Bureaucracy Times

All the news fit to be declassified.

  • 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

  • Federal Register Watch: September 28, 2026

    The Federal Aviation Administration used today’s Federal Register to shut down a long-running exemption program for twin-engine Cessna aircraft, revoking permission for single-pilot operation after an internal review turned up what the agency called “widespread non-compliance.”

    Six items from today’s 101-document Federal Register docket stood out for institutional significance or for details that raise a “why now” question. Here is what to know.

    • Federal Aviation Administration — The FAA announced it is ceasing new exemptions that had allowed certain twin-engine Cessna models, which normally require two pilots, to fly with only one. The agency said a compliance review of exemption holders found “widespread non-compliance,” though it did not detail what the violations were. Because the exemption functioned as a waiver from the aircraft’s own type certification, revoking it means operators who had been flying single-pilot must now add a co-pilot or ground the aircraft, and the notice gives little detail on how quickly that transition has to happen. Read the notice.
    • Department of Housing and Urban Development — HUD is raising the upfront guarantee fee on its Section 184 Indian Housing Loan Guarantee Program from 1.00 to 1.50 percent of the loan amount, and adding a new 1.00 percent fee, up from zero, on loans made under the program’s Skilled Workers Demonstration track. Because that guarantee fee gets folded into a borrower’s closing costs, the increase directly raises what it costs Native American homebuyers to use this government-backed loan product. The change takes effect October 1, just three days after publication, a compressed runway that leaves lenders and applicants little time to adjust loans already in process. Read the notice.
    • Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families — HHS renamed and revised the records system covering unaccompanied immigrant children, redesignating it the “ORR Unaccompanied Alien Children Bureau Administrative Program Records” and, per the notice, “streamlining” the routine uses that govern who outside the agency can receive the data. A routine use is the specific legal permission a Privacy Act system carries to share personal information without the subject’s consent, so broadening it expands who can access records on a particularly vulnerable population. The notice does not spell out which new parties or purposes the streamlined language covers, which is the detail worth watching for. Read the notice.
    • Department of Defense, Office of the Secretary — DoD established a new Privacy Act system of records, the Abuse Incident Reporting System, to centralize tracking of child abuse, neglect, and domestic abuse cases department-wide for what the notice describes as policy development and trend analysis. Standing up a new department-wide case-tracking database is a notable institutional move on its own, and the filing is worth watching for what access controls and retention limits eventually accompany it, details a system-of-records notice is not required to spell out up front. Read the notice.
    • Environmental Protection Agency — EPA finalized a rule expanding two federally designated ocean dredged-material disposal sites off Corpus Christi, Texas, about six months after proposing the change in March. A final rule is the last procedural step before an action takes legal effect, so the expanded disposal boundaries are now in force. That proposal-to-final timeline is fast by the standards of Clean Water Act ocean-dumping site designations, which more typically take a year or longer to work through comment and review. Read the notice.
    • Department of Defense, Office of the Secretary — DoD authorized its Science and Technology Reinvention Laboratories to create a new tier of “Senior Business Technical Manager” positions, classified above the General Schedule’s top GS-15 level, to advise commanding officers and senior executives on business and technology operations. This is the second Federal Register notice this year establishing the same position structure, following one published in January, and neither notice explains why the program needed a second round of authorization within the same year. Read the notice.

    This edition draws on all 101 documents published in the Federal Register on September 28, 2026. Excluded without an anomaly signal: routine advisory-committee and fishery-council meeting notices, OMB/PRA information-collection requests, foreign-built-vessel coastwise-trade petitions, antidumping and countervailing-duty proceedings, SEC self-regulatory-organization fee filings, airworthiness directives, and museum-exhibition cultural-property determinations.

    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).

  • The Red Tape Roundup — Week of September 28, 2026

    Another week of paperwork, procurement failures, and government machinery doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is sometimes the most troubling outcome of all.

    This week the site published across a wide front. From a Pentagon gas station losing money on every gallon, to a postal watchdog that can’t agree with the Postal Service on whether they even spoke last year, a nuclear bet that looks an awful lot like TVA’s last one, and an SEC access-control problem that sat unresolved for seven years. The Federal Register and Congressional Record watches covered a Senate debate on license plate readers and a House that took Wednesday off.

    In the pipeline: a full week of scheduled articles running October 12 through 16, including an ICE detention expansion that spent billions without a written plan, a federal judiciary that exempted itself from its own accountability law, and a mica plant in North Carolina whose workers filed a union decertification petition that outlived the plant itself.

    Below is what you were reading, what’s coming, and what we’ve been up to behind the scenes.

    This Week’s Most-Read

    The numbers are in. Here’s what you were reading this week:

    1. The Pentagon’s Own Gas Station Is Losing Money on Every Gallon
    2. Deja Vu on the Clinch River: TVA’s New Nuclear Bet Looks a Lot Like Its Last One
    3. SEC Flagged OTC Link’s Access-Control Problem in 2016. It Was Still There in 2023.
    4. The Postal Service and Its Watchdog Cannot Agree on Whether They Spoke in 2024
    5. One Email Can Still Turn the National Labor Relations Board Off

    Coming Up Next Week

    A look at what’s heading your way next week:

    Nobody Asked How Many Beds Before Writing the Checks — ICE spent $45 billion expanding detention capacity with three different bed-count targets and no written plan. GAO’s fix arrives in 2027. Most of the money left in 2025.

    The Third Branch Voted Itself Out of Its Own Law — The federal judiciary spends over a billion dollars a year in rent, has no occupancy data to show for it, and declined to collect any — because it hasn’t identified a “business need.” The USE IT Act it helped inspire doesn’t apply to courts.

    The Petition That Outlived the Plant — Thirty-seven workers at a North Carolina mica plant filed a union decertification petition in October 2025. The NLRB’s blocking charge rule held it in abeyance. The plant closed in July 2026. The question they wanted answered is now moot in the most complete way a labor question can be.

    From the Investigative Desk

    When 45 Programs Become a Math Problem

    Sometimes an investigation begins with a whistleblower, a court filing or an agency document that doesn’t quite add up.

    This one began with the number 45.

    While reviewing a recent GAO report this week, we followed a footnote backward into an older Government Accountability Office finding involving 45 federal programs spread across nine agencies with overlapping responsibilities.

    That sounded interesting enough.

    Then we asked the question that tends to cause trouble around here:

    What happened to all 45 of them?

    GAO had identified the overlap years ago and raised the possibility of consolidation. So we started reconstructing the original roster program by program to determine which still exist, which were renamed, which migrated elsewhere in the federal government, which disappeared, and — most importantly — how much taxpayers are spending on their descendants today.

    That turned into considerably more work than typing 45 program names into a search box.

    Federal programs have an unfortunate habit of changing names, moving between organizational structures, merging into larger accounts, surviving as activities inside successor programs or disappearing from budget documents without leaving a convenient tombstone saying, This program died here.

    So we built a disposition matrix. Then we cleaned it. Then we audited it. Then we started following the money.

    The financial reconstruction required separating genuinely comparable appropriations from broader accounts that merely contained the old program, identifying successor structures, and resisting the extremely tempting but analytically dangerous practice of adding every large number we encountered.

    By the end of the week, the investigation had evolved from a simple historical question into something more useful: a normalized attempt to compare GAO’s original universe with the federal structure that exists in 2026.

    We are not ready to tell you what the final number means yet. That’s important. A large modern spending figure does not, by itself, demonstrate that GAO’s original overlap problem became worse. Programs change missions. Congress creates new responsibilities. Inflation exists. Organizational charts mutate. And a program that technically survived may bear little resemblance to what GAO examined years ago.

    The next pass is therefore about comparability rather than arithmetic. We want to know not merely whether Washington still spends money in these areas, but whether the duplication GAO identified was actually eliminated, reorganized, renamed — or simply allowed to grow old enough that everyone stopped calling it duplication.

    There are easier ways to spend a week. Unfortunately, none of them answer the question.

    What we’re trying to answer: Of the 45 overlapping federal programs GAO flagged, how many still exist in some form — and how much is the federal government spending on them today compared to when GAO first raised the alarm?

    FOIA Watch

    The records desk had a productive week. By “productive,” we mean several agencies confirmed that our requests have successfully entered buildings from which they may someday emerge.

    DOE gets two investigations and three requests. On September 20, we filed a Department of Energy headquarters FOIA seeking records tied to nuclear-waste litigation and Judgment Fund payments. DOE acknowledged it September 21 as HQ-2026-02565-F, invoked “unusual circumstances,” and noted that its Office of General Counsel is not the only office with responsive records. Then, on September 22, we sent two more requests to DOE’s Environmental Management operation: one seeking records needed to reconcile the roughly 9,350-ton versus 9,700-ton contaminated-nickel inventory at Paducah, and another digging into the $55.57 million recyclable-material credit associated with the old BNFL East Tennessee Technology Park contract. Those two await tracking numbers.

    CBP gets another pass. A revised FOIA stemming from our investigation into separated CBP contractors retaining system access was submitted September 20. CBP acknowledged it the following day as CBP-FO-2026-160474. This is the sharpened follow-up after the first round of CBP responses gave us enough information to ask better questions — one of FOIA’s lesser-advertised features.

    VA OIG is now on the Dawson trail. On September 22, we filed a targeted request concerning the Zachary Hess Dawson VA-benefits fraud case. The request seeks records showing how investigators detected the alleged fraud, what VA and its inspector general knew about Dawson’s incarceration, the basis for the PTSD-related fraud determination, his benefit-payment history, and the eventual prosecution referral. FOIA.gov confirmation: 3197636. Agency tracking number pending.

    SEC opens another file. Also September 22, we filed for records behind the SEC’s years-long Regulation SCI examination history involving OTC Link LLC/OTC Link ATS. The SEC acknowledged the request September 23 as 26-02954-FOIA, classified Bureaucracy Times as a media requester, and invoked a 10-day extension because responsive records may be geographically dispersed, voluminous, and require consultation among offices. In other words, we appear to have asked for something interesting.

    NSF checks in from the Arctic. The National Science Foundation acknowledged our earlier U.S. Arctic Research Commission-related request on September 23 as 2026-FOI-00358 and placed it in the agency’s Complex processing track because of the work or time required. That joins the other USARC-related requests already moving through NSF, GSA, DOI and Interior’s payroll machinery.

    Meanwhile, outside FOIA proper: the press-inquiry desk was nearly as busy. We sent questions to PBGC about its temporary attrition-event reporting waiver; CMS about its Marketplace agent/broker enforcement campaign; DoW OIG about its conspicuously quiet press-release page; SEC about the OTC Link chronology; and EPA, Treasury/IRS and DOJ about stolen used cooking oil, renewable-fuel compliance and tax-credit implications. SEC declined to go beyond its public filings, DOJ’s Southern District of Iowa said it was unable to answer our questions, and EPA acknowledged the inquiry with a substantive response expected September 30–October 2. CMS acknowledged its inquiry as FY26-44633 and said a press officer would follow up.

    At least six significant FOIA actions moved this week across DOE, CBP, VA OIG, SEC and NSF, alongside a rather crowded slate of agency press inquiries. No major document production landed before deadline, but several requests now have tracking numbers and clocks attached to them.

    The government has the questions. We have the tracking numbers. Now begins the traditional federal records ritual known as waiting politely while keeping receipts.

    On Our Radar

    A few things that haven’t become stories. Yet.

    The judiciary is studying AI so judges don’t accidentally outsource judging to AI. A recent federal judiciary update described new AI-focused working groups while reiterating that AI should not be used to make judicial decisions. The principle is perfectly sensible. The fact that it apparently needs reiterating in 2026 caught our attention. We are preparing questions about what prompted the guidance, what uses have actually been observed, and where the judiciary believes the boundary should be drawn.

    The Defense Department Inspector General’s press-release calendar has become suspiciously peaceful. The DoD OIG press-release page recently appeared to stop at July 30 despite continued audit and investigative activity elsewhere on the site. We reconstructed previous years to determine whether the gap was normal and then sent the Inspector General’s office a media inquiry asking whether publication practices, staffing, approval procedures or distribution channels changed. Sometimes the absence of a press release is merely the absence of a press release. Sometimes it tells you where to look next.

    A State Department watchdog emailed us about a report we aren’t allowed to read. State OIG’s public newsletter recently directed subscribers to a report whose public landing page explains that the report is classified. That raises an oddly specific records question: what happens to classified Inspector General reports after publication, whether public versions are eventually produced, and how often those reports are later declassified. We are now watching the process. Government transparency occasionally arrives as an email announcing the existence of something you cannot see.

    Stolen cooking oil is becoming a much stranger story than it started as. What began with federal criminal cases involving theft of used restaurant grease has turned into a regulatory question involving renewable-fuel credits, supply-chain documentation and federal tax incentives. EPA, Treasury and IRS now have questions from us about what happens when apparently legitimate fuel feedstock turns out to have been stolen somewhere upstream. We don’t yet know whether this becomes a regulatory story, a tax story, a criminal-enterprise story, or all three.

    For now, it’s on the radar.

    Until next week…

  • Federal Register Watch: September 25, 2026

    The U.S. Postal Service used an interim final rule to move most of its environmental-review procedures out of binding federal regulation and into guidance it can revise on its own, taking effect the same day it was published rather than waiting on the comment period it opened alongside it.

    • United States Postal Service — an environmental-review rulebook moves out of binding regulation, effective immediately. USPS published an interim final rule rewriting how it complies with the National Environmental Policy Act, relocating most of its detailed review procedures out of the Code of Federal Regulations and into guidance documents the agency can revise without going through notice-and-comment rulemaking. Because it issued this as an interim final rule rather than a proposed one, the changes took effect on publication day even though USPS is voluntarily taking comments through October 26; ordinarily the public would get to weigh in before a change like this became binding, not after. The agency points to a recent Supreme Court decision describing NEPA as a “modest procedural requirement” and to congressional amendments passed in 2023 and 2025 as its legal footing for the rewrite.
    • Treasury/Office of Foreign Assets Control — a Syria policy shift becomes binding law with no public notice. OFAC amended its Terrorism List Governments Sanctions Regulations to eliminate a Syria-specific general license, formally catching the sanctions code up to Syria’s earlier removal from the State Sponsor of Terrorism list. The office skipped notice-and-comment rulemaking entirely under the “foreign affairs function” exception, the standard justification sanctions regulators use to put changes into effect without the public input that most rules require; that means a decision with real diplomatic consequences became enforceable law without anyone outside government getting a chance to weigh in on how it was carried out.
    • NASA — a penalty freeze traces back to last year’s shutdown. NASA announced it will keep its civil monetary penalties at 2025 levels for 2026 rather than adjusting them for inflation as the law requires each year, because the Bureau of Labor Statistics never published the October 2025 consumer price index data the calculation depends on. That gap traces back to last fall’s lapse in federal appropriations, which halted BLS data collection for weeks; under governmentwide guidance from the Office of Management and Budget, agencies across the federal government are freezing their penalty tables at 2025 levels instead, a small sign that routine regulatory housekeeping is still catching up nearly a year after the shutdown ended.
    • ATF/Department of Justice — a 23-year-old rule gets finished the same day a new one proposes to loosen it. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives finalized regulations it first issued as interim rules back in 2003, working through public comments that had been sitting since that year to lock in background-check, licensing, and delivery-verification requirements under the Safe Explosives Act. The same day, the bureau proposed a separate rule that would loosen how explosives must be stored, eliminating an entire category of required storage magazines and giving industry a 60-day comment window, the standard period regulators allow for the public to weigh in before a final version can take effect; ATF estimates the change would save industry roughly $4.9 million over ten years. Closing out a two-decade-old rulemaking and proposing to loosen the same category of rules on the same day is a pairing worth noticing, whatever the reason behind the timing.
    • Treasury/OFAC — a second same-day rule, and a second time comment was skipped. OFAC also consolidated its scattered civil and criminal sanctions-penalty provisions into a single regulatory framework, again invoking the foreign-affairs exception to bypass public comment on the grounds that the change is purely organizational and doesn’t alter any existing sanctions program. Two rules from the same office on the same day, both skipping comment under the same justification, is enough of a pattern to flag, since that exception rests entirely on the agency’s own say-so that a change is non-substantive rather than on any outside review.
    • Justice Department — ten petitions for new rules, all denied in one notice. DOJ published a single notice denying ten separate petitions filed under the Administrative Procedure Act asking the department to begin rulemakings covering immigration enforcement, health care, and firearms licensing, some of which had been pending since 2021. For several of the immigration-related denials, the department cited “alignment with current executive orders” as part of its reasoning, a reminder that a formal petition for rulemaking, one of the few tools the public has for forcing an agency to consider a specific change, can be turned down for policy reasons and not only legal ones.

    This edition draws on the full day’s Federal Register docket for September 25, 2026: 104 documents across 31 agencies. Excluded as routine: fifteen Securities and Exchange Commission self-regulatory-organization filings, agency information-collection and OMB/Paperwork Reduction Act notices, foreign-trade-zone and antidumping/countervailing-duty determinations, disaster declarations, Sunshine Act meeting notices, and four recurring CAFTA-DR textile-availability determinations.

  • Deja Vu on the Clinch River: TVA’s New Nuclear Bet Looks a Lot Like Its Last One

    The Success Story With an Asterisk

    Two articles into this series (introduced in Meet the Fourth Branch)—one on the RFC and one on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—both anchored on entities that blew up spectacularly, it seemed only fair to promise readers one that actually worked.

    The Tennessee Valley Authority was supposed to be that entity: a New Deal creation from May 18, 1933, still delivering power to more than nine million people across seven states, still self-financing off electricity sales rather than congressional appropriations, still standing while the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and the RFC’s mortgage-guaranteeing offspring both required federal intervention to survive their own ambitions.

    Here is the asterisk. TVA’s own regulator has spent the better part of four decades documenting a debt history that looks less like a success story and more like a rehearsal for one, and TVA is currently in the middle of placing the exact same kind of bet that got it into trouble the first time, on the exact same patch of land.

    Forty Times the Original Debt Ceiling

    TVA’s early financing was almost absurdly generous by modern standards. Congress appropriated roughly a billion dollars to the agency between 1933 and 1959, charged no interest on any of it, and ultimately treated more than a fifth of that money, 258.3 million dollars, as a straightforward taxpayer equity contribution that was never expected to be repaid at all, according to a Heritage Foundation institutional history of the agency. In 1959, Congress restructured TVA to finance itself through power revenues and its own bond issuance rather than direct appropriations, and set a statutory debt ceiling to keep the new arrangement disciplined.

    That ceiling did not hold the line for long. By 1979 Congress had raised it to 30 billion dollars, forty times the amount originally authorized twenty years earlier, driven almost entirely by TVA’s nuclear construction program. TVA started seventeen nuclear generating units during the 1960s and 1970s and completed only seven of them, according to GAO’s own account of the agency’s finances, a failure rate that turned billions of dollars of half built reactors into pure liability with no offsetting electricity to sell. By 1995, GAO reported that TVA carried 26 billion dollars in debt, with 14 billion dollars of that sunk into nonproducing nuclear assets that were not even included in the rates TVA charged customers, and warned in plain language that if TVA could not compete effectively as electricity markets opened up, the federal government might end up covering TVA’s debt itself.

    The debt problem eventually stabilized. The pension problem did not. By fiscal year 2016, GAO found TVA’s pension plan was only 54 percent funded, with unfunded liabilities that had grown steadily for a decade, and TVA had not even been reporting the shortfall in its own required performance plans. It got worse before it got better: TVA’s own numbers, reported by the Chattanooga Times Free Press, showed the plan falling to roughly 60 percent funded in 2019 and the underfunding widening to 5.6 billion dollars in 2020, driven largely by falling interest rate assumptions rather than any single management failure. Since then the pension picture has improved materially: according to the White House FY2026 Budget Appendix, as of September 30, 2024, the TVA Retirement System reported an estimated seventy-nine percent funding ratio and an unfunded liability of roughly 2.3 billion dollars—better than a decade ago, though still a meaningful gap on TVA’s balance sheet.

    Same River, New Reactor

    Here is where the story loops back on itself in a way that would be hard to invent. One of the reactors TVA never finished during its 1970s nuclear buildout was the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, a federally funded prototype fast breeder sited on TVA owned land near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with TVA slated to buy its output. Congress killed the project in October 1983 after roughly 1.7 billion dollars had already been spent, amid years of cost estimates that kept sliding further out of reach no matter when anyone checked them.

    In May 2025, TVA became the first utility in the country to submit a construction permit application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a new small modular reactor, specifically the BWRX-300, a boiling water small modular reactor design developed by GE Vernova and Hitachi.

    The site TVA chose is Clinch River, the same 1,200 acre property where the federal government’s last big nuclear swing already failed once. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued its Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement for the project on April 6, 2026, per the Federal Register notice, and its Final Safety Evaluation Report on June 25, 2026, finding no safety bars to issuing the construction permit, and has targeted a permit decision for the fall of 2026, meaning a yes or no could arrive shortly before or after this article appears.

    The Department of Energy has since selected TVA for up to 800 million dollars in cost shared federal funding to advance the project, on top of a separate 400 million dollar DOE grant announced in December 2025; TVA’s board has also approved up to 350 million dollars to explore small modular reactor development at Clinch River, according to the White House FY2027 Budget Appendix. TVA has additionally signed on for a 6 gigawatt small modular reactor deployment program with a private developer, framed by the current administration as central to an American nuclear renaissance and an energy dominance agenda.

    None of this is happening because nuclear has been quietly carrying TVA’s business. Local reporting in late 2025 found TVA’s nuclear generation had actually hit its lowest level since 2007 over the preceding year, even as the agency signed on for what would be the largest small modular reactor deployment commitment in the country.

    The bet is being placed on projected future demand, principally from data centers and population growth, using the identical playbook of federally backed capital investment that produced a 26 billion dollar debt pile and a decade of underfunded pensions the last time TVA tried it.

    For some background, the TVA’s total long-term debt stood at approximately twenty-three billion dollars as of June 30, 2026, according to its most recent quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, down from the mid-1990s peak but still a substantial balance sheet obligation.

    Betting the Rate Base Again

    None of this means TVA is destined to repeat the Clinch River Breeder Reactor’s fate specifically. Small modular reactor technology is a genuinely different bet than a 1970s liquid metal fast breeder, and federal cost sharing this time is explicit up front rather than discovered after the fact.

    But the structural pattern this series keeps returning to is exactly present here, where a government corporation with an implicit federal backstop and a statutory debt ceiling that Congress has shown a consistent willingness to raise whenever the number gets inconvenient, making a decades long capital commitment to a nuclear technology that has never been built at commercial scale in the United States, funded partly by federal grants that do not show up as taxpayer risk until something goes wrong.

    TVA is not the RFC and it is not Fannie Mae. It has never needed a conservatorship or a liquidation act. But the entity billed in this series as the exception that proves government corporations can work has, on its own regulator’s paper trail, already run the exact experiment it is running again, on the same riverbank, with the same optimism about demand that never quite materialized the last time.

    Whether TVA gets to keep its status as this series’ good example may depend less on nuclear physics than on whether Congress and TVA’s own management have actually learned anything from the debt ceiling they raised forty times to pay for the last round of reactors that never got built.

    Sources: GAO, Shedding Light on Tennessee Valley Authority Debt (2017); GAO, Tennessee Valley Authority: Financial Problems Highlight Need for Long-Term Solutions (AIMD/RCED-95-134, 1995); NRC Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, Clinch River SMR (Federal Register, April 6, 2026); DOE, TVA selected for up to $800 million SMR cost-sharing; TVA SEC quarterly filing (Q3 FY2026).

    Next in the series: the FDIC, the other entity in the running for the series’ success story, and what the 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank revealed about how much daylight there really is between “well run” and “the last one standing.”