Deliver the Section 653(a) report to Congress within 60 days

Research notes

Researched 2026-08-28.

Reviewed 2026-09-06. Status unchanged; the negative is re-run and its reach is now stated. The open question was whether the FY2025 §653(a) report was transmitted, and two routes were suggested.

Route 1, State’s own report indexes — re-read and still empty. state.gov can now be read: its document pages open, and a nonsense address returns a real “page not found” rather than a holding page, so a negative from a named page is now a measurement. The FY25 and FY26 State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Act report index pages were both read and their full text searched: “653”, “Section 653”, “operating plan”, “spend plan” and “allocation” return zero occurrences on either page. The state.gov sitemap was walked again — 2,358 press releases across three press-release sitemaps, 7,770 report addresses across eight report sitemaps, 13,025 page addresses across thirteen page sitemaps — and no address matches a §653(a) or foreign-assistance allocation report.

Route 2, the appropriations committees — closed to an automated read. The House Appropriations Committee’s site (appropriations.house.gov) serves its pages but refuses its search to us, for a real query and a nonsense one alike; foreignassistance.gov is a JavaScript shell with six characters of text and returns nothing, on a first attempt and on a retry. Neither can produce a finding either way.

Why this is the expected shape rather than a gap in the search. Reports to Congress are among the instruments that never enter the Federal Register. §653(a) reports are transmitted to the Committees on Appropriations, and §7019(a) of P.L. 119-75 makes the Act’s own designated amounts stand as the transmitted figures “notwithstanding the date of the transmission of such report” — a provision that only makes sense against a history of late or unpublished transmittals. A negative search must say how far it reaches: this one is strong about publication by the Department and by the Federal Register, and it says nothing either way about transmission to the committees, which no public record would carry. The item stays not started on that basis, not on an assertion that nothing was sent.