Executive Order 13865 told federal agencies to coordinate resilience to electromagnetic pulses: assess, share, plan, and stop pretending the subject was fringe. It did not appropriate a transformer fleet or order utilities to install blockers on a deadline.

The order’s verbs were assess, share, and plan, and stop treating electromagnetic pulse as a fringe subject. Those verbs can force agencies to put the work on paper and to talk. They are not the verbs that buy a transformer fleet or that require utilities to install blockers by a date. Readers who equate a signature with a protected yard will look for hardware the order never funded.

That is how Washington often works, and it is worth saying plainly so readers do not think a signed order equals a protected substation. The order created a paper trail and a set of pilots. Some regions, including military-host cities, used it. Most Americans still live on a grid that would meet E3 with operating procedure and hope.

A paper trail and a set of pilots are what that kind of order can honestly claim. Military-host cities had a local reason to use it: a base that drinks municipal water and burns municipal fuel. Some of them did the work. Diffusion is not automatic. Most people still live on a civilian system whose plan for the slow current is operating procedure, plus hope that this storm is not the bad one.

Policy is progress only when it changes equipment or the authority to take equipment offline in time. Count those, not the PDFs.

Operating procedure is a real tool. It is only as good as the authority to use it in time, and as good as the equipment it assumes is there. Hope is what fills a document that says “consider” when nobody is staffed to consider in the middle of the night. Respecting the order and describing the grid plainly are compatible. The civilian system is still mostly unshielded.

Count two things. Equipment that changed: blockers, spares, or a studied reason a critical unit does not need them. Authority that changed: a pre-written right to take that equipment offline inside a warning window. PDFs are not a third category of progress. If the documents multiply and those counts stay put, the argument has been organized. The yards have not.