It’s no secret that the Trump Administration is prioritizing the integration of civilian nuclear power development with national security objectives. On May 23, 2025, President Trump issued four executive orders designed to reinvigorate the nuclear industrial base, deploy advanced nuclear reactor technologies for national security, designate Department of Energy (DOE) sites for advanced reactors, and reform DOE nuclear reactor testing.
What’s less publicized is the security and counterintelligence (CI) effort required to protect and enable these strategic advances. The most recent 2026 NDAA prioritizes security upgrades to the DOE’s nuclear security enterprise across several specific lines of effort.
2026 NDAA Lines of Effort
- Establish a new Rapid Capabilities Program within the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to enhance the nuclear enterprise’s ability to respond to growing nuclear threats from China and Russia.
- Codify the two-site strategy for restoring U.S. capabilities to produce plutonium pits.
- Reallocate funding to support the continuation of ongoing NNSA construction projects.
- Enhance the Department of Energy’s ability to protect nuclear laboratories and facilities from unmanned aerial systems.
Security and CI policy and procedure enhancements — backed by the right technology — support these lines of effort and harden DOE’s defenses against the theft of intellectual property and classified nuclear data by nation-state actors.
What This Means for the Mission
Standing up advanced reactor capability and restoring plutonium pit production are decade-scale national programs. They will draw sustained attention from foreign intelligence services across the full collection cycle — recruitment of cleared personnel, cyber intrusion into program-supporting contractors, physical reconnaissance of construction and laboratory sites, and supply-chain compromise of the specialized equipment vendors enabling the work.
Closing those gaps is a multi-domain problem. It requires unifying personnel security, counterintelligence, insider threat, industrial security, and cyber data into a single operating picture — with the workflows and automation to act on what that picture shows.
The 2026 NDAA and the May 2025 executive orders set the policy direction. Sphinx is engaging on the security and CI execution side of those mandates — if you’re standing up or supporting a program in this space, we’d like to talk.
Defending the nuclear modernization mission.
Sphinx supports U.S. Government and contractor programs across the nuclear security enterprise.