WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is making progress on its revamped version of the Foreign Military Sales process, according to Michael Cadenazzi, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy. Initial changes to the process are unlikely to roll out until later this year.

Cadenazzi said the administration is "on time and on target with regards to everything that was tasked to us within the America First Arms Transfer Strategy." He also noted, "We have a series of initiatives that are tied to it, the sales catalog, and all those kind of things, and so we've delivered our portion of it." The changes will be incremental rather than implemented within a single year. "The hardest part is just to time phase it, because there's so many things hitting the enterprise all at once, and so we're seeing the impact of that here," Cadenazzi said.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order in early February that called for national production interests to be considered more heavily when the U.S. sells weapons to foreign nations. The executive order outlined specific steps to be completed within 120 days, a timeframe that lapsed earlier this month. The order also prioritized arms sales for countries that increase their own defense spending. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick are tasked with drafting a sales catalog of prioritized platforms, while a Promoting American Military Sales Task Force will be established to work on an implementation plan. Changes to the weapons sales process include creating a single tracking system for arms sales and identifying possible production challenges that require intervention.