For each cycle of the National Exercise Program (NEP), the Principals Committee of the National Security Council identifies exercise priorities that help guide how the NEP effectively builds, sustains, and delivers capabilities required to increase national preparedness. The 2023 – 2026 Principals’ Exercise Priorities (PEPs) are based on preparedness data, lessons learned from past exercises and real-world incidents, strategy and policy documents, partner capability assessments and input from subject-matter experts.
The 2023-2026 PEPs are:
- Climate Resilience and Adaptation: Strengthen whole community capabilities to anticipate, prepare for and adapt to climate-related disruptions, challenges and risks, including understanding how climate change alters climate-related risks and identifying ways to adjust systems to protect the whole community.
- Complex Incident Coordination: Examine the nation’s capabilities to prevent, detect, protect against, respond to, mitigate and/or recover from any natural disaster, act of terrorism or other incident that requires significant incident management coordination to a disruption severely affecting the population, infrastructure, environment, economy, national morale or government functions in an area or nationwide, including incidents that may not result in a Stafford Act emergency or major disaster declaration.
- Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity: Advance cybersecurity preparedness and the response to cyber incidents by focusing on preventing, protecting and responding to incidents on critical infrastructure targets, including disseminating information for action and collaborating with private sector partners and cybersecurity subject-matter experts to increase the security and resilience of critical networks.
- Public Health Emergencies: Prepare, mobilize and coordinate a whole community approach to improve the full spectrum of medical and public health capabilities across federal and state, local, tribal and territorial (SLTT) jurisdictions in the event of a public health emergency, disaster or attack, taking into consideration health inequities (e.g., vulnerable and underserved populations) that occur when public health emergency resources are prioritized and allocated.
- Supply Chain Resilience: Enhance supply chain resilience by fostering awareness and collaboration among key supply chain stakeholders and promoting mitigation activities, examining supply chain disruptions and identifying potential impacts to the private sector and whole community to develop effective emergency response plans and operate efficiently, minimizing response and recovery operations.
- Recovery: Examine whole community capabilities to accelerate the recovery process through the lifecycle of a disaster by identifying vulnerable population requirements, using risk assessment and mitigation strategies, increasing community resilience and maintaining short- and long-term recovery efforts.
Exercise Support Requests are accepted each year of the cycle to provide SLTT partners support through the NEP. If you are interested in receiving support for your exercise, you are encouraged to align to one of the PEPs, although it is not required.
Read the 2023-2026 PEP Report
