Flatlined Budgets, Gutted Offices: U.S. CBRN Policy's 'Nightmare
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- Congress and executive agencies have systematically cut unconventional weapons expertise since 2013, terminating the Counterproliferation Program Advisory Committee's annual report in 2013, folding the Defense Threat Reduction Agency's Threat Reduction Advisory Committee in 2019, and cancelling the annual countering WMD symposia after the U.S. Special Operations Command took over coordination in 2018.
- The Trump administration has accelerated the trend by eliminating the DHS Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office, the National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center, the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, and the Air Force's Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies (shut down in 2025), while downsizing the National Defense University's Center for the Study of Weapons of Mass Destruction.
- The Pentagon's chemical-biological defense budget has remained largely flatlined for 20 years despite high-profile rhetoric about Iraq's and Syria's chemical weapons programs, illustrating what the authors call a persistent budget-to-strategy mismatch.
- Russia continues to use chloropicrin in Ukraine and China is fundamentally rethinking biological warfare, yet current conventional threats from these countries plus Syria, North Korea, and Iran receive little senior U.S. leadership review, the article argues.
- Hypothetical AI-bioweapon convergence scenarios dominate discourse while Russia, Syria, North Korea, and Iran's actual unconventional weapons use continues, with the U.S. response remaining 'unfocused and ad hoc' according to the authors.
- The term 'weapons of mass destruction' has become a 'floating signifier,' with recent debates attempting to classify fentanyl as a chemical weapon and expand definitions of biological weapons in ways that risk rendering the terms meaningless.
- Mission creep and jargon abuse allow offices to expand research beyond mandate without congressional scrutiny, including misuse of 'biothreat' in acquisition plans that permits defense funds to flow toward natural disease outbreak countermeasures rather than deliberate biological threats.
Why it matters: The pattern documented across two decades — flatlined CB defense budgets, eliminated advisory bodies, and cancelled forums since 2013 — means the next chemical, biological, or nuclear incident will again catch U.S. leadership unprepared, with the Air Force's Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies shut down in 2025 as the latest data point in a sustained drawdown of institutional memory.
