Space Force sees new Space Academy as civilian talent pipeline

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The Air Force Academy in Colorado will continue to be a key training ground for budding Space Force officers even as NASA launches a new Space Academy, the space service’s top officer said Tuesday.
But the Space Academy could become a formal pipeline that prepares a reliable stream of civilian workers for the Space Force, which heavily relies on their deep technical expertise across each of the service’s complex missions.
“We need a lot of technical civilians in the Space Force,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Doug Schiess told reporters at the Air and Space Forces Association’s annual fall conference outside Washington. “Anybody that’s space-minded and is going to have that [Space Academy] background, that can then get a job in the Space Force as a civilian, that’s great.”
The Space Force is scrambling to rebuild its civilian workforce after losing nearly 14% of those employees to early retirements and layoffs in the Trump administration’s purge. Civilians make up about one-third of the Pentagon’s smallest service, more than in any other branch of the military.

The service is asking Congress to fund around 7,200 civilian jobs in 2027, a 40% bump over 2026, to staff a burgeoning slate of missions from communications relay to missile warning to offensive cyber operations.
The Space Academy could help fuel that growth. In an executive order last month, President Donald Trump announced the U.S. would pursue a “professional corps of civically grounded leaders” for the next era in American space exploration. The proposed academy would train specialists ranging from astronauts and satellite operators to engineers and scientists, in exchange for an agreement to join the military or civil service for a certain number of years.
Military space officials have argued that creating a separate service academy for the Space Force, established in 2019, would be unnecessarily duplicative. Schiess indicated the space branch will help shape NASA’s plan and can benefit from its work, but won’t be leading the effort.
He likened the idea to the Merchant Marine Academy, which educates civilians as well as military officers. Those graduates typically go on to staff a supplemental force of cargo ships and can support the Navy in wartime, but can head to other services as well.
Each of the Defense Department’s more typical service academies also produce a handful of second lieutenants each year who go on to work for another branch of the military. The Space Academy could offer a similar path for troops looking to join the Space Force, Schiess said.
He suggested each of the military services could host a Reserve Officer Training Corps unit at the new academy. The Space Force aims to bring in about <a href="https://www.starcom.spaceforce.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4600820/starcom-highlights-plan-to-deliver-space-force-growth/">300 guardians through ROTC</a> alone next year.
“If there is an avenue from that academy to then get to a commissioning source … then we see that as goodness,” Schiess said. “But we graduate 100 guardians from the United States Air Force Academy every year, and we will continue to do that.”

A presidential commission on the Space Academy will spend 120 days hashing out the details needed to create the new school. That panel is chaired by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and includes Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink and several other federal executives. It held its first meeting Sept. 9.
The Space Force’s training command will also offer input to the commission, Schiess said.
Space Training and Readiness Command boss Maj. Gen. Jim Smith declined to comment Monday on how the Space Force could partner with the new academy, saying the commission needs to issue its recommendations before the Space Force figures out how to implement them.
“Our national security, our way of life relies on capabilities and activities in the space domain,” Smith told reporters at the conference. “The more we increase that education and train people on issues and items relative to the space domain, that’ll be a huge win.”
NASA is now calling on states to <a href="https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/274445df4c224846adf7de19c11c4c6a/view">bid to host the academy’s permanent campus</a> starting in 2031.
That location must offer the “institutional capacity, infrastructure, partnerships, security and room for growth” needed to create a world-class school that can endure well into the future, the agency said in a Sept. 10 solicitation.
“The campus should inspire excellence, strengthen America’s aerospace workforce and visibly express the nation’s determination to remain the world’s preeminent spacefaring power,” NASA said.
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Golden Dome needs congressional buy-in, but lawmakers are still in the dark about what it would entail

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Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) said Monday there is “a lot of work that has to be done” to build broad support in Congress for the Trump administration’s ambitious Golden Dome missile defense system, in part because lawmakers still do not have any meaningful information about the system more than a year after President Donald Trump announced the initiative. 
“To be able to, I think, first of all, get the information that we need is extremely important, but also to have a better understanding of just what Golden Dome involves,” Fischer said at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air, Space &amp; Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Md.
Fischer’s comments come after a group of lawmakers sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in June saying that DoD needs to share its plans for the system before the department “spends one more taxpayer dollar” on the Golden Dome initiative.
“There is no reasonable justification for keeping the mission and number of interceptors for Golden Dome secret … It is one thing to withhold design details or performance specifications of certain systems, but it is quite another to withhold the entire system architecture that you expect Congress to approve and fund. Congress and the American public have a right to know what they are paying for,” the lawmakers <a href="https://beyer.house.gov/uploadedfiles/letter_to_secretary_hegseth_on_the_golden_dome_program.pdf" rel="noopener" target="_blank">wrote</a>. 

A recent <a href="https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62422" rel="noopener" target="_blank">analysis</a> from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office <a href="https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-news/2026/05/cbo-estimates-golden-dome-could-cost-1-2-trillion-over-20-years/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">estimated</a> that the Golden Dome architecture consistent with President Trump’s executive order would cost roughly $1.2 trillion over the next two decades, far exceeding the White House’s initial $175 billion estimate. The Defense Department has since said that outside cost estimates are incorrect because they are not estimating what DoD is building.
Fischer echoed the sentiment, saying that CBO scores “can be really unrealistic due to the fact that there is not a clear understanding of this layered defense that we’re looking at when it comes to defending our homeland.”
The CBO’s national security division <a href="https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2026/08/golden-dome-cost-estimate-draws-pentagon-pushback/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">defended</a> its estimate of the Golden Dome, saying that it used current technologies, such as Patriot missile batteries and Aegis Ashore to estimate the cost of the network of systems outlined in Trump’s January 2025 executive order.
Fischer said the program will need the buy-in not only from Congress, but from the public as well.
“That goes back to having them understand the threats, understand the needs, and understand the resources that are being committed to address all of those needs,” Fischer said.
“We need to make sure that they are followed, and there is that strong buy-in, not just from Congress, not just from any administration, but from the people of this country. And I think they will be there. They are there when they know what’s at stake,” she added.
But the program of this massive scale, with such serious national security implications, has been shrouded in secrecy, and there has been no public debate about its cost, the viability issues facing it or the strategic risks of pursuing and deploying it.

Meanwhile, Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, Golden Dome’s program manager, said the Defense Department is on track to deliver a Golden Dome operational capability by the summer of 2028.  
“The first thing we did right out of the gate was put industry consortium on contract to get after command and control, because that really is the secret sauce of any kind of national missile defense capability you want to put out there. That has been on contract. We have already tested it twice. It was effective on both sets of tests. We know, based on those tests, that we are on the right path with command and control,” Guetlein said. 
“We know, based on those tests, that the munitions that we are planning to bring to the fight, the sensors are going to be effective against the threats that … the president identified in the executive order,” he added.
Guetlein said about 95% of the $22.5 billion that Congress provided for the program last year has been obligated.
“We have gotten all of that money on contract. We have space-based interceptors on contract. We have command and control on contract. We have radars on contract. We have some munitions on contract. We’re already digging dirt. We stood up our first operational site already, and have been digging dirt across the homeland, building the construction of our sites,” Guetlein said. 
“We have the evidence that says we are making the progress that we told Congress and told the president that we would make,” he added.
The administration is seeking an average of about $15 billion annually over the next five years for the system. 
DoD recently announced that the system would cost $185 billion.
Some experts <a href="https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-news/2026/03/as-golden-domes-price-tag-rises-some-say-new-estimate-is-no-more-credible/" rel="noopener" target="_blank">said</a> the Pentagon is either “not being honest about the likely costs of this system or it is planning to build a system so limited in its architecture that it will not have even a theoretical hope of achieving its stated goal.”  

If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email anastasia.obis@federalnewsnetwork.com or reach out on Signal at (301) 830-2747.
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Pentagon finds ID problems affecting 215,000 troops

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The Pentagon is working to verify the identities of hundreds of thousands of troops who hold military ID cards, after failing to keep digital copies of proof like driver’s licenses and passports.
About 215,000 active-duty and reserve troops — about 10% of the total force — were out of compliance with the security rules needed to hold a Common Access Card as of August, a Pentagon official told Federal News Network on Sept. 3. There’s no indication that foul play is involved or that the issue has enabled a data breach, he said.
“This initiative represents an administrative record update rather than a policy change, and there has been no evidence of fraud, forgery or malicious activity,” the official said.
CACs give holders access to military installations, secure networks and other essential services. Troops need to visit an ID office with two original and unexpired identity documents to receive one. 

It’s standard procedure to check that someone is who they say they are when they join the military, but the Pentagon hasn’t always kept digital copies of troops’ personal documents in the ID card system, the official said. He characterized the issue as an “administrative gap” within the Defense Enrollment Eligibility System (DEERS), the database used to track military members and their family members to determine who should receive military benefits. 
The crackdown on problematic records began in January, when the Defense Manpower Data Center told each service it had found DEERS entries that were missing current proof of identity, the Marine Corps said.
“DMDC initiated a phased notification effort via email to all affected service members with a government and/or personal email stored in DEERS,” the Corps said in an <a href="https://www.marines.mil/News/Messages/Messages-Display/Article/4582658/identity-proofing-and-vetting-for-common-access-card-cac-issuance/">Aug. 25 memo</a>. “Cardholders who fail to have two valid identity source documents scanned into the DEERS record are at risk of CAC cancellation and/or forfeiture.”
The Pentagon declined to answer how many people were initially affected, but said the issue hasn’t impacted civilian staff or contractors.
The Defense Manpower Data Center “continues to coordinate closely with the military services to issue continuous notifications and collect the necessary identifying documentation … while preventing operational disruptions,” the Pentagon official said.
About half of the people with noncompliant DEERS records are in the Army. The largest branch of the armed forces was looking into nearly 111,000 CACs as of Sept. 2, and said it has not revoked any ID cards as part of the review.
“We are proactively modernizing and aligning our personnel records with department-wide DMDC standards to provide total credential integrity across the entire Army enterprise,” an Army spokesperson said Tuesday. 

Around 21,500 Marines lacked the right documentation at the end of July, the service said. No CACs have been canceled or suspended so far because of the issue, and deployed Marines who can’t get to a military ID office can fix their record when they get home.
It’s unclear who is responsible for fixing the remaining 82,000 or so noncompliant DEERS records.
A spokesperson for the Department of the Air Force, which also oversees the Space Force, said the organization isn’t “aware of any widespread issues affecting active-duty common access cards at this time.” A Navy spokesperson referred questions to the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
The Defense Department did not answer how long service members have to become compliant, or what it would do differently to prevent CACs from staying active if the underlying DEERS record doesn’t contain two forms of identification.
Service members without a valid CAC could also run into issues at the airport. DoD-issued ID cards can be used as a form of REAL ID to pass through Transportation Security Administration screening for up to two years after expiration. Troops who neglect to update their DEERS records and find themselves without a working CAC would need to bring another REAL ID-compliant option to catch their flight.
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Army awards $2.2B in contracts for nuclear microreactors

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The Army is moving forward with its plan to use nuclear microreactors to power major bases, hoping the technology can safeguard the service from potential threats to U.S. infrastructure.
Five companies will design and build reactors under a set of contracts collectively worth up to $2.2 billion, the service said Wednesday. The initiative, dubbed Project Janus, looks to achieve greater energy independence so critical military missions can continue if the commercial electrical grid fails.
“Everything that we do, from communications to radar, just requires constant energy,” Jeff Waksman, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy and environment, told reporters Wednesday. “As we start to think about where things are going in the future with drones, with energy weapons, there’s just more and more demand for electricity.”
Nuclear energy is a “natural game-changer” for the Army, he added.

Each firm will work with one of five Army installations to mature and deploy reactor prototypes in the coming years. The pairings include: <a href="https://antaresindustries.com/updates/antares-janus">Antares Nuclear</a> and Fort Bragg, North Carolina; <a href="https://www.bwxt.com/u-s-army-chooses-bwxt-advanced-nuclear-reactor-banr-for-janus-program/">BWXT Advanced Technologies</a> and Fort Campbell, Kentucky; <a href="https://www.ga.com/ga-microreactor-selected-for-us-army-janus-program">General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems</a> and Fort Hood, Texas; <a href="https://www.radiantnuclear.com/news/radiant-wins-750m-janus-army-contract">Radiant Industries</a> and Fort Benning, Georgia; and <a href="https://info.westinghousenuclear.com/news/westinghouse-evinci-microreactor-selected-for-u.s.-army-janus-project">Westinghouse Government Services</a> and Fort Drum, New York.
<h2>Selecting bases and vendors</h2>
The Army announced last year it would consider <a href="https://www.army.mil/article-amp/289074/army_announces_next_steps_on_janus_program_for_next_generation_nuclear_energy">several sites</a> to host its first microreactors. The winning locations prevailed on factors ranging from security and mission set to the area’s likelihood of seismic activity.
“It’s really difficult to look across the five and not draw the immediate conclusion that this is a direct link to power projection,” Brandon Cockrell, the Army’s deputy assistant secretary for energy and sustainability, said. “That was a critical aspect that we looked at. … We have to be able to meet the Army’s mission if there are any vulnerabilities in the grid.”
The companies are now on the clock to get at least one reactor up and running by the end of September 2028 — a deadline President Donald Trump set in an executive order last year. 
Dozens of officials and experts from across government and academia vetted bids based on their cost, schedule, technical feasibility and benefit to the Army, among other criteria. Waksman argued each company’s timeline is “aggressive but plausible,” and that the bases and reactor designs that were chosen offer the best chance of success.
“This is already very difficult,” he said. “There’s a reason no one has actually built a fully operational commercial nuclear microreactor before.”
Under the other transaction agreements, issued in partnership with the Defense Innovation Unit, the firms will be paid as they hit each of the program’s milestones. Waksman expects “billions of dollars” in private capital will comprise the majority of the program’s funding, but declined to provide specifics.

Though Radiant said Wednesday it had inked an agreement for up to $750 million, the Army declined to answer how much money the other companies may receive as part of the larger pot. 
The contracts fund each reactor’s construction and their first year of operations, Waksman said. After that, the Army will begin covering the costs. 
But Waksman acknowledged that number is still murky.
“The reality is, nobody knows what these microreactors are going to cost,” he said. “We don’t ever expect that microreactors are going to be quite as cheap as big reactors. … They don’t need to be at natural gas prices for these to have a lot of value to the Army.”
<h2>Contract0r-operated reactors</h2>
Contractors will own and run their reactors; the Army will supply that workforce with technical knowledge and other support. Officials likened the partnership to the collaboration between NASA and industry on early space programs.
The reactors will first go through an Army-run regulatory process, which Waksman said ideally will align with those used by the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Each system must also comply with federal environmental rules.
Defense officials have a dual goal: They want to create the foundation for a commercial microreactor industry as well. Janus funding subsidizes costs that can make or break a company trying to get a new technology off the ground.
For instance, Radiant said it plans to deploy 15 reactors for the Army by 2030. That’s on top of an earlier agreement to bring its products to Colorado’s Buckley Space Force Base.
“Operating on military installations first gives us the reliability track record to unlock commercial deployments,” Radiant’s Chief Commercial Officer Mike Starrett said in a release. “The resulting, much larger commercial volume drives down costs, letting the government buy at scale for less.”

General Atomics, meanwhile, said it would use the contract at Fort Hood to implement a microreactor design that’s capable of scaling from 5 megawatts to 20 megawatts.
“Our experience designing and deploying 68 reactors worldwide and supporting reactor technologies throughout their lifecycles positions us to deliver assured energy solutions that enhance operational resilience and strengthen mission readiness,” Scott Forney, the company’s president said in a statement.
<h2>Risk borne by vendors</h2>
Waksman acknowledged the “very real chance that one or more of these companies will fail.”
“We want to ensure that, at all times, we have competition,” he said. “We believe that this will be the spear tip, not just for microreactors, but for all advanced reactors in the United States.”
The project could also spur more growth in nuclear engineering as a technical field in the Army, Waksman said. 
“West Point is very excited about trying to get more cadets into nuclear engineering, and I think we are going to see that,” he said. “This is part of the general push that the Army has had to become more technically forward, be more of a technology leader.”
The Army effort joins others across the U.S. military that seek to reap the benefits of nuclear energy. It plans to expand the Janus initiative to other Army sites in the future.
<h2>Community outreach and local concerns</h2>
But concerns persist about the long-term impact that nuclear energy could have on local communities.
Officials maintained the reactors are safe and will not contaminate local soil. Radiological material must be removed from each site within the first two years of operation, and comply with federal limits on radiation in soil. Waksman added that the service has dug into the physical risks reactors may pose to the workforce and ways to minimize them.
The Army plans to continue engaging with the communities that are slated to receive the microreactors, saying it has met with elected officials and locals and will hold town halls.
“We wouldn’t be putting these on these installations unless we had absolute certainty and comfort in the safety of these systems,” Waksman said. “I’d much rather live near one of these microreactors than live near a fuel farm.”
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Awards and administers the office's grants and judges whether states comply with the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act's core protections. The Administrator is appointed by the President from among people with experience in juvenile justice programs.

Administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

Eileen M. Garry

Administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the institutional head of Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under Norman Y. Mineta Research and Special Programs Improvement Act of 2004 (49 U.S.C. 108); directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration

Paul J. Roberti

Directs the federal crop insurance program and also serves as Manager of the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation. Appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture; no Senate confirmation required.

Administrator of the Risk Management Agency

Patricia Swanson

Directs the agency's rural business loan, loan guarantee and grant programs under the Under Secretary for Rural Development. Appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture; no Senate confirmation required.

Administrator of the Rural Business-Cooperative Service

J.R. Claeys

Directs the agency's rural housing and community facilities loan, guarantee and grant programs under the Under Secretary for Rural Development. Appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture; no Senate confirmation required.

Administrator of the Rural Housing Service

George Kelly

Directs the agency's electric, telecommunications and water and waste lending programs. Appointed by the President; no Senate confirmation required.

Administrator of the Rural Utilities Service

Karl Elmshaeuser

Administrator of the Small Business Administration, the institutional head of Small Business Administration. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under Small Business Act of 1953 (15 U.S.C. 631 et seq.); directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of the Small Business Administration

Kelly Loeffler

Runs the power marketing administration: negotiates its wholesale sales contracts, sets rates that repay the federal investment in the dams, and directs generation scheduling with the Corps. Appointed by the Secretary of Energy.

Administrator of the Southeastern Power Administration

Virgil G. Hobbs III

Runs the power marketing administration: negotiates its wholesale contracts, sets rates that repay the federal investment in the dams, and oversees its transmission system. Appointed by the Secretary of Energy.

Administrator of the Southwestern Power Administration

Mike Wech

Directs federal security screening at airports and security regulation across all transportation modes, and receives and distributes transportation security intelligence. Appointed by the President with Senate confirmation for a five-year term; the statute requires experience in transportation or security.

Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration

David P. Cummins

Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division, the institutional head of Wage and Hour Division. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (29 U.S.C. 204); directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division

Andrew Rogers

Runs WAPA's power marketing, rate setting and transmission operations, exercising on the Secretary's behalf the power marketing functions transferred from the Bureau of Reclamation. Appointed by the Secretary of Energy.

Administrator of the Western Area Power Administration

Tracey A. LeBeau

Funds high-risk energy research that industry will not finance on its own, awarding cost-shared projects to companies, universities and national laboratories and cutting them off when technical milestones are missed. Its targets are set by statute: energy imports, emissions, efficiency, nuclear waste, and the resilience of energy infrastructure.

Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy

Conner Prochaska

Runs the Section 106 process, under which a federal agency must consider how a project it funds, permits or carries out would affect historic properties and consult states and tribes before proceeding. It writes the regulations for that review, joins the hardest cases itself, and advises the President and Congress.

Advisory Council on Historic Preservation

Chairman of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is an operating division of the United States Department of Health and Human Services within the Public Health Service. It produces evidence and funds research to make health care safer, higher in quality, more accessible, and more affordable, and works to ensure that the evidence is understood and used. It was established in 1999 under the Healthcare Research and Quality Act, succeeding the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, and is codified at 42 U.S.C. 299.

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Roger D. Klein

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry is a public health agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, administered through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It evaluates and works to reduce human exposure to hazardous substances from waste sites, spills, and other releases, conducts public health assessments, and studies the health effects of toxic exposures. It was authorized by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980.

Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry

Aaron Bernstein

Runs the Department of Agriculture's own laboratories: its scientists work on crop and livestock production, plant and animal disease, food safety, human nutrition and natural resource management. Results are published for public use rather than sold, and much of the work is done with land-grant universities.

Agricultural Research Service

Flies the aircraft and crews the vessels that Customs and Border Protection uses to detect, track and interdict smuggling and other unlawful cross-border activity. It is CBP's air and sea arm: the Border Patrol covers the land between ports of entry and the Office of Field Operations staffs the ports.

Air and Marine Operations

Jonathan P. Miller

Reviews court-martial convictions from the Air Force and Space Force, sitting in panels of at least three appellate military judges. It can affirm, modify or set aside findings and sentences, may hold a sentence inappropriately severe, and its decisions can be taken on to the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.

Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals

Provides graduate and professional education to Air Force and Space Force members and Department of the Air Force civilians: its graduate school awards master's and doctoral degrees in engineering, science and management, and its continuing-education schools train civil engineers, logisticians and strategic-force specialists.

Air Force Institute of Technology

James C. Bowers

The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau is a bureau of the United States Department of the Treasury. It collects federal excise taxes on alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and ammunition and regulates the production, labeling, advertising, and importation of alcohol and tobacco products. It was established on January 24, 2003, under the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which split the former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and retained the tax and trade functions in the Treasury.

Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau

Serves as the principal cyberspace policy official within State Department senior management and as the Secretary's adviser on cyber and digital issues, leading the Department's cyber diplomacy. Appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, with the rank and status of ambassador.

Ambassador at Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy

Adam Cassady

Designs, builds and maintains the permanent American military cemeteries and memorials outside the United States - the graves, chapels, monuments and grounds where American war dead are buried or commemorated. It also controls the erection of other United States war memorials and monuments on foreign soil.

American Battle Monuments Commission

Chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission

The American Printing House for the Blind is a private nonprofit corporation that holds a federal charter and serves as the official national source of educational materials for students who are legally blind and enrolled in programs below the college level. It produces and distributes braille and large-print textbooks, educational aids, and assistive technology, funded through an annual federal appropriation administered by the Department of Education. It was chartered by Congress in 1879.

American Printing House for the Blind

Craig Meador

The President of the American Printing House for the Blind leads the Louisville nonprofit that manufactures and furnishes braille, large-print and tactile materials for the instruction of blind students, distributed to schools each year under a federal per-pupil quota (20 U.S.C. 101, 102). Its Board of Trustees selects the president.

President

Funds economic development in the Appalachian counties of thirteen states, approving grants for broadband and water infrastructure, workforce training and business development, mostly delivered through local development districts. It is run jointly by the governors of the member states and a federal co-chair.

Appalachian Regional Commission

Gayle Conelly Manchin

The Architect of the Capitol is a legislative branch agency responsible for the maintenance, operation, development, and preservation of the United States Capitol, the congressional office buildings, the Library of Congress buildings, the Supreme Court building, the United States Botanic Garden, and the grounds of the Capitol campus. The title refers to both the agency and the official who heads it. Permanent statutory authority for the office dates to the Act of August 15, 1876.

Architect of the Capitol

Thomas E. Austin

The Architect of the Capitol has the care and superintendence of the Capitol and maintains the buildings and grounds of the Capitol campus (2 U.S.C. 1812). A commission of congressional leaders and appropriations and administration committee members appoints the Architect to a renewable 10-year term and can remove the holder at any time (2 U.S.C. 1801a).

Archivist of the United States, the institutional head of National Archives and Records Administration. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under National Archives and Records Administration Act of 1984 (Public Law 98-497); directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Archivist of the United States

Bradford Pentony Wilson

Arctic Research Commission

Chairman of the Arctic Research Commission

Operates the two homes for retired and former enlisted members of the armed forces, Armed Forces Retirement Home-Washington and Armed Forces Retirement Home-Gulfport, providing residences, meals and graduated levels of health and long-term care. Eligibility is statutory, turning on length of service or wartime service.

Armed Forces Retirement Home

Stephen T. Rippe

Hears and decides contractors' appeals from the final decisions of Department of Defense and NASA contracting officers - disputes over payment, delay, termination and contract interpretation. Its full-time judges must have at least five years of experience in public contract law and are selected the way administrative law judges are.

Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals

Reviews court-martial convictions from the Army, sitting in panels of at least three appellate military judges. It can affirm, modify or set aside findings and sentences, may hold a sentence inappropriately severe, and its decisions can be taken on to the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.

Army Court of Criminal Appeals

Heads the National Security Division and is the Justice Department's primary liaison to the Director of National Intelligence. One of the Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorneys General, designated for the role by the President (28 U.S.C. 507A).

Assistant Attorney General for National Security

John A. Eisenberg

Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Justice Programs, the institutional head of Office of Justice Programs. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under Justice Assistance Act of 1984; directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Justice Programs

Maureen A. Henneberg

Heads CBP's intelligence office and reports directly to the Commissioner, with responsibility for the agency's intelligence enterprise, its counterintelligence operations and its intelligence-sharing agreements. A career official, not a presidential appointee.

Assistant Commissioner, CBP Office of Intelligence

Ronald J. Ocker

Directs CBP's foreign initiatives, its personnel stationed abroad and its partnerships with foreign customs and border agencies, and reports directly to the Commissioner. A career official, not a presidential appointee.