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

4. Department of Defense · Minor

Rebuild HUMINT and counterintelligence capabilities

Not started

106 4. Department of Defense

“Rebuild human intelligence (HUMINT) and counterintelligence (CI) and improve their integration with defensive and offensive cyber operations.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    No rebuilding of human intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities, and no integration of them with defensive and offensive cyber operations, on an allowlisted source. The nearest enacted provisions are FY2026 NDAA sec. 6511, which requires the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security to issue policy for counterintelligence briefings to servicemembers about recruitment by governments and companies of concern, and sec. 6521, which requires notice of FBI counterintelligence assessments of federal officeholders — awareness measures, not capability rebuilding. Searched: the FY2026 NDAA for "human intelligence" (five hits) and "counterintelligence"; the FY2026 defense appropriations act; the Federal Register full-text API since 2025-01-20; the bills Corpus.

Research log

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

Research notes

Human intelligence appears five times in the FY2026 NDAA and counterintelligence is touched at secs. 6511 and 6521, but nothing there rebuilds either capability or integrates it with cyber operations.

This item sits in the page 105–107 defense intelligence cluster (#182, #183, #184, #185, #186, #187, #188). One negative search covered the whole cluster: the FY2026 NDAA titles XV and LXV, the Federal Register full-text search, and bills in Congress from congress.gov.

  • Unified Agenda sweep, 2026-09-01. The Department of War’s full 2026 Unified Agenda was read on reginfo.gov (the agency’s 111 active 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. One entry names counterintelligence: RIN 0790-AL67, Privacy Act of 1974; Implementation (Counterintelligence Investigations and Collection Activities (CICA), DoD-0025), Final Rule Stage, final action projected 07/2026, whose proposed rule was published on 2025-07-21 (90 FR 34197, FR document 2025-13581). It exempts a counterintelligence system of records from Privacy Act access provisions; it neither rebuilds a capability nor integrates one with cyber operations. Subject area, not this ask’s object. https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaViewRule?pubId=202510&RIN=0790-AL67 Capability rebuilding is done by budget, billets and directives, none of which appears on any Unified Agenda, so the negative reaches rulemaking exhaustively and DoD practice not at all.
Action
restore
Object
human intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities
ID
187