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

4. Department of Defense · Notable

End the informal congressional "tiered review" of arms sales

Not started

101 4. Department of Defense

“End the tiered review process to eliminate at least 20 days from the FMS process.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Moved the other way, and now on the Department's own record. Both Foreign Military Sales Process Review reports to Congress have been read in full, and each says the opposite of this ask in one sentence: under the heading "Working with Congress to improve consultation through the Tiered Review Process and modernizing the Congressional Notification Process", **"The Department remains committed to the Tiered Review Process and values Congressional oversight of arms transfers."** The wording is identical in the report of July 2025 and in the report of January 2026, so the position was restated after nine months rather than drifting. The reports are the statutory FMS 2023 progress updates required by section 7019(e) of P.L. 118-47 and P.L. 119-4, and they record "no progress to report" against other recommendations where there was none, which is what makes the tiered-review sentence a considered statement rather than boilerplate. Nothing else touches the informal tier: EO 14268 sec. 3(a)(iii) directs State and Defense to send Congress a joint letter proposing higher statutory certification thresholds and to "work with the Congress to review congressional notification processes" — engagement, not abolition; EO 14383 sec. 4(v), headed "To streamline Congressional notifications," amends EO 13637 to move Arms Export Control Act sec. 36(a) functions to the Secretary of War while leaving sec. 36(b) formal notification with State. Searched: the Federal Register full-text API for "tiered review" since 2025-01-20 (four hits, none about arms sales); the FY2026 NDAA (0 hits); the bills Corpus. Corrected 2026-09-05: these reports were previously recorded as an unreadable lead.

Research log

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

Research notes

The tiered review is the informal, pre-notification stage in which the four congressional committee leaders can hold a sale. Ending it would take either State’s own decision or a statutory change; neither happened. What the administration did instead is ask Congress to raise the statutory notification thresholds and streamline the delegations behind formal notification.

  • How the reports were found, 2026-09-05. State’s own site search cannot be used: a search on state.gov returns a real page that is not an answer, and three unrelated queries return the same result set. The substitute is the site map — state.gov’s sitemap is a genuine index of 85 children carrying 68,057 URLs, with press releases running from 2025-04-24 to the day of the read. It does not contain these reports, and that is a fact worth recording: State’s reports to Congress are posted as PDFs in the site’s monthly uploads folders, and WordPress does not put uploads in the sitemap, so a sitemap negative is a negative about pages and says nothing about documents. Both PDFs open and can be read in full.
  • Dates come from the PDFs themselves: the January 2026 report’s creation date is 2026-01-12 and it was uploaded in January 2026; the earlier report’s creation date is 2025-07-23 against an August 2025 upload, so it is dated at creation and was posted the following month. Its document properties still carry the file name of the November 2024 progress update it was built from, which is why it was first noted as an August 2025 report.

This item sits in the page 101–102 foreign military sales cluster (#157, #158, #159, #160, #161, #162), whose shared instruments are EO 14268 (2025-04-09), EO 14383 (2026-02-06), the State Department’s ITAR rulemakings and FY2026 NDAA title XII subtitle B. One search covered the whole cluster.

  • Regulatory agenda search, 2026-09-01. The Department of War’s full 2026 Unified Agenda was read on reginfo.gov — 111 active regulatory agenda entries across the Air Force, Army, Navy, the Corps of Engineers, Health Affairs, the DFARS council and OSD — not the abbreviated version the Federal Register prints. State’s full agenda was read the same way (33 active regulatory agenda entries, six of them ITAR). Nothing on either agenda names the tiered review, which is what one would expect of an informal pre-notification courtesy that exists in no regulation. The nearest entry is DFARS RIN 0750-AL90, Acquisitions for Foreign Military Sales and Transportation (DFARS Case 2023-D016), Proposed Rule Stage, NPRM projected 07/2026 — which clarifies FMS transportation requirements to fix lost and misdirected shipments. FMS is the subject area; the congressional review stage is the object, and no RIN reaches it. https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaViewRule?pubId=202510&RIN=0750-AL90 The negative here reaches DoD and State rulemaking exhaustively and says nothing about the practice, which would end by a State decision or a letter to the four committee leaders.
Action
eliminate
Object
informal congressional notification ("tiered review") process for arms sales
ID
159