The Department of Strategic Continuity has issued its 2026 Research Priorities Statement (DSC-ADM-2026-001), setting out six priority areas that will organize its research divisions and programs during its first year of operation.
WASHINGTON — The Department of Strategic Continuity today issued the 2026 Research Priorities Statement (DSC-ADM-2026-001), the first policy document released by the Department since its establishment on 12 January 2026. The statement sets out the research questions the Department will pursue in its first year, the organizational structure through which it will pursue them, and the principles that will govern its work.
The statement builds on the final report of the Interagency Task Force on Civilizational Continuity, Report on Long-Horizon Systemic Risk (ITFCC-2025-07), delivered in November 2025. That report concluded that the risks most likely to affect the long-term continuity of civilization arise from interactions among systems, including energy, food, finance, communications and increasingly automated infrastructure, and that no existing institution was organized to study those interactions over periods of decades.
“Our first obligation is to understand the problem accurately,” said the Secretary of Strategic Continuity. “This statement commits the Department to research that is careful about uncertainty, open to independent review, and published wherever it can be. The questions are long-term ones, and the work has to be built to last as long as the questions do.”
Six priority areas
The statement identifies six priority areas, each of which is to be developed into a research program:
- Integrated systems modeling — development and validation of a model of interactions among critical global systems, building on the Integrated Civilizational Systems Model developed during the Task Force period.
- Frontier computational system evaluation — methods for evaluating advanced artificial intelligence systems used in, or proposed for, critical infrastructure.
- Long-term forecasting — methods for forecasting and decision-making under deep uncertainty over multi-decade horizons.
- Continuity infrastructure — design, construction and operation of research facilities for high-performance computing and archival storage.
- Long-duration information preservation — technologies and practices for retaining human knowledge over a century or longer.
- Computational neuroscience — research into the feasibility of representing neural structure and function computationally, beginning with standards, small-organism benchmarks and an ethics framework.
The statement notes that the sixth area addresses long-term scientific questions whose answers are not known, and that research in it will be subject to standing ethics review before any protocol proceeds.
Organization
To carry out these priorities, the Department will stand up five research divisions in March 2026: 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. The statement also provides for an External Scientific Advisory Board, a Research Ethics Review Board, and a Model Review Panel to provide independent review of the Department’s systemic risk modeling.
The statement commits the Department to publish its technical reports, working papers and frameworks under a common identifier series, with a distribution statement of “Approved for public release; distribution unlimited” wherever release is possible.
The full statement is available in the publications library. A summary of the priorities is available on the Research Priorities page. Media inquiries may be submitted through the Contact page.