11. Purpose
This Statement sets the research priorities of the Department of Strategic Continuity for calendar year 2026. It is issued by the Secretary under the Department’s founding charter (DSC-ADM-2026-000)1 and applies to all offices of the Department.
The Statement serves three purposes. It translates the Department’s mission — to ensure the long-term survival of humanity and the continuity of civilization through research into systemic risk, advanced computational systems, and the preservation of human knowledge and cognition — into a bounded set of research areas with objectives for the Department’s first year. It assigns responsibility for each area to a lead office. And it establishes principles that govern how all Departmental research is conducted, reviewed and reported, so that the Department’s work can be judged by the public and by its oversight bodies against commitments made at the outset.
Priorities not listed in this Statement may be pursued only to the extent that they support a listed priority or are approved by the Deputy Secretary on the recommendation of the Chief Scientist.
22. Background
The Interagency Task Force on Civilizational Continuity (ITFCC) was convened in March 2024 to examine whether risks capable of causing severe, long-lasting disruption to civilization were being adequately assessed and prepared for. It delivered its final report, ITFCC-2025-07, Report on Long-Horizon Systemic Risk, in November 2025.
The Task Force reached four conclusions that shape this Statement. First, the principal risks to continuity are systemic: they arise from interactions among energy, food, water, financial, information and computational systems, and no institution was responsible for assessing those interactions as a whole. Second, the growing delegation of operational control in critical infrastructure to advanced computational systems had created dependencies that were neither measured nor systematically evaluated. Third, methods used for public planning were poorly suited to horizons of decades and to uncertainty that cannot be expressed as reliable probabilities. Fourth, the preservation of knowledge — the records, data and expertise needed to maintain and rebuild complex systems — had received little sustained attention, and the question of whether human cognition itself might one day be preserved had been left entirely to speculation rather than to disciplined research.
The Department was established on 12 January 2026 to consolidate and continue this work. It inherits from the Task Force an early integrated systems model, now in its third version,2 a set of preliminary assessments, and an initial agreement for the transfer of a site in southern Nevada for research computing. Five research divisions are established under the founding charter and will be formally stood up in March 2026.
33. Priority areas
The Department will concentrate its 2026 research effort in six priority areas. Each is assigned a lead office, accountable for its objectives, and partner offices, which contribute staff and expertise. Lead offices are expected to organize each priority area as a standing research program during 2026.
| Priority area | Lead office | Partner offices | Intended program structure |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Integrated assessment of systemic risk | Office of Strategic Risk Assessment (OSRA) | OAAI, OLSR | Standing program from March 2026 |
| 2. Evaluation of advanced computational systems in critical infrastructure | Office of Advanced Artificial Intelligence (OAAI) | OSRA | Standing program from March 2026 |
| 3. Long-term forecasting and decision methods | Office of Long-Term Systems Research (OLSR) | OSRA | Standing program from March 2026 |
| 4. Continuity research infrastructure | Continuity Infrastructure Administration (CIA-DSC) | Directorate of Neural Continuity (DNC) | Standing initiative following site transfer |
| 5. Long-duration information preservation | CIA-DSC | OLSR | Standing program by mid-2026 |
| 6. Neural continuity research | DNC | OAAI, CIA-DSC, OLSR | To be chartered as a dedicated program following ethics framework review |
3.13.1 Integrated assessment of systemic risk
The Department will maintain the capacity to assess, in an integrated and quantitative way, how stresses in one critical system propagate to others, and to report its assessments to the public at regular intervals. The Integrated Civilizational Systems Model (ICSM) developed under the Task Force will be the principal instrument for this work, but the Department’s assessments will not rest on a single model.
- Complete the re-architecture of ICSM as version 4, with a shorter coupling interval and explicit representation of computational systems, and establish a controlled baseline by April 2026.
- Publish full documentation of the model’s structure, data, calibration, validation and known limitations.
- Establish an independent Model Review Panel with unrestricted access to the model, and record its findings, including dissenting views, in Departmental publications.
- Undertake a structural assessment of dependencies among critical global systems.
- Publish the Department’s first probabilistic assessment of systemic risk over the coming decade by October 2026, and annually thereafter.
3.23.2 Evaluation of advanced computational systems in critical infrastructure
Advanced computational systems now perform monitoring, dispatch, optimization and decision functions across critical infrastructure. The Department will develop the capacity to evaluate how such systems behave under conditions their developers and operators may not have anticipated, and how failures in one deployment may be correlated with failures in others.
- Publish an evaluation framework for advanced computational systems deployed in or proposed for critical infrastructure roles by mid-2026, with initial attention to electric grid operations and financial settlement.
- Develop sandboxed evaluation environments that reproduce infrastructure operations without exposing live systems, for deployment when Departmental computing capacity becomes available.
- Measure the extent of automated control in critical infrastructure, and supply evaluation results to the integrated systems model.
- Assess technological risks from advanced computational systems that bear on the Department’s mission, and advise other priority areas on their use of such systems.
3.33.3 Long-term forecasting and decision methods
The Department’s work concerns horizons of decades and, in the case of archival preservation, longer. It will develop and apply methods suited to those horizons and to uncertainty that cannot be reliably quantified, and will hold its own forecasts to account.
- Develop methods for planning under deep uncertainty suitable for application to Departmental programs and facilities, and publish a working paper on their use during 2026.
- Design arrangements for recording and scoring the Department’s forecasts over time, so that its record can be examined by others.
- Examine the design of institutions that have sustained a function over many decades, and recommend principles for the Department’s own long-term organization.
- Provide scenario design and decision analysis support to the integrated assessment of systemic risk.
3.43.4 Continuity research infrastructure
The Department’s research requires computational and archival infrastructure designed for reliability over long periods and for continued operation through severe external disruption. The Department will develop three Continuity Research Facilities with complementary functions, sited for geographic separation and independent utility supply.
- Complete the transfer of the southern Nevada site, designated Continuity Research Facility Alpha, and bring its primary computing system to initial operating capability during 2026.
- Advance the development of a subsurface facility on the Colorado Front Range for archival and computational research, and of a facility in interior Alaska for long-duration preservation research.
- Establish engineering standards for power, cooling, physical protection and maintainability for all Departmental facilities.
- Publish non-sensitive descriptions of facility functions, status and specifications.
3.53.5 Long-duration information preservation
The records, data and documented expertise on which complex systems depend are held on media and in formats with service lives of years to decades, by institutions that may not persist. The Department will research how essential information can be retained and kept interpretable over a century or more.
- Assess the longevity, failure modes and reading-technology dependence of candidate archival media, including magnetic tape, optical media, silica glass and microfilm.
- Design and pilot a replicated, multi-medium archive architecture across geographically separated facilities.
- Establish standards for describing archived material so that it remains interpretable without reliance on the institution that created it.
- Apply these standards to the Department’s own records and model archives.
3.63.6 Neural continuity research
The Department will investigate whether human cognition could eventually be represented, reconstructed and sustained on computational systems. This is a long-term research question, not an established capability. No such representation of any nervous system approaching human scale has been demonstrated, and the Department does not regard success as assured. The research is nonetheless within the Department’s mission because, if it proved feasible, it would bear directly on the preservation of human knowledge and cognition, and because the scientific, technical and ethical questions it raises warrant disciplined public investigation rather than speculation.
This area will be chartered as a dedicated program once its ethics framework has been reviewed. Until the program is chartered, work will be limited to the objectives below.
- Prepare a program charter defining scope, staged phases, and the criteria for proceeding from one phase to the next.
- Establish a standing Research Ethics Review Board to review all research protocols in this area before work begins. No research involving human subjects or human tissue will be undertaken without its approval.
- Survey the state of connectomics and computational neuroscience, and define acquisition standards and fidelity measures for neural reconstruction.
- Specify benchmark emulations of small nervous systems against which progress can be measured.
- Begin developing standards for the long-term preservation of neural data.
- Treat questions of personal identity and continuity as open scientific and philosophical questions, to be addressed explicitly in program documentation.
44. Coordination among priority areas
The six priority areas are interdependent, and lead offices are expected to plan accordingly. The integrated assessment of systemic risk depends on the evaluation of computational systems for the parameters that describe automated control, and on forecasting and decision methods for its scenario design. Continuity research infrastructure supports every other area: it will host the integrated systems model, the evaluation environments for computational systems and the computing workloads of neural continuity research, and it will house the archives developed under information preservation. Information preservation and neural continuity research share a need for standards that keep very large datasets intact and interpretable for decades.
Where a shared dependency creates competing demands — most immediately for computing capacity at Facility Alpha during its first year — the Chief Scientist will set allocation rules in the consolidated research plan. In setting them, the Chief Scientist will give precedence to work with fixed public commitments, including the first probabilistic assessment of systemic risk.
| Priority area | Measure of progress by 31 December 2026 |
|---|---|
| 1. Integrated assessment of systemic risk | ICSM version 4 baselined and documented; Model Review Panel review completed and recorded; first probabilistic assessment published |
| 2. Evaluation of advanced computational systems | Evaluation framework published; at least one sector evaluated in a sandboxed environment |
| 3. Long-term forecasting and decision methods | Working paper on planning methods published; design for a forecast record agreed |
| 4. Continuity research infrastructure | Facility Alpha at initial operating capability; development milestones for the second and third facilities met or variances reported |
| 5. Long-duration information preservation | Media longevity assessment published; pilot replicated archive operating |
| 6. Neural continuity research | Program chartered following ethics review; Research Ethics Review Board constituted; preliminary data preservation standards released for public comment |
55. Cross-cutting principles
The following principles apply to all research conducted or funded by the Department. The Chief Ethics and Research Integrity Officer is responsible for guidance on their application and for reporting to the Secretary on compliance.
5.1 Research integrity
Departmental findings will be determined by evidence and stated method, not by their convenience to any policy position, including the Department’s own. Analysts will record the provenance of data, the configuration of models and the assumptions behind every published result in sufficient detail for the result to be reproduced. Results that are unfavorable to Departmental programs will be reported on the same basis as favorable ones. Staff and external collaborators will disclose conflicts of interest, and no person will review work in which they have a direct interest.
5.2 Transparency
The Department will publish its research by default. Technical reports, working papers and frameworks will be released for public distribution unless release would compromise the physical security of facilities, the privacy of research participants, or obligations under data licenses, and the reasons for any withholding will be recorded. Methods and limitations will be published together with findings. Where the Department’s assessments carry large uncertainty, that uncertainty will be stated plainly, in terms a non-specialist reader can understand.
5.3 Ethics review
Research involving human participants, human tissue or data about identifiable persons, and research whose conduct or results raise significant ethical questions, will be subject to independent ethics review before it begins. Review will be proportionate to risk, will be repeated at each change of phase or protocol, and may result in the modification or termination of research. Ethics review bodies will have authority to stop work, and their decisions will not be overridden by program management.
5.4 Public accountability
The Department’s research is conducted on behalf of the public and will be open to scrutiny by the public and by independent oversight. The Department will cooperate fully with the Office of the Inspector General, will seek and publish the advice of the External Scientific Advisory Board on its research portfolio, and will report annually on progress against the objectives in this Statement, including objectives not met.
66. Implementation and reporting
| Requirement | Responsible | Due |
|---|---|---|
| Implementation plan for each priority area, including milestones, staffing and facility requirements | Lead office Director or Administrator | Within 60 days of this Statement (18 April 2026) |
| Consolidated research plan reconciling priority-area plans and resolving shared resource needs | Chief Scientist | Within 90 days (18 May 2026) |
| Quarterly progress review against objectives | Deputy Secretary, with lead offices | Each quarter from June 2026 |
| Annual research report to the public, including objectives not met | Secretary | First quarter of 2027 |
| Review and reissue of this Statement | Secretary, on advice of the Chief Scientist and the External Scientific Advisory Board | February 2027 |
Resources will be allocated across the six priority areas in accordance with the consolidated research plan. Where a priority area depends on facilities not yet available, lead offices will identify interim arrangements and the dates at which work will transfer to Departmental facilities.
This Statement takes effect on the date of issue and remains in effect until reissued. Questions on its application should be directed to the Office of the Chief Scientist through internal channels.
Notes
- 1.The founding charter is an internal document and is not published online. Its provisions concerning the Department’s mission and authorities are summarized on the Departmental mandate page. ↩
- 2.Versions 1 to 3 of the model were developed by Task Force analytic staff between 2024 and 2025 and informed ITFCC-2025-07. Version 4 is to be a re-architecture rather than an update; see Section 3.1. ↩