Back in July Sen McConnel (R,KY) introduced S 2572, the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2026. The Senate Appropriations Committee published their Report on the bill at the same time. There is no cybersecurity mention in the bill. While there are 109 separate mentions of the term ‘cyber’ in the Committee Report, only four of those mention cybersecurity issues of interest here.
The House version of the bill , HR 4016, was introduced in June and passed in the House by a mainly party-line vote of 221 to 209. This bill is similar to S 4921, the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2025, that was introduced by Sen Tester (D,MT) in August 2024. No action was taken on that bill (or it’s House counterpart – HR 8774) in Senate the 118th Congress.
Cybersecurity in the Report
On page 195, under the heading ‘Commercial Satellite Testbed’ the Committee notes that:
“To assure United States national security, the United States must support a holistic solution to detect, deter, and defend these mission essential systems [commercial satellites], particularly from cyber-attacks. Therefore, the Committee recommends an additional $15,000,000 and encourages the Director, Space Systems Command to develop a commercial satellite testbed by developing advanced cyber assurance protocols for commercial systems and that can provide critical insights into defending commercial assets and providing resilience for continued operation.”
On page 196, in the spending tables for ‘Research, Development, Test And Evaluation, Defense-Wide’ the report notes that there is an increase of $12.8 million dollars over the budget request for cybersecurity research. In their explanation of the funding increase on page 201, they report that $7.8 million is for “Program increase: Vehicle cyber security research”.
On page 209, under the heading ‘DARPA AI Reliability Research’ the Committee comments:
“The Committee notes that AI reliability is a foundational necessity for trustworthy and effective deployment. Therefore, the Committee encourages the Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency [DARPA] to expand DARPA’s work on developing advanced techniques for Al model reliability, mechanistic interpretability, and hardware security, in order to enable more robust evaluations of AI models before deployment.”
On page 210, in the spending table for ‘Operational Test and Evaluation, Defense’, the report notes that they are providing $3 million over the budget request for that heading. It further notes that that is due to a program increase for “Microgrid Cyber Security”.
Moving Forward
Yesterday, the Senate began the process of considering HR 4016, the House version of this bill. No amendments have been offered as of yet (it is still too early in the process), but one of the first will be from McConnel offering the language from this bill (probably updated some) as substitute language. There will be some level of bipartisan support for that substitute (where there would be none for the House language), almost certainly enough for the bill to pass. There has been some reporting that this will be turned into another multi-bus bill, with perhaps LLH and THUD bills included in this substitute language. Bipartisan support is expected.