Cryptographically relevant quantum computers (CRQCs) threaten to render obsolete the public-key cryptography that secures federal communications, financial transactions, and critical infrastructure, yet federal institutional readiness to execute this transition remains insufficiently theorized. This qualitative study examined how U. S. federal policy discourse conceptualizes the quantum threat and structures the migration to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). The research employed Braun and Clarke's reflexive thematic analysis with a hybrid deductive-inductive coding approach, integrated with Fairclough's three-dimensional critical discourse analysis, applied to a multi-stratum archival corpus of 964 documents (134 substantive) drawn from the Federal Register, congressional hearings, NIST public comments, Government Accountability Office audits, and Office of Management and Budget guidance issued between 2016 and 2026. Four research questions addressed risk framing, institutional capacity, interagency coordination, and strategy-execution alignment. Findings revealed an urgency-uncertainty paradox resolved discursively through the harvest-now-decrypt-later threat construct; a 35-to-1 asymmetry between estimated migration costs (7. 1 billion through 2035) and current annual federal quantum expenditures (~200 million) ; a fragmented multi-agency architecture anchored by NIST (31. 3% of the corpus) without single-point accountability; a five-month policy oscillation in 2025 between mandatory and discretionary procurement triggers; and significant discursive silences on crypto-agility and legacy-system technical debt. The study advances policy discourse analysis by theorizing discursive silence as an analytic category and offers a tiered governance model alongside eight evidence-based recommendations addressing centralized coordination, appropriations, performance measurement, and workforce capacity. Implications extend to federal cybersecurity policy, doctoral training in national security, and institutional change under technological discontinuity.
Laszlo Pokorny (Sun,) studied this question.