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

4. Department of Defense · Notable

Restrict the tiered review process for arms sales to cases of unanimous congressional support

Not started

101 4. Department of Defense

“Use the tiered review process only when unanimous congressional support is guaranteed in order to eliminate the "weaponization" by select Members of Congress that has prevented billions of dollars of arms sales from moving into formal congressional notification.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Moved the other way. The tiered review is not restricted to cases of guaranteed unanimous congressional support; the Department has twice told Congress it is keeping the process as it is. Its statutory Foreign Military Sales Process Review reports of July 2025 and January 2026 both state, under the heading "Working with Congress to improve consultation through the Tiered Review Process and modernizing the Congressional Notification Process", that **"The Department remains committed to the Tiered Review Process and values Congressional oversight of arms transfers"**, and that PM "continues to work on these initiatives and will consult with our committees as soon as appropriate" — continued consultation with the committees, which is the practice the Quote calls weaponization, and no condition of unanimity anywhere. Where the Department did narrow something it said so: the same reports record "no progress to report" on limiting Special Security Arrangements. The administration's chosen instrument elsewhere was to move delegations and propose higher statutory thresholds — EO 14383 sec. 4(v) amends EO 13637 to "streamline Congressional notifications" by re-delegating Arms Export Control Act sec. 36(a) functions to the Secretary of War, and EO 14268 sec. 3(a)(iii) proposes new statutory certification thresholds — neither of which conditions the informal tier on unanimity. Searched: the Federal Register full-text API for "tiered review" since 2025-01-20; the FY2026 NDAA, whose FMS provisions (secs. 1211, 1212, 1213) address workforce, acquisition strategies and the FMS-Only list, not the notification tier; the bills Corpus. Corrected 2026-09-05: the reports were previously recorded as an unreadable lead on #159.

Research log

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

Research notes

The mirror image of #159, and it fails for the same reason: the tiered review process is intact and is used on the terms State has always used it, not restricted to sales with unanimous congressional support.

  • Same shared instrument as #159, and the two are leveled apart on purpose: a shared instrument is not a shared ask. The reports do one thing to #159’s Quote — the process was not ended — and a second thing to this one: the Department describes itself as working with Congress to improve consultation through the tier, which is the opposite of reserving it for sales that already command unanimity. Both stay not started; neither inherits the other.
  • One adjacent change is real and reaches neither ask: from 2026-02-26 State publishes formal 36(b) congressional notifications on its own Political-Military Affairs pages, with earlier cases left on the Defense Security Cooperation Agency’s site (https://www.state.gov/arms-sales-congressional-notifications/, read 2026-09-05). That moves where formal notifications are published; the tiered review is the informal stage before them.

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 negative search covered the whole cluster.

  • 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. State’s full agenda was read the same way (33 active entries, six of them ITAR). As with #159, no entry on either agenda names the tiered review; the nearest is DFARS RIN 0750-AL90, Acquisitions for Foreign Military Sales and Transportation (DFARS Case 2023-D016), Proposed Rule Stage, on FMS shipment logistics. https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaViewRule?pubId=202510&RIN=0750-AL90 The negative reaches rulemaking exhaustively and agency practice not at all.
Action
restrict
Object
informal congressional "tiered review" process for arms sales
ID
161