Review - S 2572 Introduced – FY 2026 DOD Spending

Back in July Sen McConnel (R,KY) introduced S 2572, the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2026. The Senate Appropriations Committee published their Report on the bill at the same time. There is no cybersecurity mention in the bill. While there are 109 separate mentions of the term ‘cyber’ in the Committee Report, only four of those mention cybersecurity issues of interest here.

The House version of the bill , HR 4016, was introduced in June and passed in the House  by a mainly party-line vote of 221 to 209. This bill is similar to S 4921, the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2025, that was introduced by Sen Tester (D,MT) in August 2024. No action was taken on that bill (or it’s House counterpart – HR 8774) in Senate the 118^th Congress.

Moving Forward

Yesterday, the Senate began the process of considering HR 4016, the House version of this bill. No amendments have been offered as of yet (it is still too early in the process), but one of the first will be from McConnel offering the language from this bill (probably updated some) as substitute language. There will be some level of bipartisan support for that substitute (where there would be none for the House language), almost certainly enough for the bill to pass. There has been some reporting that this will be turned into another multi-bus bill, with perhaps LLH and THUD bills included in this substitute language. Bipartisan support is expected.

For more information, including description of significant cybersecurity discussions in Committee Report, see my article at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/s-2572-introduced-fy-2026-dod-spending - subscription required.