April 13, 2026
Federal agencies under pressure need smarter systems, not tougher people About this issue brief Written by Caitlin Thompson Caitlin Thompson, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist, former national director of suicide prevention at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and nonresident senior fellow at the Adrienne Arsht National Security Resilience Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. A nationally recognized subject-matter expert in veteran mental health, suicide prevention, and veteran care, she provides consultative services to nonprofit, corporate, and government organizations.
Bottom lines up front The institutions charged with keeping the United States secure operate under chronic strain that can make them prone to failure in moments of crisis. Many current efforts focus on helping individuals operate effectively within flawed systems. But it’s only by redesigning the flawed systems that the US government can create the readiness on which national security depends.
The hours are long and the pace rarely eases, including shifts of twelve to fourteen hours that inevitably erode family and social life. In theory, there are guardrails. In practice, the approval processes meant to limit overwork can become a formality: the reality of excessive hours reduced to a signature on a page, without changing the workload or capturing the extent of the time burden. The culture reinforces it. Leadership may say the right things, but the cycle doesn’t break, and in some corners of the institution, burnout is even treated as a point of pride. The quiet signal that this has become normal: the organization celebrates the 2 a.m. email. People are mentally drained, but stepping back to recover can feel professionally risky because there’s a persistent sense that if you can’t do it, someone else will, and asking for help can damage your credibility. The above vignette is a composite scenario, drawing on multiple examples raised by participants—national security practitioners, psychiatry and health experts, and think tank experts on individual resilience— across a series of roundtables conducted by Atlantic Council researchers in 2025 and held under the Chatham House rule. The institutions charged with keeping the United States secure—including US military services and combatant commands, the intelligence community (e.g., CIA, National Security Agency), the Department of Homeland Security, and the State Department—operate under chronic strain that can
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make them dangerously prone to failure in moments of crisis. Many of the “resilience” efforts created to address this problem— wellness training and mindset workshops— focus on helping individuals operate within flawed systems. Only by adapting those systems can the US government deliver long-term readiness enabling reliable performance under stress that US national security requires. y Individual resilience is not the solution to chronic strain in national security institutions. It is a signal that reveals where systems, incentives,