Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

6. Department of State · Minor

Create a template “digital hygiene” program for African countries

Not started

186 6. Department of State

“This should include the development of powerful public diplomacy efforts to counter Chinese influence campaigns with commitments to freedom of speech and the free flow of information; the creation of a template “digital hygiene” program that African countries can access to sanitize and protect their sensitive communications networks from espionage by the PRC and other hostile actors…”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No template digital hygiene program exists. Federal Register full-text search for the quoted phrase "digital hygiene" since 2025-01-20 returns 0 documents of any type; the phrase appears nowhere in the state.gov sitemap index (re-harvested in full on 2026-09-05 to 68,057 URLs), nor in either the FY 2025 or the FY 2026 index of State's statutory reports to Congress (122 FY 2026 reports, read title by title), nor in a state.gov-scoped search of the PDF uploads the sitemap does not cover, nor in the Bureau of African Affairs' March 2026 statement of Africa policy, which frames technology engagement as commercial (critical minerals, AI infrastructure, Pax Silica) rather than as network sanitization assistance. The Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy's own description of its three offices lists technical assistance for "secure critical and emerging technologies, including telecommunications infrastructure" but names no African template program. Recorded under the cluster negative searches for ticket 09 batch 09b in `docs/research/ch-06.md`.

    No action found yet. This entry is the starting point, not a finding.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Every source this Status rests on is allowlisted and was read in full; none of it was off the allowlist or unreadable.

  • How far the state.gov negative reaches, re-measured 2026-09-05. State’s own site search cannot show that something is absent: every query returns an ordinary page that is not an answer, and unrelated queries return the same results, as does the site’s built-in WordPress search. We used three substitutes instead. (1) The sitemap: state.gov’s sitemap index, a real index of 85 sub-sitemaps, harvested in full to 68,057 URLs (an earlier count of 42,098 was too low), with press releases running 2025-04-24 to 2026-09-05. (2) The reports-to-Congress indexes, which cover what the sitemap cannot: State posts its statutory reports as PDFs in the site’s uploads folder, and WordPress does not put uploads in a sitemap, so a sitemap negative is a negative about pages and says nothing about documents. The FY 2026 index (122 reports under section 7016(b) of Div. F of P.L. 119-75) and the FY 2025 index were both read in full. (3) A web search limited to state.gov, which is what turned up the uploaded PDFs.
Action
create
Object
Template “digital hygiene” program for African countries
ID
498