For months, congressional leaders have been working to deliver what they have described as “the most significant acquisition reforms in a generation.” But several key provisions — including measures on pricing transparency, oversight of major programs and Other Transaction Authorities — were ultimately dropped from the final version of the fiscal 2026 defense policy bill.

Both the House and Senate sought to close the loophole that allows companies to submit cost and pricing data after contract price is agreed upon. 

The House version of the defense bill included a provision that would prohibit contractors from using cost or pricing data that is more than 30 days old as a defense against defective pricing allegations. Lawmakers backing the proposal said it would “empower the Defense Department to enter into contracts with sufficient pricing information.”

The Senate version of the bill contained a similar provision, but both proposals were removed from the final bill. 

Instead, lawmakers directed DoD officials to examine whether late disclosures of cost or pricing data is a systemic problem and recommend ways to fix it. 

“We note that the sweeps process under the Truth in Negotiations Act is a post-price agreement review requiring contractors to disclose any updated cost or pricing data in their possession for certification before contract award. We are aware of concerns that contractors may not be providing disclosures of cost or pricing data in their possession prior to a price agreement, opting to disclose such data only after agreement and immediately before contract award,” the lawmakers said in the joint explanatory statement. “This practice may result in upward adjustments to contract pricing without providing time for sufficient review due to factors such as the expiration of funds or urgent military needs for the products or services.” 

House-led efforts to rein in cost overruns and strengthen oversight of major defense acquisition programs were also blocked during the conference process. The proposal would have accelerated the Pentagon’s reporting timeline, requiring the department to alert Congress within 30 days of any significant or critical cost overruns.

Also omitted is a House proposal to curb the outsized influence of tech giants over the cloud computing and artificial intelligence defense contracting spaces. The measure would have directed DoD to ensure there is a competitive award process when procuring cloud computing, data infrastructure and AI capabilities.

OTA reforms 

While other transactions are intended to move innovative technologies out of the lab and into production, lawmakers said it remains unclear how often these agreements actually lead to follow-on production contracts. 

But a House proposal that would have required Pentagon officials to provide a report on detailing use of follow-on agreements made under Other Transaction Authorities between 2022 and 2025 did not make it into the bill.

Instead, the Government Accountability Office was directed to conduct a review of how OTAs are used, including whether follow-on agreements deliver long-term capability.

The House also sought to require large OTA-funded projects to follow the same oversight rules as major defense acquisition programs, but that proposal was ultimately dropped from the final bill as well.

Small business and workforce provisions left out

A House provision aimed at expanding opportunities for veteran-owned small businesses was stripped from the bill — the measure would have required DoD to set annual contracting goals for small businesses owned by veterans. Moreover, it would have allowed the Pentagon to use noncompetitive procedures when awarding certain contracts to veterans.

“We note that veteran-owned small businesses are an important part of the defense industrial base and we encourage the Secretary of Defense to continue supporting veteran-owned small businesses,” the lawmakers said.

The House’s proposal to create a standardized Schedule V for reporting veteran employment and retention data across all DoD contracts and grants was also dropped from the final bill.

Another House provision would have required the department to ensure contractors are meeting the federal 7% disability hiring requirement.

Portfolio management reforms

While the move to a more portfolio-centric approach to acquisition is a feature of the defense policy bill, negotiators dropped a Senate proposal to establish “capstone requirements” for future portfolio acquisition executives. The shift in strategy for defining needs aimed to improve speed and innovation by revising programs in consultation with the Joint Requirements Oversight Council.  

The House also tried to address DoD’s longstanding high turnover in key acquisition leadership roles by requiring a six-year minimum assignment for bosses formerly known as program executive officers, but the effort failed to advance. Instead, the final bill directs the Pentagon to brief Congress next year on “actions taken to strengthen stability in program management and tenure for critical acquisition positions.”

Legislators did endorse the spirit of the foiled measure.

“Stable, milestone-aligned tenure is essential to program continuity, accountability, and cost and schedule performance. Short-term assignments can incentivize short-sighted decision-making by officials who will not be present to manage long-term consequences,” they said. “Longer tenure strengthens accountability by ensuring that the same leaders who initiate major acquisition decisions remain responsible for their execution and outcomes. Frequent rotations disrupt long-term planning, erode institutional knowledge, and hinder the Department’s ability to deliver capabilities to the warfighter on time and within budget.” 

The House passed the annual defense bill on Wednesday. The legislation now heads to the Senate.

The post Here are key acquisition reforms dropped from the 2026 NDAA first appeared on Federal News Network.

The 43-day partial government shutdown left us all bereft of information technology news and updates on program progress. Now that agencies are funded at least through Jan. 31, the conference circuit is in its end-of-the-year sprint and lawmakers are working on the final touches of the defense authorization bill, there are some interesting IT news items that have emerged over the last week or so. Here are three of them that deserve highlighting.

TMF Board beats deadline

The Technology Modernization Fund officially expires on Friday, meaning the board can only continue to oversee and fund existing awards.

While the House was attempting to add a provision to the fiscal 2026 defense authorization bill to extend the TMF, the board quietly made at least one new award before the impending deadline.

The National Nuclear Security Administration earned an investment of $28.3 million for three separate, but interrelated modernization projects.

The agency will use the funding “to modernize the foundational technology infrastructure supporting its nuclear security missions through an integrated cloud and artificial intelligence transformation. Current systems have critical vulnerabilities: the FireGuard wildfire monitoring activity requires intensive manual analysis across classification barriers; the Turbo Federal Radiological Monitoring and Assessment Center (FRMAC) radiological assessment tool cannot communicate with other emergency response applications; and limited AI development infrastructure prevents rapid evaluation of models for nuclear security threats. These vulnerabilities hamper data aggregation, slow emergency response, and leave gaps in the agency’s ability to assess evolving technological risks.”

A government source with knowledge of the TMF award said most of the funding — about $23 million — will go to modernizing the AI infrastructure for NNSA’s classified environment.

NNSA has been building out its classified environment in the cloud for much of the last two years and the influx of funding will accelerate that effort.

For example, NNSA recently implemented AskSage’s platform to access secure AI tools through the Army’s tenet.

The source said through the TMF investment, NNSA can more quickly implement its own version of AWS, Microsoft and Google clouds with AI tools built in.

NNSA expects to create a centralized AI infrastructure for its classified users to make it easier for them to access these tools more quickly.

This was NNSA’s second TMF award. It won $3.8 million in July 2024 to modernize its Radiological Response Data Portal.

The source said the other two projects, for which NNSA will receive about $3 million for FRMAC and $2 million for FireGuard, were grouped together as part of the overall modernization initiative because they will rely on AI and machine learning tools.

“Through the TMF, FireGuard aims to use machine learning to automatically track fire boundaries and move data between computing systems. This automation would allow analysts to spend their time verifying maps instead of drawing them from scratch, which is particularly critical as wildfires pose growing risks to nuclear sites,” the TMF states on its website. “Through the TMF, NNSA plans to shift the Turbo FRMAC radiological assessment tool from its legacy desktop software to a cloud‑based platform, providing emergency teams with the speed, accuracy, and collaborative capability they need to protect the public and critical infrastructure during radiological crises.”

The source said while much of the work to modernize the systems and to develop the AI infrastructure was already underway, the TMF money certainly will help NNSA move faster.

And that idea of moving faster brings us back to Congress failing to extend the program’s authorization. While plenty of programs operate without authorization, it seems like this type of investment, at least for the short term, is on hold.

There still is some hope, as the Senate did allocate $5 million for the TMF in fiscal 2026 in its version of the Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill. This is the first time in three years lawmakers didn’t zero out new funding for the TMF.

Commerce, USDA race for AI

The departments of Commerce and Agriculture are in a friendly race to see who can implement the new USAi platform first.

Brian Epley, Commerce’s chief information officer, said at ACT-IAC’s Executive Leadership Conference last week that, hopefully within the next few weeks, employees at all bureaus will be able to begin using the different large language models for their use cases.

Meanwhile, Tony Brannum, the chief information security officer at Agriculture, said deployment of the AI shared service across the agency is imminent as well.

These would be the first agencies to take advantage of the USAi platform, which GSA launched in March and expanded this summer to provide generative AI chatbot tools for other agencies.

“The code base is the same as GSAi. It is just a copy for our agency partners to use so that they can do that deep exploration across a broad portfolio of generative AI technologies and large language models, but most importantly, capture the observability telemetry data so that they can make informed decisions about how they’re going to buy well into this disruptive space in the future,” GSA CIO Dave Shive said at the ELC conference.

GSA says the USAi platform is part of how it’s providing agencies the opportunity to try out AI tools that previously would’ve either been cost prohibitive to roll out across the agency or included too much risk.

Zach Whitman, GSA’s chief AI officer, said USAi has become an interagency project in terms of developing and learning from its use.

“With a tool like USAi, you can really get practical, hands-on data to suggest these are the ways in which we’re seeing this adoption curve today. And the telemetry that we’re gathering in terms of how frequently do people use the thing is an important step for the program development,” Whitman said. “But then also, what are they asking of this tool? What kinds of mission functions are they using this tool for? That true fidelity on how the thing is being used is, I would argue that the real value proposition of a tool like USAi is to be able to see inside how the workforce is truly adopting this new technology to such granularity, and then shape policy and workflows to maximize that utility has been an eye opener for us, as well as our partners.”

As for Commerce, Epley said it will use the chat prompt tools to answer specific questions that arise in each bureau based on their individual use cases.

“We have an AI use case inventory of more than 300. USAi will bring Commerce to life when it comes to AI tools,” he said. “We looked at what we were doing on our own when it came to AI and decided it was best to partner with GSA. The majority of our workforce doesn’t have a working knowledge of AI, so now they will have tools at their fingertips. We expect USAi to increase our productivity for our employees and for the mission.”

Epley added that Commerce will use its lessons from implementing USAi and create a playbook for other agencies to ease their move to the shared service.

This is a multi-year effort for Commerce, as Epley expects they will have to optimize the value of the LLMs and figure out which tools are best for which mission area.

As for USDA, the implementation of USAi is the culmination of a decade-long journey to improve its data tagging.

Brannum said knowing what data the agency has, where it’s located, and who has access to it will make the application of AI tools easier.

“There is a lot of interest in AI across the agency. We are asked why something is blocked, or once they see something out there from GSA, they ask to use it,” he said.

JWCC-Next, JOE and more from DISA

The Defense Information Systems Agency will continue to run its own multiple award contracts for the foreseeable future. DISA’s Procurement Services Executive Doug Packard, who will retire in January after more than 35 years in government, said the agency has no immediate plans to consolidate acquisition programs into GSA.

That means the Joint Warfighting Cloud Computing Contract-Next (JWCC-Next) and several other high profile programs will remain in play for 2026.

At DISA’s annual industry day on Monday, executives said JWCC-Next, Olympus, the Joint Operational Environment (JOE) and several other major IT programs are positioned for significant progress over the next year.

Byron Stephenson, the J-9 vice director for the Host and Compute Center at DISA, said DISA has been working with the DoD CIO’s office to collect requirements for the new contract.

“We are still looking at all the requirements that were collected across the department to ensure we bring the best cloud capable contract for the future,” Stephenson said.

He expects DISA to issue the JWCC-Next solicitation during the third quarter of fiscal 2026 and make an award about a year later.

Additionally, DISA will issue a solicitation in the second quarter of fiscal 2026 for technical support for the JWCC engineering program office.

As for the current iteration of the contract, which DoD awarded in November 2021, Stephenson said the use by the services continues to grow.

“In 2025, had over $3.9 billion in total orders. We are actively seeing increases as the Air Force onboards to the contract now,” he said. “We had large Army orders last year, so it is continuing to see progress.”

Aside from JWCC-Next, DISA J-9 is busy implementing several large scale technology programs. Stephenson said the joint operational environment is operational in multiple theaters with active workloads, including the Indo-Pacific Command. Through JOE, DISA is bringing commercial cloud services to commands located outside the continental United States.

Meanwhile, DISA’s Olympus, which is its infrastructure-as-code initiative, is active in two environments, AWS and Microsoft, and military services and agencies can take advantage of the tools through DISA’s working capital fund.

The post TMF makes one more award before authorization expires first appeared on Federal News Network.

Interview transcript:

Terry Gerton We’re going to talk about a recent GAO report that’s certainly timely. The use of the Department of Homeland Security and Custom and Border Protection’s use of soft-sided facilities for joint processing centers. Tell us a little bit more about the situation and what motivated GAO’s assessment of how this process is going.

Travis Masters Well, Terry, as you probably are aware, most of our reviews are initiated at the request of Congress. And so in this case that was the case. The Homeland Security Committees in both the House and the Senate requested that we take a look at DHS’s contracting and use of soft-sided facilities at the southwest border for holding apprehended individuals and processing them. In the 2019 to 2024 time frame, the number of individuals at the border that were apprehended increased over that time frame from about 850,000 individuals in 2019 to a peak in 2022 of about 2 million individuals. That’s a lot of people. CBP’s facilities were dealing with overcrowding issues, and so they put these temporary, tent-like structures known as soft-sided facilities up to help alleviate that. There was a lot of money associated with that as well. The cost for the facilities went from $170 million in 2019 to $1.4 billion dollars in 2024. So given the numbers of individuals and the size of the cost, Congress was interested in having us take a look at how those contracts were being were being managed and the facilities were being run.

Terry Gerton In the course of this assessment, your team visited multiple sites. You went onsite to see what was happening. What were the most significant findings about how CBP planned for and provided oversight of these facilities?

Travis Masters We visited four facilities. At the time of our review, CBP had seven total soft-sided facilities along the southwest border. We visited four of those. And we looked at eight contracts out of the 69 they had for those. The primary takeaway for us in all of that was that there were areas where CBP could have done a little bit better with regard to analysis and planning for requirements for those facilities, with regard to numbers of personnel needed for certain functions. For instance — porters, who are folks that move individuals’ possessions around within the facility and other items within those facilities. As part of our review, we pointed out that they had, in some cases, too many individuals in a facility and in other cases, too few. And they didn’t really have a staffing model methodology for helping with those fluctuations. And in fact, during our review, our questions about that actually prompted CBP to go back and revisit that, which resulted in a real-time savings: $2.7 million per month between August 2024 to March of 2025, for about a savings of $18 million. So, you know, things of that nature. It was about doing better planning and having better analysis that was really kind of the broad takeaway for us.

Terry Gerton Simultaneous to your report, DHS received millions of dollars to construct additional hard-sided or permanent facilities. What did you find about the cost effectiveness of the temporary structures compared to permanent joint processing centers?

Travis Masters The permanent facilities don’t exist yet. DHS is in the process of building the first one in Laredo. They received just over $300 million from the Congress in 2022 to build this permanent facility. What we found was similar in that sense, that the analysis and planning up front for choosing where that facility might go, how big that facility might be, lacked in some areas regarding requirements and cost estimating. They made a decision to put the facility in Laredo; they didn’t really document clearly the rationale or the criteria for why that was the location selected versus other locations. And they didn’t have a comprehensive cost estimate in place before that. And so again, it really boils down for us to just doing good upfront homework to make sure that you understand that the investment you’re making is well-informed and that it’s the most efficient investment and effective one possible, which again requires you to understand the requirements and things of that nature. So in that sense they were similar. They both JPC and the soft-sided facilities needed some additional study up front.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Travis Masters, he’s a director for contracting and national security acquisitions at GAO. In the course of this assessment, GAO made six recommendations documenting lessons learned, focusing on those lifecycle cost estimates. Which of these do you see as the most important for DHS to act on right away?

Travis Masters I think the lessons learned aspect, conducting the analysis necessary to kind of inform future decisions, is probably the biggest. We made some other recommendations as well, regarding oversight of the contract and training of contract oversight officials, which are also important. But the lessons learned piece and the study and analysis piece regarding the joint processing center, I think are the keys. In March of 2025, CBP closed the soft-sided facilities that it had. The number of apprehensions went down, the soft-sided facility contracts were not extended. And so CBP kind of has an opportunity right now — now that there’s sort of a lull in the in the number of individuals being apprehended — to take some time to think forward about, how would they plan for and react when numbers increase again? Because history shows us that the numbers do increase and decrease over time, and it’s likely that the numbers will increase again at some point in the future. So we see that as really a target of opportunity for CBP to take some time to retrospectively look and document lessons learned so they can prepare for the future.

Terry Gerton That’s a great point. DHS did concur with all of the recommendations, but you bring up an important point about capacity. Do they have the capacity and the skill sets to do this cost analysis, to do this planning? What would it take for DHS and CBP to really fully implement your recommendations?

Travis Masters Well, just simply assigning the people to do the work, having an organization within DHS to take a look at the numbers historically, the contracts that were in place at the time, the data, very similar to the information that we collected and analyzed for our report. And then taking some time to sit down and look at — there are a number of best-practice documents. GAO has best practices, for instance, for analysis of alternatives that we cite in the report that could help DHS as it plans for its joint processing center investments, figuring out what’s the best alternative, cost-effective wise or requirements-wise. And so just taking some time to sit down and actually do the analysis, and then we’d like them to document that. I think it’s important to document those lessons, not just simply have them in some individual’s head or maybe in a collective group of heads, but have it on paper for you know, for the future individuals that will have to make those decisions as well, so that it’s memorialized.

Terry Gerton DHS has other detention functions across other portions of its organization. Do you see a cross-fertilization of this skill set and making sure that they’re considering the same factors as they’re planning for other detention facilities?

Travis Masters Absolutely. I mean I think these are just general, basic, good analysis, good informed decision-making kinds of things that would apply regardless of the organization. Our report was focused on CBP specifically, but as you know and others know, ICE also has detention facilities that it manages and contracts for, and I think that these same principles, these same ideas are applicable to them as well.

The post With billions spent on temporary border facilities, GAO says DHS needs better plans first appeared on Federal News Network.

More than a dozen federal statistical agencies are falling behind on producing high-quality data sets that impact the U.S. economy and government policy, according to former officials.

An annual report from the American Statistical Association finds widespread staffing and spending cuts across the federal government, along with policy changes under the Trump administration, have led to certain public-facing data sets being delayed, suspended or canceled.

Experts who led the report are also concerned by a decline of public trust in federal government data sets.

Former Chief Statistician of the United States Nancy Potok, a co-author of the report, said in a call on Wednesday that “we saw a severe decline in the agency’s ability to meet their missions,” and that the “status quo was no longer satisfactory.”

“What most people noticed was that many statistical products just disappeared. They either were eliminated, in terms of no data collection taking place, because contracts were cut or funding was cut or people weren’t there, or because of the lack of staff and resources,” Potok said.

The association’s annual report found that most statistical agencies lost 20% to 30% of their staff this year, and the Trump administration is pursuing further workforce cuts at these agencies.

The Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics lost nearly all its employees this year, as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing plans to dismantle the department and reassign its programs to other federal agencies. The statistics office currently has three employees.

President Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics this summer after the agency produced a monthly jobs report that showed hiring had slowed.

The Social Security Administration’s former chief data officer left the agency after filing a whistleblower complaint alleging that the Department of Government Efficiency improperly put the sensitive data of more than 300 million Americans at risk of exposure.

In May, the DOGE posted on X that the Census Bureau conducts more than 100 additional surveys beyond the decennial population count. DOGE wrote that many of those other surveys are “obsolete,” and that the results are “not being used to drive any action.” DOGE said the Census Bureau has terminated five “wasteful surveys.”

“Some of the existing guardrails are really at risk of being pushed and potentially ignored,” Potok said.

The association’s report last year found that federal statistical agencies are having a harder time producing quality data. Part of the problem is that fewer individuals are filling out the surveys that power this data. A national decline in trust in government corresponds with lower response rates for federal statistical surveys.

Potok said the ASA’s report last year found that “status quo is going to deteriorate over time, and something needs to be done.” However, she said those problems have only gotten worse.

“This is an immediate kind of crisis situation that we have found,” Potok said.

Mike Calabria, the current chief statistician of the U.S., said in a keynote address last month that his priorities are strengthening data security at statistical agencies and reversing a “long-term decline in response rates” for statistical surveys.

“People are going to be more reluctant to respond if they don’t believe that their data is going to be secure and protected,” Calabria said on Nov. 6 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I’m a very big privacy advocate, and I want to make sure that whatever we do collect does not get hacked or breached, or that people feel confident that the data they give the government is not going to be shared in ways that they haven’t consented to.”

A  senior administration official told Federal News Network that the report’s findings amount to “typical swamp lobbying.”

Potok said the Trump administration has taken some steps to support statistical agencies, “but it was far outweighed by the things that happened that weakened them.”

The administration, she added, has exempted the Census Bureau from a governmentwide hiring freeze that ran through Oct. 15. Now that the freeze is over, agencies have been instructed to only hire one new federal employee for every four that leave.

Connie Citro, former director of the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, said that these agencies produce “bedrock statistics that the financial world, and in general, the world looks to,” and that budgets are not keeping up with demand for data, which has only accelerated with the rise in artificial intelligence tools.

“These weakened resources weaken the ability for agencies to modernize mentor staff, engage with data users and communicate with stakeholders, and all this is essential to set priorities for innovation and move forward,” Citro said.

Since fiscal 2009, eight of the 13 statistical agencies have lost at least 16% of purchasing power, but have been expected to produce more data.

“While there are strong supporters of federal statistics in Congress, we do not have any vocal champions on the Appropriations Committee,” Steve Pierson, ASA’s director of science policy, said on the call.

The report finds the administration has left key leadership unfilled and pursued “disruptive agency relocations” and eliminated statistical products without input from Congress or the public.

“These losses have affected agency work and undermined innovation, modernization, and communication with data users, leaving agencies struggling to meet expanding demands for data that are more granular, timely, and responsive to policymakers’ needs,” the report states.

The report also cites declining public trust in the data these agencies produce. The percentage of U.S. adults who trust federal statistics fell from 57% in June, to 52% in September, according to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

The percentage of people agreeing or strongly agreeing that they can trust federal statistical agencies to keep information about them confidential declined by six percentage points, from 31% to 25%.

Last month, a federal judge blocked the IRS from sharing data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. There are several other pending federal lawsuits challenging similar data-sharing agreements with ICE.

The post ‘Bedrock’ federal data sets are disappearing, as statistical agencies face upheaval first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency doesn’t want to leave companies hanging when they reach out to CISA with an important innovation or technology development.

That’s a key reason why CISA earlier this month launched an Industry Engagement Platform, referred to as the IEP. The website provides an external portal where companies, nonprofits, academia and others can sign up to share information with the agency.

“We want deep engagement with the private sector technology innovators, and it can sometimes be hard to schedule meetings with the government or share what you’ve been working on,” Bob Costello, CISA’s chief information officer, said in a recent interview with Federal News Network.

Costello said CISA started work on the platform earlier this year with the goal of improving that process. He said the design of the IEP is based on widely used tax preparation services, with easily fillable fields and the ability to suggest meeting times with CISA staff across different divisions, depending on the topic.

“What we’re going to see first and foremost is hopefully shifting to the left or a shorter time period from when a vendor contacts us, to us expressing interest in the scheduling of that meeting, because we have the system handling all of that,” Costello said.

He said the new platform augments the more traditional ways CISA engages with outside organizations, such as requests for information or industry days. The goal is also to help smaller companies get in touch with the agency.

“I do see it as advancing our transparency and accessibility to working with us,” he said. “So much innovation happens in the private sector, as well as in research labs and elsewhere. But we really want to hear from all those innovators that maybe sometimes just don’t even know how to contact us.”

The new platform should also eventually give CISA a wealth of analytics on companies, technologies and sectors it engages with, Costello said. Tracking that engagement over time should also help the agency, he added.

“Maybe one group’s interested, or we see something here, but it’s not quite ready for an investment,” Costello explained. “Come back and talk to us in six months, and then we’re able to actually kind of track that progress in the system as well, too. I think that that’s very helpful overall to that business relationship that we have with industry.”

The cyber agency, which provides a range of cybersecurity and infrastructure services to government and industry, is interested in hearing about innovations in IT and security controls, data analytics, post-quantum security and artificial intelligence.

As the CIO, Costello said he’s particularly interested in automated testing solutions.

“There’s a lot of good work being done on automated testing of IT solutions. Automated or AI-based red teaming of systems is very interesting to us,” he said. “And not just vulnerability scanning, but helping to determine if your system or asset is actually vulnerable to the vulnerability that that’s being disclosed, or if you have other compensating controls in place that make it so that patching within 10 minutes is not really required … That’s the next generation of understanding how we do vulnerability management.”

Meanwhile, the engagement platform is a step toward eventually needing just one account to work with CISA, Costello said. Right now, the agency’s various cybersecurity services, for instance, all have different sign-up portals.

The agency also runs a voluntary cyber incident reporting portal. But under a rule scheduled to be finalized next May, thousands of companies across critical infrastructure sectors will be required to report cyber incidents to CISA, markedly increasing the number of reports the agency will receive.

“We are hoping to come in time where reporting to CISA or sharing information to CISA can happen across automated systems, while always maintaining that capability for a human to share information with us,” Costello said. “I’d really like us to start driving in [fiscal] 26. and we have a lot of really great ongoing initiatives, to get to that more automated sharing of large scale information.”

The post CISA looks for ‘deep engagement’ with innovators via new platform first appeared on Federal News Network.

The U.S. government is seeing increasing cyber and physical threats targeting the critical infrastructure Americans rely on every day, including federal systems. Just last month, U.S. officials issued an emergency directive ordering federal agencies to defend their networks against hackers exploiting flaws in Cisco’s software. In July, an investigation revealed that engineers based in China were given indirect access to the cloud platform used by multiple federal agencies. And last year, a Chinese espionage group targeted at least 200 U.S. organizations, including the Army National Guard, in an operation known as Salt Typhoon.

Cyberthreats to U.S. government systems are a significant national security risk that expose the country to spying, sabotage and more. In light of these threats, it might be tempting for federal agencies and other recently-hacked government organizations to hunker down or seek refuge in a traditional GovCloud. Doing so may give the illusion of a quick fix, but will ultimately undermine President Trump’s priorities and U.S. national security, and is a step backwards technologically.

To understand why a return to GovClouds is such a bad idea, it is worth revisiting the history behind why the government has shifted from GovClouds to commercial clouds in the first place. The emergence of modern cloud technology in the early 2000s fundamentally changed enterprise IT, including how the U.S. government operates. For decades prior, federal agencies relied on government-owned servers to store data and run their networks. Taking advantage of the cloud, however, meant relocating those functions to off-site data centers managed by private companies and, as a result, relinquishing some control over who managed and accessed their information.

In 2011, the U.S. government started the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) to safely accelerate federal agencies’ adoption and secure use of cloud services. To sell cloud products to the government, companies had to prove that any personnel handling federal data had the proper authorizations and background screenings. The approach made sense at the time, because the goal was to provide a standardized approach to security assessments and authorizations as this new technology was adopted.

However, FedRAMP — and the Defense Information Systems Agency, which manages the evaluation and authorization of cloud services for the Defense Department — led many cloud providers to create separate cloud environments dedicated to serving federal agencies, GovClouds, rather than running government workloads in their commercial cloud environments. While this made compliance with the assessments and authorizations easier, it came at a cost: GovClouds badly lagged behind commercial cloud in terms of capacity, performance and security, with less than 5% of government cloud environments possessing the full characteristics of current cloud computing.

GovClouds are isolated environments and are slow to roll out security updates and new features, including AI, therefore limiting the public sector’s access to rapidly advancing technologies. Isolation may seem like a good idea that reduces external threats, but it does little to eliminate insider threats — which account for the majority of data breaches — and it deprives government customers of the constant learning and adaptation of commercial technology.

Over time, these problems pushed federal agencies away from GovClouds in favor of the evident security and performance advantages of commercial cloud: continuous roll out of new features and updates, consolidated security operations that take advantage of economies of scale and scope, and lower cost.

GovClouds are also very expensive to build and operate, and those costs are passed onto American taxpayers. These are among the reasons why President Donald Trump issued an executive order tasking federal agencies to adopt commercial solutions for federal contracts wherever possible.

In light of recent events, it would be a colossal mistake for the government to retreat to GovClouds now — especially as it increasingly looks to adopt AI. President Trump’s AI Action Plan put forward an ambitious strategy to ensure American AI leadership abroad, but also to use AI to transform the federal government. The computing power necessary for that transformation will be immense and only increase year after year — and a GovCloud will not be able to keep up. Following through on the President’s AI Action Plan will simply require more than what GovClouds can offer.

As the U.S. government faces increasingly severe cyber threats, let’s not forget the lessons of the past. GovClouds are the technological equivalent of the Maginot Line: expensive, easy to quantify and seemingly impregnable, but unable to defend against modern attacks. The federal government needs to look forward, not back, to secure its systems and push toward President Trump’s vision for the future.

Andrew Grotto founded and directs the program on geopolitics, technology and governance at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. He serves as the faculty lead for the cyber policy and security specialization in Stanford’s master’s in international policy program, where he teaches courses on cyber policy and economic statecraft. He is also a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was the senior director for cyber policy on the National Security Council in the Obama and Trump administrations.

The post Look forward, not back, in response to cyber threats first appeared on Federal News Network.

Interview transcript: 

Terry Gerton You’ve reported on an incident that happened just before Thanksgiving, when the Justice Department demanded a massive collection of data from U.S. attorneys. Tell us what they were asking for and why they got such a short deadline to provide it.

Ben Penn Yes, so the Deputy Attorney General’s office on the Monday before Thanksgiving asked all 93 U.S. attorneys’ offices for a collection of basically data points, samples of all the cases that they’re working on that show progress on a variety of White House directives and memos from the political leadership of the Department of Justice. And this was basically, it’s not all that abnormal to do something like this, which is called a data call, for the DOJ headquarters in Washington to seek statistics and basically hold the U.S. attorney’s offices feed to the fire and show them and give them specific data points that demonstrate progress on some of the prior year’s policy priorities. But this one did come across as a little bit grueling given the timing with such short turnaround. They were all told they had only two days before to turn around the data and respond by the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, and just the sheer volume of all the data and stats that was being asked for. I did hear from folks that that was a little bit noteworthy, but overall, I think what’s interesting here is the request serves as a snapshot, it’s sort of a window into, what are the policy buckets that enforcement, in particular, that this administration is most keen to provide examples of to show the White House that it’s fulfilling its objectives.

Terry Gerton So you sound like there’s two conflicting thoughts there. One is, this is a normal end-of-year data call to get a comprehensive perspective of all the work that DOJ has done over the past year and yet they really had about a 72-hour timeline to do it. Did somebody forget to send the email three weeks earlier, or what’s going on there?

Ben Penn I don’t have any insight there. I will say that it could simply be, we could speculate as to whether the White House, given all that’s been going on this year, with the White House moving DOJ’s agenda closer to its own, if it came from the White House asking to, maybe expressing frustration about, why aren’t there more cases, for instance, on lawsuits against sanctuary city jurisdictions, or, where are political violence cases pursuant to an EO, or executive order that Trump put out after Charlie Kirk was murdered? But we don’t know for sure, and it is possible that this is just, that to be a U.S. attorney is not an easy job and having a tight deadline may just be part of the process.

Terry Gerton You mentioned a couple of specific situations there that they were looking for data on. Tell us more about the investigation of organized political violence after Charlie Kirk’s murder.

Ben Penn Yeah, so in September and shortly after Kirk was assassinated, there was a, it was, I called it an EO earlier, it was actually technically a presidential memorandum that came out and instructed the Attorney General Pam Bondi to basically ensure that there were cases that were being brought that specifically looked at organized political violence and domestic terrorism issues that have been priorities of the department in the past, but specifically in this case it seemed to direct request for information about left-leaning groups and funding sources like the George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, and to look at Antifa and to try to investigate all the possible sources of organized political violence. So that was one of them. There was also a request for information on open cases that had a nexus to cartels or transnational criminal organizations, which stemmed from an Attorney General Pam Bondi memo back in February. There’s also requests for all cases that are all examples of dismissals or cases that were closed in the aftermath of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s memo earlier this year that called for basically scaleback enforcement of the cryptocurrency industry. Those are just some examples.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Ben Penn. He’s a senior reporter at Bloomberg Law. So what are the kinds of documents that DOJ should be expecting to get back from this data call?

Ben Penn Yeah, well presumably, assuming all 93 U.S. attorneys’ offices were in compliance with the deadline, they have basically, I would say it’s both numerical and there are probably narrative examples of the types of cases that the department is in the midst of pursuing into cartels or into foreign terrorist organizations. So, but you would also see counts of say, all the U.S. attorneys’ offices combined have brought, say, the X number of lawsuits against sanctuary jurisdictions, or have brought X number of cases under, there was a specific request, for instance, to show the number of cases, criminal prosecutions of adults who sponsored unaccompanied migrant children. That was another recent policy from the Deputy Attorney General asking U.S. attorney’s offices to take a harder stance on looking for any crimes that an adult sponsor of an unaccompanied migrant child may have committed. So they’re looking to tally up all the examples that show how the extent to which the U.S. attorneys’ offices are implementing what the administration wants them to be doing.

Terry Gerton Given now that the data call itself is public knowledge, what would you expect to happen with the data as it’s collected? Will that also be public, do you think? Or will lawmakers want access to it, and what conclusions will people draw?

Ben Penn I would love to provide some transparency into this, Terry. Unfortunately, I would not expect it unless anybody would like to disclose the results to me or to any other member of Congress or reporter. But the existence of this request was an internal email that I obtained. And I believe, it is, at the same time, I could see if the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General are pleased with the results, you could see them highlighting it in an end-of-year summary of success that we’ve had in enforcing the president’s priorities. That’s something that you would see, but there is no obligation for them to show their work, if you will.

Terry Gerton And might Congress be interested in it as a matter of oversight?

Ben Penn Yeah, I could certainly see that, whether both supporters or critics of this administration would have an interest in knowing the extent of enforcement into political violence, into sanctuary jurisdictions, into cryptocurrency industry. That’s all information that you could expect in an oversight request. Or, subject to the next time one of the senior DOJ officials is testifying on the Hill, we could see questions along those lines. So I’m all about transparency. I would love to see as much robust data that shows what came of this request as possible.

The post DOJ ordered a sweeping data collection from U.S. attorneys on Trump-era priorities days before Thanksgiving first appeared on Federal News Network.

Interview transcript: 

Terry Gerton I want to talk with you about the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. They were pretty quiet during the shutdown, but they’ve got a full quorum now. They haven’t had that in a while. And they’ve got funding. You work with them quite a bit. What do you think is going to change in the near term?

Debra Leder I think we’re going to see a lot of changes, at least over the next several weeks, until there might be another issue with funding down the road. But I think that we can expect the EEOC to come out of the gate running to accomplish some of these tasks that they have been anxious about doing since the current administration took hold in January of 2025. And so although there’s now a new member who makes the quorum for the EEOC Commission, the now chair who was acting chair and previously commissioner, I think has made the priorities well known. And now that there is a quorum, the agency will actually be able to take official action and vote. Things of those nature will make a big difference.

Terry Gerton So talk us through the priorities of the EEOC under this administration and maybe where there are major differences from the prior administration.

Debra Leder So, we are going to see a lot of realignment and adjustment of where the EEOC focuses its attention and its resources. Some of the big ticket items for the new EEOC commission is to align the agency’s policies with the executive orders that were issued, several of the executive orders which were issued in January of 2025 and forward. Those issues including the ferreting out DEI that may be counter to the law in the EEOC’s view, as well as the pregnant workers’ protection regulations in the EEOC’s view, maybe going too far from what Congress passed as the protection act for that, and also to maybe roll back certain protections for certain previously thought to be protected categories, including those of the LGBTQ+ community in terms of sexual orientation and transgender status, gender identity type thing.

Terry Gerton  So those shifting priorities can come into play in a variety of ways. Do you anticipate more aggressive litigation on the part of the EEOC? Maybe just more policy memorandums? How do you think those priorities will actually be put into practice?

Debra Leder  I think in terms of priorities for the regulations, the rules that had been put out during the past administration, including the harassment guidance that was, I think, officially published in April of 2024, and the pregnant workers’ guidance, I think as a first measure or order of business, the EEOC is going to either do a wholesale retraction or an overhaul revision of both of those guidances, for sure. And in terms of litigation resources, we’ll be seeing more priority pattern in practice and systemic litigation, targeted perhaps in ways that it hasn’t been over the past few years, including to what the commission may view as illegal DEI initiatives that employers may have, and then also helping to clarify its view of what employers are obligated to do, especially in the area of religious accommodations and whether or not, and how, to balance religious accommodations versus other interests that are sometimes competing in the workplace.

Terry Gerton So would you anticipate the order of those activities being first publication and education and communication about these new priorities, or new angles on the rules and then moving to enforcement?

Debra Leder  I think the publication angle has already been well disseminated, even though the EEOC didn’t have a quorum. Now, Chair Andrea Lucas has been very vocal about what she sees as the driving priorities of the agency and in her speaking, as well as in the budget that was submitted in May of 2025 in terms of where they’re going to allocate the dollars to that. So I think the agency is already kind of gassed up and ready to go out of the station in terms of that. It’s just how long will it take to undo some of these regulations, given that there is a commenting period and they’re also subject to court challenge, as we’ve seen in the past several years. So knowing that that might not be as fast a process as the EEOC might hope, we’ll at least see a displacement of the disclaimer language and archived language we now currently see on the banner page for the EEOC, and it’s either work under construction or, stay tuned for new upcoming guidelines. But in the interim, I think we’ll see it in the way that the agency works on a day-to-day basis, how they accept charges, which charges they investigate fully, and which they may serve to litigate, and so that, as well as continuing to do the education and outreach to let the community know what their priorities are, what the EEOC is expecting to spend its resources and efforts on.

Terry Gerton  I’m speaking with Debra Leder. She’s a partner in labor and employment law at Akerman. Following on with that assessment of what the priorities are going to be and where you expect to see action, for the employers who deal with EEOC issues, what should they be doing in the near term to prepare for this change in focus from the EEOC?

Debra Leder Hopefully, employers have already been staying aware of, on top of the changing priorities, the realignment from the current administration. And so being insightful, those employers most likely have already started to review their policies, to review their websites, to review their hiring criteria, as well as how they handle compensation issues and to just make sure that the policies are going to be step-in-step alignment with what the EEOC and what the executive orders have asked for. But in terms of really getting up to speed, aside from continuing to monitor what regulations may be updated and not just formal guidance, but we may see more enforcement guidance or Q and A type format from the EEOC to help employers get up to speed on doing that. Employers need to make sure all of their documentation has been reviewed and is ready in the event of what might be a very broad, all encompassing request through the investigation stage of some of the EEOC’s priority issues. So to just buckle up and be ready for that ride.

Terry Gerton And so what will you be watching for as the EEOC really gets its feet under it and and moves out? Are there particular cases or activities that you think are going to be significant here in the short run?

Debra Leder Well, the significant cases are waiting to see how the EEOC is going to interpret, we kind of already know, but from the Bostock versus Clayton County case in terms of transgender, gender identity and sexual orientation protections and whether or not the EEOC is going to — we know the EEOC in their updated guidance on harassment is going to remove those types of protections. We already know that the EEOC, I believe, has not taken any additional charges or is not investigating charges that assert claims on those grounds, although there’s still private cause of action to get a right to sue to bring those issues to the forefront. But bringing it back to what employers can do, they need to continue to be mindful of what might be the federal policies that they’re seeing and how that might compete with state and local laws that are also a moving target on a day-to-day basis, or at least a week-to-week basis. So employers definitely have a challenging thing, but as a lawyer and as the co-editor of my HR Defense blog, which I have to put a pitch in for, we try to stay on top of all these issues and push out information that employers need to know.

The post The EEOC powers up for swift action with full funding, a quorum and new priorities first appeared on Federal News Network.

• Recent changes to the Postal Service’s network could mean slower deliveries of prescription drugs in the mail. A study from the Brookings Institution found 6% of Americans live far away from a brick-and-mortar pharmacy, rely heavily on mail-order prescriptions and live in areas impacted by USPS consolidation. Brookings also found that nearly half of all Americans face at least one of those scenarios. USPS this year has been running trucks less often between its processing plants and post offices to transport mail and packages.
  (How USPS network changes threaten prescription drug access for vulnerable populations - Brookings Institution)
• Lawmakers want the Defense Department to do away with duplicative cybersecurity regulations. The compromise defense authorization bill released over the weekend would direct the Pentagon to harmonize all cybersecurity requirements that apply to the defense industrial base. The deadline for harmonizing those regulations would be June 1. The goal is to eliminate inconsistent and duplicative cyber requirements across DoD and the military services. That legislative push comes as the Pentagon starts to roll out the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, or CMMC, requirements across its contracts.
  (NDAA compromise text - House Armed Services Committee)
• Former federal employees are warning of what they say is the “destruction” of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. In a letter penned Tuesday, more than 200 civil rights attorneys who left government this year said they did not want to leave their jobs, but that political leaders at DOJ pressured them to go. The former employees warn that the Trump administration’s overhauls at DOJ have led to a loss of expertise. Their letter also raises concerns about the possibility of a greater exodus of career DOJ staff on the horizon.
  (Open letter on DOJ’s Civil Rights Division - Justice Connection)
• The Defense Department has launched GenAi.mil. The platform will put “frontier AI models” into the hands of warfighters. The department selected Google Cloud's Gemini for Government as the first AI deployed on the new platform. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said DoD personnel will be able to "conduct deep research, format documents and analyze video or imagery at unprecedented speed.” “The future of American warfare is here, and it’s spelled AI,” Hegseth said.
  (DoD unveils new GenAI platform, taps Google’s Gemini for first deployment - LinkedIn)
• The head of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s cyber workforce and education efforts is stepping down. Rodney Petersen said his last day will be Dec. 31. For the past 11 years, Petersen has served as director of NIST’s National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education Cybersecurity Workforce Framework program. Known as the “NICE Framework,” it provides a common language to describe cybersecurity work and the knowledge and skills needed to complete that work. There’s no word yet on who will replace Petersen.
  (Rodney Petersen announces retirement after decades in cybersecurity education - National Institute of Standards and Technology)
• The government’s dispersed HR systems are on the verge of a major transformation. By January, the Office of Personnel Management expects to award a contract that will eventually result in a cohesive HR system for all agencies. It’s not the first time OPM has attempted to merge the more than 100 disparate HR systems across government. But the current effort underway is different: “We’ve already brought experts from many different agencies into a steering committee that are helping us to set the strategy up front,” said Dianna Saxman, OPM’s associate director of HR Solutions.
  (OPM’s plan to unify disparate HR systems taking shape - Federal News Network)
• Despite broad bipartisan support, right-to-repair provisions that would have given service members the ability to fix their own equipment in the field were stripped from the compromise version of the 2026 defense policy bill after industry pushback. The Senate’s provision requiring contractors to provide the military with detailed repair and maintenance instructions was removed from the final text. The House’s data-as-a-service provision, which would have required the Defense Department to negotiate access to technical data and necessary software before signing a contract, was dropped from the bill as well. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) said they “support the Pentagon using the full extent of its existing authorities to insist on right to repair protections” when purchasing equipment from contractors.
  (Congress quietly strips right-to-repair provisions from 2026 NDAA despite wide support - Federal News Network)
• The IRS is setting new limits on telework for employees who are facing a variety of temporary hardships. The IRS said hardship-based requests for full-time telework that employees submitted, but were still awaiting approval, will be “closed,” effective immediately. An agency memo cites the Trump administration’s return-to-office mandate as the reason for the policy change. Employees can still submit hardship-based telework requests, but approvals must come from the agency’s leadership or its human capital office, which is inundated with paperwork from employees retiring under the deferred resignation program.
  (IRS closes out ‘hardship’-based requests for telework, citing return-to-office mandate - Federal News Network)

The post Could USPS network changes threaten access to prescription drugs? first appeared on Federal News Network.

Interview transcript:

 

Terry Gerton Congratulations on being a newly elected fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. What does that honor mean to you?

Jamie Morin Well gosh, the number of folks that I have admired over the years who are fellows of the Academy is pretty impressive. And so it was it was humbling, but really a wonderful recognition. I was I was deeply honored.

Terry Gerton Well, it reflects a lifetime of service. Tell us about what motivated you to begin public service in the first place.

Jamie Morin  I take it back to family influence, for one. I was raised with a really strong tradition of making the community stronger. My mother’s a school teacher, has worked with autistic children for most of her career, still working in that field. And both my parents just had a really strong commitment to the community. So it starts with that, right? And then for me I grew up in the late Cold War, and that built in me a really strong interest in national security. And so I was struck that a meaningful way to serve and to strengthen the nation was to work in a career in national security. And it’s been just enormously rewarding and fulfilling.

Terry Gerton As you think back across that career — you served in the Air Force, you served at DoD level. What stands out as one of your most meaningful accomplishments in the public administration space?

Jamie Morin Well, you said accomplishments, but let me start with a moment. You know, I guess this will sound hopelessly naive in these cynical days, but the first chance I had to take the oath to uphold the Constitution — when as a graduate student, I guess I was 22 or 23 years old, I was offered the chance to work in the Pentagon on requirements and plans — to be pulled into something much bigger than yourself, to be pulled into incredibly consequential matters, and to do it with a devotion to those principles in the Constitution. Just being in that moment as a young person was a tremendously shaping experience for me. So that that’s where I would have to start. I’ve probably taken that oath personally six or seven times since. I’ve administered it dozens of times. I had the privilege of presiding at a graduation ceremony from basic military training with hundreds of young people starting a career in military service. But you keep coming back to: We are offered an opportunity in this nation to uphold a constitution that’s bigger than any of us, bigger than the politics of the moment. And that that’s a great starting point. You know, to the accomplishments, I’ve worked mostly in resource management, in making smart decisions with the taxpayers’ money. Chief Financial Officer for the Air Force, Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation for the Department of Defense as a whole. So the biggest opportunities for impact in roles like that are when you can get something started on the right foot. And the things we do in national security, particularly in developing technology — it takes time. We’re trying to do really hard things. But I had the opportunity with both the Air Force and working for the Secretary of Defense to get a few really consequential and major programs started, thinking about the B-21 bomber for the Air Force, for example. It’d been a long time since the U.S. Air Force had been able to buy a bomber on something approaching planned cost and planned schedule. And it looks like we’re on a path to be pretty darn close to that on that program. And so that’s a tremendous thing to be able to look back and say, “hey, we’ve been working on this, it’s a big deal, billions of taxpayer dollars, critical to the success of the joint force. And I was able to have my fingers all over that at the outset.” So that’s a significant one. Moments of crisis. We’ve recently gone through a government shutdown. I had the challenge of operating through a few of those as Air Force CFO and working in OSD, and some close calls as well as actual shutdowns. Those are searing moments where leaders have to make tough decisions — again, with the Constitution first and foremost in our mind. Our system isn’t always perfect, but it is ours and it’s our responsibility to operate within it and to make it better. And then finally, I guess I would highlight people, in that the public service is an important calling. It demands things of people that are different than what we ask of people in the private sector. And because it’s sometimes hard for people to get their feet under them in the complexity of an organization like the Department of Defense or many of the other federal agencies, we have to make long-term investments in our people. So being able to be involved in hiring and developing talent and giving people an opportunity to really accomplish their potential and then to also send them forth to go do bigger and better things, whether in government or outside, those have been just tremendously rewarding for me.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Jamie Morin. He’s Vice President of Defense Strategic Space at the Aerospace Corporation and a newly elected fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. Jamie, you told some great stories there, but early in that last response, you mentioned the oath of office and allegiance to the Constitution. You’ve seen in your service firsthand how trust in government can be tested in times of fiscal uncertainty and strategic transition, and we’re certainly in that right now. How do you view the current state of public administration and what can it do to help increase public trust in government?

Jamie Morin I think approaching public administration as an exercise in continuous improvement is really important. We have to always be willing to question the “how” of how we get things done. Take advantage of new technology, take advantage of new concepts and approaches. We have to do that, still, with an eye to the core principles, right? Public service is a public trust. We have to conduct ourselves in public administration in such a way that there is no question about the integrity with which people work and that they are doing things with the right ends in mind. We’re talking about a nation approaching its 250th birthday. So the timelines and the time horizon that the public administration has to think about is different than what we as individual humans have to think about, or what even, you know, long-lived companies have to think about. We have to take that long-term perspective for the betterment of the nation. But again, you’ve got to balance that with responsiveness to changing needs. The needs that the public administration meets in a time are shaped by the time. They’re shaped by the technology, they’re shaped by the psychology of the citizens, they’re shaped by the external environment that we operate in. So continuous improvement, willingness to adapt, but founded on those core principles of what government is about and the constitution we uphold. I think that’s the bottom line for me.

Terry Gerton Well, and you also mentioned the importance of people. If you were speaking to someone just starting out in public service, perhaps in defense analysis or budgeting, what advice would you give them about building a career that really makes a difference?

Jamie Morin I would start with coming in for the right reasons. Every once in a while I run into people who are entering public service with a plan to sort of hop, skip and jump their way through it. I’m not sure that’s the right approach. I think that there are certainly great opportunities for people to come and depart from government service and have careers that cross those boundaries. I think that’s very useful. But, you know, it really should be about the mission of the agency and the national interest, not so much the personal interest. So I find that people that come in with that perspective generally do better. If you’re thinking about, how can I accomplish things for the citizens, how can I deliver on the promises of government? Those people are more likely to both enjoy themselves and have a positive impact than those who are, you know, kind of climbing their way up a ladder. But the other piece I would suggest is that reputation matters. People’s ability to get things done in complex environments, whether big bureaucracies or just very difficult missions with lots of factors that have to come together. It depends on credibility. It depends on creativity. It depends on being seen as a team player. Someone who’s willing to make sacrifices to get the right things done. And that’s a hard-earned reputation — and it’s one that’s also easy to lose if you make bad choices. As someone who is an adjunct professor at Georgetown now and teaches students who are really interested in public service, these are conversations I have all the time. I encourage people to look at the career and I encourage them to look at it from a mission accomplishment perspective, because that’s how it’s going to be most rewarding for them and for the mission that they’re trying to actually support.

The post Jamie Morin helped shape defense strategy from inside the Pentagon. Now he’s being honored for his contributions to public service first appeared on Federal News Network.

The IRS is setting new limits on telework for employees who are facing a variety of temporary hardships.

The agency said in an internal memo Monday that hardship-based requests for full-time telework that employees submitted, but were still awaiting approval, will be “closed,” effective immediately.

The memo, obtained by Federal News Network, cites the Trump administration’s return-to-office mandate for federal employees as the reason for the policy change.

“As a result of return to office, the current hardship program process and approvals will be adjusted to ensure compliance,” the memo states.

According to the memo, IRS employees are generally limited to five days of telework per calendar year.

Employees can still submit hardship-based telework requests, but approvals must come from the agency’s leadership or its human capital office, which is inundated with paperwork from employees retiring under the deferred resignation program.

The IRS lost more than a quarter of its employees this year through voluntary separation incentives.

Several IRS employees told Federal News Network that the IRS in the past has granted hardship-based telework to accommodate a range of emergencies, including employees facing domestic violence or employees who are immunocompromised following organ transplants.

It’s not clear how long employees will wait for hardship approvals under this policy change. Federal News Network has reached out to the IRS and the Treasury Department for comment.

The memo states that requests for short-term telework arrangements lasting fewer than 90 days will still be reviewed and considered on a case-by-case basis.

Short-term telework arrangements for less than 30 days must get approval from the agency’s human capital office. Hardship requests for more than 30 days of telework will require approval from the agency’s chief operating officer.

The new IRS policy comes as other agencies are setting restrictions on telework as a reasonable accommodation for employees with disabilities.

The Department of Health and Human Services rolled out a new reasonable accommodation policy last week that required all telework, remote work, or reassignment requests to be reviewed and approved by an assistant secretary or a higher-level official — a decision that is likely to slow the approval process.

Meanwhile, IRS employees have been under scrutiny from an agency watchdog to ensure they are complying with the Trump administration’s return-to-office mandate.

Federal News Network reported in August that the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration conducted an audit, at the request of the Treasury Department, to see if IRS employees were reporting to the office as often as they claimed.

The Trump administration, more broadly, has required agencies to collect data, including badge swipes into office buildings, to determine if federal employees are following the return-to-office mandate.

According to the National Treasury Employees Union’s 2022 national agreement with the IRS, when an employee is experiencing a temporary hardship, the agency “will make every reasonable effort to approve a temporary telework location,” including moving the employee to another office location.

Under this labor agreement, the IRS can approve a permanent hardship in cases where an employee or an immediate family member faces a “significant hardship” that threatens their life or livelihood. Examples include seeking specialized care for serious medical conditions that affect major life functions, a spouse faced with relocation or the loss of their job, or employees facing domestic violence or other similar “threats to life or limb.”

Temporary hardship requests are granted on a broader basis than permanent hardship requests. NTEU and the IRS included temporary hardship requests in their labor contract, based on discussions around medical issues impacting an employee’s immediate family members.

The 2022 agreement states the IRS may approve a temporary hardship for up to a year, depending on the circumstances of the hardship and “subject to staffing and workload needs.” Management can further extend a temporary hardship for a maximum of one more year.

IRS denials of hardship requests are supposed to be resolved through the union’s grievance procedure. The IRS, however, no longer recognizes NTEU, given the Trump administration’s rollback of collective bargaining rights across the federal workforce.

NTEU is leading a lawsuit challenging those executive orders targeting federal employee unions. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will hear oral arguments in the case next Monday.

The IRS memo states that the agency will still grant requests for “situational” telework for “unforeseen, non-recurring emergencies.”

Those include an employee dealing with an illness or medical appointment that would normally require sick leave, an employee needing to stay home to meet with a service provider for urgent home repairs, or a school or caregiving facility closure with less than 24 hours’ notice.

The memo states that IRS managers can provide up to 90 days of telework as an interim accommodation for employees waiting for the agency to process their request for reasonable accommodation.

Federal agencies are required under the Rehabilitation Act to provide reasonable accommodations to qualified employees with disabilities, as long as that accommodation does not result in an “undue hardship” for agencies.

“Treasury recognizes the role that limited telework can play to support achieving the mission and employees’ work-life balance,” the IRS memo states.

However, Tax Notes reported last week that the IRS faces a growing backlog of more than 8,000 reasonable accommodation requests.

The post IRS closes out ‘hardship’ requests for telework, citing return-to-office mandate first appeared on Federal News Network.

Despite its popularity and broad bipartisan support, right-to-repair provisions that would have given service members the ability to fix their own equipment in the field were stripped from the compromise version of the 2026 defense policy bill after industry pushback. 

The House’s Data-as-a-Service Solutions for Weapon System Contracts provision, which would have required DoD to negotiate access to technical data and necessary software before signing a contract, was removed from the final text of the annual legislation released over the weekend. The Senate’s provision requiring contractors to provide the military with detailed repair and maintenance instructions was dropped from the bill as well.

Instead, the legislation requires the Defense Department to develop a digital system that would track and manage all technical data and verify whether contractors and subcontractors comply with contract requirements related to technical data. The compromise version of the bill also requires DoD to review all existing contracts to determine what contractors were required to deliver and what data DoD can access. 

“It’s almost completely meaningless relative to ‘right to repair.’ It only addresses cases in which the contractors have failed to deliver or make available the data that is already in their contracts. It doesn’t address in any way whether the contracts themselves are sufficient to support service members’ right to repair,” Greg Williams, director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight, told Federal News Network.

While this is not the first time Congress has stripped right-to-repair language from the National Defense Authorization Act, the 2026 defense policy bill is likely the most high-profile attempt to block the reform — this year, the proposal had gained momentum and wide support from the Trump administration, the House and Senate, and senior DoD leaders.  

But defense lobbyists pushed back against the reform during the conference process. The National Defense Industrial Association, for example, said these bipartisan efforts would “hamper innovation and DoD’s access to cutting-edge technologies by deterring companies from contracting with the DoD.” 

Eric Fanning, former secretary of the Army and CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, said the right to repair provisions would “cripple the very innovation on which our warfighters rely.”

“Given that we had support in the House and the Senate on a bipartisan basis, and we had the support of the Trump administration and the secretary of Defense, I don’t know how to interpret this, other than to say that industry prevailed in their influence over Congress, and the NDAA now reflects the interests of the business community instead of the American taxpayers and service members,” Williams said.

For years, the military has struggled with contract-imposed restrictions on repairing and maintaining its own equipment and weapons, forcing it to rely on original manufacturers to conduct necessary fixes in the field, which is costly and time-consuming. 

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, for example, has become an outspoken critic of large defense companies — he previously said that defense contractors have “conned the American people and the Pentagon and the Army.” Driscoll recently highlighted a Lockheed Martin Black Hawk helicopter part that costs the Army $47,000 to replace because the manufacturer refuses to fix a control knob the Army could make for $15.

 Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mt.) said in a statement they “support the Pentagon using the full extent of its existing authorities to insist on right to repair protections when it purchases equipment from contractors.” 

Williams said while this is the chance for the Pentagon to exercise its existing authorities, without legislation that enforces consistency, it’s very unlikely that contracting officers will be able to effectively implement right to repair across thousands of contracts. 

“I don’t want to let the Pentagon off the hook either. I believe that if Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made this a high priority, he could ensure that we acquire adequate data. But he would have to make sure that every contract officer on every contract was way more diligent than they have been up to this point,” Williams said.

For now, the right-to-repair effort is likely stalled until next year. Lawmakers will vote on the NDAA one more time before it is sent to President Donald Trump for his signature.  

“We will keep fighting for a common-sense, bipartisan law to address this unnecessary problem,” Warren and Sheehy said.

The post Congress quietly strips right-to-repair provisions from 2026 NDAA despite wide support first appeared on Federal News Network.

The 8(a) small business contracting program is in a fight for its life.

From Capitol Hill to the courts to now the executive branch, the 47-year-old program is facing questions about its legitimacy and challenges to its true impact like never before.

Over the course of the last two weeks, the 8(a) program and firms taking part in the socioeconomic program have seen:

The Center for Individual Rights, a conservative public interest organization, and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty file a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana in mid-November seeking to “force the repeal of an unconstitutional racial preference regulation that has been incorporated into many federal contract, loan, investment, and grant programs. “

The Small Business Administration send a letter to more than 4,300 8(a) firms seeking 13 different data, ranging from a list of the company’s employees to bank statements for the last three fiscal years to a copy of all 8(a) contracts, as part of its ongoing audit of the program.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), the chairwoman of the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, wrote a letter to 22 agencies yesterday calling on them to “to halt new 8(a) sole-source contract awards.” Ernst’s request comes after she introduced legislation that would suspend all 8(a) sole source contracts until SBA completes its audit.

Each of these on their own would be enough to put the 8(a) program under pressure, but taken altogether, experts say the program is under such an attack that it could mean the end of what many believe has been a successful contracting program.

“The administration has been targeting this program and wanting to shut it down since taking office,” said one former SBA executive, who requested anonymity in order to talk about the program. “They presume it is handouts and a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) program.”

Ernst has been leading the charge over the past several months to address what she believes is wide-spread fraud in the 8(a) program. Her concerns come from two specific recent cases. In June, a U.S. Agency for International Development contracting officer and three owners of companies pled guilty for their roles in a decade-long bribery scheme involving at least 14 prime contracts under the 8(a) program worth over $550 million.

Then in October, a video from the O’Keefe Media Group, a right-wing activist organization, showing that an official from ATI Government Solutions admitted to defrauding the SBA’s 8(a) program.

Ernst highlighted these two cases and what she called the Biden administration’s “indifference toward the 8(a) program integrity” as the reasons for the need for agencies to review and Asuspend sole source contracts.

“The SBA’s 8(a) program is the largest set-aside program at the agency, which dished out $40-plus billion in contract awards during fiscal 2024 alone. Yet decades of Government Accountability Office (GAO), SBA’s Office of Inspector General, and Justice Department probes expose the same rot,” Ernst wrote to agencies. “Sloppy oversight and weak enforcement measures allow 8(a) participants to act as pass-through entities, snagging unlimited no-bid deals with little transparency. Every loophole guts public trust and rigs the system against honest competitors.”

Ernst is asking agencies to respond by Dec. 22 as to whether they plan to suspend 8(a) sole source contracting. She also wants agencies to review all sole source and set-aside contracts they awarded since 2020.

On Wednesday, Ernst will take a deeper look at the 8(a) program, holding a hearing  with witnesses ranging from the Project on Government Oversight to the Government Accountability Office to Open The Books, a non-profit government watchdog organization, to a reporter from the Daily Wire.

Ernst’s letter and hearing comes on the heels of the SBA requiring all 8(a) firms to submit 13 data sets as part of its ongoing audit of the program.

By Jan. 5, 8(a) vendors must send to SBA:

• General ledger for the last three full fiscal years (CSV files only)
• Trial balance as of the last day for each of the last three fiscal year-ends (CSV files only)
• IRS Form 4506 covering the last three full fiscal years (PDF files only)
• Bank statements as of the last day for each of the last three fiscal year-ends (PDF files only)
• Bank reconciliations as of the last day for each of the last three fiscal year-ends (PDF files only)
• Payroll register and reconciliation (including any distributions to any owner) monthly for the last three full fiscal years (PDF files only)
• List of all employees, broken out by contracts those employees are servicing, for the last three full fiscal years (PDF files only)
• List of all vendors (as well as all joint ventures) for the last three full fiscal years (PDF files only)
• Copy of all 8(a) contracts on which the firm is currently working for the last three full fiscal years (PDF files only)
• Subcontracting agreements related to the contracts in item 9 (for the last three full fiscal years) (PDF files only)
• Financial statements which include, at a minimum, the year-end balance sheet, YTD P&L, cash flow statement, and the statement of equity for each of the last three fiscal years (CSV files only)
• Financial statement reconciliation to the year-end Trial Balance for the last three fiscal years (CSV files only), and
• For each of the last three full fiscal years, a sub-ledger schedule tying to the year-end trial balance accounts for: all accounts receivable accounts, all accounts payable accounts and all P&L accounts (CSV files only)

“To the extent that your firm submitted any particular information in routine annual reporting, that particular information need not be submitted again,” wrote Wendell Davis, SBA’s general counsel, in the letter, which Federal News Network obtained. “Failure to respond to the SBA’s inquiry may result in a determination that your firm is not eligible for continued participation in the 8(a) Program and may result in further investigative or additional remedial action.”

Emails to SBA seeking more details on the audit were not returned.

Contracting experts say the fact the letter came from the General Counsel’s Office and not just the Office of Government Contracting and Business Development means that this is now a legal and compliance investigation, not an administrative refresh.

“By shifting the audit to SBA legal, SBA can look far beyond whether firms filed the right paperwork to get 8(a) certified. They can analyze contract execution, where most fraud occurs, and trace how money, control, and influence move between partners — including patterns involving [program managers, contracting officers, business opportunity specialists] and others,” wrote Robb Wong, a former associate administrator in SBA’s Office of Government Contracting and Business Development, on LinkedIn. “In short, they’re looking for tails that wag the dog: money flowing indirectly to parties who couldn’t receive it directly under the rules. If this sounds foreign to you, you’re probably fine. If it hits close to home — slow down, re-examine your documents, and make sure the story they tell still supports 8(a) ownership, control, and eligibility.”

Wong, who  is now managing executive at Deep Water Point & Associates, offered some guidance for companies:

• File on time. Miss the deadline and you’re out.
• Ensure your documents support ownership, control and continued eligibility.
• Verify your teaming agreements comply with limitations on subcontracting and actual workshare.
• Confirm your performance documentation matches what you proposed — and what you certified.
• Be thorough. The burden of compliance is on you; SBA can draw negative inferences from gaps in information and evidence.

The third piece of this probe is the lawsuit filed by the Center for Individual Rights in November. CIR isn’t new to challenging the 8(a) program, bringing the Ultima lawsuit to court in 2023 and eventually winning the case, which led to SBA requiring companies to provide a narrative as to why they are socially and/or economically disadvantaged.

CIR says this challenge is different because than the Ultima case.

“In Ultima, the SBA was harming our client, so we just addressed the SBA’s use of the rule. Now, the Center for Individual Rights, together with our colleagues at Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, represent clients who were harmed by other agencies applying the SBA’s rule. Because the SBA’s rule is woven throughout other race-based government programs, we are now challenging the rule itself,” said Mike Petrino, the organization’s lead attorney. “This case challenges the regulation issued by the Small Business Administration — because the SBA, not Congress, created the legal presumption that every individual who is a member of certain races and ethnicities is ‘socially disadvantaged.’ This case is also different [from previous challenges] because it addresses unlawful discrimination by more than one agency.  The SBA’s rule is at the heart of numerous race-based programs administered by different agencies. Instead of challenging each-and-every instance where an agency, applying the SBA’s rule, discriminates against someone, this lawsuit targets the source of the unlawful discrimination by addressing the rule itself.”

Petrino said CIR and the Wisconsin Institute don’t want to end the 8(a) program, but just remove any racial preferences that they say SBA inserted into the law.

“Section 8(a) as passed by Congress would still be in effect, and the SBA could try again to create a program that comports with the Constitution and Section 8(a),” he said.

The post SBA audit, lawsuit puts 8(a) program deeper in cross-hairs first appeared on Federal News Network.

The government’s dispersed systems for managing human resources for the federal workforce are on the verge of a major transformation, according to the Office of Personnel Management.

By January, OPM said it expects to award a federal contract that will eventually result in a cohesive HR system for all agencies to use. But in the short term, creating a governmentwide HR entity will mean working to consolidate the more than 100 systems agencies currently use for workforce management.

It’s not the first time OPM has attempted to merge the disparate HR IT systems across government. But Dianna Saxman, OPM’s associate director of HR Solutions, said the effort currently underway is “different.”

“We’re really leveraging the collective wisdom of the entire federal community,” Saxman said Tuesday during a public meeting of the Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council. “We’ve already brought experts from many different agencies into a steering committee that is helping us to set the strategy up front.”

Along with employing a steering committee at OPM, Saxman said many federal human capital leaders have started collaborating internally with other agency executives, like chief information officers and chief data officers, to plan the integration of the upcoming HR system.

“What we’re seeing in these agency engagements is a lot of enthusiasm and support for the overall effort,” Saxman said.

Once implemented, the new system will be the source for agencies, HR offices and federal employees to manage personnel records, payroll systems and performance data, while also having the capability to provide federal workforce analytics.

After OPM awards the HR IT contract in January, the agency will spend the next several months implementing the core HR system by the end of April. From there, OPM plans to work one-on-one with agencies to configure the platform to meet their unique needs.

All told, OPM’s end goal is to have the HR IT system fully adopted governmentwide by September 2027.

The value of the anticipated contract award in January is not yet clear. But it comes after OPM released a request for proposals (RFP) in October, detailing a specific plan of action to modernize and centralize the more than 100 current federal HR systems.

In May, OPM had previously released its initial RFP through the General Services Administration schedules program, which emphasized the need for interoperability in governmentwide human capital systems. The May RFP came just weeks after OPM initially announced a sole source award to Workday in early May, but then quickly canceled that award.

The expected timing for awarding the HR IT contract also “aligns beautifully” with the Trump administration’s newly released President’s Management Agenda, Saxman said. She highlighted three key goals in the new agenda that dovetail with the HR IT consolidation effort.

For one, a centralized HR IT platform would underly the administration’s goal of fostering a “merit-based” federal workforce, Saxman explained.

“As we look to foster greater merit, we’re able to do that by having an end-to-end HR IT capability that allows us really to see what’s happening with the federal workforce, with skillsets we have available [and] how people are being promoted and evaluated,” Saxman said. “This gives us that visibility.”

The Trump administration’s goal of making “buying power” more efficient calls for consolidated contract opportunities that are “smarter, faster, cheaper,” according to another component of the new PMA.

“A lot of the contracting processes in government are really decentralized, and there’s a lot of repetitive action there,” Saxman said. “This effort seeks to centralize the purchasing of a private sector core human capital capability at OPM — we would have one entity buying it on behalf of the entire federal government.”

On top of that, Saxman noted that OPM’s effort aligns with the goal of leveraging technology, as the PMA seeks to “consolidate and standardize systems,” while also incorporating “digital-first” government services and eliminating data siloes.

“We’re going to be consolidating over 100 systems into one, reducing the number of system integrations that are required and the complexity of managing all of these systems,” she said.

Saxman outlined what she said will eventually be an array of benefits for agencies, HR offices, federal employees and external stakeholders, once legacy HR systems are decommissioned and the new system is fully implemented.

“There are many manual data requests that come out from OPM, many different stakeholder groups,” she said. “But we’ll have an opportunity where the data will be readily available in dashboards, so we can have a real view of what’s happening with the federal workforce at any point in time.”

OPM also hopes to ease the workload for HR employees by eventually moving all personnel records to single files, even when employees transition between multiple agencies throughout their career. Currently many federal employees have personnel records that span across multiple different HR systems.

“Our goal here is to have one system that they can manage their employee record,” Saxman said.

For signs of success, Saxman said OPM will be measuring and looking for improvements in employee experience, cost savings and better data overall.

“A lot of our HR professionals are working with outdated, disparate technologies that are not serving them well, that are not serving our employees well,” Saxman said. “As a federal community, this is something that we have wanted to do for a long time.”

The post OPM’s plan to unify disparate HR systems taking shape first appeared on Federal News Network.

Interview transcript:

 

Terry Gerton OASIS+ enters Phase II with five new service domains and draft scorecards expected December 16, ahead of a January 12 solicitation date. The expansion could reshape competition and compliance for federal contractors, especially small businesses. Stephanie Kostro, president of the Professional Services Council, is here to share her insights. We’re going to focus a little bit more than we usually do today on things that are happening in the small business world. So let’s start with December 4th. GSA announced the launch of the OASIS+ Phase II expansion. First of all, tell us what’s noteworthy there.

Stephanie Kostro This is long anticipated, Terry, and I will say thank you very much for focusing on small business today. It has been an area where a lot of our contracting friends have looked for guidance and information from the executive branch and from the legislative branch, to be honest, about where small business policy is going. And so thanks so much for raising this important issue area. OASIS+ has been in the works for so many years now, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of vendors very interested in this expansion. And what I’ll tell you very quickly is Oasis+ had been eight domains or eight categories of services. It is now 13. And the five that they’ve added in this new tranche are very interesting. It is things like business administration, financial services, human capital, marketing and public relations, and social services. So this is a dramatic increase in the scope of Oasis+. It expands from eight domains, service domains to 13. And we have a lot of interest here in the contracting community about how they can support the executive branch through these new domains.

Terry Gerton Those new domains seem tailor made for small businesses. What are you hearing about how small business might be able to participate now?

Stephanie Kostro Again, it’s very exciting. It looks like the solicitations will be open here in January, mid-January of 2026. We’ll have to see what the actual words on the paper, if I can be that mundane about it, say about small business participation. But this is exactly the kinds of domains that small businesses excel. The marketing and PR, the human capital, financial services, etc., where they can partner with large companies in either in a joint venture or as a mentor-protege. So we’ll have to see what GSA decides will be the allowable partnering arrangements going forward. I would also note that this is a reflection of an executive order that the president signed out early on, and it was back in March, it was called Executive Order 14240, Eliminating Waste and Saving Taxpayer Dollars by Consolidating Procurement. So really this is the migration of some of the domains from other vehicles over to Oasis+, which really makes Oasis+ a must-have vehicle for contractors.

Terry Gerton What should small-business owners and leaders be looking at between now and January to help them prepare?

Stephanie Kostro They really should check out Oasis+ Phase I and see what came out in the solicitation documents for that. They should monitor the GSA websites very, very closely to see if any blog posts there will give them insight into what will be allowable. You know, a lot of times PSC has voiced concern about final requests for proposals not hewing very closely to the draft that they had released as an RFP. And so sometimes you have to scramble as a small business to figure out who can you partner with? Because the final RFP does not really look like the draft RFP. I’m hoping that GSA decides to move forward with a final RFP that looks very similar to a draft RFP so that our small businesses can plan accordingly. It has been a rough year in 2025 for small businesses. Some of them have seen contract terminations or de-scoping or rescoping. Some of them have been asked to offer up discounts that really cut into the muscle, not just the fat, if there was fat for a small business. But we need the innovation that comes from small businesses. And I think this is a great opportunity for them to provide an offer that is really beneficial to the government and to the small business community.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Stephanie Kostro. She’s the president of the Professional Services Council. Stephanie, speaking of small businesses, there was a bill that passed the House last week, the SBA IT Modernization Reporting Act. What are you watching here?

Stephanie Kostro Oh, now we can really dork out, Terry, on all of this stuff. So I as I mentioned in our previous conversation here, we’re talking about HR and financial services, or rather human capital and financial services, etc. The IT Modernization Reporting Act is a really interesting piece of legislation that looks at recommendations offered by the Government Accountability Office back in 2024 about reporting on agencies’ IT systems. And so they really want the Small Business Administration to help address risks tied to the Small Business certification platform that can help reduce the project risk, so that it can actually improve project risk management, establish a risk mitigation plan and resolve cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Now, Terry, as you know, we are seeing a host of cybersecurity requirements come out from the Department of War and their Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program, but also elsewhere. And it hits small businesses hard. You know, some of this is basic cyber hygiene, but some of it is really, really burdensome on small businesses that don’t have the resources and can’t spread resources out between, say, a commercial side and a government side. And so as we look at the implementation of this legislation, it’ll be interesting to see how small businesses can reduce the risk and reduce their vulnerabilities across and what SBA can do to support them in that.

Terry Gerton This is obviously the beginning of its legislative process. It still has to pass the Senate. It still has to get signed. But are there things that you would want small businesses to be looking at now with the expectation that this bill will eventually be passed?

Stephanie Kostro That is a great question, Terry, and it actually leads me to something that your listeners probably just learned about recently, which was the House and Senate released their National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2026, where that act, and it’s in its final stages, this is the conference bill, right? And so now it just has to pass House and Senate and get signed by the President. I say “just,” but it takes a few days for that to happen. That bill was released on December 7. And I would note that in it actually establishes more firmly Project Spectrum, which is a Department of War effort to help small businesses with their cybersecurity. I encourage small businesses to look at Project Spectrum if they are a Department of War contractor. But even if you’re not, take a look at what those offerings are. See what you can get the government to support you and to help pay for in terms of cyber hygiene and cybersecurity. I’m encouraging the companies to do that even in advance of any of this SBA IT Mod act. As we move forward, it’s going to be a huge cost for companies and anything the executive branch puts in place to mitigate those costs or help minimize those costs is going to be a good thing.

Terry Gerton Stephanie, you’ve already alluded to a couple of big changes that small businesses are facing as a result of so many of the new policies and programs coming out of the Trump administration this year; 2026 is going to look very different for small businesses than 2025. Give us a feel for the change in the business market, the government contracting market for small business, and what do you think the year ahead brings?

Stephanie Kostro Small businesses have, again, seen a lot of changes here in 2025, not least of which has been calling into question the socioeconomic set-asides that we have in place. There’s the 8(a) program, which is for disadvantaged businesses, but there are also women-owned small business, veteran-owned small business, service-disabled veteran-owned small business, hub zone, etc. So we have ratcheted back, as a nation, back to the statutory requirements. The Biden administration and others had grown the set-aside amounts and thresholds for these kinds of small businesses. Those are back down to the statutory requirements. In addition, we have heard about this audit of the 8(a) program, which was launched months ago, but more recently, contractors have been receiving documentation requests from their customers to help justify 8(a) program awards, etc. So they’ve seen that as well. As we go into 2026, I imagine we will see more of this audit-like activity to make sure the companies that certify themselves as small are in fact small and qualify for these set-asides. I would also say under the revolutionary FAR overhaul, which is this FAR rewrite we’ve been undergoing for a few months, all of the class deviations, part by part of the FAR, are out there. The agency supplements are being changed. We are awaiting formal rulemaking for some of these things. But it does appear that the “rule of two” upon which a lot of small businesses base their business strategies is also changing. I’ll just succinctly summarize it by saying right now, if the revolutionary FAR overhaul goes through the rulemaking process and nothing else is changed, that “rule of two” applies only to the contract level, not to the task-order level, which is a significant change. It also allows the contracting officers to have a little bit of flexibility in terms of what can be deemed for a set aside, and then also not necessarily requiring companies to recertify their status. And so a lot of these changes are going come to be executed in 2026, and it is again going to be a year a little of some upheaval for small businesses.

Terry Gerton So if you’re a small business owner or leader and you’re thinking about your strategy or your business plan for 2026, what are the key things that should be at the top of your consideration list?

Stephanie Kostro The first one is obviously to monitor everything that the government, the executive branch is saying in terms of what the requirements are for a small business. I would also make sure that if you have an opportunity to get on a vehicle yourself as an organic small business or as a joint venture, go ahead and get on, because I’m not sure what on-ramping opportunities are going to look like in the future for some of these larger vehicles. And also make sure that you have all of your documentation in a row, all your ducks in a row for documentation. And that includes not just, “hey, you’ve got an 8(a) contract award and you may be getting required to submit some documentation,” but to certify yourself to make sure that the platforms are in place where you can certify yourself quickly with the SBA and making sure that you have all of that documentation in line. This is also an interesting dynamic for any new entrants to the market who have not experienced what existing small businesses experienced here in 2025. They may look at this and go, the juice is not worth the squeeze. It’s too hard to do work with the federal government. I think it is a business decision that if folks want to come and talk to those of us at the Professional Services Council and we can give them a little bit of a taste of what the dynamics are, we’re happy to talk to them about, is this a good market for you to explore? I think it is. Particularly, for example, we talked about at the top of this discussion, the Oasis+ expansion. The new five domains are for services, are great for small businesses. How do you compete for that? Come talk to us and we can help you out.

The post GSA’s next-generation contract vehicle is expanding and small businesses need to pay attention first appeared on Federal News Network.

For years, the conversation about artificial intelligence in government focused on model development — how to train algorithms, deploy pilots and integrate machine learning into existing workflows. That foundation remains critical. But today, federal leaders are asking a different question: What does an AI-native government look like?

The answer may lie in AI agents — autonomous, adaptive systems capable of perceiving, reasoning, planning and acting across data environments. Unlike traditional AI models that provide insights or automate discrete tasks, AI agents can take initiative, interact with other systems, and continuously adapt to mission needs. These systems depend on seamless access to 100% of mission-relevant data, not just data in a single environment. Without that foundation — data that’s unified, governed and accessible across hybrid infrastructures — AI agents remain constrained tools rather than autonomous actors. In short, they represent a move from static tools to dynamic, mission-aligned infrastructure.

For federal agencies, this shift opens up important opportunities. AI agents can help agencies improve citizen services, accelerate national security decision-making, and scale mission delivery in ways that were once unthinkable. But realizing that potential requires more than adopting new technology. It requires building the digital foundations (data architectures, governance frameworks and accountability measures) that can support AI agents as core elements of federal digital infrastructure.

A new phase for AI: Why agents are different

Federal agencies have decades of experience digitizing processes: electronic health records at the Department of Veterans Affairs, online tax filing for the IRS, and digital services portals for immigration at Customs and Immigration Services and the Department of Homeland Security. AI has expanded those capabilities by enabling advanced analytics and automation. But most government AI systems today remain tethered to narrowly defined functions. They can classify, predict or recommend, but they do not act independently or coordinate across environments.

AI agents are different. Think of them as mission teammates rather than tools. For example, in federal cybersecurity, instead of just flagging anomalies, an AI agent could prioritize threats, initiate containment steps and escalate issues to human analysts — all while learning from each encounter. In citizen-facing services, an AI agent could guide individuals through complex benefit applications, tailoring support based on real-time context rather than static forms.

This evolution mirrors the shift from mainframes to networks, or from static websites to dynamic cloud platforms. AI agents are not simply another application to bolt onto existing workflows. They are emerging as a new layer of digital infrastructure that will underpin how federal agencies design, deliver and scale mission services.

Building the foundations: Beyond silos

To function effectively, AI agents need access to diverse, distributed data. They must be able to perceive information across silos, reason with context and act with relevance. That makes data architecture the critical enabler.

Most federal data remains fragmented across on-premises systems, multi-cloud environments and interagency ecosystems. AI agents cannot thrive in those silos. They require hybrid data architectures that integrate separate sources, ensure interoperability and provide governed access at scale.

By investing in architectures that unify structured and unstructured data, agencies can empower AI agents to operate seamlessly across environments. For instance, in disaster response, an AI agent might simultaneously draw on Federal Emergency Management Agency data, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather models, Defense Department logistics systems, and public health records from the Department of Health and Human Services — coordinating actions across federal entities and with state partners. Without hybrid architectures, that level of coordination is impossible.

The second layer: Governance, trust, transparency

Equally as important is governance. Federal leaders cannot separate innovation from responsibility. AI agents must operate within clear rules of transparency, accountability and security. Without trust, their adoption will stall.

Governance begins with ensuring that the data fueling AI agents is accurate, secure and responsibly managed. It extends to monitoring agent behaviors, documenting decision processes, and ensuring alignment with legal and ethical standards. Federal agencies must ask: How do we verify what an AI agent did? How do we ensure its reasoning is explainable? How do we maintain human oversight in critical decisions?

By embedding governance frameworks from day one, agencies can avoid the pitfalls of opaque automation. Just as cybersecurity became a foundational consideration in every IT system, governance must become a foundational consideration for every AI agent deployed in the federal mission space.

For the federal government, trust is also non-negotiable. Citizens are owed AI agents that act fairly, protect their data, and align with democratic values. Transparency through being able to see how decisions are made and how outcomes are validated will be essential to earning that trust.

Agencies can lead by adopting principles of responsible AI: documenting model provenance, publishing accountability standards, and ensuring diverse oversight. Trust is not a constraint; it is a mission enabler. Without it, the promise of AI agents will remain unrealized.

Preparing today for tomorrow

The question for federal leaders is not whether AI agents will shape the future of government service; it is how quickly agencies will prepare for that future. The steps are clear:

• Invest in data infrastructure: Build hybrid, interoperable architectures that give AI agents access to 100% of mission-relevant federal data, wherever it resides.
• Embed governance from the start: Establish frameworks for transparency, accountability and oversight before AI agents scale.
• Cultivate trust: Communicate openly with citizens, publish standards and ensure that AI systems reflect public values.
• Experiment with mission scenarios: Pilot AI agents in targeted federal use cases (cyber defense and benefits delivery, for instance) while developing playbooks for broader adoption.

We are at a turning point. Just as networks and cloud computing became indispensable layers of federal IT, AI agents are poised to become the next foundational layer of digital infrastructure. They will not replace federal employees, but they will augment them — expanding capacity, accelerating insight, and enabling agencies to meet rising expectations for speed, precision and personalization.

The future of the federal government will not be built on static systems. It will be built on adaptive, agentic infrastructure that can perceive, reason, plan and act alongside humans. Agencies that prepare today — by investing in hybrid architectures, embedding governance and cultivating trust — will be best positioned to lead tomorrow.

In the coming years, AI agents will not just support federal missions. They will help define them. The question is whether agencies will see them as one more tool, or as what they truly are: the next layer of digital infrastructure for public service.

Dario Perez is vice president of federal civilian and SLED at Cloudera.

The post AI agents: The next layer of federal digital infrastructure first appeared on Federal News Network.

Interview transcript:

Terry Gerton You have been in public service and in safety net programs for over 33 years. As we come out of this shutdown, it really exposed both the importance and the fragility of these programs. Give me a sense from your experience what you saw, and maybe, what did we learn about these programs in the last 43 days?

Clarence Carter Well, I hope what we learned is the essential nature of the these programs. The first couple of weeks of the shutdown were pretty lukewarm. But as it got to the place where we saw the potential challenges to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, things got serious. And quite frankly, I never thought it would get to the moment where we were not in a position to provide the most basic of the safety net services to the 42 million consumers that are desperately in need of those. I am glad that we were able to ultimately clean that up. But having that, if you would, anvil over the head of individuals that desperately need that most basic support I think showcased the importance of the safety net and of some of the programs we administer.

Terry Gerton You’ve just written a book called “Our Net Has Holes in It.” When you look at these programs, I know you’ve worked in housing assistance, now you’re supporting all kinds of human assistance programs there in Tennessee, what are the most enduring lessons that you want to bring forward about making sure these critical programs work for people?

Clarence Carter Terry, the most I would think enduring message that I have is that we clearly in this nation, we have a desire to help our neighbors that are living in the margins. We spend annually, and this is federal government alone, $1.49 trillion annually in service to vulnerable Americans. My argument, and “Our Net” lays out this argument, that what we have to do is shift our intention, shift our design, and shift our execution. It’s not about us not caring enough. It’s not about us not spending enough. It is about flawed intention, design and execution.

Terry Gerton As you think about those three principles, let’s take design first because that’s the structure that we’re working with.

Clarence Carter That’s right.

Terry Gerton What are the core features that need to be reformed?

Clarence Carter  The first core feature is that all of the 114 means-tested programs are, they were designed singularly to address one aspect of the human condition. And they weren’t designed to work in conjunction with anything else. But many of the consumers that the system serves has multiple challenges that need to be remediated. And the system wasn’t designed to take that kind of comprehensive approach. And so one of the first things that has to happen is the system has got to be reformed so that all of the programs can be enabled to operate as tools in a toolkit, but that can be connected to allow us to take a more comprehensive approach to the issue of human well being, not simply the administration of programs.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Clarence Carter. He’s currently the commissioner of human services for the State of Tennessee. Clarence, that’s a huge design issue. I want to talk also about execution because human services programs and assistance are state-federal partnerships. You’ve worked on both sides of that. What are the execution issues there and how can we overcome them?

Clarence Carter Okay, and so Terry, you lay that out perfectly. And the challenge is the states and localities administer the programs and utilize the funding with some state add-on. And the states administer the programs. And so what ends up at the state level is you end up executing the flaws of design of the federal system. And so the state doesn’t have an opportunity to do it differently. They have to administer the rules of the programs as they have been given. And so my life’s work has been a journey to call out the dysfunction of design that begins at the federal level and then works its way all the way down the food chain until it gets to the consumer, who then is quite frankly in a place where they are being served by a system with great intention, but really poor execution and design.

Terry Gerton Alright, so the third portion that you mentioned was intention and you’ve worked across party lines, you’ve worked with leaders of both parties across the partisan lines. One would think that vulnerable assistance would be an important bipartisan issue, but it gets tangled up in politics. How do we separate the value of the programs and the intent of the programs from the politics around the programs?

Clarence Carter Terry, I think that we have to do that by shifting our focus from the politics to the programs. And I feel like, and we lay this out in “Our Net,” it begins with intention. Our intention has to be that we meet our neighbor in their vulnerability with the intention to grow them beyond the vulnerability, not simply provide benefits, goods and services as long as they meet the criterion to be served. And I believe that if we begin with that intention, we can check our partisan weapons at the door and focus on, okay, if it’s our intention to grow people beyond, then how do we architect the system to achieve that objective? We have to begin with this shared vision of understanding that we will always have, every society known to humankind has, that we will always have neighbors amongst us that suffer from some manner of economic, social, developmental vulnerability. And so we have to design an efficient, effective system that understands vulnerability with the intention to grow our citizenry beyond that vulnerability, and success has to be in a system like that. Not that I delivered a benefit, good or service, but that the consumer got healthier for it. We measure right now, we measure outputs. I can tell you, as a administrator of the SNAP program, what I get held accountable for is, did I deliver the SNAP benefit to who was entitled to receive it? Did I deliver it in the right amount? And did I deliver it in the right time frame? Nobody asks me, did that family get to a place where we grew their capacity so that they don’t need it? I get judged on efficiency measures. I think that we need to add to efficiency measures, we need to add human wellbeing metrics, and that that needs to be the true determinant of success.

Terry Gerton Clarence, you’ve laid out a powerful vision there. What would be the top one or two or even three policy priorities that you would put on the table for Congress to help strengthen the safety net and achieve that vision of wellbeing?

Clarence Carter The first would be connectivity. And what I mean by that is that the 114 means-tested programs of the safety net need to be able to be connected so that they become tools in a toolkit to achieve the objective of growing people beyond. So connectivity is important. But before we get to connectivity, we have to begin with a shared vision. And that shared vision, our argument in “Net” is that that shared vision has to be helping individuals achieve the highest degree of freedom possible. And so if we set out with that intention to help individuals achieve the highest degree of freedom possible, and we connect the tools so that those tools can work together, then we can have a system and we measure what counts. We measure human capacity. Those things coming together can create a profoundly different system of public supports.

The post Can our safety net programs survive stress and deliver more than short-term relief? first appeared on Federal News Network.

• The nation’s largest federal employee union is urging Congress to vote against the House rule for the 2026 Defense policy bill. The American Federation of Government Employees said negotiators removed a bipartisan House provision that would have restored collective bargaining rights for hundreds of thousands of Defense Department civilian employees. The union said removing that language means the legislation fails to protect basic rights of workers who maintain ships and aircraft and support service members. AFGE is calling on lawmakers to reject the procedural rule and restore the worker protections before the National Defense Authorization Act moves forward.
  (AFGE urges Congress to reject NDAA rule after union protections are removed - AFGE)
• The top Democrat on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee is asking the Postal Service to ensure service members get holiday packages on time. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said hundreds of holiday care packages sent to troops overseas were returned to sender. About 100 of those care packages sent through the nonprofit Boxes to Boots are still missing in transit. Blumenthal is asking Postmaster General David Steiner to provide guidance to military families and organizations who are encountering similar obstacles and ensure timely delivery of these care packages.
  (Senator calls for Postal Service to guarantee holiday packages for service members - Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.))
• The Trump administration is trying to reduce the federal government’s real estate footprint. A congressional committee will take a closer look at those efforts on Thursday. A subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will hear from the acting head of the General Services Administration’s Public Buildings Service. It will also hear from the Government Accountability Office and the Public Buildings Reform Board which has helped GSA identify underutilized federal office space.
  (Subcommittee to hold hearing on consolidating federal real estate - House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee)
• The Technology Modernization Fund will expire in three days. The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program remains on the shelf. Congress chose not to include reauthorization language for either program in the compromise version of the 2026 defense authorization bill released yesterday. House lawmakers pushed to get the TMF extension provision added during conference, but were unsuccessful. Meanwhile lawmakers are still at odds over the future of the SBIR program, which saw its authorization expire on September 30. Both chambers of Congress are expected to vote on the NDAA later this week.
  (NDAA forgoes extending TMF, reauthorizing SBIR - House Armed Services Committee )
• The President's Management Agenda is finally out. Eric Ueland, Office of Management and Budget deputy director for management, laid out eight initiatives across three broad categories that are the administration's key management reform objectives. The priorities include consolidating and standardizing systems, hiring based on skills and merit and finding cost-effective locations for agency buildings. A senior OMB official told Federal News Network that the PMA takes the president’s promises, as well as the administration’s work already underway, and creates a framework to “institutionalize” those end goals.
  (Trump’s government management vision centers on elimination, accountability - Federal News Network)
• A powerful senator is calling for agencies to stop all sole source 8(a) contracts. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), the chairwoman of the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee, told 22 agencies to pause any further 8(a) sole source awards and review all current contracts for potential fraud. In a letter sent to agency leaders yesterday, Ernst said 8(a) sole source contracts are a fraud magnet. Ernst wants to know by December 22 from each agency whether they will suspend the program's sole source contracts. The letter comes two weeks after Ernst introduced legislation that would suspend all 8(a) sole source contracts until SBA completes its ongoing audit.
  (Ernst presses agencies to pause 8(a) sole source awards - Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa))
• A compromise version of the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act includes several key civilian personnel reforms that could change how the Defense Department hires and manages its civilian workforce. The draft text includes a provision that would allow the Defense Department to promote employees without having to satisfy minimum time-in-grade requirements before being eligible for promotion. The bill would also allow the Defense Department to use skill-based assessments to determine whether applicants are qualified for open positions. In addition, the legislation expands which positions DoD can hire using special cyber authorities, as well as significantly increases the maximum pay DoD can offer for cyber talent.
  (Compromise NDAA would let DoD promote civilians faster, increase cyber pay - Federal News Network)

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The post Expert Edition: How to tackle complex federal cyber challenges first appeared on Federal News Network.

In the Army, a new acquisition bureaucracy is starting to take shape. It means new names for some longstanding Army organizations. But at its core, the reorganization is about letting Army officials manage the acquisition system as portfolios of capabilities with less of a focus on individual programs.

That idea’s been championed by outside reform advocates for years, including when the “Section 809 panel” on acquisition reform released its final report in 2019. The Congressional panel on Planning, Programming, Budgeting and Execution Reform echoed the call as part of its recommendations. So did both the House and Senate in their respective versions of the latest Defense authorization bill. And last month, it got the explicit endorsement of the secretary of Defense.

“We will leverage taxpayer dollars in a more accountable, flexible and deliberate manner to maximize their value across capability portfolios,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during an address at the National War College. “We will shift funding within portfolios’ authorized boundaries swiftly and decisively to maximize mission outcomes. If one program is faltering, funding will be shifted within the portfolio to accelerate or scale a higher priority. If a new or more promising technology emerges, we will seize the opportunity and not be held back by artificial constraints and funding boundaries that take months or even years to overcome.”

In that address, Hegseth credited the military services with laying the groundwork for some of the reforms he wants to make department-wide. And the Army started its implementation work last month, naming six new “portfolio acquisition executives.” Each of those PAEs will oversee different “capability areas” with programs managed by what had, up until now, been called program executive offices (PEOs), and will now be called capability program executives (CPEs).

But there’s more in those portfolios than just the former PEOs, said Brig. Gen. Christine A. Beeler, the capability program executive for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (CPE STRI).

“The PAE is going to be able to wrangle all of those enablers, and we are just one enabler to the PAE,” said Beeler during a staff town hall late last month. “There are also folks up at big Army that are going to help us on the programming side … and you’ve got requirement folks. That can get combined and come to us in a single requirements community of practice, so that things that get decided at the PAE level will be easier to understand and make trades on.”

Last week, another of those former PEOs announced the details of its own internal reorganization. Leaders of the newly-dubbed Capability Program Executive for Command, Control, Communications, and Network say most of their changes will be at the program manager level — both to align with the Army’s broader acquisition “transformation” agenda, and to orient the office more explicitly around the Army’s plans for Next Generation Command and Control.

The changes there include four new program offices — one each for applications, data and AI, infrastructure and transport, plus changing roles for several other offices. CPE C3N officials expect to detail the changes during the next Army technical exchange meeting at Aberdeen Proving Ground next month.

Beeler said there will be program office changes within her organization as well, but the reorganization will take until the summer of 2027 to fully unfold. Along with that, she said, will be a reduction in senior officer positions.

“The key changes were a mandated reduction of command select list billets by 30% at both the O-6 and the O-5 level,” she said. “So that means, over time, we’re going to transition from three CSL billets to two CSL billets at the O-6 level, and from eight CSL billets eventually to five CSL billets at the O-5 level.”

And at the even more senior levels, Beeler says the end state of the Army’s acquisition reorganization is that the new PAEs will be two-star generals or the civilian SES equivalents. And the CPEs will be one-star positions.

But those details — like many others in the reorganization — are still subject to change.

“This is a very time and event-driven process,” she said. “We’re not jumping in tomorrow, both feet and everything’s changed. That wouldn’t make any sense, and we would lose the discovery part of how these pathfinder adjustments to the acquisition process are actually going to work. For the time being, we will be the Capability Program Executive STRI. We believe in the future we’re going to change the logo and we’ve got some ideas out there for how we’re going make other changes over time, but at the end of the day, this is what we’re going to do. We simulate the fight, we replicate the threat, and we’re going to make sure that the Army can win across all domains.”

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