The Daily Fuckup

The White House used two June memoranda to set the pace on a pair of sensitive technology issues. National Security Presidential Memorandum 11 was issued on June 5, 2026, and National Security Presidential Memorandum 12 followed on June 12, 2026. NSPM-11 addresses artificial intelligence in the national security enterprise. NSPM-12 focuses on cybersecurity for national security systems and explicitly ties parts of its work to the NSPM-11 roadmap.

That sequencing matters. NSPM-12 does not read like a clean break from the earlier memo. It refers back to the AI roadmap and sets out follow-on coordination inside the national-security bureaucracy. In other words, the second memorandum uses the first one as a reference point instead of starting from zero. The result is a small paper trail with outsized reach: one memo sets a framework, and the next one uses that framework to organize related work.

The larger point is less dramatic and more durable. Presidential memoranda let the White House move quickly without waiting for Congress. They can direct agencies, assign tasks, and shape executive-branch priorities fast. They can also be revised or withdrawn just as fast by a future administration. So the June actions are real governance, but they are governance by instruction, not by statute. Their force comes from what agencies do next: how they translate the text into guidance, procurement, standards, and internal controls.

That makes the June pair useful as a snapshot of how the administration wants to manage AI and cybersecurity inside the national-security system. The memoranda show an executive branch trying to organize technical policy through direct orders and staged follow-up. They also show the limits of that method. A memorandum can push the machinery in one direction. It cannot, by itself, guarantee that the direction lasts.