Sponsors (2)
The bill strengthens DoD resilience and oversight by mandating standardized recovery capabilities, audits, and a department‑wide recovery strategy, but it imposes faster timelines, procurement constraints, and potential costs and prioritization tradeoffs that could strain budgets and narrow risk focus.
Military personnel and DoD systems: must implement immutable backups and recovery capabilities, improving resilience of critical defense systems against data‑destroying cyberattacks.
Congress, taxpayers, and oversight bodies: require auditable annual recovery certification and independent audits, increasing transparency and accountability about DoD readiness to recover from cyber incidents.
DoD components and Congress: must adopt a Department‑wide data recovery strategy (unclassified with a classified annex option) that identifies recovery time objectives (RTOs), needed technologies, oversight, and funding, giving Congress clearer information to authorize resources and prioritize recovery capabilities.
Taxpayers and DoD budgets: short deadlines for rapid fielding and recurring exercises/audits (180–270 days) could strain procurement timelines and increase near‑term costs.
Federal IT teams and state partners: mandating specific technical standards and a certified inventory may limit rapid adoption of novel commercial solutions and slow procurement of emerging tools.
Taxpayers and congressional oversight: annual unclassified reporting could reveal programmatic gaps that require costly remediation or create political pressure to reallocate funding, producing additional fiscal or programmatic burdens.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Imposes mandatory DoD data classification, recovery time objectives, recovery capability standards, approved-technology requirements, annual auditable certification, and a Department-wide recovery strategy.
Official title: To amend title 10, United States Code, to require the Secretary of Defense to implement resilient capabilities to recover critical Department of Defense data in the event such data is lost, degraded, or destroyed, and for other purposes.
Introduced May 7, 2026 by Suhas Subramanyam · Last progress May 7, 2026
Creates mandatory Department of Defense requirements and deadlines to ensure recovery of DoD data after outages or attacks. It requires the Secretary of Defense to classify DoD data by criticality, set recovery time objectives (short timelines for critical and other data), field specified recovery capabilities (immutable backups, network segmentation, continuous monitoring), use approved technologies, run nation-state-level recovery exercises, complete independent audits, and submit annual auditable certification reports and a near-term Department-wide data recovery strategy to Congress.