President Issues Executive Orders on Quantum Technology
Commentary by Vijay Dewan
President Trump signed two related Executive Orders ("EO") on quantum technology, one to lead in the development of U.S. quantum computing and the other to protect the nation's data, critical infrastructure, and digital economy from cryptographic attacks.
The EO on quantum technology directed a whole-of-government effort to keep the U.S. ahead in quantum information science and technology ("QIST"). The Order includes a new national strategy, building a quantum computer for scientific discovery at a Department of Energy facility, strengthening quantum supply chains and workforce, and protecting the technology from adversaries. The Order also requires intelligence and defense officials to assess the national-security implications of commercial quantum computers.
The EO on "Securing the Nation against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks" sets a policy for moving federal information systems (and helping other infrastructures) toward post-quantum cryptography (encryption designed to resist quantum attacks) using standards from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The EO warned that adversaries collect encrypted U.S. data now to decrypt it later once quantum computers mature. The EO directs agencies to move their high-value and high-impact systems to quantum-resistant key establishment by the end of 2030 and digital signatures by the end of 2031.
Commentary
What's striking here is the timing. A quantum computer that can actually break today's encryption is still probably years out, so it's tempting to call this premature. But the threat estimate has moved fast, and the acceleration is the real story. The number of qubits thought necessary to break RSA-2048, the public-key encryption that secures much of the internet, stood at roughly 20 million in 2019, fell to under a million by 2025, and a research group now claims under 100,000. Each drop arriving faster than the last. Almost none of it came from better hardware. The machines didn't suddenly catch up; the math got cheaper.
That's what makes the cryptography order the sensible half of this pair. It targets exactly the right risk, "harvest now, decrypt later," where adversaries bank encrypted data today to open once the hardware matures. A 2030 deadline does nothing for data already being siphoned off in 2026, and migrating federal systems to post-quantum standards is a multi-year undertaking no matter when the threat actually lands. You can doubt the timeline and still have to start now.
And doubt is warranted, because the hardware reality remains brutal. Today's best machines already exceed a thousand physical qubits, but that's the wrong yardstick, because those qubits are noisy. What matters is error-corrected logical qubits, where the field is still at a few dozen at most. Breaking RSA-2048 needs on the order of a thousand stable logical qubits, and because error correction can take hundreds to a thousand physical qubits to produce a single reliable one, that means holding on the order of a million physical qubits in coherence at once. Getting there means clearing monumental engineering hurdles that scale exponentially with size.
So the companion "tech push" toward a useful quantum computer is where worthy of continued skepticism. The cryptography order insures against a tail risk that's cheap to hedge and expensive to ignore; the bet on near-term quantum advantage is a different proposition entirely.