# DoD Economic, Financial, and Business Authorities — Research Plan ## Purpose and agreed scope For U.S. national-security professionals, principally DoD: identify the widest practicable range of existing economic, financial, and business capabilities; the legal requirements for using them; and the distributed actors needed to coordinate and execute. Test the proposition that existing authorities collectively meet national-security needs rather than assume it is true. Scope: U.S. DoD, publicly available evidence, current law. Partners appear where execution depends on them, especially law enforcement and counterintelligence. USD(I&S) means the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. Legal authority must be express statutory authority or an identified judicial holding; do not infer new substantive powers from broad mission statements, organizational descriptions, strategies, or executive orders. Strategies and executive orders are demand evidence, not interchangeable with statutory authority. ## One integrated research and delivery effort 1. **Establish taxonomy and evidence rules.** Organize by capabilities, not quotations or a list of section numbers. Define consistent records and distinguish authority, funding, delegation, and execution capacity. 2. **Run parallel, comprehensive domain reviews.** Read relevant U.S. Code chapters/sections and uncodified public-law provisions; check amendments, expiration dates, conditions, and restrictions. Map actors down to execution offices where public evidence supports it. Separately extract strategic needs and review legal boundaries/court holdings. 3. **Reconcile and challenge.** De-duplicate overlapping pathways; distinguish direct DoD powers from partner-dependent options; test broad claims against appropriations, purpose, time, amount, competition, intelligence, domestic activity, and other statutory limits. Record source dates and unresolved currentness questions. A negative search is not proof of a legal gap. 4. **Deliver once, as an integrated package.** Research narrative, categorized authority inventory, actor map, legal-boundary and strategy-to-authority gap registers, source/coverage audit, and a navigable website presentation with downloadable data. These are internal research steps, not staged public build-outs. ## Coverage domains - Research, experimentation, testing, prototyping, acquisition, procurement, grants/cooperative agreements, prize competitions, intellectual property, technology transfer, laboratories, and workforce development. - Industrial-base finance and capacity: priority/allocation authorities, purchases and purchase commitments, loans/guarantees where actually authorized, working-capital/revolving funds, supply-chain resilience, stockpiles, small businesses, manufacturing, and security of supply. - Land, facilities, military construction, leasing, utilities/energy, housing, environmental restoration, logistics, depots/arsenals, sales/disposal, public-private and intergovernmental support arrangements. - Security cooperation, international research/acquisition, reciprocal logistics, partner training/equipment, humanitarian support, international contributions, intelligence/security, counterintelligence-related support, and domestic interagency dependencies. - Cross-cutting legal eligibility, funds constraints, relevant judicial holdings, decision rights, and strategy-demand/gap analysis. ## Record design Every capability record: plain-English capability; category; express legal citation and primary-source URL; summary of statutory permission; legal authority holder; planner, resource owner, approver, executor, and necessary partners; eligibility/trigger/purpose requirements; funding conditions; constraints; source currentness; confidence; and unresolved execution facts. No record should label a named office as a delegate without evidence. An illustrative coordinator is not the legal holder. Actor records distinguish statutory responsibilities from organizational/implementation descriptions. Capability records support many-to-many links: one authority can require multiple actors, and one actor may execute multiple authorities. Ordinary contracting authority is not unrestricted permission to lend, take equity, spend without appropriation, or exercise another agency's powers. ## Gap and boundary rules **A. What DoD legally cannot do:** identify the precise prohibited or unavailable action, controlling law/holding, relevant exceptions, and whether another actor has a legally distinct role. **B. What strategy requires but DoD may lack authority to do:** identify an actual publicly documented objective; operationalize the needed action; inventory existing pathways; specify the residual mismatch; and classify it as substantiated authority gap, candidate gap requiring counsel/Congressional review, or no authority gap demonstrated. Funding, policy preference, implementation delay, and coordination problems do not become legal gaps by relabeling. Feasibility means an existing legal pathway can be assembled through coordination, subject to applicable conditions. It does not certify availability of current-year funds, executed delegations, required findings, or approvals. ## Sources and currentness Prefer the Office of the Law Revision Counsel/U.S. Code, Congress.gov/GovInfo enacted public laws and Statutes at Large, and official judicial opinions. Use official DoD/Service/agency pages to substantiate actual actor roles and public strategy/executive-order sources to substantiate demand. Regulations and directives may identify actors but will not be treated as independent substantive authority within this scope. Separate bills/proposals from enacted law. Research target date: 2026-10-02. Record the currency date shown by each source and check enacted amendments and sunset provisions. If the available corpus does not reach the target date, label the deliverable with the actual verified horizon and disclose the remaining delta; do not present date-of-access as proof of current law. ## Existing-solutions preflight Use existing official legal and organizational repositories as the evidence base. The project adds a capability-and-actor synthesis, not a replacement legal database. Use the installed Sites presentation capability for the website; no new paid research subscription or custom research platform is authorized or needed. ## Quality gates - Positive authority claims anchored to identified statutory provisions or judicial holdings. - Citation URLs, section numbering/recodification, dates, and sunset-sensitive programs checked. - No statutory ceiling represented as available money; no strategic objective represented as a legal grant. - No assertion that every conceivable action is possible; no claim of an exhaustive legal opinion. - Explicit distinction between legal holder and coordinating/executing organizations. - Exceptions and partner dependencies accompany negative findings. - Coverage and unresolved questions are visible in the final package.