “ready.”

    Two Programs, One Worker

    Vocational Rehabilitation, or VR, is a joint federal-state program overseen nationally by the Department of Education’s Rehabilitation Services Administration. Medicaid Home- and Community-Based Services, or HCBS, is overseen federally by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

    Together, they represent the primary federal programs funding employment services for people with intellectual or developmental disabilities, according to officials interviewed by GAO.

    The scale is substantial.

    Federal VR grants to states totaled approximately $3.7 billion in fiscal year 2023, and people with intellectual or developmental disabilities represented about 22 percent of VR cases nationally that year. Separately, a federally funded study estimated roughly $1.5 billion was spent on employment services for people with I/DD in FY2023, with Medicaid HCBS supplying most of that money. That estimate did not include the VR grants.

    The programs perform different roles, and on paper the transition between them is fairly orderly.

    VR typically finances shorter-term services such as job discovery and placement. Once an individual reaches job stabilization, generally after 90 days of employment, the VR case closes and Medicaid HCBS can finance longer-term assistance such as job coaching.

    If the worker loses or changes jobs, however, the process can begin again.

    That handoff is where things can become complicated.

    Mind the Gap

    GAO interviewed 12 employment service providers across the three states. Six reported service gaps caused by administrative burden or confusion between VR and state I/DD agencies.

    In Pennsylvania, one provider told investigators that support coordinators sometimes waited for a formal VR closure letter before beginning Medicaid-funded job coaching, even though individuals became automatically eligible after reaching 90 days of job stability.

    GAO said the practice caused “unnecessary gaps in services.”

    Providers can also find themselves financing the gap.

    Four of the 12 providers told GAO they experienced reimbursement delays as individuals transitioned from VR to I/DD services. One Georgia provider reported continuing to serve individuals without reimbursement during a three-month transition period while the agencies completed closure letters and prior authorizations.

    According to GAO, providers are not reimbursed for services delivered while an individual is caught between agencies after the VR case has closed.

    The consequences do not necessarily remain confined to accounting departments.

    One Washington provider told GAO that some families simply give up on obtaining employment services because of the administrative workload and back-and-forth between agencies. A Georgia provider described a woman who lost her job and then experienced months of delays reopening her VR case because of agency miscommunication.

    Pick Your Payment Problem

    Behind the coordination problem is another peculiarity: the two systems generally pay providers differently.

    VR agencies in the three states generally used a milestone model, paying providers when an individual achieved specified employment outcomes. Medicaid HCBS programs primarily used fee-for-service, paying according to units of service or time.

    Each approach comes with its own incentive problem.

    Under milestone payments, providers can perform substantial work without receiving full reimbursement if the worker fails to reach the prescribed outcome, even when circumstances are outside the provider’s control.

    GAO gives a particularly revealing example. One provider supported an individual whose workplace went out of business before the worker could demonstrate job stability. Because the required milestone wasn’t reached, the provider faced the reimbursement risk.

    Pennsylvania officials told GAO that providers considered milestone payments too risky compared with fee-for-service arrangements.

    Fee-for-service solves that problem and introduces another.

    The more services a provider delivers, the more it gets paid.

    Yet the objective of supported employment is generally for workers to become increasingly independent, with on-the-job assistance fading over time. GAO notes that fee-for-service therefore does not financially incentivize providers to reduce or eliminate services.

    In other words, one model can penalize providers when a desired outcome isn’t achieved. The other can reward them for continuing to provide the very services the program hopes workers will eventually need less of.

    Federal program design has apparently discovered diversification.

    Washington Has Been Told Before

    None of the coordination problem is entirely new to the federal government.

    In 2022, the Labor Department’s Office of Disability Employment Policy, Education’s Rehabilitation Services Administration, CMS and other federal agencies jointly encouraged state and local governments to coordinate funding through techniques known as blending, braiding and sequencing.

    The guidance also encouraged interagency agreements specifically to prevent confusion over responsibilities and delays in services.

    Georgia and Pennsylvania officials told GAO they found the guidance useful.

    Washington officials told GAO they had not yet implemented it.

    States have made other changes. Pennsylvania, for example, established guidance allowing an individual to proceed to Medicaid HCBS-funded employment services if VR has not made an eligibility determination within 120 days. Georgia officials said their VR and I/DD agencies now meet weekly to track transitioning cases and monthly to troubleshoot stalled ones.

    Those efforts matter, because GAO’s report is not a nationwide census of disability employment programs.

    The auditors examined only three states and interviewed 12 providers. GAO explicitly cautions that the results cannot be generalized to all states or all service providers.

    But within that limited sample, the pattern is difficult to miss.

    The government has programs to help people with intellectual and developmental disabilities enter and remain in the workforce. It has federal money supporting those programs. It has guidance explaining how different funding streams can be coordinated. And states have procedures intended to move people from one system to another.

    Yet GAO still found workers encountering service gaps, providers waiting months for reimbursement and families navigating enough administrative machinery that some reportedly abandoned the process altogether.

    For a system designed to remove barriers to employment, the paperwork occasionally appears to have erected a few of its own.

    Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office, Disability Employment Services: Factors Affecting Coordination Between Vocational Rehabilitation and Medicaid Programs (GAO-26-106499, September 2026).

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  • New Mexico’s $74 Million Rural Health Announcement Is the First Piece of a Much Bigger Experiment

    The Trump administration announced $74 million Sunday to expand rural healthcare across New Mexico. That number is real, but it is also roughly one-third of the story. The full first-year award to New Mexico under the new federal Rural Health Transformation Program is approximately $211.5 million. And in Year One, a significant portion of that money is not going toward new doctors, new clinics, or new hospital beds. It is going toward building the regional architecture that will eventually decide where those things should go.

    What the $74 Million Actually Buys

    The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced that the $74 million will fund six Regional Hub Organizations under Healthy Horizons, one component of New Mexico’s broader rural health strategy. The hubs are charged with identifying local needs, establishing priorities, and developing plans for expanding specialty, maternal, behavioral, and chronic-disease care. Year One, in other words, is substantially a planning operation — which may be exactly what New Mexico needs.

    New Mexico’s own Legislative Finance Committee has already raised that question in a different context. A committee analysis found that lawmakers had appropriated $226 million to the state’s Rural Health Care Delivery Fund between 2023 and the 2025 special session, and that by October 2025 slightly more than a quarter of it had been spent. Legislative analysts found no overarching plan guiding those investments and questioned whether grant decisions were adequately tied to demonstrated community need. Healthy Horizons is, at least structurally, an attempt to build that plan before spending the rest of the money.

    The Funding Stack

    The Rural Health Transformation Program was created by the 2025 federal budget reconciliation law, Public Law 119-21, with $50 billion appropriated over five fiscal years — $10 billion annually from FY2026 through FY2030. Half of each year’s funding is split equally among states with approved applications; the remainder is distributed based on rural population, healthcare infrastructure, state policy, and program design. All 50 states received awards. New Mexico’s first-year share is $211.5 million, of which $74 million covers the Healthy Horizons hub phase. The program’s full five-year budget for New Mexico, per CMS’s published application abstract, is approximately $393.3 million — covering workforce recruitment, telehealth, remote patient monitoring, health-data infrastructure, and chronic-disease management alongside the specialty and maternal care components.

    The Larger Context

    The same law that created the Rural Health Transformation Program also made substantial changes to Medicaid financing. New Mexico officials and members of its congressional delegation have warned those provisions could place additional financial pressure on providers serving Medicaid patients. The rural health money and the Medicaid changes are separate components of the same legislation — the $74 million is not replacement funding for reduced Medicaid flows — but the juxtaposition is unavoidable. Washington is restructuring one major source of rural healthcare revenue while simultaneously running a $50 billion experiment to transform how rural healthcare is delivered. CMS has a dedicated Office of Rural Health Transformation to administer the program through 2031 and has emphasized both state flexibility and accountability for results.

    New Mexico has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on rural health in recent years, and its own legislative analysts subsequently found the investments lacked strategic direction. Six regional hubs are now being stood up with federal money to produce exactly that direction. Whether they do — and whether the infrastructure being built in Year One translates into measurable outcomes by Year Five — is the question the announcement doesn’t answer. It just starts the clock.

    Sources: CMS, Rural Health Transformation Program — New Mexico Application Abstract; New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee, FY2027 Budget Recommendations.

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  • The Reform Congress Wouldn’t Pay For

    The federal government has spent a decade trying to prove it can sell its own buildings faster than it can grow moss on them. In 2016, Congress passed the Federal Assets Sale and Transfer Act, a law with a genuinely tidy premise. Create an independent board to identify unneeded federal real estate, let the General Services Administration sell it, and use the proceeds to fund the next round of sales. A self-perpetuating disposal machine, powered by its own output.

    Then Congress built the machine, filled the tank once, and walked away for three years.

    A Fund in Name Only

    FASTA created the Asset Proceeds and Space Management Fund, a pool meant to hold sales revenue and reinvest it in future disposal costs. It is, on paper, an elegant piece of institutional design. Sell an unneeded federal warehouse, use a slice of the proceeds to relocate the tenants of the next unneeded building, repeat until the government’s real estate footprint stops costing taxpayers billions a year in upkeep on buildings nobody uses. A recent GAO report found that the government owns hundreds of thousands of buildings, and that disposing of the ones nobody needs can take years or decades while the bills keep coming.

    The catch, tucked into every appropriations-dependent fund since the invention of the federal budget, is that money sitting in an account is not the same as money an agency is allowed to spend. Congress has to appropriate it first, round by round, year by year, at its own discretion. FASTA’s authors either didn’t anticipate how easily that discretion could evaporate, or didn’t care.

    The Three Years Nobody Noticed

    Between 2016 and 2022, Congress appropriated a cumulative $90 million from the fund, a modest but functioning start. Then, from fiscal year 2023 through 2025, it appropriated nothing. Zero dollars, three consecutive years, while GSA’s High-Value Round sales kept depositing proceeds into an account it increasingly could not touch. By the end of fiscal year 2022 the fund held roughly $194 million in sales revenue. The government had money sitting in the bank for a program built entirely around the premise of using its own proceeds efficiently, and it declined to authorize a withdrawal.

    It is worth sitting with that for a moment. This isn’t a story about an agency losing track of paperwork or missing a deadline. It’s a story about a fund functioning exactly as designed, generating exactly the revenue it was supposed to generate, and then being denied access to that revenue by the same legislative body that wrote the design. The fund didn’t fail. It was throttled.

    In 2026, with the program’s last recommended round underway and the Public Buildings Reform Board set to dissolve at year’s end, Congress appropriated roughly $143 million more, bringing the cumulative total to $233 million against a fund that, by then, held about $538 million following the long-delayed sale of a California property called Laguna Niguel. The gap between what the fund held and what GSA was permitted to spend ran as high as $300 million at points between 2022 and 2026. That gap is not an accounting curiosity. It is nine months of stalled relocation for the Railroad Retirement Board, an agency officials said would find self-funding “devastating to its mission.” It is a Chicago federal building whose tenant is waiting on a $19.5 million allocation that GSA has repeatedly flagged as “in flux.”

    Self-Funding Was Always the Fine Print

    GSA didn’t sit still during the drought. The agency requested funding for a separate initiative called the Optimization Program, eventually lining up roughly $470 million across fiscal years 2025 and 2026 to plug the gap FASTA’s own fund wasn’t allowed to fill. But that money comes with its own leash. Projects above a statutory cost threshold require congressional prospectus approval before the funds can even be obligated, and as of August 2026, only the House side of that approval had come through. The Senate side hadn’t. So GSA now sits on two separate pots of money it can see but, in one case, still cannot spend, for two separate bureaucratic reasons layered on top of each other like sediment.

    Meanwhile, the law itself quietly changed the plumbing. Amendments passed in 2025 now route proceeds from the program’s second round and beyond directly to whichever agency owned the building, bypassing the central fund entirely, still subject to the same appropriations process that starved the fund in the first place. GSA officials told auditors the change granted no new efficiencies. It just moved the choke point somewhere else.

    The Self-Funding Machine, Unfunded

    None of this required a scandal, a whistleblower, or a single act of malice. It required Congress to write a law premised on reinvested proceeds, then treat the reinvestment step as optional for three budget cycles running. The Public Buildings Reform Board will cease to exist by the end of this year, having recommended more disposals than the appropriations process was willing to underwrite. What’s left is a machine that works exactly as designed, sitting mostly idle, waiting on a permission slip that took Congress three years to sign.

    Source: U.S. Government Accountability Office, Federal Real Property: GSA Has Made Progress Disposing of Unneeded Properties, but Challenges Remain (GAO-26-108451, September 2026).

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  • 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.

  • $308 Million to Keep the Lights On in a Building From 1945

    The National Nuclear Security Administration would like you to know that it has learned something about contract oversight. In 2014, when it awarded the contract to build a new uranium processing facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, it did something it almost never does. It gave the project its own line item, separate from the sprawling, undifferentiated blob of “management and operating” work that otherwise governs how NNSA pays its contractors. A separate fee plan. A separate performance evaluation. Isolated accountability, in theory, for a single, isolable piece of work.

    According to a new GAO report on how NNSA uses contract line items, this was the pilot. The one meant to prove that separating deliverables out of the M&O morass would sharpen contractor performance and protect the government from the kind of cost bleed that has made NNSA’s acquisitions program a fixture on GAO’s High Risk List for over a decade.

    Here is how the pilot is going. The Uranium Processing Facility is nearly four billion dollars over its cost baseline and eight years behind schedule. NNSA re-baselined the project in December 2024, at a new estimate of $10.35 billion, more than fifty percent above where the project stood before. And because the replacement facility still is not ready, NNSA is now paying to keep the building it was supposed to replace alive, Building 9212, poured in 1945, older than the Atomic Energy Commission that once ran it, and not built to a code that anticipated an earthquake or a derecho hitting Oak Ridge. The Y-12 contractor’s own estimate for keeping 9212 in service is over $308 million, plus another $100 million in deferred maintenance nobody wants to put off any longer.

    The Fee Structure That Was Supposed to Fix This

    The theory behind giving a project its own line item is straightforward enough that GAO states it almost apologetically in the new report; separate the deliverable, separate the fee, and the contractor has a reason to hit the target instead of coasting on whatever else is going well across the site. NNSA officials told GAO they used exactly this logic for the Uranium Processing Facility, and for a while, on paper, it worked as designed. The line item let NNSA withhold fee when performance lagged. Officials told GAO that over the years since 2014, NNSA paid the contractor less than $40 million out of roughly $220 million in available fee, precisely because the fee was isolated and precisely because performance was bad.

    Withholding fee is not the same as finishing a building. The project kept slipping anyway, right up until the 2024 re-baseline, at which point, GAO notes, the contractor’s cost and schedule performance apparently improved. Which raises the obvious question nobody in the report quite asks out loud: did the line item fix the contractor, or did NNSA just eventually agree to pay for the delay it had spent a decade complaining about, at which point the delay, unsurprisingly, stopped generating friction?

    Separately, GAO’s February 2026 assessment of NNSA’s twenty eight major construction projects found that the UPF’s Main Process Building and Salvage and Accountability Building, the two subprojects riding under that pioneering line item, are responsible for roughly eighty percent of the $4.8 billion in cumulative cost overrun across the entire NNSA major projects portfolio, and forty percent of its thirty years of cumulative schedule delay. The flagship example of contract-oversight reform is also the single largest driver of the exact problem the reform was supposed to solve.

    A Building That Predates the Concept of a Safety Code

    None of this is abstract for the people who still have to run Building 9212 while its replacement crawls toward completion. The building processes enriched uranium for nuclear weapons components and Navy reactor fuel. It was constructed during the Manhattan Project‘s industrial buildout, before the National Environmental Policy Act, before OSHA, before DOE’s own seismic design standards existed in anything resembling their current form. GAO’s September 2025 review found that NNSA does not have a comprehensive, agreed-upon plan for how to keep operating it safely through the additional years the delay has bought it.

    The $308 million is not a hypothetical either. It is the contractor’s own figure, submitted as part of planning for continued operations through 2035, one year past NNSA’s current target date for the new facility to be fully operational, itself a date GAO’s reporting suggests deserves some skepticism given the project’s history of missing every prior one. Consolidated Nuclear Security, the M&O contractor at Y-12, is simultaneously the entity being paid an isolated, performance-linked fee to finish the new facility and the entity submitting cost estimates to keep the old, code-noncompliant facility running because the new one is not finished. It is worth sitting with how neatly those two roles cancel each other out as accountability mechanisms.

    What the Line Item Actually Bought

    To be fair to GAO’s broader report, and to NNSA, nobody involved is claiming the line item made things worse. NNSA officials told GAO the tailored fee structure gave them leverage they would not otherwise have had, and withholding $180 million in fee over a decade is not nothing. The report’s two recommendations, that NNSA document its criteria for when to use line items and formally capture lessons learned from the ones it has used, are modest and NNSA has already agreed to both, with target dates in the spring of 2027.

    But modest is the operative word, and it is worth being precise about what a documented criteria policy will and will not fix. It will not shrink Building 9212’s price tag. It will not un-spend the $4 billion the UPF re-baseline added to the government’s bill. What it will do, at best, is make NNSA’s next attempt to isolate a construction project’s fee and performance evaluation slightly more consistent across sites than the current, undocumented, case-by-case process that has left Los Alamos with zero project line items despite a $1.86 billion pit production subproject sitting well past the threshold the agency’s own officials cite for other sites.

    The uranium processing facility was supposed to be the proof that separating the fee from the noise made contractors perform. Instead it produced a decade of withheld fee, a $4 billion rebaseline, and a Manhattan Project era building that will now run a year past NNSA’s own optimistic new deadline, on a budget nobody is calling a placeholder because the money has already been spent. If this is what accountability looks like when NNSA does it on purpose, on its single best-documented example, it is fair to ask what the agency’s much larger, entirely undocumented middle ground of construction spending is actually buying the country.

    Sources: GAO, NNSA Contract Line Items: Agency Should Document Criteria for Use and Capture Lessons Learned (GAO-26-108409, September 2026); GAO, NNSA Construction Projects: Cost and Schedule Performance (GAO-26-107777, February 2026); GAO, Uranium Processing Facility: DOE Needs to Address Cost, Schedule, and Risk Challenges (GAO-25-107330). Related: The Design Standard NNSA Lowered to Keep Its Plutonium Factory on Schedule.

  • The Room They Called “The Fishbowl” for Six Years, and the Officer Whose Job Was Not to Notice

    The VA Office of Inspector General inspects every VHA medical facility on roughly a three year cycle, which means that for roughly three years at a stretch, nobody with subpoena-adjacent authority is required to walk into the emergency department at the Manhattan campus of the VA NY Harbor Healthcare System and ask why psychiatric patients are being interviewed in a glass box. When inspectors finally did, in March 2026, they discovered the box already had a name. The emergency medicine chief and the associate chief of staff for psychiatry both called it “the fishbowl,” a phrase presumably retired the moment anyone from outside the building was in earshot. A label on the door, more literal than the nickname deserved, read “Psychiatrist.” Patients being asked about suicidal ideation or sexual trauma were doing so visible from multiple angles, inside the department and out.

    The facility’s privacy officer, asked directly, said she had never observed two stretchers sharing a single bay during her environment of care rounds, an arrangement inspectors documented as ongoing. The emergency medicine chief, asked the same question, said the setup had existed for at least six years. Both statements can be true. That is the finding.

    An Emergency Department Held Together by Load-Bearing Cardboard

    VA NY Harbor is not a small operation. It runs three medical centers, in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, plus two outpatient clinics and two mobile units, on a fiscal year 2025 medical care budget of roughly $955 million, serving about 44,000 veterans a year. Brooklyn and Queens came through the inspection clean; the OIG had no environment of care findings at either site. Manhattan did not fare as well.

    In the emergency department, inspectors found exposed plywood where laminate had worn off the nurses’ station desk, dirty ventilation, stained and gapped ceiling tiles, cracked floors, and a broken latch on the isolation room door. In the dental clinic one floor or hallway away, they found rusted metal cabinets, chemicals and supplies stored under sinks, dirt beneath eyewash station covers, food and drink sitting in the dental laboratory (a documented violation of VA’s own infection control standards for dental clinics), and, repeatedly, corrugated cardboard boxes, the kind that harbor pests and dust and add combustible load to a room full of chemicals. Two oral surgery rooms had ceiling gaps directly above the surgical chairs.

    None of this had been flagged during the facility’s own recent comprehensive environment of care rounds, the internal inspection process that exists precisely to catch it. When the OIG team came back the next day for a reinspection, staff had already started cleaning some of it up, which is its own small confession; the fixes were achievable on short notice, which means the problem was never a resourcing question. It was a noticing question.

    Two Stretchers, One Bay, and a Six-Year Argument With Itself

    The privacy finding is the more instructive one, because it is not really about physical space. It is about what an institution’s own oversight function is capable of seeing. The facility has a privacy officer whose job includes environment of care rounds. Those rounds, by her account, never turned up two patients sharing a curtain-less bay. The department’s own chief clinician says that configuration is not new; it is closer to institutional furniture.

    The Joint Commission’s Rights and Responsibilities of the Individual standard requires hospitals to protect patient privacy, and the OIG noted the practical stakes plainly; patients who cannot get privacy for sensitive complaints, mental health crises, sexual trauma, substance use, are patients who may simply decline to raise them at all, or who leave the encounter feeling exposed rather than treated. The facility’s own response to the finding was immediate and almost too easy; ED staff pulled one stretcher out of each affected bay the moment the recommendation landed, eliminating the shared space rather than solving it with a curtain, which raises the obvious question of why a curtain, or a policy, or literally anyone’s attention, hadn’t managed that six years earlier. For the fishbowl itself, the facility’s fix leans on VA’s own emergency department design guidance, which calls for psychiatric screening rooms to allow direct staff observation, meaning the transparency was not an accident so much as an unexamined design tradeoff between clinical monitoring and patient dignity that nobody had revisited since whoever built the room made the call.

    A Test Result Workflow That Exists Everywhere Except Where It’s Needed

    The OIG’s third finding is duller on its face and structurally identical underneath. VHA Directive 1088(1) requires every service line to maintain a documented workflow specifying which non-provider staff, nurses, licensed practical nurses, medical support assistants, are authorized to communicate which kinds of test results to patients. The facility has a general policy stating that licensed or certified staff may relay non-critical results. What it does not have, across “several specialty care services,” is the service-level documentation the directive actually requires, the part that would tell a nurse in cardiology or dermatology whether calling a patient about a scan result is her job or someone else’s.

    Leaders confirmed the gap themselves when asked. Nobody was hiding it. It had simply never been built, in the same way the cardboard boxes had simply never been thrown out and the privacy officer had simply never seen what her colleague had been describing for six years. The facility’s own quality tracking mechanisms, the Joint Patient Safety Reporting system, the Good Catch program, the External Peer Review Program, the monthly committee meetings, exist in some abundance. What they apparently do not do reliably is surface a problem that a Manhattan ED nurse could have told you about on any given Tuesday.

    The Oversight Cycle Doing What It’s Designed to Do, Which Is Not Enough

    Give the facility this much; leadership concurred with all three recommendations, submitted corrective action plans, and in the case of the environment of care findings, moved fast enough that some of it was already fixed by the time the OIG came back the following day. The VISN director signed off. The interim facility director signed off. Everyone involved said the right things in the appendixes.

    But the report itself arrives with a footnote worth sitting with; the VISN structure it describes, the one responsible for overseeing this facility, no longer exists in the form the report uses to describe it. In the months surrounding this inspection, VA consolidated its 18 Veterans Integrated Service Networks down to 5, a reorganization announced in pieces between December 2025 and July 2026, mid-stream of the very inspection cycle meant to hold the old structure accountable. The report’s own authors had to add a disclaimer explaining that recommendations addressed to a now-defunct VISN director apply to whoever holds the equivalent job in the new one.

    That is the pattern underneath all three findings, scaled up. A privacy officer who does rounds but doesn’t see what’s in front of her. A directive that exists in policy but not in the one department that needed it. A three-year inspection cycle checking on an organizational chart that gets redrawn faster than the cycle completes. The OIG can only inspect the facility that exists on the day the team walks in. Everything else, six years of a fishbowl, a fiscal year of cardboard boxes, an oversight structure reorganized out from under its own paperwork, keeps running on the honor system until somebody happens to look.

    Source: VA Office of Inspector General, Healthcare Inspection — Comprehensive Healthcare Inspection of the VA NY Harbor Healthcare System, Brooklyn, New York (Report VAOIG-26-00053-273, September 2026).

    Fediverse Reactions

  • Coast Guard Has Completed 36 Sexual Misconduct Reforms. GAO Says It Still Can’t Measure Whether They Work

    The U.S. Coast Guard has completed 36 of 49 actions intended to address sexual misconduct across the service. A September 2026 snapshot from the Government Accountability Office credits the progress, then identifies the thing still missing: any completed system for determining whether the reforms have actually changed anything.

    How It Got Here

    Operation Fouled Anchor was a Coast Guard Investigative Service inquiry into more than 100 sexual-assault allegations at the Coast Guard Academy spanning 1990 to 2006. The investigation concluded in 2020 that the academy had routinely mishandled cases and failed to create a safe environment for cadets. Congress did not learn about it from the Coast Guard. According to an April 2025 GAO report, leadership notified the relevant committees only when media reporting on the investigation was imminent, in June 2023 — a delay GAO concluded had materially impaired congressional oversight.

    The Coast Guard subsequently committed to reforms. A November 2023 internal review identified 33 corrective actions; 16 more were added later, bringing the total to 49. By August 2026, the service reported 36 complete.

    The Measurement Gap

    GAO’s concern is not the count. It is that the Coast Guard initially had no mechanism to obtain feedback from personnel on whether the changes were working, and that as of June 2026 its new combined-data tool — designed to establish a baseline for evaluating cumulative reform effects — still lacked goals or measures. The service developed a workforce feedback tool in June 2026 and provided GAO with an updated implementation plan in August, which is movement. But GAO first raised the absence of a performance plan before Congress in March 2024. More than two years later, the Coast Guard still had not completed one capable of tracking progress over time. Timelines for the 13 unfinished actions also remained unupdated, with no clear next steps documented.

    What Congress Has Been Told

    Federal law requires the Coast Guard commandant to submit an annual report to three congressional committees on sexual assault and harassment involving Coast Guard members, due by January 15 each year, with specific elements enumerated under 14 U.S.C. § 5112. The reporting record since Fouled Anchor became public has not been clean.

    GAO’s review of the FY2022 report found five of eleven required elements fully included, four partially included, and two missing entirely — including congressionally mandated statistics on victims who themselves faced misconduct charges collateral to the assault investigation. That requirement had been added in 2021; Coast Guard officials told GAO they could not account for why it was absent. The report also arrived roughly a year late. A draft of the FY2023 report had the same problems, which caused the Coast Guard and DHS to withdraw a version already approved by the Acting Commandant in June 2025 for correction and re-review. The FY2024 report improved: six elements fully included, four partial, one omitted — and the previously missing victim-misconduct data restored.

    Then the FY2025 report. Completed in July 2026, declared complete by Coast Guard officials. GAO’s September snapshot says required elements are still missing. GAO has not publicly specified which ones, and has contacted Coast Guard officials for their response.

    Where That Leaves Things

    The Coast Guard is in an awkward position to have arrived at several years after Fouled Anchor became public. It can report 36 of 49 reform actions complete, but lacks a finished system to measure their cumulative effect. Its annual congressional reports have been late, incomplete, or both in every cycle GAO has reviewed. And all of this follows an investigation into more than a century’s worth of sexual-assault allegations at its own academy that Congress learned about only when a journalist was about to publish.

    GAO acknowledges that institutional change at this scale takes time and credits the steps already taken. But completing action items and measuring outcomes are different things, and the Coast Guard has now had more than two years since GAO first said so publicly to close the distance between them.

    Sources: GAO, Coast Guard: Actions Needed to Improve Congressional Reporting and Evaluation of Sexual Misconduct Reforms (GAO-25-107481, April 2025); 14 U.S.C. § 5112, Annual report on sexual assault and sexual harassment.

    Fediverse Reactions

  • The FAA Cannot Define Who Keeps You Alive Up There

    The Federal Aviation Administration employs 44,979 people. Somewhere among them are the workers who ensure your flight does not end as a smoking hole in a field, and somewhere else, apparently, is a filing cabinet where the FAA keeps its definition of who those workers actually are. A new report from the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General, published September 16, opens with a premise that should alarm anyone who has ever boarded a commercial aircraft. The agency responsible for the safest airspace in the world cannot agree, internally, on what “safety critical” means.

    This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the finding of an audit mandated by Section 429 of the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024, which directed the OIG to check whether FAA had built the workforce plans Congress requires and whether those plans actually captured the people the agency depends on to keep planes in the sky and out of each other’s flight paths. The answer, delivered with the dry precision OIG reports specialize in, is that FAA does the legal minimum and calls it a system.

    A Word That Means Four Different Things

    FAA’s Office of Human Resource Management maintains four separate classifications for its workforce, Safety Critical, Mission Critical, Public Safety, and Mission Support. Each carries its own definition, and each was built for a different bureaucratic purpose. Safety Critical and Mission Critical exist to determine who gets furloughed. Public Safety and Mission Support, introduced in 2025, exist to determine who gets exempted from the Deferred Resignation Program, the buyout scheme that thinned federal payrolls that year. Meanwhile, the Aviation Safety Workforce Plans covering fiscal years 2020 through 2024 used an entirely different three-tier scheme (Safety Critical, Safety Technical, Operational Support), which was swapped out for the Public Safety and Mission Support categories in fiscal year 2025, then swapped back to the original three tiers in fiscal year 2026.

    Read that again. In three consecutive fiscal years, FAA changed the taxonomy it uses to describe its own safety workforce three times, and at least one of those changes was explicitly tied to determining who was eligible for a voluntary resignation incentive rather than to any operational or safety rationale. An FAA official told OIG investigators that a common definition “would be welcomed,” which is bureaucratese for an admission that after decades running the National Airspace System, nobody has bothered to write one down in a way that survives contact with the next personnel action.

    The Quarter of the Workforce Nobody Is Watching

    The practical consequence of this definitional fog is a coverage gap that would be comic if the stakes were lower. FAA is legally required to publish two annual workforce plans, one for air traffic controllers and one for the aviation safety inspectors and engineers in the Office of Aviation Safety. Combined, those plans account for 19,862 employees, 44 percent of the agency’s total workforce.

    Left out entirely: 10,808 employees, roughly a quarter of everyone FAA itself classifies as Mission Critical or Public Safety, appear in no workforce plan whatsoever. That population includes Airport Safety Inspectors, who hold the identical occupational classification as the Office of Aviation Safety inspectors who are covered, and who spend their days checking runway lighting, markings, and emergency equipment. It includes first-line and operational air traffic managers, the people who supervise the controllers the agency does track. It includes engineers scattered across the Air Traffic Organization and the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, the latter a growth industry the report itself flags as expanding. FAA’s justification, relayed to OIG officials without apparent irony, is that the agency “only completes workforce plans that are mandated by law.” Not the ones that would be useful. The ones that are mandatory.

    The Data Nobody Asked For, Which Is Exactly the Data You’d Want

    Even the two plans FAA does publish are thinner than they look. Neither the Air Traffic Controller Plan nor the Aviation Safety Workforce Plan includes information on gaps in senior positions, meaning nobody outside the agency can tell how long a critical supervisory slot sits empty before it gets filled, or how long the average vacancy period runs for the most consequential jobs in the building. Neither plan addresses employee competencies or skills gaps, despite both including sections on training initiatives, an odd omission for documents ostensibly meant to answer the question of whether the workforce is actually prepared to do the job. Neither includes information on workforce development or cooperative training programs, and the Air Traffic Organization, which houses the controller workforce, does not run any workforce development or cooperative training programs of its own to omit.

    FAA is separately unable to explain how it manages conflicts of interest when its safety inspectors rotate through training with the aerospace companies those same inspectors are supposed to be regulating, a gap Section 429 specifically required the agency to account for. The Office of Aviation Safety pointed OIG toward its general ethics order and annual training requirements, which address personal conduct broadly but say nothing about the specific arrangement of an inspector cycling through industry-sponsored instruction and back onto that industry’s oversight file.

    The Minimum Viable Compliance

    FAA’s official response to all this, dated September 2 and signed by a deputy director in the agency’s own Office of Audit and Evaluation, concurs with all four of OIG’s recommendations. It also states, without evident self-awareness, that the agency has “successfully completed” every workforce plan the law requires. Both statements are true, and that is precisely the problem the report identifies. Compliance with a statute that nobody bothered to make comprehensive is not the same thing as knowing who your safety-critical workforce is, and FAA has spent five years proving it can do the former while declining to do the latter.

    The agency’s remedy, per its own comments, involves mapping occupational series to statutory responsibilities, drafting guidance for a standardized three-category workforce segmentation, and building a succession planning program, all of it promised for completion by September 30, 2027. That is a full fiscal year and a full congressional term of runway before the agency that runs the world’s busiest airspace commits to knowing, on paper, who is actually keeping it safe. Until then, the 10,808 people currently invisible to their own employer’s planning documents will keep doing the work anyway. The paperwork will simply keep pretending they don’t.

    Sources: DOT OIG, FAA’s Aviation Safety Workforce Planning (September 16, 2026); FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024, H.R. 3935.

  • 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).