Research Mandate
Chartered research
The founding charter makes the Department of Strategic Continuity responsible for research on risks to the long-term continuity of civilization and on the means of preserving human knowledge and capability across a severe disruption. The charter gives the Department authority to:
- develop, maintain and publish integrated models of interdependent civilizational systems, and assess long-horizon systemic risk;
- evaluate frontier computational systems and the dependence of critical systems upon them;
- conduct and sponsor research in computational neuroscience, connectomics and the preservation of human cognition, subject to standing ethical review;
- design, construct and operate research facilities for computation and for long-duration preservation of information;
- develop methods for long-term forecasting and for planning under deep uncertainty; and
- publish its findings, methods and data, and collaborate with federal science agencies, universities and international scientific bodies.
The charter calls this work research. Its products are knowledge, methods, data and infrastructure. Decisions about whether and how to act on that knowledge belong to the institutions with authority to make them.
Research priority areas and programs
The 2026 Research Priorities Statement organizes the chartered research into six priority areas, each carried out by a single program with a lead division.
| Priority area | Program | Lead division | Established |
|---|---|---|---|
| Integrated assessment of systemic risk | Integrated Systems Modeling Program (ISMP) | OSRA | March 2026 |
| Frontier computational systems and infrastructure dependence | Frontier System Evaluation Program (FSEP) | OAAI | March 2026 |
| Computational neuroscience and cognitive preservation | Neural Continuity Research Program (NCRP) | DNC | 9 June 2026 |
| Continuity research infrastructure | Continuity Infrastructure Initiative (CII) | CIA-DSC | April 2026 (expanded 1 September 2026) |
| Long-duration information preservation | Long-Duration Information Preservation Program (LDIPP) | CIA-DSC, with OLSR | May 2026 |
| Long-term forecasting and decision-making under deep uncertainty | Long-Term Forecasting Program (LTFP) | OLSR | March 2026 |
Most programs draw on more than one division. The Neural Continuity Research Program, for example, is led by the Directorate of Neural Continuity with the Office of Advanced Artificial Intelligence, CIA-DSC and the Office of Long-Term Systems Research as partners. The ICSM is owned by the Office of Strategic Risk Assessment but runs on infrastructure operated by CIA-DSC.
Forms of work
The Department carries out research in its own divisions and facilities, and through cooperative agreements and contracts with universities, nonprofit research organizations and industry. All published work, whether intramural or sponsored, goes through the same publication review process. Its outputs take four forms: Technical Reports, Working Papers, Frameworks, and Policy and Administrative documents. All are listed in the publications library.
Boundaries of the mandate
The founding charter places explicit limits on the Department. These are not matters of policy that the Department may revise itself.
The Department does not have, and may not exercise:
- Operational authority. It does not operate, direct or control energy, water, communications, financial, transport or other infrastructure outside its own facilities.
- Regulatory authority. It does not issue regulations, standards with force of law, licenses or permits. Its frameworks are voluntary research frameworks.
- Law-enforcement or intelligence authority. It has no powers of investigation, arrest or compulsion, and it does not collect intelligence. The Office of the Inspector General’s oversight of the Department itself is a separate matter.
- Public-safety or emergency-management functions. It does not issue warnings, alerts or protective guidance to the public.
Human-subject research
The charter prohibits any human-subject research on emulation, cognitive reconstruction or related topics except under protocols approved in advance by the Research Ethics Review Board (RERB). This includes the acquisition or use of human neural tissue and the collection of human neural or behavioral data for emulation research. The RERB reviews every NCRP protocol. It can approve, require changes to, suspend or terminate a protocol, and Department leadership cannot override its decisions.
The Neural Continuity Research Program’s long-term goal, the preservation of human minds in purpose-built computational infrastructure, is explicitly aspirational. The current state of the art is a neuron-level emulation of very small nervous systems (Emulation Fidelity Level 3 for C. elegans and partial Drosophila circuits). The program is organized in phases, and each depends on the review of the one before. Whether human cognitive continuity is achievable at all, and what it would mean, remain open scientific and philosophical questions. They are treated as such in DSC-WP-2026-006.