Swati KhandelwalJun 23, 2026Cryptography / Quantum Computing
President Trump signed an executive order on June 22 setting hard deadlines for federal agencies to move high-value assets and high-impact systems to post-quantum cryptography.
Key establishment must move by December 31, 2030; digital signatures by December 31, 2031. EO 14409 leaves national security systems on a separate track.
The deadlines matter because of a threat that does not need a working quantum computer today. Adversaries can collect encrypted U.S. data now and decrypt it later, once a large-scale quantum machine exists, the risk is known as "harvest now, decrypt later".
The order describes that risk directly and pulls the government's PQC timeline forward by four to five years. The prior government-wide target, set by the 2022 National Security Memorandum 10, ran to 2035.
