Commission on U.S. Quantum Primacy, Preliminary Report of 10 November 2026: What Young, Luján and Bajraktari's Panel Asks For in Foundry Access, NIST Benchmarks and State Post-Quantum Migration

What the Commission on U.S. Quantum Primacy published on 10 November 2026

The Commission on U.S. Quantum Primacy, convened by the Special Competitive Studies Project and co-chaired by Senators Todd Young and Ben Ray Luján with SCSP president Ylli Bajraktari, released its preliminary report, Defining the American Quantum Era, on 10 November 2026. The 19-page document organizes ten near-term priorities under four elements: discovery, development, deployment and scale. Its main proposals are a national quantum software program modeled on the Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project, a NIST-led public-private benchmarking and interoperability effort, and a National Quantum Foundry Access Program for shared fabrication, packaging and testing across hardware types.

Which figures the report gives, and which decisions it leaves to spring 2027

The report sets U.S. strengths in research and software against Chinese advantages in supply chains: cleanrooms at roughly $150 per square foot in China against $800 to $1,000 in the United States, and about $3 billion a year in Chinese public quantum funding against about $1 billion in U.S. federal R&D. It proposes no budget for any of its own programs. It also asks for faster post-quantum cryptography adoption in critical infrastructure and state and local governments, the priority with the most direct civic reach, since it touches county offices, utilities and the citizen data they hold. The commissioners include the chief executives or research heads of IonQ, IBM, Google Quantum AI and SandboxAQ, which matters for how the proposed benchmarks would be governed. The final report, due in spring 2027, is to set out policy recommendations, infrastructure needs and an implementation strategy.