History

Origins: the Interagency Task Force on Civilizational Continuity

The Department’s origins lie in the Interagency Task Force on Civilizational Continuity (ITFCC), convened in March 2024. The task force brought together scientists, engineers and analysts from federal science, energy, health, agriculture and security agencies, with academic advisers. It was asked a narrow question: did existing federal risk assessments, each organized around a single sector or hazard, adequately describe risks arising from the interaction of many systems at once?

The task force concluded that they did not. Sector assessments were often sound within their own boundaries, but no institution was responsible for the couplings between sectors: the dependence of grid control on computational systems, of food distribution on fuel and finance, of manufacturing on a few sources of semiconductors and critical minerals. Over its 20 months the ITFCC built the first three versions of what became the Integrated Civilizational Systems Model to study those couplings. It also commissioned two small pilots in long-duration data preservation and a review of the state of connectomics and computational neuroscience.

The final report

The task force delivered its final report, ITFCC-2025-07, Report on Long-Horizon Systemic Risk, in November 2025. The report made three central recommendations:

1. That a standing federal research institution be created with responsibility for long-horizon systemic risk. The institution should have its own modeling capability, subject to independent review, and its findings should be published.
2. That dedicated computing and preservation infrastructure be developed, physically dispersed and engineered for decades of service, to support that work and to protect records of lasting value.
3. That foundational research into the preservation of human knowledge, including the long-term scientific question of whether human cognition could be represented computationally, be pursued openly, under standing ethical review, rather than left to unreviewed efforts.

The report also described the limits of its own modeling. It recommended that any successor institution present systemic-risk results as conditional estimates with explicit uncertainty, and that it establish an independent panel to review its models. Both recommendations were carried into the Department’s founding charter.

Establishment

The Department of Strategic Continuity was established on 12 January 2026 under its founding charter, which consolidated the task force’s staff, models and pilot projects into a single department. The charter is registered as DSC-ADM-2026-000 and is not published on this site; its provisions on mission, mandate and governance are summarized on the Research Mandate and Institutional Governance pages.

Five weeks later, on 17 February 2026, the Department issued its first public document, the 2026 Research Priorities Statement (DSC-ADM-2026-001). It set out six research priorities and the programs to carry them out.

Timeline

The first year

In March 2026 the Department formally stood up its five research divisions: the Office of Advanced Artificial Intelligence, the Office of Strategic Risk Assessment, the Directorate of Neural Continuity, the Continuity Infrastructure Administration (CIA-DSC) and the Office of Long-Term Systems Research. Three programs began the same month: the Integrated Systems Modeling Program, the Frontier System Evaluation Program and the Long-Term Forecasting Program. The Continuity Infrastructure Initiative followed in April and the Long-Duration Information Preservation Program in May.

In April, version 4.0 of the ICSM was baselined, and its model description was published as DSC-TR-2026-003. On 9 June the Neural Continuity Research Program was chartered, after the Research Ethics Review Board had reviewed its program plan. In September the Directorate of Neural Continuity released the draft Neural Data Preservation Framework for public comment.

Infrastructure work went on alongside the research. Facility Alpha reached initial operating capability on 18 August. Archive Level 1 at Facility Bravo was commissioned in June, and a pilot vault at Facility Charlie began operating in July. On 1 September the Continuity Infrastructure Initiative was expanded to bring both sites under a single construction and engineering program.

On 15 October 2026 the Office of Strategic Risk Assessment released the first Outlook, Civilizational Systems Outlook: 2026–2035, produced with version 4.2 of the ICSM. Its central finding is that, in 71 percent of ensemble runs (90 percent interval 58–82 percent), the Department’s models indicate entry into a systemic breakdown regime before 1 January 2035. The result is discussed, with its definitions and limitations, under Risk Assessment.

Looking ahead

The Department’s second year, FY2027, began on 1 October 2026. Its emphasis is described on the Research Priorities page. The Department intends to publish its first annual report, covering its first year of operation, in early 2027.