It manages federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) supporting various U.S. government agencies in the aviation, defense, healthcare, homeland security, and cybersecurity fields, among others.

[5] Originally always seen in upper case, MITRE began using normal capitalization around the time of the Mitretek spinoff, but both forms can still be widely found as of 2023[update].

[7] MITRE's first employees had been developing the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system and aerospace defense as part of Lincoln Labs Division 6.

Approximately half of MITRE's employees work under the unit, which seeks to "further extend the parent organization's impact across federally-funded research-and-development centers and with partners in academia and industry".

MITRE will support NIST's work "related to cybersecurity solutions composed of commercial components and the integration of technology to build trustworthy information systems for government agencies".

[24] Currently, MITRE holds the contract to administer and provide management to JASON, an advisory group for the federal government made up of scientists.

"[7] MITRE has completed software engineering work for the Distributed Common Ground System and helped the North Atlantic Treaty Organization create intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) data standards.

[29] MITRE and the Air Force Association's Mitchell Institute published a report in 2019 recommending improved technologies for the U.S. nuclear command, control and communications (NC3) network and warning that some of the system's early satellites are "vulnerable to electronic attacks and interference".

[14] During the 1980s, MITRE helped modernize the Air Force's airborne early warning and control system and improve the Milstar constellation of communications satellites.

[35] MITRE also provided global navigation satellite system signal generation equipment for testing at the United States Army's White Sands Missile Range.

In addition to air traffic management and aviation regulations, the group has worked on merging unmanned aerial vehicle operations into the NAS as well as defining how the system will function in 2035, a decade after the scheduled implementation of NextGen.

[41] The company's Singapore-based unit was hired by CAAS to consider how artificial intelligence, machine learning, and speech recognition could be used to improve air traffic management systems.

[44] MITRE and the Naval Research Laboratory developed the Frequency-scaled Ultra-wide Spectrum Element (FUSE) antenna to increase the data transfer speed between ground users and satellites.

[50] In September 2020, the U.S. Air Force awarded a $463 million contract to continue work for the National Security Engineering Center, an FFRDC supporting the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community.

[6] Microsoft and MITRE partnered on the open source Adversarial Machine Learning Threat Matrix in collaboration with IBM, Nvidia, and academic institutions.

Launched in October 2020, the framework is "designed to organize and catalogue known techniques for attacks against machine-learning systems, to inform security analysts and provide them with strategies to detect, respond and remediate against threats".

[55][56] MITRE and the British startup company Simudyne partnered to convert an "agent-based" financial risk model of "asset fire-sales and investor flight from banks and funds into a commercial product".

[57] MITRE has also researched cloud computing policy,[58] helped the U.S. federal government identify fraudulent comments intended to "spoof" public support for non-existent positions during the rulemaking process,[59] and increased the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue's delinquent taxpayer compliance rate.

"[61] During the 1980s, MITRE worked on a digital radiological imaging project for MedStar Georgetown University Hospital and an upgrade to MEDLINE for the National Institutes of Health.

[63] MITRE's patient data set SyntheticMass, based on "fictional" Massachusetts residents, was formatted by Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources and made available to developers via Google Cloud in 2019.

[66][67] The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) funded a $16.5 million MITRE-led project to create an enduring open source tool called Sara Alert, for monitoring symptoms of Americans exposed to COVID-19.

[68][69][70] In April 2020, Sara Alert launched in Arkansas and was being tested in Danbury, Connecticut as well as the Northern Mariana Islands, with data being maintained by the Association of Public Health Laboratories.

[77] Subsequent holders of the president and chief executive officer (CEO) role included Charles S. Zraket (1986–1990),[14][78] Barry Horowitz (1990–1996),[7] Victor A. DeMarines (1996–2000),[79] Martin C. Faga (2000–2006),[80] Alfred Grasso (2006–2017),[81][82] and Jason Providakes (2017–2024).

[87][88] Current trustees include Rodney E. Slater (chairman), Sue Gordon (vice chair)[89], Richard D. Clarke, Lance Collins, Maury W. Bradsher, Michael Huerta, Chris Inglis[90], Yvette Meléndez, George Halvorson, Paul G. Kaminski, Adalio T. Sanchez, Cathy Minehan,  and Jan E. Tighe.

In June 2020, the coalition launched the COVID-19 Decision Support Dashboard, which uses public data to assess transmission trends and display color-coded indicators based on performance by jurisdiction.

[97] MITRE is also part of the Fight Is In Us coalition, a collaborative effort between advocates, companies, and government officials to promote plasma donation for patient treatment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

[41] In June 2008, MITRE was presented with the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service for "significant contributions in communications, command and control decision-making, intelligence, cyberspace, and warfighter field support, as well as research and development".