Sponsors (4)
Introduced April 23, 2026 by Randy Weber · Last progress April 23, 2026
The bill makes a large, coordinated investment to expand U.S. quantum R&D, workforce, and industrial capacity (while strengthening security and interagency coordination), but does so at greater federal cost and with new security, compliance, and collaboration limits that may disadvantage some researchers, smaller institutions, and fundamental science.
Students, trainees, and the domestic STEM workforce will gain substantially expanded education, training, internships, and career pathways in quantum science and engineering, improving job prospects and long-term talent supply.
Researchers, national labs, and companies will get stronger R&D and commercialization infrastructure (centers, foundries, testbeds, DOE/NSF programs) that can accelerate technology maturation and create jobs and startups.
Federal programs will better protect and harden critical systems by supporting post-quantum cryptography, supply-chain resilience, and coordinated research on quantum-safe capabilities, reducing future cybersecurity and national-security risks.
Taxpayers face materially higher federal spending risk because the bill expands grant programs, centers, DOE/NSF activities, and testbeds without explicit offsets.
New definitions, security rules, and prohibitions (including restrictions tied to Confucius Institutes and 'foreign entities/countries of concern') will limit some international collaborations and could exclude researchers or institutions from funding.
By emphasizing engineering, commercialization, and near‑term demonstrations across many programs, the bill risks diverting finite federal R&D funds away from fundamental/basic science that drives long‑term breakthroughs.
Based on analysis of 24 sections of legislative text.
Reauthorizes and expands federal quantum R&D, education, workforce, supply‑chain, standards, and research‑security authorities across multiple agencies and creates new centers and foundry programs.
Extends and updates federal authority for civilian quantum research, development, workforce, standards, and commercialization by changing the program sunset, expanding agency roles, creating new centers and foundry programs, and requiring an international cooperation strategy. It broadens statutory language from “science and technology” to “science, engineering, and technology,” strengthens workforce and education programs, adds research-security and foreign‑entity rules, and directs new coordination, reporting, and standardization activities across NIST, NSF, DOE, OSTP, NASA, and other agencies. The bill creates competitive “quantum acceleration centers,” a DOE quantum instrumentation and foundry program, an NSF national workforce coordination hub, expands DOE’s RD&D and QUEST cloud/partnering authorities, mandates an OSTP international quantum cooperation strategy, and updates definitions (including post‑quantum cryptography and foreign‑entity terms). Most new activities are subject to appropriations and to existing research‑security rules required by recent R&D/competition law.