New Trump executive orders on quantum computing

The Trump administration in June issued two new orders on quantum computing:

• The cryptography order assigns leadership to OMB and the National Cyber Director, with Commerce, NSA and DHS issuing guidance, and requires agencies to name PQC transition leads within 30 days. Vendors reading the order describe the shift as moving "from awareness to execution”—inventory your cryptographic assets, establish ownership, migrate against milestones, per QuSecure.
• The order also calls for a new procurement clause requiring federal contractors to comply with postquantum standards by 31 December 2030. Legal analysts note the corollary that vendors may prefer not to think about: enforcement and litigation exposure around cybersecurity representations rises alongside the funding opportunity.

Pulling the federal target from NSM-10’s 2035 to 2030 and 2031 compresses the largest cryptographic replacement project the government has ever attempted. Bad actors are scooping up encrypted data in transit for Q-day for quantum computers to later decrypt. Data at rest should theoretically be safe, but cloud providers often encrypt the rested data’s private encryption keys with a public key. While the deadline moved up roughly five years, the estimated cost of breaking RSA-2048 fell by orders of magnitude in about twelve months.

The reference point for years was Gidney and Ekerå's 2019 estimate: 20 million noisy qubits, eight hours. In May 2025, Gidney cut that to fewer than one million noisy qubits running under a week—a twentyfold reduction on identical hardware assumptions. Then, in February 2026, a Sydney-based group's Pinnacle Architecture preprint claimed RSA-2048 with fewer than 100,000 physical qubits by swapping surface codes for quantum LDPC codes, another order of magnitude. In March 2026, researchers proposed cryptographically relevant Shor computations using as few as 10,000 reconfigurable neutral atoms, trading qubit count for runtime.

Google, a principal architect of the modern web’s transport layer, has set its own PQC migration timeline at 2029, a year ahead of the federal key-establishment deadline and two years ahead of the signature deadline.a