; and (2) by adding to the end the following new paragraph: (2) The Secretary may delegate the authority provided by paragraph (1) to the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. . 216. Program of standards and requirements for microelectronics (a) Program required The Secretary of Defense shall establish, not later than 180 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, a program within the National Security Agency to develop and continuously update, as the Secretary determines necessary, standards, commercial best practices, and requirements for the design, manufacture, packaging, test, and distribution of microelectronics acquired by the Department of Defense to provide acceptable levels of confidentiality, integrity, and availability for Department commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) microelectronics, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and custom integrated circuits (CICs). (b) Advice and assessment The Secretary shall ensure that the program established pursuant to subsection (a) is advised and assessed by the Government-Industry-Academia Working Group on Microelectronics established under section 220 of the James M. Inhofe National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023 ( Public Law 117–263 ). (c) Requirements The program established by subsection (a) shall develop— (1) evidence-based assurance processes and techniques that sustain, build on, automate, and scale up the results and accomplishments of the Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes (RAMP), RAMP-Commercial (RAMP-C), and State-of-the-Art Heterogeneous Integrated Packaging (SHIP) programs to enhance the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of microelectronics while minimizing costs and impacts to commercial manufacturing practices; (2) validation methods for such processes and techniques, in coordination with the developmental and operational test and evaluation community, as the Secretary determines necessary