A group of lawmakers found the Pentagon has diverted at least $2 billion intended for barracks repairs, school upgrades for children of service members and training programs to support the southern border mission.

In a report released last week, Democratic members of Congress say the Pentagon redirected funding from a range of military construction and infrastructure projects to support immigration operations, including elementary schools at Fort Knox, a medical and dental facility at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island in Washington, Marine Corps barracks in Japan and a jet-training facility in Mississippi. 

Funds originally allocated for the now-cancelled jet-training facility at Columbus Air Force Base and overseas barracks were reprogrammed to construct roughly 20 miles of border wall. In total, about $1 billion was shifted from barracks repairs to support border operations. 

The report, based on the Pentagon’s reprogramming requests to Congress and open source information, is the first comprehensive account to date of the known costs associated with using the military for immigration operations.             

In addition to the cost breakdown associated with providing military support to immigration enforcement, the lawmakers warned that military readiness “will suffer as a direct result of diverting” DoD resources for immigration enforcement, arguing that the role is “not consistent with DoD’s mission and that service members have neither signed up nor been trained for.”

For instance, the 10th Mountain Division had recently been trained and certified to conduct large-scale combat operations in a multi-domain operational environment, but hundreds of its soldiers were deployed to the southern border in early 2025, where the division assumed control of the mission. The Army later rotated in the 101st Airborne Division — the service’s only air assault division — to replace the 10th Mountain Division at the border. 

“Instead of standing ready for true national security missions, deployment-ready units are being sent to Texas and other states to control the U.S. southern border in support of [U.S. Customs and Border Protection],” the lawmakers said.

Some of those costs are also intangible, the lawmakers argue. During peak fire season, for example, the California National Guard’s firefighting unit was understaffed due to nearly half its members being deployed to Los Angeles to “protect [ICE] in the execution of their duties,” according to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

The lawmakers say it is unclear whether the Pentagon has assessed the impacts of shifting these funds and resources on the department’s readiness. The Pentagon did not respond to a request for comment on whether such an analysis has ever been conducted.

The cost of military involvement in immigration enforcement

President Donald Trump has pushed to expand the military’s role in immigration enforcement since taking office, including by deploying National Guard and active-duty troops to the southern border and U.S. cities; transferring federal land along the border to DoD control; conducting military deportation flights; permitting the detention of noncitizens on military installations within the U.S. and overseas; and allowing military lawyers to serve as immigration judges.

The lawmakers found that approximately $1.3 billion — the largest share of the diverted funds — was used to pay for the deployment of troops to the southern border. 

“Many of these troops at the border may be doing little more than ‘standing around.’ Yet their presence has not been cheap: earlier this year, DoD’s own data showed it was spending an estimated $5.3 million per day on its border operations,” the lawmakers said. 

More than $420 million was redirected to support immigration detention operations on U.S. military installations and at overseas bases, including Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti.

The Trump administration began detaining noncitizens at Fort Bliss, an Army post in Texas, in August. By September, the department had spent more than $363 million to support the Fort Bliss Montana Avenue facility in El Paso and a related Customs and Border Protection processing center. The facility initially opened with about 1,000 beds, with plans to expand its capacity to 5,000 by 2027 at an estimated cost of up to $1.2 billion. ICE’s detention oversight unit found the unfinished facility was already in violation of at least 60 federal immigrant detention standards, according to the report.

The lawmakers also found that the department diverted at least $40.3 million to pay for military flights used to deport noncitizens, which are a lot more costly to operate than civilian aircraft. While it costs $28,500 an hour to fly a C-17, which was used to conduct deportation flights, a flight contracted by the Department of Homeland Security costs $8,500 an hour. 

By the end of September, the Trump administration had conducted at least 88 deportation stops along 63 flight routes using military aircraft.

“Before this administration, military aircraft appear to have never been used for deportations,” the lawmakers said. 

In addition, the report found that domestic deployments of National Guard and active-duty troops to Los Angeles; Portland, Oregon; Memphis, Tennessee; and Chicago cost at least $258 million.

“As the number of mobilizations grows, so will the financial costs of paying, transporting, housing, feeding, and equipping troops — as well as the mounting personal costs to the individuals who serve in their state National Guards, and to their families. These servicemembers are being pulled from their homes, families, and civilian jobs for indefinite periods of time to support legally questionable political stunts,” the lawmakers said.

Hegseth also approved a plan to detail up to 600 military lawyers to the Justice Department as temporary immigration judges earlier this year — an effort aimed at easing a backlog of roughly 3.5 million cases that has grown in recent years.

While the Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion advising the Justice Department to reimburse the Defense Department for military lawyers serving as temporary immigration judges, it is unclear whether DoJ has begun the process.

The lawmakers said the information obtained for this report “confirms that the vast majority of these DoD funds have not been reimbursed to date — even though DHS recently received an unprecedented influx of $170 billion, giving ICE a budget bigger than any other law enforcement agency in the United States and bigger than many countries’ militaries.”

“Allowing DHS to continue to pick DoD’s pockets puts our military readiness at risk,” the lawmakers said.

While the fiscal 2026 defense policy bill fully funds deployments of National Guard and active-duty troops to support the southwest border mission, the Defense Department is forced to divert funding from other military accounts in the meantime. The defense policy bill also fully funds the establishment and enforcement of National Defense Areas along the southwest border and authorizes the department to provide additional support to CBP through the use of private contractors.

The post Pentagon diverted over $2 billion from barracks, schools to fund border mission first appeared on Federal News Network.

© AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

In the few months since the General Services Administration set up contracts to make it easy and cheap to access artificial intelligence tools from major commercial providers, 43 agencies have signed up.

“We can get an enterprise license for $1 or less for the frontier models of the large language models (LLMs), which is incredible, and that gives agencies this amazing opportunity to test out a new technology, either through doing the acquisition themselves, or using USAi and having a chance to try out something that previously might have been cost prohibitive, or if they had tested it out, they were going to be facing only a really very limited pool of users,” said Laura Stanton, the deputy commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service at GSA, recently at ACT-IAC’s Executive Leadership Conference. “This gives a chance for exploration and testing in a way that we’ve never seen before.”

As more agencies jump on board the AI train, they will have to add new clauses and acquisition requirements to their contracts starting March 11.

Under a new memo from the Office of Management and Budget, agencies have 90 days to update acquisition polices to ensure the LLMs they purchase are truth seeking and ideologically neutral.

“LLMs shall be truthful in responding to user prompts seeking factual information or analysis. LLMs shall prioritize historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity, and shall acknowledge uncertainty where reliable information is incomplete or contradictory,” OMB Director Russ Vought wrote in the Dec. 11 memo. “LLMs shall be neutral, nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas. Developers shall not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments into an LLM’s outputs unless those judgments are prompted by or otherwise readily accessible to the end user.”

The memo fulfills one of the requirements from the July executive order, Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government.

The memo details requirements for new contracts for AI as well existing ones. Additionally, agencies should apply these principles to commercial and internally developed LLMs.

OMB says as part of the contracting effort for LLMs, agencies must obtain information from the vendor to determine that the technology meets these unbiased AI principles.

“The amount and type of information available will vary depending on the vendor’s role within the software supply chain and its relationship with the LLM developer itself, with more information generally being available from sources closer to the original LLM developer,” OMB wrote. “When an agency transacts with such a third-party LLM provider, the availability of product information and potential for direct product interventions will depend on the willingness of the actual AI developer to collaborate through the third-party distributor. Agencies should consider these nuances of LLM procurement in determining how to apply the requirements of this memorandum to ensure that an LLM offered for procurement complies with the unbiased AI principles.”

Memo builds on AI guidance

At the same time, OMB emphasized that agencies shouldn’t require vendors to disclose sensitive technical data, such as model weights.

“Documentation requests should seek enough information for an agency to assess a vendor’s risk management actions at the model, system, and/or application level, as appropriate, to establish compliance…” OMB wrote.

OMB has issued previous memos to agencies for how to ensure they are buying AI tools that meet their needs. In April, the administration laid out several deadlines for agencies, including updating processes and contractual terms to address the use of government data and clearly delineate the respective ownership and IP rights of the government and the contractor.

In October 2024,  OMB tried to address current and emerging questions to ensure agencies are applying the right rigor to the AI tools.

Jose Arrieta, founder and CEO of Imagineeer and a former federal acquisition and technology executive, said the memo is focused on making AI operational, and that is really important at this point and time.

“I read this as guidance that enables AI. It is not about banning models at all. It’s about requiring truth, provenance, and accountability at the contract level,” said Arrieta, who served as chief information officer at the Department of Health and Human Services and as director of the GSA IT Schedule during his more than 15 years in government. “I think it enables agencies to treat AI like critical infrastructure very quickly. It creates a structure that rewards disciplined AI platforms, particularly because it is grounded in enforceable governance. As with anything, the devil is in the details of implementation, and there are certainly ways this could be implemented that introduces risk. But overall, I found it refreshing. In many ways, it feels like an early Christmas gift for procurement and technology professionals who are trying to responsibly deploy AI in federal agencies, as well as for AI firms that are actually building with guardrails.”

He said the memo lays out for the acquisition community the rules of the road for how to evaluate, govern and award contracts that are based on metrics.

For example, OMB says for the minimum threshold for transparency, agencies must request four different data sets, including the acceptable use policy and information about the model, system and/or data as it relates to the LLM.

Workforce training still to come

Arrieta added that the guardrails outlined in the memo also give acquisition and technology professionals much needed top cover to ask vendors harder questions about transparency and model provenance.

“OMB didn’t issue a rule with this memo. They used acquisition policy, and historically acquisition authority has been used to drive a wide range of policy initiatives across government,” he said. “What’s different here is that this isn’t just a policy statement. It’s a very operational set of feedback for agencies. The open question is how agencies will react to it. Will they behave differently even though it’s not a rule? Does this guidance intersect with existing regulations in unexpected ways? Does it give agencies enough certainty to execute, or will it prompt more questions back to OMB?”

Some of those unanswered questions, Arrieta said, center on how best to equip the acquisition workforce to use the memo as practical guidance when buying AI tools.

“This is going to require new acquisition templates,” he said. “Someone is going to have to develop a vendor due diligence playbook. How do vendors respond to bias? In the age of AI, what triggers a termination for convenience versus a termination for cause? The answers may seem obvious at first, but they get much more complex when you work through real AI scenarios. If there’s no explicit audit policy, for example, how do you audit AI models and provide meaningful feedback? These are hard questions agencies are going to have to confront. The memo leaves space for that thinking, which is good, but someone needs to lead by creating playbooks and taking a center-of-excellence approach. Agencies are going to need that kind of support.”

The post OMB sets procurement guardrails for buying AI tools first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Federal News Network

The Office of Personnel Management is seeking to bring a surge of technical expertise into the government’s ranks, as part of a new federal hiring initiative called the “U.S. Tech Force.”

The effort from OPM looks to hire 1,000 new federal employees for the initial class of the Tech Force. OPM plans to run recruitment as a “pooled hiring” effort, where agencies will be able to bring in employees for two-year stints to work on various modernization projects.

Agencies involved in OPM’s new program include the departments of State, Treasury, Defense, Interior, Agriculture and Labor, as well as the IRS, OPM and the General Services Administration, among many others.

“With almost no exception, we have basically every agency willing to participate in this program, and we’ve got grand ambition,” OPM Director Scott Kupor told reporters Monday. “Our hope is that as this works, we can grow that cohort, and also that we can use this as a model for how we can do more centralized, efficient hiring across government.”

Kupor said the Tech Force aims to help fill two workforce gaps simultaneously: technology expertise and early-career talent. The program will focus in particular on federal hiring for those with skills in AI, software engineering and data science.

Individuals who are recruited into government through the Tech Force will mostly be brought in as GS-13 or GS-14 level employees, according to Kupor, with salaries ranging from about $130,000 to $195,000. OPM has opened applications for the program and will assess candidates on a rolling basis. The agency is targeting 1,000 Tech Force hires by the end of March.

The new initiative comes after the loss of over 300,000 employees from government this year, due to the Trump administration’s efforts to overhaul the federal workforce. Tech Force hiring may also coincide with annual staffing plans, Kupor said, which all agencies are required to submit to OPM and the Office of Management and Budget this month.

It’s not the first time the government has sought to recruit technologists and early-career talent through a tailored federal hiring initiative. The Obama administration, for instance, launched the U.S. Digital Service, now called the “U.S. DOGE Service.” The effort similarly sought to bring in tech talent temporarily to work on specific agency modernization projects.

In 2021, the Biden administration also created the U.S. Digital Corps, an effort designed to recruit entry-level talent with software engineering, data science, design, cybersecurity and other critical IT skills into public service careers.

Programs including the Presidential Innovation Fellowship and 18F have additionally looked to recruit federal workforce expertise in specific sectors, and integrate digital services into agencies’ workflows. In March, however, GSA shuttered the 18F program.

Kupor said OPM’s new Tech Force effort is different than prior initiatives, since employees will be hired directly into agencies, and because it’s happening on a larger scale.

“A lot of what USDS does today is they get brought in on a project-by-project basis,” Kupor said. “But these will be full-time employees assigned to agencies, working on what the leadership believes are the most important priorities.”

Ushering more early-career employees into government has also been a common goal across several administrations. Currently, about 7% of the federal workforce is under age 30.

In an attempt to target early-career talent, recruitment for the Tech Force will include partnerships with universities, non-profits, professional associations and private sector companies.

“We’re less worried about where they’re coming from. We’re more concerned about, do they have the appropriate merit to be able to do the job, and are they excited about the prospect of working on these programs for the next two years?” Kupor said.

OPM is partnering with more than 20 private-sector tech companies to help recruit and manage Tech Force. The initial cohort will include hires from outside government, as well as early-career managers at private sector companies who will be pulled into public service temporarily for the program.

Kupor also expressed a desire to add flexibility for employees who may be interested in switching between the private sector and the federal sector over the course of their careers.

“I think both organizations benefit tremendously from that,” he said. “What we really want to do is get the benefit of really smart people working on some of the world’s most complex and difficult problems, and then also demonstrate to them that, if they so choose, they can take those skills and work in the private sector.”

OPM will lead federal hiring for the Tech Force as a pooled recruitment effort, by assessing applicants and creating a roster of qualified candidates. From there, agencies across government will be able to select and hire from a shared list of candidates that OPM has vetted. OPM’s goal is to repeat the pooled hiring effort once per year, for each new cohort of early-career technologists.

The strategies of pooling hiring and sharing certificates have been growing across agencies for the last several years. Many of the Biden administration’s federal hiring efforts under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, for instance, used pooled hiring.

“We’ve got to crawl before we run on this stuff, but I think is going to be, hopefully, a model for us to … increase the efficiency of hiring, both for the applicants and for the agency,” Kupor said. “You’ll see us do a bunch of stuff here at OPM, over the course of next several years, on figuring out, how do we attract people who are early career, to think about government?”

The post OPM seeks early-career talent for ‘Tech Force’ federal hiring initiative first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Getty Images

Federal teams spent the last year testing AI applications, measuring return on investment, and separating hype from reality. They identified where AI delivers results and where it falls short, gaining the experience and resources needed to drive real transformation.  

In the year ahead, we will see this shift from piloting applications to implementing AI solutions that fundamentally reshape how the government serves its citizens. Federal agencies will enter 2026 knowing what works and ready to act, positioning AI to deliver its most significant impact yet on government priorities. 

Three transformations will define this transition by breaking through decades-old modernization barriers, moving from reactive to proactive cybersecurity, and democratizing software development beyond traditional IT departments. Each build on the others to create compounding returns across government operations. 

AI-driven federal modernization at scale  

Modernization has long been a challenging government priority. With AI, agencies can finally achieve it at scale. 

Outdated IT systems and code cost the government hundreds of millions of dollars annually to maintain and operate. Still, the processes required to retire them, including code refactoring, are time-consuming and traditionally have been unable to scale. This is where AI can make long-held modernization goals attainable. 

AI-powered refactoring tools translate between programming generations, automatically converting decades-old COBOL and Fortran systems into modern, maintainable code while preserving critical business logic. These tools also identify security vulnerabilities, ensure compliance, and generate documentation throughout the modernization process. 

Legacy system updates will transform from multi-year projects to months-long sprints. Agencies that adopt AI-driven modernization will complete system updates 10 times faster than traditional approaches, freeing up resources for innovation rather than maintenance. 

Shifting from reactive to proactive security

While we can’t predict the next major cybersecurity incident, we do have the tools to change our approach to security. In the coming year, AI-powered defense systems will become one of the most effective ways to stay ahead of breaches. 

Continuous threat monitoring and automated remediation using AI will predict and prevent attacks before they occur, rather than responding after the damage is done. 

Sophisticated adversaries now have access to AI tools that can exploit vulnerabilities faster than human security teams can patch them. Without AI-powered proactive measures, agencies will struggle to keep pace with well-resourced bad actors. 

Agencies that successfully implement proactive AI security models will achieve measurably lower breach rates and faster threat response times, establishing a new benchmark for government cybersecurity excellence. 

Making everyone a developer

AI is democratizing software development across government, finally realizing the decade-old prediction that ‘everyone can be a developer.’  

This transformation extends software creation across all government roles. Mission specialists, policy experts and administrators can now build applications and automate workflows without traditional programming skills. This exponentially increases government development capacity as subject matter experts translate their domain knowledge into functional software solutions.  

 Human ingenuity drives creative problem-solving while AI handles technical implementation. This shift is accelerating rapidly, with 89% of executives expecting agentic AI to become the industry standard for software development within three years. 

AI-powered development platforms automatically maintain security and compliance standards, enabling agencies to build development capacity across all departments rather than just within IT. 

The compounding impact of AI transformation

Agencies that prioritize human-AI collaboration across modernization, cybersecurity and development will build high-performing teams that combine technical excellence with mission expertise. The combination creates capabilities that neither humans nor AI could achieve independently. 

Success requires viewing these three transformations as interconnected investments that advance together. Each capability strengthens and accelerates the others to deliver secure software faster while maintaining the highest standards of governance. 

The agencies that move first on all three fronts will set the standard for the rest of the government. More importantly, they’ll prove that transformation timelines can be measured in months, not years. 

Bob Stevens is vice president of Americas and public sector at GitLab. 

The post The year AI moves from pilots to practice: Three predictions for government in 2026 first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Getty Images/Lemon_tm

Interview transcript

Terry Gerton Hottest topic I think is the NDAA on the Hill. It passed the House. What’s going on next?

Mitchell Miller Well, it’s going to the Senate and there are a few little tripwires in the overall, more than 3,000-page bill, but I think it is on its way to getting passed. This is something, as you well know, that is always passed every year for more than six decades, which is pretty rare in this sharply divided Congress. So there’s, you know, a lot of support for it broadly. I think obviously the 3.8 percent pay increase for military personnel. A lot of talk among the leadership related to acquisition and the reforms that are taking place related to that, that a lot of these weapon systems, basically there’s a concern among lawmakers that the Pentagon can’t obviously, you know — the metaphor is you can’t turn around an aircraft carrier very quickly. And similarly with acquisition, you can’t just adjust something super fast, but they have put in a lot of reforms that the lawmakers at least believe will allow the Pentagon to quickly react and create new weapon systems on a faster glide path than they currently are now.

Terry Gerton As people have been making their way through the 3,000 pages in the conference bill, there’s been some surprise about provisions that folks thought were home runs and got dropped as the bill went through conference.

Mitchell Miller Right, and one of them is the right to repair provision, which of course would allow people to basically, within units of the defense department, to fix their own equipment, which sounds pretty basic, but it would provide a lot of additional resources to do that. And everybody thought that was going to go through pretty easily, but for whatever reason it was pulled, and I think that has sent some shock waves through the contracting world as to why that is going to happen. I think that as we move into the next year we will probably see that looked at again. Certainly some things have been pulled or changed over the course of this whole NDAA process. And one of the side notes that came up this past week was the fact that they would basically allow for the Army to continue its helicopter flights near Reagan National Airport as they used to. They of course have been limited since that accident, terrible accident in January that killed 67 people in a midair collision involving an Army helicopter and a commercial jet liner. And there was a lot of furor last week among lawmakers related to — including this language that essentially says that the Army gets a buy on putting in the new communications systems that would allow for helicopters to be quickly identified, more quickly identified than on radar and that they could essentially potentially go back to the status quo. So I talked to Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) and he says he’s going to reach out to the Pentagon to try to see if they can get that changed. But I don’t think these issues will jeopardize the overall NDAA. I think we can see that it will be passed this week.

Terry Gerton Well that will be progress at least to have one of those bills through, even with some of these outstanding issues. The other funding issue that’s certainly top of mind is whether or not we’re going to get a repeal on the ACA extensions. It failed in the Senate. Where does it go next?

Mitchell Miller Well, this is really interesting because, you know, during the whole debate over the government shutdown, they said, oh, we have plenty of time. We can deal with this later. It doesn’t happen until the end of the year, the subsidies going away from the ACA. Well, here we are. And we have not really gotten through any kind of progress. The Senate, as you mentioned, voted down two proposals, dueling proposals. One, the Democrats wanted to extend the ACA subsidies for three years. The Republicans came up with an alternative plan related to health savings accounts, which they say would provide more control for Americans over their own health care costs. And variations of those two themes are now being sorted out in the House. A lot of House moderates on the Republican side, frankly, are concerned that it’s going to look bad politically heading into the midterms if they don’t do anything related to this issue. So you have a really unique situation where this is such a big issue that you have people trying to essentially do an end run with discharge petitions in the House for the Republican leadership. Various proposals extending the ACA possibly two years with caps on how much people can make, various requirements related to cutting out fraud. So it’s going to be fascinating to see how all this unravels this week in the House. My personal thinking is that they are not going to get anything actually passed this week. And then we are going to, of course, head into the new year where you’re going to have more than 20 million people under those ACA provisions who will be seeing those soaring costs related to their health care premiums. So it’s pretty fascinating that Congress just was not able to do this, at least to this point.

Terry Gerton Mitchell Miller is Capitol Hill correspondent for WTOP. Mitchell, around that ACA issue, there was so much bad blood and mistrust throughout the shutdown. How is that impacting what’s got to happen next, which is appropriations bills?

Mitchell Miller You know, it’s really left a bad feeling on both sides, I think. And unfortunately that has impacted this whole appropriations process. You know, all year long we heard nothing but talk about, we want to get back to regular order. We’re going to pass all of these 12 bills. Well, here we are in December, and we only have three bills that have been passed in terms of those overall appropriations. So the thinking is, among several lawmakers including Senator Tim Kane (D-Va.), who I spoke to recently, is that maybe they can chip away, maybe they can find some more and put them in an omnibus. They were talking about possibly doing an omnibus before they take their break, but that is simply not going to happen. So now they’re looking at maybe January to potentially get another minibus, if you will, maybe get four or five of these major legislative packages through that way. But then we’re staring down the barrels once again of Jan. 30, the shutdown showdown. And I’ve talked to some lawmakers about that, and they said, yep, it’s going to be here before we know it. So they’re hoping at least to get some goodwill back in the appropriations process as they chip away, as I said, related to these other measures. On the other side, I will say that the House speaker, Mike Johnson (R-La.), was very happy to make the point recently that they will not have the overall huge omnibus that, as you know, they often have right before Christmas or right during the holidays where they have to get everything done. This has been something that the Republicans have been really pushing back on. They don’t want one of those big deals and they’re not going to get it because everything got pushed into 2026.

Terry Gerton Well, it sounds like some lawmakers might be getting coal in their Christmas stockings.

Mitchell Miller I think there will be a lot of coal in Christmas stockings this year.

Terry Gerton Mitchell, one of the other topics that comes to mind when you mention regular order is congressional oversight hearings. And there was a move towards oversight, especially regarding the boat strikes over the last week or so. What are you seeing there?

Mitchell Miller Well, I think it’s an interesting tale of two cities, if you will, or tale of two chambers. On the House side, you’ve got a lot of review that has been taking place within the House Armed Services Committee, but the chairman, Mike Rogers, essentially said he is satisfied with what he has seen related to the video of that so called ‘two tap’ strike. And then on the other side, on the Senate side, Roger Wicker (R-MS), the Republican chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee says, Well, I wanna see a little bit more. I wanna get all the lawmakers on the committee to actually see the whole video. So it’s interesting to see that little mini divide within the Republican Party. And then of course you have Democrats who are really calling for a lot more oversight, saying they have to look into this more, and of course that was exacerbated even more by the seizure of the tanker related to Venezuela. So there is a move, I think, among lawmakers to reassert some of the powers of the legislative branch, but we’ll have to see how much that moves forward.

Terry Gerton Well the judicial branch got involved last week as well. There was a Supreme Court hearing on Monday about whether or not Trump’s firing of an FTC commissioner was constitutional. And that has a lot of impact potentially for independent agencies. Any response there?

Mitchell Miller Yeah, there’s a lot of concern about it because it seems like, at least, particularly on the Democratic side, they feel that all of these independent panels are just slowly being taken away by various executive orders, and in this case in the Supreme Court order — decision. And there is a feeling that if this is allowed to continue, there really won’t be any more independent panels, that it will go back essentially to the spoil system that used to take place many years ago and they tried to wipe away all of this so that the politics didn’t get involved with all these panels and commissions and committees. And that’s why there is so much at stake to jump to the midterm elections, because right now there really isn’t going to be much oversight related to this on the Republican side. They feel like the president has the power, he is going to do what he wants. But if the House flips and goes to the Democrats, then I think you’re going to see a lot more oversight on issues just like this one, on issues like the one you spoke of related to the boat strikes. So that could really have a profound impact on what happens with Congress moving forward.

Terry Gerton Well, it doesn’t sound like we’ll get much of a break over the holiday season. There’s much to watch here as we go forward.

Mitchell Miller Lots of busy things happening here.

The post Defense, health care, oversight and spending; these four fronts are exposing deep divides on Capitol Hill first appeared on Federal News Network.

© The Associated Press

Federal appeals court judges are weighing what limits, if any, exist for President Donald Trump to classify which agencies are essential to national security, while rolling back collective bargaining rights in the process.

Trump signed an executive order in March ending collective bargaining rights with federal labor unions at a wide swath of agencies, on the grounds that those agencies primarily serve a national security mission. He followed that initial executive order with a second order in August, exempting more agencies from collective bargaining.

Under the 1978 Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute, national security agencies are exempt from collective bargaining.

District courts temporarily blocked the Trump administration from enforcing its collective bargaining rollback. But the appeals court in May allowed agencies to proceed with enforcement.

A majority of the appeals court determined unions didn’t have the legal right to sue because the Trump administration said it wouldn’t end any collective bargaining agreements while the case is being litigated.

But several agencies have eliminated collective bargaining agreements with their unions after the appeals court’s ruling.

In the latest case, the Department of Homeland Security announced last Friday that it would impose a new “labor framework” in January 2026 that would rescind a collective bargaining agreement between the Transportation Security Administration and the American Federation of Government Employees.

Josh Koppel, a Justice Department attorney representing the Trump administration, said the district court “clearly erred,” when it determined President Donald Trump exceeded his authority in rolling back federal workforce collective bargaining rights.

During oral arguments on Monday before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Koppel said national security exemptions under the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute are “a determination for the president to make.”

“Whether an executive agency performs national security work is really a question that the president is best situated to determine — with the president’s understanding of the national security threats, with the president’s understanding of how agencies work together, how they work independently to address those threats, and it’s not something that the courts have particular expertise in,” Koppel said.

“The president is the expert. The executive branch is the expert. Congress also, to some extent, in deciding what is necessary,” he added.

Lawmakers, however, are looking to undo the president’s collective bargaining rollback. The House last week passed the Protect America’s Workforce Act, which would restore collective bargaining rights for a majority of federal employees. The entire Democratic Caucus, along with 20 Republicans, voted in favor of the legislation.

Attorneys representing the plaintiff unions argued that the Trump administration has been overly broad with national security exemptions.

Richard Hirn, an attorney representing the American Foreign Service Association, said the rollback of collective bargaining rights for the State Department’s diplomatic workforce contradicts legislation passed by Congress.

“Congress would never have enacted the Foreign Service Labor-Management Relations Statute … if it had any doubts, as a general rule, it would be consistent with national collective bargaining by the Foreign Service officers, would be consistent with national security,” Hirn said.

“Congress knew what the Foreign Service officers were doing,” he added.

Jason Walta, an attorney representing the Federal Education Association, raised concerns that the Trump administration is selectively enforcing its rollback of collective bargaining rights. The executive orders, he added, carve out an exemption for unions that represent federal police officers and firefighters.

“Even those seem to have a fairly crucial national security function — certainly more crucial than the K-12 teachers that I represent,” Walta said.

Among its members, FEA represents teachers at schools run by the Defense Department.

Walta said the administration has been overly broad in applying a national security mission to an entire department, when that designation only applies to a small portion of its programs.

The entire Energy Department falls under executive order, because of its mission to safeguard the nation’s nuclear stockpile. But the subagency within DOE that performs that function is already excluded under a 2008 executive order from President George W. Bush.

“As I understand the government’s argument, the president could exempt the entire federal government, root and branch, and that would be both unreviewable and a proper exercise of the president’s discretion under this provision,” Walta said.

Paras Shah, an attorney representing the National Treasury Employees Union, told the three-judge panel that the executive order “nullifies most of Congress’s comprehensive federal labor relations scheme.”

“He can do it, and the courts can’t do anything about it so long as he invokes the statute’s narrow national security exemption,” he said.

Shah said the executive order rolled back the collective bargaining rights of three-quarters of the federal employees who had them.

“We can’t collectively bargain for them. Their rights are gone,” he said.

Koppel said those statistics “are a little misleading.” Four agencies that fall under the executive order — the departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Justice and Homeland Security — make up about 60-70% of the federal workforce.

“When plaintiffs bandy about these numbers, what they’re really talking about in the main is these really core national security agencies,” Koppel said.

The appeals court judges raised several questions about the scope and limits of the president’s discretion to set these national security exemptions to collective bargaining.

“It is a presidential determination, but the statute provides certain criteria for that determination,” Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, said during oral arguments.

Judge Bradley Garcia, a Biden appointee, said the court “ought not to second-guess” Trump’s determination of which agencies fall under the national security category, but added the “concern would be if the record reveals or suggests that the president didn’t make those determinations.”

“We can try to find out what definition the president applied, and if it is an utterly unreasonable definition, we can, in fact, have to step in and set aside this order,” Garcia said.

The executive order excludes the entire Treasury Department from collective bargaining because it affects the economic strength of the United States.

Judge Douglas Ginsburg, a Reagan administration appointee, questioned whether the Trump administration was taking an overly broad approach to its national security classifications of entire departments.

“Doesn’t the president then have some obligation to specify what really, where really is the primary function, since the consequence is overwhelmingly felt by people who don’t have that?” Ginsburg asked.

Koppel told the judges that because the Treasury secretary serves on the national security council, the department should be considered a national security agency.

“The president could say this agency — Department of Defense, Department of Energy — has as a primary function national security work, and even if there are subdivisions that do not, that is still the primary function of the agency, and the president doesn’t need to go to a lower level,” Koppel said.

However, Koppel also argued that Trump exempted some agency subdivisions from the executive order, demonstrating that the scope of the executive order was not all-encompassing.

“The president clearly was not just looking at one subdivision, saying, ‘They have a primary function of national security. Therefore, I’m going to exclude the entire agency.’ The president did do tailoring,” he said.

Garcia, however, raised some concerns about the scope of that tailoring.

“One reading of that is that the president applied a reading, under which any employee that does anything that promotes the general welfare of the United States is doing national security work,” Garcia said.

“This is my fundamental question: Your arguments about non-reviewability suggest that the president ought to almost always win in a case like this, but the fact that there are statutory terms — national security, primary — that can be judicially reviewed in edge cases means that your threshold argument that courts never review any determination under the statute is at least on a shaky ground,” he added.

Before getting into the merits of the case, Koppel argued that these cases challenging the breadth of the executive orders should be first heard by the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

“FLRA has jurisdiction to consider whether these agencies are properly excluded from the provisions of the FSMLRS,” Koppel said.

The FLRA often adjudicates whether individual employees perform national security work to determine whether or not an employee can be part of a collective bargaining unit.

Shah said the FLRA is not well-suited to judge whether the executive orders exceed the president’s authority.

Last year, in its ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court struck down a precedent that required courts to defer to federal agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous laws.

“It’s never decided whether an executive order like this is valid or not, so it cannot apply its distinctive knowledge to that question — especially in this day and age, post-Loper Bright, where anything it says will not get deference in any event,” Shah said.

The post Appeals court judges scrutinize Trump’s national security basis for collective bargaining rollback first appeared on Federal News Network.

© The Associated Press

Interview transcript

Terry Gerton You are involved with the National Electrical Manufacturers Association. We have heard a lot of talk about underemployment in the trades, the skilled trades, but NEMA makes the point that this kind of security, electrical security is like national security. Walk us through that argument and then we’ll talk about your specific programs.

Peter Ferrell NEMA — well, first let me introduce what NEMA is to your members. The Electrical Manufacturers Association represents about 300 or so companies, both large and small, that produce the equipment and components that go into many of other sectors throughout the economy, which include the energy sector, the defense industrial base, the water sector and others. Sectors that are really kind of, you know, on their own are important, but holistically really kind of make not just the economy function, but also our nation function holistically. And so our members from the grid side and the energy side make the components and the equipment that not only house — or excuse me — that power communities, that power warehouses, that power manufacturing facilities, but they also power defense applications from military bases and also provide the equipment for industrial military sector as well. So, you know, without those components, really there comes a gap for defense purposes and for energy purposes. And those two things of course are very interrelated. And so NEMA helps … Fill that gap with our manufacturers and the components and products they provide.

Terry Gerton What are the specific workforce challenges that you’re facing in the electrical manufacturing field?

Peter Ferrell So NEMA conducted a grid reliability study that was published at the start of this year. And it concluded that there were three main buckets of areas that were really driving energy demand. And this ties into your question, but for some context, with the growth of energy needs for remanufacturing purposes, for electrification purposes, for EV purposes, but also for AI and data center purposes, you know, there is this new demand for all of these products all of a sudden. And so, you know, to make those components, to make all of those things possible requires a very diverse and pretty skill-heavy workforce … And from a manufacturing perspective too, I want to just kind of emphasize it’s not just skills that involve, you know, folks’ hands in a factory — kind of that traditional old school way of looking at a manufacturing. A lot of manufacturing is automated, a lot of it’s connected systems … that require new age skills in terms of, you know, how do we scale manufacturing? And so the workforce needs in this area are very wide and very deep. And so we need folks that know how to wind coil, that can stack cores made out of electrical steel to make distribution transformers, a very kind of classic and traditional hands-on work, but we need folks that understand how to manage and operate industrial control systems, operational technologies, IT specialists, welders and other kind of more skilled, you would say, new age jobs. All of those things come together to form really what the modern manufacturing environment looks like. And so all of those jobs are very specialized and very unique, but really it’s kind of an all-of-the-above when it comes to the skill sets.

Terry Gerton And NEMA’s making the case that transitioning service members and veterans are an optimal target pool for you. Tell us about why you think that and what you’re doing to recruit them.

Peter Ferrell So right now NEMA is looking toward kind of implementing a program called, or pursuing a piece of legislation called, the Veterans Energy Transition Act or the Vets Act. And what it is is that it’s a piece of legislation, a bipartisan piece of legislation, that was introduced earlier this year by Representatives Jen Kiggins (R-Va.) And Chrissy Hoolihan (D-Pa.), both who are veterans themselves. And what it seeks to do is to really kind of bring the supply chain components of the energy supply chain to meet the workforce that veterans provide or that can provide. And so veterans have a lot of skills that they learn throughout their careers, especially lengthy careers, if they’ve been in for many decades. And so it’s a way of trying to, you know, seamlessly as possible, take the skill sets, whatever they may be, whether it’s in management, whether it’s in operations, whether it’s in logistics, just to name a few, and to bring those skills over to the energy sector to help meet the moment and fill the voids in those jobs and those many areas that I mentioned just a second ago. And so … We feel that veterans, of course, kind of play an important role and kind of have a really special element that they bring. They’re mission-driven, they’re team-driven. They look at things holistically ,but also, you know, in how they apply their skill sets. All of these things matter. And so for us, those kind of intangibles that kind of the military provides and, you know, develops and really instills — and not just workforce and values and things of that nature, but also in terms of how military service folks just view work, and kind of the meaning of work and why it’s important. We feel that that’s a very valuable intangible that, you know, when applied to the energy sector and to manufacturing, can really produce tremendous benefits, not just for the companies that hire them, but also for the communities that they’ll end up serving through the course of their work.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Peter Ferrell. He’s senior director of government relations at the National Electrical Manufacturers Association. We’ll come back to the legislation in a minute, but there are already a number of programs out there that have been put in place over the last couple of decades to support transitioning service members. There’s apprenticeships with unions in the industry you’re speaking of, right? Electrical apprenticeships and some of those. There’s Skillbridge, there’s transition programs from the veteran serving organizations and fellowships. Is NEMA engaged with those? And if you are, are they not working for you? Is that why you need legislation that proposes a new solution?

Peter Ferrell One of the organizations that NEMA is involved with is the Veterans Internship Providing Employment Readiness Program or the VIPER program. And … that program is focused mainly on trying to reduce suicides of folks that leave the military and then find themselves without the ability to kind of have any meaning in their life. And so really that program is meant to help marry up companies and folks who can employ veterans with those folks with those skill sets. So it’s a very complimentary kind of program to what the legislation is trying to do. But the legislation is proposed based on the folks at the Niskanen Center, which is a think tank here in Washington, D.C., identified not only that there was a workforce shortage to provide jobs in the energy sector, but that veterans provided really kind of this complimentary tool for it. But as you point out in your question, that there are many existing programs to help veterans prepare for the workforce. There’s the other side of that coin, which is how is it that we’re preparing companies to meet that workforce as they depart the service or, to help veterans who have already departed, or actually involve spouses in a way? So what this does is it’s an attempt to kind of incentivize and help companies meet veterans or transitioning folks where they are. Because it’s one thing to say, you know, a program has helped someone who’s transitioning out, learn how to build their resume, learn how to dress, learn how to conduct an interview, and then go to a job fair. But the question is, well, are the right jobs at that job fair? Where, you know, have there been incentives? Are they able to participate in those opportunities to meet those veterans? And so this bill would help kind of give the resources to especially small and medium-sized manufacturers that just make the right components and make the right pieces of equipment, but they just don’t have the budgets or the resources to really reach out to those members. This is really kind of, in a sense, helping, like I said, the other side of that coin — to help companies meet veterans where they are. And so, in a sense, [this] complements kind of the existing veterans transition programs like Skillbridge, like TAP, like Solid Start that are already on the books.

Terry Gerton In the interim then, while you’re working on the legislation with members of Congress, what do you want employers in this sector to know and what do you want transitioning service members and veterans to know? How can we bring them together while we’re waiting on the legislation?

Peter Ferrell Well again, there’s programs like the VIPER program, and to really kind of bang the drum around these issues and, you know, through great avenues through your program, for example, to let folks know that these things exist. I think … in some ways … there’s a lot of information out there and for a lot of folks it’s confusing. What do you listen to? You know, who are the best resources to rely on. And so really kind of emphasizing to not just employers, not just to manufacturers, but also to folks in this that do distribution and folks that are in the contracting world that, you know, there are a lot of companies that need this, that need this employment, that they’re good jobs, that they are, you know, in many ways, it’s the most American of things. It’s an American job that you’re getting, and they provide very well. And but there’s a need, and sometimes it’s a lack of just not knowing that these needs are out there. And so in the interim, getting the word out around the fact that the industry as a whole, from when a component is made, to how it gets delivered, to how it gets installed, all of those sectors need workers. But also that, you know, there’s 200,000 or so veterans that are leaving the service, retire for one reason or another about every single year. But, you know, according to statistics from VIPER, only about a quarter of those folks have jobs immediately after they leave the service. And so it’s, how do we ensure that folks are aware that there are willing participants that want to utilize the skills that have been developed over many years of service and to build upon those skills to, you know, help veterans or folks know that there is a place for a lot of those folks but making sure that they marry up and that one knows about the other and it’s making sure that that communication is out there.

The post A new bill could turn military experience into energy-sector strength first appeared on Federal News Network.

© The Associated Press

For Jay B., the decision to opt into the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program (DRP) earlier this year was not an easy one.

Like many federal employees, Jay, who requested using an initialism of his name for fear of retaliation, spent decades in public service. But after working remotely for over 10 years, the administration’s return-to-office requirements meant he’d have to commute over 100 miles a day — a change that became a major factor in his decision to take the DRP in April and end his Forest Service career.

Governmentwide, the DRP let eligible employees sign a contract earlier this year, agreeing to quit their jobs in exchange for months of paid leave, until Sept. 30 for most. Over 154,000 employees took the offer, accounting for about half of this year’s federal workforce reductions.

But with 30 years of service, Jay, along with thousands of other DRP-takers, also qualified for the government’s Voluntary Early Retirement Authority (VERA). So in April, he applied for retirement.

“Thirty years of my life has been in the federal government,” he said. “So relying on VERA, along with the deferred resignation program, has been a little bit scary.”

Jay’s decision, however, would lead to months of uncertainty: After submitting his retirement application, HR lost some of his paperwork, causing him to be incorrectly marked as “ineligible” for VERA and delaying his application.

Jay emailed his agency’s HR office over 30 times in search of assistance. But because he lost access to his government computer after taking the DRP, emails from his personal account were marked as spam.

“It just felt like I was out on an island,” he said.

At the Forest Service, HR has processed 2,253 retirements, and 508 applications remain pending, according to an agency spokesperson.

HR staff are “committed to providing prompt, accurate and courteous service,” the spokesperson told Federal News Network.

Jay eventually managed to reach an HR specialist and have the error corrected, but only after weeks of stress and exhaustion. As his application began processing in the months that followed, he said he had limited communication with his assigned HR specialist. But knowing that the specialist was juggling more retirement applications than usual due to the DRP, he maintained that she “did a great job,” given a difficult situation.

“I believe that if I had not been in the DRP, that issue would have been resolved well before my retirement date,” he said. “Things are looking a little better now, but the process has just been really, really difficult.”

As one of tens of thousands of federal employees leaving their jobs, Jay’s experience is all too common. Though the government’s retirement process has been a pain point for years, 2025 is a particularly difficult time to retire, according to many benefits experts and former employees.

Federal News Network interviewed more than a dozen retiring employees at various points in the process, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. The individuals come from agencies including the IRS, Social Security Administration (SSA) and departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Defense, Commerce and Justice.

Amid the application influx, the Office of Personnel Management has also rolled out a major effort this year to modernize the legacy federal retirement system, which has long been paper-based. Many experts see the launch of OPM’s online retirement application (ORA) as a long-awaited improvement, but some remain wary of the timing, as agencies face application volumes not seen in at least a decade.

Thiago Glieger, a federal retirement planning expert at RMG Advisors, described the converging changes as “uncharted waters” for OPM.

“OPM has not really handled this new [ORA] system before, and this many federal employees retiring all at the same time,” he told Federal News Network.

But Kimya Lee, OPM’s deputy associate director for Retirement Services, said having the ORA platform available this year has been crucial for managing both current and upcoming waves of retirement applications.

“A surge like this would be extremely difficult for our legacy processing to work — it just wasn’t built for something like this,” Lee said during a Dec. 9 Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCO) Council meeting. “Despite record high retirement volumes this year, ORA is performing well. This gives us confidence as we prepare for retirement activities in 2025 and into 2026.”

At the Forest Service, a spokesperson said ORA “streamlines submissions, reduces errors and shortens processing times,” and added that the agency’s HR specialists work directly with OPM to resolve processing issues.

Still, the surge of applications meant that Jay, like many others, waited months after his salary payments ended, before he received a payout of his lump-sum annual leave. The financial boost is usually delivered within a few pay periods, and often tides over retiring employees while they wait for their annuities.

“I’m still worried about how all this will go,” he said.

At the time of publication, Jay’s retirement application had still not made it to OPM.

Retirement processing times on the rise

OPM itself is already well above its typical retirement workload due to the DRP, and seeing slower processing times as a result. Later this month, the agency is anticipating a second wave of retirement applications, which will further flood the system.

In November, OPM took in nearly 23,400 retirement applications from agencies to begin processing them. And in October, OPM had a similarly high intake of over 20,300 applications. That’s more than triple OPM’s volumes from October and November 2024, when just about 13,700 applications entered the system.

All told, OPM’s inventory of retirement applications is now over 48,300, nearing four times the 13,000 applications the agency aims to have on hand at once, as it both manages incoming applications and processes existing ones.

In April, OPM estimated the entire process — from the day an employee submits an application, to the day the employee’s annuity is finalized — took between three to five months. OPM’s part of the process alone, at that time, took about a month and a half.

But the rising application volume has slowed the pace of processing. The average time it takes OPM to review an application, calculate benefits and finalize an annuity has continually increased for most of 2025. After peaking in October at an average of 79 days, nearly three months, OPM’s average processing time decreased to 73 days in November.

Processing times for digital retirement applications, however, are notably faster. OPM has been completing those applications in about 38 days, or just over a month. In November, OPM reported that about one-third of incoming applications were digital, and two-thirds were paper-based.

“Digital cases are moving more than twice as fast as paper cases, but we are expecting these numbers to decrease,” Lee said. “We have a surge of applications going on right now, but as the surge decreases, we also expect our digital case [processing times] to decrease substantially.”

At many agencies, the retirement process is relatively similar. Once an employee applies for retirement, the employee’s home agency first prepares the application and sends it to a payroll provider for processing.

After initial agency and payroll processing is complete, the retiring employee receives a lump-sum payout of their unused annual leave.

From there, the application goes to OPM for review and the calculation of a temporary “interim” annuity payment, usually between 60% and 80% of a retiree’s final annuity.

Lastly, retirees begin receiving their final annuity once OPM fully adjudicates their applications — a process that, under usual circumstances, takes several months.

Some outlier cases can take much longer. OPM has said court orders, special annuities, part-time or intermittent federal service, or even working at multiple different agencies, can all slow the process.

One federal employee who spoke to Federal News Network retired in June 2024 and is still waiting for her application to be fully adjudicated, despite receiving interim payments in the meantime.

But with this year’s massive wave of retirements, the retiree feared further delays in the finalization of her application.

“I just don’t want it to get lost in the system,” she said. “I feel like I have no control.”

OPM has received nearly 139,000 retirement applications so far this calendar year, and processed about 103,000. But the workload is expected to grow in the next few months. OPM is anticipating thousands more applications to enter its systems by the end of December.

With applications on track to surpass 140,000 this calendar year, OPM is facing the highest retirement volume in at least the last quarter-century — and possibly ever.

Back to top

DRP has swamped the federal retirement process

The flood of DRP retirees has added substantially to the government’s retirement application volume. Of the 35,000 total applications in ORA with a September retirement date, DRP employees represent about half — more than 17,500 applications.

In other words, September’s digital retirement volume is likely double what it would have been without the DRP.

Of all DRP applications currently pending, close to three-quarters, or about 12,650, have reached OPM, according to numbers OPM provided to Federal News Network.

Other retirement applications, however, are still with either agency HR offices or payroll providers, awaiting initial processing before they can be delivered to OPM.

Applications not yet with OPM may face longer wait times. The National Finance Center, for instance, estimates a current processing time between 60 and 90 days once receiving an application, according to emails viewed by Federal News Network.

Rob Shriver, a former acting director of OPM during the Biden administration, summed up the current experience as one of “incredible frustration” from DRP employees and others trying to separate from government service.

“HR was already understaffed — now lots have left, and they have an ever-increasing workload. It’s all going to create backlogs,” Shriver, currently managing director of the Civil Service Strong initiative at Democracy Forward, told Federal News Network.

As those thousands of retirees wait, the typical end-of-year retirement flood OPM is expecting will add to the workload, and as a result, likely delay the timeline for finalizing annuities.

“There’s no question — we have a very busy time now, and we’ll get another big surge in December,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said in an interview with Federal News Network. “We’re certainly cognizant and doing everything we can to anticipate and deal with the larger volume.”

Back to top

Retiring federal employees “in the dark”

Along with OPM, agency HR offices are also seeing slowdowns in retirement processing work, as they review employees’ applications before forwarding them to OPM. Challenges in HR have led to many retiring employees saying they are confused or frustrated, as they face delays, limited information and, for some, application errors.

Some fear the issues will only get worse as more retiring employees enter the process.

One former employee from HHS, for instance, described having to submit her retirement paperwork three separate times earlier this year. The employee opted to retire after being told she was one of 10,000 that HHS laid off in April as part of a reduction in force (RIF).

Despite being subject to the RIF, the HHS employee said her personnel file was incorrectly marked as a “voluntary retirement.” As she attempted to work with the agency to correct the error, she said she received conflicting and limited information from different parts of HHS, as well as OPM.

“I’ve been yanked around — the left hand didn’t know what the right was doing,” she said.

By now, the HHS employee has managed to receive her interim annuity payment, nearly five months after her official separation date, but is still waiting for her final annuity from OPM.

“I’m pretty happy that worked out, but getting there really required several months of working with my HR specialist,” the employee said. “I think there were some points that she was ready to pull her hair out.”

An HHS spokesperson declined to comment and referred all questions on retirement processing to OPM.

One employee retiring from a career at SSA also experienced delays in the retirement process. On multiple occasions, when he reached out to HR to request updates, he received auto-replies saying SSA’s HR department was “experiencing an unprecedented volume of requests,” according to emails viewed by Federal News Network.

Still, the SSA employee expressed a level of understanding for the delays he experienced.

“All the people in my agency did the best they could,” the employee said. “I’ve been in the dark a good bit, but that’s through no fault of anybody’s.”

In response to questions from Federal News Network on retirement processing, an SSA spokesperson said the agency “has the right level of benefit specialists dedicated to processing employee retirement applications in a timely manner.”

“Processing times vary based on when an employee submits their application, the completeness of the application, and the review process,” the spokesperson added.

For some, the retirement challenges go back to the beginning of the year, prior to the DRP flood. One IRS retiree who retired in January described limited information from HR throughout the process. Though his application eventually made it to OPM and was finalized, he questioned how IRS would handle much higher volumes later in the year from the DRP.

“If you’re months behind from 1,400 people, what are you going to do when 22,000 people go at once?” the retiree said.

The situation at IRS has changed considerably since January. Some currently retiring IRS employees described the agency’s HR office being far behind schedule. Several told Federal News Network they have not received their lump-sum annual leave payouts, nor their interim annuities.

“It’s crazy, and we all feel very, very unsettled,” one said.

“We are in administrative limbo,” another said. “We’re just all at a standstill.”

Over the last few months, retiring IRS employees have received multiple mass emails from the agency’s HR office, asking for patience as the office worked to process an “unusually high” workload. The office has asked employees not to call with questions, as that could lengthen the delays, according to emails viewed by Federal News Network.

“Even with this increased volume, our team remains fully committed to ensuring each retiree receives the support they deserve during this important transition,” one email reads.

An IRS spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Federal News Network.

Governmentwide, the processing delays were also exacerbated by the 43-day government shutdown. OPM’s Retirement Services (RS) division continued to operate throughout the shutdown, since it is funded through a trust fund rather than appropriations. But slowdowns still occurred, as some agencies opted to furlough their HR staff during the funding lapse.

“When HR offices close down, finance offices close down, there’s nobody there to process cases and send them to OPM,” Kenneth Zawodny, a former associate director for RS at OPM, explained. “There’s still work coming in, but that big surge continues to be delayed and delayed and delayed.”

Back to top

For HR, it’s “the biggest test they’ve ever faced”

As retirement applications flooded into agencies this year, many HR offices quickly became swamped. Some HR employees themselves took the opportunity to exit their jobs, leaving larger workloads for those who were left.

Glieger, the retirement planning advisor, described many HR departments as “simply overwhelmed.”

“We have bottlenecking of a lot people that are leaving on DRP, and so [HR] just can’t provide the kind of support that they used to before,” Glieger said.

The challenges for HR have left some retiring employees in the dark. One described his experience in the retirement process as “not normal.”

“Because of their caseload, I was just one in a huge stack of people,” the employee said.

The governmentwide HR workforce had been steadily growing over the last few years. Overall, HR staffing increased by about 8,000 employees between fiscal 2020 to 2025, according to OPM data.

But due to the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce, HR staffing has decreased by about 5% so far in 2025, with agencies losing a cumulative total of about 2,600 employees. The numbers are only accurate through September, however, and do not include HR employees who left their jobs through the DRP.

A former agency chief human capital officer (CHCO), who requested anonymity to be able to speak candidly about the situation, said federal HR has long been “chronically understaffed.”

“My heart is with the HR offices,” the former CHCO said. “They are overworked, underappreciated and this is really the biggest test they’ve ever faced.”

In 2022, OPM named HR as one of the government’s three ongoing mission-critical skills gaps. And during a 2023 CHCO Council forum, one participant noted difficulties in retaining HR specialists, due to a broader skills shortage in the HR profession.

“The agency is effectively competing with the private sector and the whole of the federal government,” the participant said.

The former agency CHCO also expressed concerns about the future of the HR profession in government, especially considering the higher workloads HR employees have faced this year.

“They didn’t create this mess,” the former CHCO said. “They’re the ones that were trying to implement what was never done before, with very little direction, very little support, and a lot of people yelling at them to move faster, without any understanding of what the consequences would be.”

Back to top

A second retirement flood lies in wait

As DRP applications inundate the government’s retirement process, agencies are also bracing for a second retirement wave at the end of this month.

Many federal employees choose to retire each December, since it can maximize their lump-sum annual leave payouts. That leads to a yearly, and expected, surge in retirement applications entering OPM’s system.

The DRP wave and the December wave make up a significant part of this year’s retirements: Employees with retirement dates in September and December, combined, account for 72% of all 2025 retirements, according to OPM.

In anticipation of the annual application surge each year, OPM temporarily adds more staffing to its Retirement Services division. That can mean anywhere between 30 and 50 additional full-time equivalents (FTEs) to assist with processing new applications. The agency also addresses the annual surge by increasing overtime hours for RS employees.

Kupor said those usual accommodations will be “a little bit higher this year because of the DRP-related retirements.”

But at the same time, OPM lost a significant chunk of its own workforce this year. The agency’s staffing has declined by more than one-third — about 1,000 employees — due to the DRP, as well as some RIFs and probationary firings.

In OPM’s RS division, the staffing losses have been relatively smaller. Since January, more than 100 RS employees have left their jobs either due to the DRP or regular retirement — a reduction of about 16% of that division’s workforce, according to OPM.

Currently, the RS division has about 300 employees who process incoming applications. Another 200 or so employees work in the call center to answer retirees’ questions, and several hundred more handle other types of cases, like survivor benefits and post-retirement adjustments.

In November, OPM’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) warned that “operating with a reduced workforce” will be a top management challenge for OPM in the coming year.

“The effective loss of this large number of employees represents a challenge facing OPM in building and sustaining an optimal workforce to support the agency’s mission,” a Nov. 24 OIG report states. “This reduction occurred rapidly and has created immediate gaps in operational capacity.”

Kupor, however, pushed back against some of the concerns from the OIG report.

“More headcount is not the answer to the currently long application processing and call center wait times,” Kupor wrote in Dec. 8 comments addressed to the OIG. “We have a comprehensive approach to address this … Nonetheless, given we are dealing with both paper-based and electronic-based applications and the sheer volume of applications we are receiving, we recognize that processing times are likely to increase in the short term.”

OPM looks to interim annuities. But some are waiting on that too.

In the short term, Kupor said OPM is trying to be “as transparent as possible,” while also asking RS staff to focus on delivering interim annuities to retirees as quickly as possible.

“We recognize that this is a very, very significant number of applications we’re seeing,” Kupor said. “We’re trying to get ahead of that and make sure that we can be responsive.”

The standard approach to retirement processing, in the past, has been for HR to work on a retirement application, and then send it to OPM, usually within 30 to 45 days, according to a former agency CHCO. An employee will also typically see a lump-sum payout of their annual leave within about two pay periods.

“A lot of people would live off that lump sum while their retirement annuity is being calculated by OPM to get an interim payment,” the former CHCO said. “But now they’re at a point where they’re not even able to do that.”

Lee, from OPM’s RS division, said having to wait months to receive an interim annuity payment is “the first thing retirees worry about” once separating from government.

Historically, about 40% to 50% of all retirement applications have been able to receive an interim payment almost immediately.

But more recently, OPM said it has made “system changes” that now allow for about 70% to automatically get an “instant” interim payment.

“This is a major improvement in financial security for retirees,” Lee said.

Some retiring DRP-takers, however, still expressed frustrations as they remain waiting on their interim annuities, as well as their lump-sum annual leave payouts, with little communication and few answers.

“This whole process has been a nightmare — employees are still showing up on rolls as active employees, and a large amount of employees have still not heard from HR,” one employee wrote in an email to Federal News Network. “We are literally stuck in limbo — no payments, no more checks. This is causing financial hardship for so many people.”

In another email viewed by Federal News Network, one HR representative told a retiring federal employee: “The events of this year and the large amount of employees leaving the federal government has put a strain on the normal processes.”

“Things are moving forward,” the email reads. “Just at a slower pace than normal.”

Back to top

A major step toward retirement modernization

The challenges in federal retirement this year come as OPM attempts to make longer-term improvements to the process overall.

After several years in the making, OPM fast-tracked its modernization initiative, the ORA platform. Over the summer, the agency launched ORA and began asking all incoming applications to be entered through the new platform.

For decades prior, OPM’s Lee said the retirement process was highly fragmented, with many agencies and payroll providers operating under different systems. She lauded the ORA as a “unified retirement ecosystem” that removes some manual processing steps that had been creating delays and bottlenecks. She said new automation features have reduced application errors.

“Now by the time the package reaches HR, it is far more accurate — it’s more complete than anything we have ever seen in a paper environment,” Lee said.

Lee added that OPM has continued to ask for feedback from HR specialists using the new platform, which she said has been critical in shaping ORA.

“That collaboration is one of the big reasons ORA is working as well as it is today,” Lee said. “They test new features before they were released. They told us immediately when there were glitches.”

Since its launch over the summer, more than 91,000 retirement applications have been initiated through ORA. Kupor said that generally, the rollout so far is “going very well.”

“It really enhances the front-end of the process,” Kupor said. “Instead of people literally printing out paper documents and sending those documents to our team in Pennsylvania to handle manually, [employees and HR offices] now can just go onto the [ORA] system and they can begin their application electronically.”

John Hatton, staff vice president of policy and programs at the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association (NARFE) said that generally, adding more visibility through ORA and being able to see where a claim is in the process, is a significant improvement.

“We’re not out of the woods with the whole system being improved,” Hatton said. “But I think it’s a step in the right direction.”

Back to top

Some cite issues in new retirement platform

While many experts see OPM’s retirement modernization project as a positive development in the long run, some have expressed reservations about the timing of the rollout — coming at the same time as a major surge in applications.

“Retirement is already a pretty stressful process for people, so then on top of that, not having a clear process or information about a new system only adds to the anxiety,” said Glieger, the federal retirement advisor. “[OPM is] very hopeful that over time this is going to be a good system, but right now there are a lot of moving parts that have to come together for all of that efficiency to really start showing up.”

OPM has rolled out three versions of ORA since the platform first launched in June. OPM’s Lee said a “big re-platforming” in August went “extremely well,” something that she credited to the feedback of HR specialists who pointed out development issues early on.

The initial rollout of ORA over the summer, however, also hit some bumps in the road. The update caused many retiring employees to resubmit their paperwork at the request of their agency HR offices, according to multiple retirees.

The new ORA platform, notably, also contains an auto-population feature, which fills in employees’ service history, annuity estimates, high-3 calculations and more.

Some employees who have used ORA described seeing errors appear on their applications, after being auto-populated. One DOJ employee who resubmitted her application on ORA said an auto-populated error led to further delays. Her experience was “confusing,” she said, adding that some parts of the ORA platform were “too limited.”

A DOJ spokesperson told Federal News Network that the agency “continues to look for ways to improve the offboarding process to ensure employees are processed out in an efficient and timely manner.”

In November, the IRS’s HR office also acknowledged that ORA had been auto-populating incorrect data for retiring employees. The errors were apparent in calculations for service history, “high-3s” and sick leave, according to emails viewed by Federal News Network.

“Please rest assured that your HR specialist will include accurate documentation with your retirement package,” the message said. “These documents will ensure that [OPM] receives the correct information needed to process your retirement accurately.”

Lee said the auto-population feature of ORA is intended to give retiring employees an opportunity to identify and correct errors earlier on, and to “reduce preventable issues” before they further slow the process down the road.

“Instead of relying on guesswork or waiting weeks for an answer, ORA shows employees exactly what’s finished and what needs attention,” she said. “It took a complicated, technical process, but it made it straightforward and manageable for an employee.”

But some employees said they are continuing to experience technical difficulties with OPM’s platform. In one example, when a retiree struggled to get a temporary password from OPM to access ORA, her inquiries to OPM’s customer service went unanswered. She instead received automatic email replies, saying it would take two weeks to generate the password.

“I have still not received any money — interim annuity or even annual leave payment,” the employee told Federal News Network. “It has been a mess!”

Kupor said OPM will continue rolling out new versions of ORA as more features or adjustments are needed. At the same time, though, he acknowledged the frustrations from retiring employees who are experiencing long wait times, and who had to resubmit their applications.

“We’ll never just kind of clap our hands, declare ourselves done,” Kupor said. “This is a major modernization project, and it’s going as well as we could have expected. We obviously appreciate that this is an incredibly important thing for us to get right and to get timely. And we totally respect the fact that after a long career in federal service, people expect that they should be able to retire with dignity, and in an efficient way.”

OPM’s long-time efforts to modernize federal retirement

The ORA platform was an initiative that began under the Biden administration as part of a multi-year strategy to modernize the government’s entire retirement process. The Trump administration has since taken up the mantle and continued the initiative this year.

“I really do believe it’s an improvement. It’s something I’ve been waiting for — for a long time,” said Tammy Flanagan, a federal retirement expert and advisor with Retire Federal. “I can’t understand why it took this long, and I was concerned that OPM implemented it this year, but maybe it’s a good thing because of the volume. Maybe it will help ease that burden.”

By now, OPM has onboarded major payroll providers, including the Interior Business Center (IBC), National Finance Center (NFC) and Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), to the new ORA platform. OPM said it is still working with some smaller providers to bring them into ORA.

Shriver, the former OPM acting director under the previous administration, said he was “glad to see” the modernization efforts continuing.

“But an online retirement application is only step one,” Shriver said. “If you have a bunch of digital applications coming in, but you still have a paper process on the back end, you need people to take those applications [and] turn them into actual annuity payments.”

For decades, OPM has been trying to update its retirement systems, with some efforts dating back to the 1980s. But time and again, the agency’s attempts at modernization have fallen short of expectations.

In 2006, for instance, the agency awarded a contract aimed at digitizing the retirement process, but the effort ultimately failed to deliver.

Then in 2010, OPM tried taking smaller steps toward updating the retirement process, an initiative that made some progress, until the agency changed course again a year later.

In a report from 2011, the Government Accountability Office wrote: “For over two decades, OPM has been attempting to modernize its federal employee retirement process by automating paper-based processes and replacing antiquated information systems. However, these efforts have been unsuccessful, and OPM canceled its most recent retirement modernization effort in February 2011.”

After a major data breach hit OPM in 2015, the agency had to scrap many of its IT modernization plans, including the ongoing efforts to modernize the retirement system.

Then during the Biden administration, the retirement modernization effort took on yet another new shape. In 2023, OPM’s Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) issued a multi-year IT strategy, which became the basis for many of the retirement updates OPM is still continuing now.

What a past surge indicates for those retiring now

The current surge in retirements across government is uncommon, but not entirely unprecedented. In 2013, OPM faced another massive retirement wave.

During fiscal 2013, OPM processed 138,039 total retirement claims from federal employees. It’s the highest volume OPM has had in at least the last 25 years — until now, with OPM on track to surpass 140,000.

In 2013, OPM attributed the delays in part to sequestration, which at the time forced the agency to curtail call-center hours and to suspend overtime hours for Retirement Services employees. The large volume also went hand in hand with longer processing times.

For Zawodny, the former OPM associate director of RS, the problems boiled down to a lack of funding and resources at OPM.

“Without the adequate staffing, without the adequate automation, there’s nothing you can do,” Zawodny said. “There’s only so much that’s going to be able to come through that funnel at a time. No matter how much you pour on top of it, it can’t all come out evenly.”

Zawodny said over the course of 2013, the backlog continued to increase. The office attempted to address the paperwork surge, similar to the current situation, by having staff work overtime.

Later, after getting approved to make more hires in RS, Zawodny said it still took OPM months to get the new recruits through a lengthy hiring process.

“And then you have to train the individuals,” he added. “It took upwards of nine months to a year to get an individual ready to start processing, doing calculations, providing benefits and advice.”

Congress eventually got involved, raising concerns about OPM’s absence of a long-term plan to overhaul the mostly paper-based process, combined with across-the-board budget cuts and a lack of consistent leadership within OPM.

More than a decade later, OPM’s new modernization efforts have taken a significant step forward. But in the big picture, the ORA platform represents about one-third of the total work for overhauling retirement processing. ORA modernizes the user-facing part of the process, OPM officials have explained, but more work is ahead before the government’s retirement process can be considered fully digital.

OPM is still looking to upgrade its digital file system (DFS), which contains personnel data on all retiring employees, as well as “Janus” — OPM’s program for calculating retirement annuities for applicants.

“We are revamping an entirely manual process — we’re realistic enough to understand that takes time. It takes iterations of software development, it takes process changes,” Kupor said. “Our team is doing everything we can to be proactive and get ahead of it. I’m certain there will be lessons that we’ll learn and things that we can do differently as we go forward, but we are absolutely committed to the cause here.”

“Digital retirement is changing what federal employees can expect from all of us — from every agency, from our payroll providers, and from OPM as well,” Lee added. “We’re seeing real results today with faster service, fewer errors, greater transparency. We’re committed to continuously improving.”

Despite OPM’s long-term efforts, though, the Trump administration’s workforce disruptions across the entire year have ultimately heightened employees’ uncertainty, according to NARFE’s Hatton.

“Whether it’s a shutdown, whether it’s reductions in force, hollowing out agencies, hollowing out HR staff through the deferred resignation program,” Hatton said. “That all can create disruptions in getting these files processed. We’re especially concerned that the agency side of the process is going to be difficult.”

In the immediate term, Flanagan, the retirement advisor, recommended that retiring employees currently in the process keep an eye out for any communications from OPM or their agencies, while also simply being prepared for things to take much longer than usual.

“But I don’t know what else employees can do,” she said. “I really don’t.”

Back to top

The post ‘In the dark:’ Retiring federal employees face major delays first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Federal News Network

 

• More than 60% of the government’s security clearance data last year was either inaccurate or incomplete. That’s according to a recent review conducted by the Government Accountability Office. In a new report, GAO said delays and issues with IT systems continue to make the security clearance process a top management challenge in the federal government. The issue has remained on GAO’s High Risk List since 2018.
  (Personnel security clearances: Actions needed to address significant data reliability issues that impact oversight - Government Accountability Office)
• Amid the Trump administration’s workforce reductions, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor touts that 92% of departing feds left voluntarily. But in response to Kupor’s comments, James Walkinshaw (D-Va) said calling the departures “voluntary” is misleading. Walkinshaw argues that many federal employees were coerced into leaving, rather than choosing to go on their own. Nothing about that, the congressman said, was voluntary.
  (Response to OPM Director Scott Kupor on federal workforce comments - Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.))
• The Department of the Navy is pouring nearly half a billion dollars into artificial intelligence and autonomous technologies to modernize shipbuilding operations. The Shipbuilding Operating System, or Ship OS, will leverage Palantir’s software to aggregate data from enterprise resource planning systems, legacy databases and operational sources to identify bottlenecks, streamline workflows and support proactive risk mitigation. Early pilot deployments of these AI capabilities have already shown some results, including reducing submarine schedule planning at General Dynamics Electric Boat from 160 manual hours to under 10 minutes. At Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, material review times dropped from weeks to less than an hour. The initial rollout will focus on the Submarine Industrial Base, with plans to expand to surface ship programs as the Navy validates and scales the approach.
  (Navy pours nearly $500 million into AI to modernize shipbuilding - Navy.mil)
• Agencies have new acquisition considerations when buying artificial intelligence capabilities. Agencies have three months to update their acquisition clauses and policies to ensure contracts for large language models comply with two overarching principles. In a new memo, OMB said by March 11, agencies must ensure new contracts for AI tools include the requirements that demonstrate the LLMs are truth seeking and ideologically neutral. OMB detailed how agencies can ensure both commercial and internally developed LLMs meet these two principles. Agencies should ask vendors for documentation that includes enough information to assess a vendor’s risk management actions at the model, system and/or application level to establish compliance with these principles. As for existing contracts for LLMs, agencies must add these new clauses prior to exercising an option period.
  (OMB outlines new procurement requirements for LLMs - Office of Management and Budget)
• Agencies are taking more advantage of financial management shared services than ever before. The Government Accountability Office found in a new report that agencies spent $183 million through the financial management marketplace in fiscal 2024. That is a $180 million increase over 2023. The reason for this increase, auditors found, is that the number of providers and products in the financial management marketplace has grown over the past several years. There are now 25 providers that are offering 139 different services. GAO said this is the first in a series of reports addressing shared services as required by the 2023 spending bill.
  (Use of financial management shared services on the rise - Government Accountability Office)
• The Department of Homeland Security is moving to strip airport security screeners of union rights for the second time this year. The Transportation Security Administration said it will officially rescind a collective bargaining agreement for transportation security officers in early January. That decision comes after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem signed a new determination that TSA staff should not be allowed to participate in collective bargaining. In June, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction that blocked DHS’s previous attempt to dissolve TSA’s collective bargaining agreement. The American Federation of Government Employees has vowed to fight Noem’s latest action in court as well.
  (DHS moves to eliminate TSA collective bargaining agreement, again - Federal News Network)
• Republican lawmakers have introduced legislation that would codify a part of President Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan and allow the Defense Department to establish a National Security and Defense AI Institute to advance defense innovation, workforce development and AI readiness. Lawmakers say the institute would “host testbeds for defense-related AI data management, reliable AI, and AI readiness.” It would also play an important role in developing a skilled workforce capable of implementing these emerging technologies. A companion bill led by Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) has already passed the House as part of the annual defense policy bill.
  (Lawmakers move to stand up a Defense AI Institute - Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas))
• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is out with new cyber performance goals for tens of thousands of organizations across the country. CISA’s Cybersecurity Performance Goals 2.0 document is geared toward critical infrastructure sectors. The agency updated the voluntary goals last week to be more in line with the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s latest Cybersecurity Framework. CISA’s updated goals include new guidance on governance, emerging threats and third-party risks. Other agencies have used CISA’s performance goals to set cybersecurity standards and requirements for specific sectors.
  (CISA unveils enhanced cross sector cybersecurity performance goals - Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency)

The post Inaccuracies plague government security clearance data first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Amelia Brust/Federal News Network

Interview transcript

Terry Gerton You know, it turns out that not everything was shut down during the shutdown. The Department of Education issued a final regulation on Halloween that picked up on a March 7 executive order related to the public service loan forgiveness program. Tell us about what this new regulation does.

Randall Thomas That’s right, Terry. The regulations finalized proposed regulations that were issued in August and that implement that executive order. And that executive order directed Education to propose revisions to the PSLF regulations to ensure the definition of public service excludes organizations that engage in activities that have a substantial illegal purpose. That executive order stated that it was the policy of the administration that individuals employed by organizations whose activities have a substantial legal purpose shall not be eligible for the PSLF program. Education amended the regulations to provide that a qualifying employer for purposes of the program does not include organizations that engage in these specific enumerated activities in the regulation such that they have a substantial illegal purpose. Qualifying employers, for people who are familiar with the program or those who aren’t, generally include federal, state, local government agencies, Section 501(C)(3) organizations, and certain other entities. And these regulations were issued after … the PSLF statute was enacted in 2007 and first became effective in 2009. And those regulations have been amended seven times since they were first promulgated. The new regulations establish that to be considered a qualifying employer, an organization must not engage in an illegal activity such that it has substantial illegal purpose. And with that language and that standard, Education is effectively adopting the IRS’s illegality doctrine in these regulations. Education states that the IRS’ use of the doctrine is a basis for Education to issue the regulations. Education also listed several activities deemed to reflect a substantial illegal purpose, which we’ll probably cover in a few minutes, and the proposed regulations received nearly 14,000 comments [and] were generally finalized without substantive changes.

Terry Gerton I think most people would agree that agencies that are engaging in illegal behavior ought not to be subject to loan forgiveness. What is new about this regulation, especially when it comes to defining the illegal activities?

Randall Thomas Yeah, so historically, like we mentioned just a minute ago, Terry, this was a status test and not a conduct test by the Department of Education. You could look to a Section 501(C)(3) organization and see that the IRS had made a determination with respect to that exempt status. And the IRS separately employs an illegality doctrine, but now the Department of Education has said that it will also apply the illegality doctrine based on a preponderance of the evidence to determine whether an organization is operating for a substantial illegal purpose. And here they define certain illegal activities as indicative of having a substantial illegal purpose. Those activities were also all noted in the executive order from March of this year, and they include aiding or abetting violations of federal immigration laws, supporting terrorism, the use of puberty blockers or sex hormones for minors in violation of federal or state law, engaging in the trafficking of children to another state for purposes of emancipation from their lawful parents in a violation of federal or state law, engaging in a pattern of aiding and abetting illegal discrimination, and engaging in a pattern of violating state laws, which is defined as a final non-default judgment by a state court of trespassing, disorderly conduct, public nuisance, vandalism, or obstruction of highways.

Terry Gerton Well those are pretty specific. How will the Department of Education actually determine if an agency or an organization engages in those activities? What will they look at?

Randall Thomas So the employer disqualification process here requires Education to find that an employer has a substantial illegal purpose by a preponderance of the evidence after weighing the employer’s illegal conduct and narrowly focusing on only the illegal conduct enumerated in the regulation. The preamble to the regulation notes that a determination by Education regarding illegality only represents Education’s conclusion that the organization is not a qualifying employer and does not represent a determination by the IRS regarding tax exempt status. Education will determine that a qualifying employer violated the applicable standard when it receives an application in which the employer fails to certify that it did not participate in activities that have a substantial illegal purpose, or when it otherwise determines that a qualifying employer engaged in these activities unless Education approves a corrective plan signed by the employer. There’s an employer reconsideration process that gives employers the right to submit additional information and seek review and determinations. That process is aimed at providing due process to ensure that Education considers all relevant information prior to taking action to remove eligibility and to ensure that employers will be given an opportunity to respond, except in cases where there’s conclusive evidence that the employer engages in activities such that it has an illegal purpose, substantial legal purpose, rather. And Education presumes that the following evidence is conclusive. That includes a final judgment by a state or federal court whereby the employer is found to have engaged in illegal activities such that it has a substantial illegal purpose, a plea of guilty or no contest, whereby the employer admits to having engaged in illegal activities that have a substantial illegal purpose, or pleads no contest to allegations that it engaged in illegal activities with a substantial illegal purpose, or a settlement that includes admission by the employer that engaged in illegal activities that have a substantial illegal purpose. It provides that nothing in the determination process shall be construed to authorize Education to determine an employer has a substantial illegal purpose based upon the employer or its employees exercising their First Amendment rights or any other rights protected under the Constitution. And Education notes that even without such explicit references, the regulation could not be enforced in a manner that contravenes the First Amendment and that lawful activity will not disqualify an organization, no matter how controversial or unpopular it may be.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Randall Thomas. He’s a partner at Morgan, Lewis and Bockius. All right, that’s a lot of legal speak about the requirements. What if any new responsibilities or risks does this create for the public service organizations who might have borrowers participating in the program?

Randall Thomas Yeah, so two impacts here, the qualifying employers and also the borrowers, of course. The employers now bear the responsibility of affirmatively certifying that they are not engaged in activities with a substantial illegal purpose. They face disqualification now based on this new preponderance of the evidence standard, and certain things like judgments, no contest pleas, and settlements are treated as conclusive evidence that the employer engages in activities such that it has a substantial illegal purpose. Employers will want to engage counsel to think about how the PSLF regulations may apply and whether the employer’s activities expose it to any PSLF disqualification risk under the new regulations. And, you know, you probably want to do that with an eye toward these activities that the regulations say are indicative of a substantial legal purpose. There’s also the borrower impact, and thankfully these regulations don’t have an effective date until July 1, 2026. So you do have some headway — runway to figure out how they’re going to apply to your employer. For borrowers, the regulations will remove PSLF eligibility for individual borrowers during periods of employment by organizations that have been disqualified. Where an employer is deemed to have engaged in activities that breach federal or state law, affected borrowers won’t receive credit toward loan forgiveness for months worked after the determination date of ineligibility, but borrowers will receive full credit for work performed until the effective date of Education’s determination that the employer no longer qualifies. And under the regulations, Education is required to notify borrowers of a qualifying employer’s status. If the qualifying employer is at risk of becoming or becomes ineligible to participate in a PSLF program, the borrower cannot request reconsideration of a determination by Education that resulted in the employer losing status because the employer has a substantial illegal purpose.

Terry Gerton Are any of these new regulations being tested in legal cases?

Randall Thomas There are several cases that have been filed so far challenging the regulation.

Terry Gerton And what is the status of any of those? Can you derive any sense of where this might go in the future?

Randall Thomas I can’t opine right now. I don’t think that any — well, I think that it’s too premature. These regulations were just finalized a little bit over three weeks ago. And I don’t know that there’s been any action on these cases.

Terry Gerton What do you think this signals for the future then of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program? Do you think the authorities will continue to be tightened and the eligibility requirements strengthened?

Randall Thomas Yeah, Terry, I have no expectation about whether they will or won’t be tightened any further, but the new rule is clearly designed to tighten PSLF standards, and the administration through the executive order and Education in the preamble to the regulations, they say as much. The preamble to the regulation discusses at length the aim of the regulation in ensuring that taxpayer dollars are not misused and strengthening accountability and enhancing program integrity. The preamble states that the regulations will protect hardworking taxpayers from shouldering the cost of improper subsidies granted employees of organizations that undermine national security — and I’m quoting the regulation here — and American values through criminal activity. I can’t speak to the policy or the balance between accountability and access to forgiveness. I will note that Education notes in the preamble to the regulation that it disagrees with [the] assertion that the rule will have a significant macroeconomic effect on labor markets in education, health care, social services. They stated that they found no basis to conclude widespread effects would be likely and that they expected most organizations to voluntarily comply with the rule, such that Education anticipates that it will take action to remove eligibility for less than 10 organizations per year.

The post A final regulation issued on Halloween has reshaped the Public Student Loan Forgiveness program first appeared on Federal News Network.

© The Associated Press

The systems architecture for using commercial clouds has served federal agencies well for nearly 20 years.

The cloud movement sparked innovation in the design and deployment of applications, but the exploding use of artificial intelligence calls for a new cloud architecture, suggests Anish Patel, the head of federal civilian at cloud services company Cloudflare.

“If we think about the next generation of services that are going to rely on AI, there’s really a need for a new architecture in that,” Patel said during Federal News Network’s Industry Exchange Cloud 2025. “And so, how does that public cloud architecture, evolve?”

AI compute demands necessitate cloud evolution

He said the principal reason for this need derives from the compute demands of AI.

“AI is really the first thing since the development of the computer that’s been revolutionary on that compute scale,” Patel said.

Developers are folding AI into applications, along with technologies such as post-quantum cryptography and blockchain. Until now, those elements weren’t typically part of digital services.

“But when you combine all those things now,” Patel said, “thinking about the speed of interaction and how reliant you are on a network that’s trusted and reliable becomes really critical.”

Therefore, the resulting architecture must distribute compute power closer to clusters of end users, rather than executing solely in a given commercial cloud.

“If you can bring both that compute and that internet power as close to the end user as possible, that’s game-changing for where the internet is and where AI applications are going,” Patel said. Otherwise, the sheer processor cycle demands of AI will cause performance problems evident to users.

Architecting a reliable cloud architecture for all users

In thinking about the next architecture, IT staffs must consider both their organizations’ own users and external constituents, customers and business partners. Patel noted that many agencies have workforces scattered throughout the country. The need for reliability and low latency equals that of external users.

With reduced workforces, agencies will need to increase that reliability because the paper-based, office visit and telephone options may cease to exist.

“What’s coming next isn’t just that digital services are generally available, and when it’s not, you can pick up the phone or go into an office,” Patel said. “It’s just to be expected that all services are digital, and that service has an uptime and reliability level greater than TikTok or Twitter.”

He added, “There is a new generation of architectural thinking that has to come along with a distributed architecture.”

Patel made the analogy of search. Early Internet search functions, characterized by services like Ask Jeeves, were slow. Google, he said, revolutionized that with instantaneous results.

Today, when using public-facing generative AI sites, users “see it thinking, and there’s a couple of seconds there of it processing, and then it spits out an answer.”

That’s OK for now, he said, but the next generation of AI-enabled digital services will need the same step-function increase in performance that occurred with search.

The distributed architecture also includes distributed data, Patel noted. He said this requires special attention to data sovereignty, privacy and transparency — and secure handling.

“I may be a U.S. citizen traveling overseas, needing access to certain information in a particular country,” he said. “Especially if I’m an agency who’s globally distributed or has people that are traveling all over the world, I want to be able to process my information in a way that adheres to U.S. laws and follows the FedRAMP standard.”

Planning for distributed cloud architecture? Start with your users

Instituting a distributed architecture starts at the application development stage, Patel said.

“You have to start building for where the users are, wherever they are, and adjust to the users’ expectations,” he said. Also important? Building “for the next generation of services that aren’t fully built yet.”

Use of a containerized microservices approach helps because it lets an organization modify or upgrade parts and pieces of an application much more easily than traditional development techniques.

Still, Patel said, until recently “if it was distributed, it was on the agency and the IT folks to come figure out a way to distribute that application, have a disaster recovery strategy, et cetera. If you’re doing that manually, it’s still a highly complicated process, and you still have this scenario where it becomes overwhelming for the IT organization.”

That’s where companies like Cloudflare come in, Patel said. Cloudflare has built a hyper-distributed network together with the services for organizations to use. The company pioneered the idea of easy-to-adopt security for the Hypertext Transport Protocol, so organizations could readily obtain HTTPS status.

“You can now build your applications once and distribute everywhere at the same time, all over the place, and you don’t have to think about it,” he said. “You’re essentially offloading the capabilities of that application, infrastructure and services to vendors who are designed to essentially distribute this across the globe.”

Ensuring FedRAMP compliance in hyper-distributed cloud environments

That raises the question of FedRAMP compliance, the need for which would appear to severely limit the physical facilities on which federal applications can execute. That in turn means federal customers can’t always access the range of cloud services available to commercial customers.

Patel said that, in supporting a mission to “build a better internet,” Cloudflare wants “to ensure that everybody gets the same internet.” Its solution is to build the FedRAMP standards into the architecture itself, so that distributed instances of an application inherit compliance that was built into the original version.

“That means,” he said, “if there’s new services that are offered — new capabilities — and you need to extend the services to be tightly controlled in a particular way to a particular geography, you have the full control to be able to do that.”

The control ensures an agency can maintain public trust in an application and adjust how distributed instances operate.

“You may have certain areas where certain applications that you just want distributed everywhere,” Patel said, “and you need it to just be available for the user as fast as possible.”

On the other hand, he added, “You may have some cases where it makes more sense to for the application to be highly centralized in particular way and be able to route it to the right location.”

For example, at a local clinic somewhere offering medical services to veterans, “you want to make sure, regardless of the Wi-Fi they may have or the device they may have, that experience is still secure but performant, so the veteran can get through the process.”  

Discover more articles and videos now on our Federal News Network’s Industry Exchange Cloud 2025.

The post Industry Exchange Cloud 2025: Cloudflare’s Anish Patel on AI driving need for new cloud architecture first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Federal News Network

Identity, credential and access management, a foundational pillar of zero trust, centers on three key elements: widespread use of phishing-resistant multifactor authentication, elimination of unnecessary administrative privileges and continuous monitoring and authorization. 

Tony Goulding, cyber evangelist at Delinea, said one area where agencies are seeing the most success is deploying phishing-resistant MFA.

The Office of Management and Budget’s M-22-09 memo and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s accompanying guidance expect agencies to use phishing-resistant multifactor authentication whenever possible. 

While CISA’s guidance is somewhat flexible, emphasizing that “any form of MFA is better than no MFA,” it still reinforces that phishing-resistant methods should be the end goal for ICAM and zero trust.

“In a perfect world, and really aligning with the spirit and the direction of OMB as well as CISA, it means that you’ve really got to try hard to get this MFA in place,” Goulding said during Federal News Network’s Industry Exchange Cloud 2025.

Making progress on multifactor authentication

But some applications and use cases simply cannot support phishing-resistant MFA, particularly older systems that were never designed to accommodate hardware tokens, he pointed out. Temporary contractors also pose hurdles since agencies often cannot easily issue full Personal Identity Verification or Common Access Card credentials.

And in other cases — including legacy environments or remote devices — the technical limitations make deploying modern authentication methods challenging.

“Those are scenarios where organizations are employing, pretty much across the board, a migration plan to replace or migrate their applications and their systems to more modern systems that can accommodate fishing-resistant MFA. Of course, there’s an element of cost and logistics in doing that because you’re going to have to spend money to do it. You’re going to have to update processes. But it is a path that the majority of the organizations that we deal with are actually taking,” Goulding said. 

Doing away with excessive access privileges

The second key element of ICAM — eliminating standing administrative privileges — is forcing agencies to reevaluate the thousands of high-privileged accounts scattered across their networks. Privileged identities, often created out of convenience, represent one of the most exploited attack vectors, Goulding said.

Many organizations, particularly those running Linux and Unix environments where the administrators create local privileged accounts, typically have full privileges and are rarely monitored, making them a prime target for attackers, he said.

“The first step is eliminating those that are unnecessary and then allowing the administrator to use their existing identity. They may have an ID account, for example, that becomes the only account that they will use, and it needs to have minimum rights,” Goulding said. “The third thing is that you then give them the ability to elevate their privileges when they need to elevate their privileges for a legitimate administrative purpose.”

He added, “Those are three of the key things that we’re seeing agencies make tremendous strides in deploying.”

Embracing real-time continuous monitoring

The final must do, Goulding pointed out, is continuous monitoring and authorization. Admittedly, this remains a persistent challenge across the agencies, he said.

“No more point-in-time checks — you want to move more toward evidence-driven, ongoing verification,” Goulding said.

“We’ve actually been very successful in enabling our customers, both agencies and commercial, because our solution generates a stream of identity and access and privileged access signals. Things like elevation request: Elevation is important because if you’re doing least privilege, then you’ve got to give legitimate administrators the ability to elevate privilege just in time — when it’s necessary to do that.”

Session recording — long considered valuable but rarely used due to lack of staff to review recordings — is another area where monitoring is evolving. Goulding said artificial intelligence now allows agencies to automatically scan session recordings on Linux and Windows systems, flagging unusual behavior such as if shadow accounts are created or attempts are made to add additional privileges to a low-privileged, compromised account.

“These session recordings are gold, but they’re never actually reviewed. So automation can really help in making sure that that happens,” he said.

Looking ahead, Goulding warned agencies about “not falling into the trap of trying to cherry pick best-of-breed parts of a solution.” Instead, he recommended that agency teams embrace modern cloud-native software as a service platforms that can scale, update and integrate easily.

Discover more articles and videos now on our Industry Exchange Cloud 2025 event page.

The post Industry Exchange Cloud 2025: Delinea’s Tony Goulding on how to achieve 3 pillars of ICAM first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Federal News Network

The State Department is retroactively promoting hundreds of additional Foreign Service employees, after unilaterally changing the criteria and the panels of individuals who oversee this process.

The American Foreign Service Association said the department recently carried out these retroactive promotions, as part of “targeted administrative actions.”

Earlier this year, the State Department eliminated an employee’s contributions to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) goals from the criteria for promotion within the Foreign Service. Instead, the department said it would vet Foreign Service employees on their “fidelity” to the Trump administration’s policies.

AFSA President John Dinkelman said the State Department retroactively promoted 200 Foreign Service employees, based on these new criteria.

In a departure from past practice, Dinkelman said the State Department isn’t sharing the names of employees receiving these promotions, or the names of those who served on Foreign Service promotion boards.

“We have no idea who made these decisions,” Dinkelman said, adding that the State Department made these “unprecedented changes to the process” without consulting AFSA.

Dinkelman said that the level of transparency is important to ensure the promotion recommendations are unbiased.

The State Department’s inspector general’s office reported in May 2022 that human resources employees frequently gave spots on Foreign Service promotion boards to family members and friends. According to the report, several employees raised concerns that certain board selections amounted to “nepotism and favoritism.”

State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said in a statement that the Biden administration “imposed ideological litmus tests on civil servants, penalizing competent and deserving government employees in the process.”

“Under President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the State Department rewards excellence, which is the right thing to do for our workforce, for our country, and for the American people,” Pigott said.

In July, the State Department unveiled new criteria for promotions and career advancement in the Foreign Service. Among the changes, the department will assess employees on their “fidelity” to the Trump administration’s policy goals.

The department’s newly released “core precepts” for tenure and promotion will grade Foreign Service on five criteria — fidelity, communication, leadership, management and knowledge.

Previous versions of this scorecard placed greater emphasis on subject matter expertise and assessing an employee’s contributions to DEIA goals.

“The derivative effects of this mean that some poor individual, who actually played by the rules and who fairly demonstrated their adherence to principles that are now distanced by the government, was not promoted, and somebody else has been now placed in front of them in the line,” Dinkelman said.

The department no longer recognizes AFSA as a union, following executive orders that scaled back collective bargaining rights for a majority of the federal workforce.

The State Department’s human resources bureau releases new precepts every three years, outlining the most important qualities Foreign Service officers must demonstrate to advance to higher ranks.

As part of a newly added “fidelity” standard, Foreign Service employees across all ranks will be evaluated on their contributions to “protecting and promoting executive power.”

The fidelity portion of the scorecard links to a White House webpage listing President Donald Trump’s executive orders and presidential actions.

The Bureau of Global Talent Management says that mid-level Foreign Service officers should be able to demonstrate how they are “zealously executing” U.S. government policy.

AFSA also raised concerns in August, when the State Department promoted several Foreign Service officers who received reduction-in-force notices earlier that summer.

The union said the promotion of laid-off diplomats suggested the department may have dismissed some of its top performers.

The State Department sent RIF notices to nearly 1,350 employees in July.

Of those, nearly 250 were Foreign Service officers currently stationed in the U.S. A federal judge in San Francisco has temporarily blocked the State Department from officially separating these employees.

Shortly after sending those layoff notices, the Foreign Service resumed hiring. By the end of January, the Foreign Service will have made enough hires to replace those who received RIF notices.

In September, it brought on a class of more than 100 new Foreign Service officers. This month, another 70 new hires were brought on to serve a five-year appointment as non-career consular fellows.

Dinkelman said that in January, the Foreign Service is scheduled to hire another class of 160 new Foreign Service officers.

The post State Dept retroactively promotes hundreds of Foreign Service officers after rewriting criteria first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Federal News Network

The Department of Homeland Security is again moving to rescind a collective bargaining agreement with Transportation Security Administration employees, despite an ongoing court case over DHS’ prior move to eliminate the TSA union agreement.

In a Dec. 12 press release, TSA announced that a new “labor framework” would be implemented starting Jan. 11, 2026. The framework rescinds the 2024 CBA between TSA and the American Federation of Government Employees, the agency said.

TSA said the decision is based on a Sept. 29 determination by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, “Eliminating Collective Bargaining at TSA Due to its Incompatibility with TSA’s National Security Mission and its Adverse Impact on Resources, Flexibility, Mission Focus, Security Effectiveness, and Traveler Experience.”

TSA said Noem’s determination — which it did not release — “establishes that employees performing security screening functions … have a primary function of national security and shall not engage in collective bargaining or be represented for any purposes by any representative or organization.”

Noem also determined that collective bargaining for TSA officers “is inconsistent with efficient stewardship of taxpayer dollars and impedes the agility required to secure the traveling public,” according to the agency statement.

“Our Transportation Security Officers (TSOs) need to be focused on their mission of keeping travelers safe not wasting countless hours on non-mission critical work,” Adam Stahl, senior official performing the duties of TSA deputy administrator, said in the press release. “Under the leadership of Secretary Noem, we are ridding the agency of wasteful and time-consuming activities that distracted our officers from their crucial work.”

AFGE quickly criticized TSA’s announcement. AFGE represents approximately 47,000 airport screeners under the CBA.

“Merely 30 days ago, Secretary Noem celebrated TSA officers for their dedication during the longest government shutdown in history,” AFGE National President Everett Kelley said as part of a statement. “Today, she’s announcing a lump of coal right on time for the holidays: that she’s stripping those same dedicated officers of their union rights.”

AFGE noted that a federal judge earlier this year blocked DHS from dissolving the collective bargaining agreement. The union had brought the lawsuit in response to a previous determination issued by Noem that sought to dissolve the CBA.

In granting the preliminary injunction in June, the judge presiding over the case wrote that Noem’s previous attempt to dissolve the CBA “appears to have been undertaken to punish AFGE and its members because AFGE has chosen to push back against the Trump Administration’s attacks to federal employment in the courts.”

That ongoing case is currently scheduled to go to trial next September.

Kelley said AFGE “will continue to challenge these illegal attacks on our members’ right to belong to a union.” He also urged the Senate to pass the Protect America’s Workforce Act “immediately.”

TSA staff don’t have the same statutory rights as other federal employees under Title 5 of U.S. Code. But in response to longstanding concerns about TSA attrition, then-TSA Administrator David Pekoske in 2022 issued a determination that expanded collective bargaining at the agency to mirror the bargaining rights under Title 5.

TSA and AFGE then negotiated and signed a seven-year collective bargaining agreement last year. The agreement established a streamlined process for grievance and arbitration, expanded official time, fewer restrictions on sick leave, increased uniform allowances and opportunities for local collective bargaining.

In a statement today, AFGE Council 100 President Hydrick Thomas called the decision to revoke the CBA a “slap in the face” to TSA employees

“Prior to having a union contract, many employees endured hostile work environments and workers felt like they didn’t have a voice on the job, which led to severe attrition rates and longer wait times for the traveling public,” Thomas said. “Since having a contract, we’ve seen a more stable workforce, and there has never been another aviation-related attack on our country.”

In its statement, TSA said that agency policy will govern “employment matters previously addressed by the 2024 CBA, and TSA policy will provide for alternative procedures to ensure that employee voices are heard and that legitimate concerns are resolved quickly.”

The post DHS moves to eliminate TSA collective bargaining agreement, again first appeared on Federal News Network.

© The Associated Press

Against the backdrop of Ukraine, growing East/West geopolitical tensions, and persistent cybersecurity attacks by nation-state threat actors, defense organizations are accelerating their efforts to harden digital infrastructure, including secure data exchange across borders and federated environments.

At its 2025 summit, for instance, NATO leaders agreed that future defense budgets must rise, and for the first time, the alliance’s spending target formally incorporates cybersecurity alongside more familiar priorities, including personnel and equipment. As a result, cyber resilience is now treated as a defined component of the broader defense investment framework.

Domestically, the U.S. military is also significantly raising its game. Announced earlier this year, the Army’s Unified Network Plan sets out a data-centric approach to modernizing networks, in an approach designed to create a secure backbone that links tactical units to command centers while embedding zero trust principles throughout. Among various other key priorities, it emphasizes resilience, interoperability with allies, and the implementation of a standardized data exchange through frameworks such as the Unified Data Reference Architecture.

The Department of the Navy’s Zero Trust Blueprint takes a similar path, laying out a phased strategy to integrate zero trust across enterprise IT and tactical systems. In particular, it mandates continuous verification of users, devices and files, and also identifies secure cross-domain transfers between classified and unclassified environments as a critical priority.

The Navy is also preparing to operate in contested environments where connectivity is unreliable, which is often referred to as denied, degraded, intermittent and limited (DDIL) scenarios. For instance, a submarine with no signal access must still operate securely, a challenge the Navy is aiming to address head-on.

The risks of reactive technologies

Despite this clear domestic and international commitment to zero trust strategies, however, an important security blind spot remains in the infrastructure of many defense organizations: file security. To explain, traditional approaches to file security were designed around perimeter control and reactive detection, technologies that remain crucial to a comprehensive approach.

A big part of the challenge, however, is that these tools, including antivirus, sandboxing and signature-based analysis, struggle to identify new or modified threats, leaving organizations particularly exposed to zero-day exploits and advanced persistent attacks. In practice, this means adversaries can exploit vulnerabilities in common formats such as PDFs, Office documents and email attachments to bypass defenses and gain a foothold inside sensitive networks.

In defense environments that require immediate and frictionless collaboration across complex domains and jurisdictions, these limitations present potentially serious risks. Specifically, files move constantly between classified and unclassified systems, between sovereign networks, and across cloud environments that host shared mission data. Once a file crosses the boundary, legacy controls cannot provide reliable security assurance, and consequently, a reliance on implicit trust or the absence of sufficient sanitization can allow hidden threats to spread laterally, with obvious consequences.

The zero trust data format

These initiatives indicate a clear direction of travel: defense organizations are moving toward architectures where data must be trusted only when verified, shared on common standards, and protected consistently across domains. The challenge lies in enforcing these principles in practice when information crosses networks, jurisdictions and classifications.

This is where Zero Trust Data Format (ZTDF) provides an essential foundation by extending zero trust to the file itself and ensuring that protection and policy travel with the data wherever it goes. It applies zero trust principles directly to individual data objects, including files, emails and structured datasets, by embedding encryption, access controls and auditability inside the data itself.

Instead of relying on the security of the network it passes through, each file carries its own protection, ensuring that policy and assurance travel with the data wherever it goes. ZTDF is also gaining traction in defense circles, having been ratified by NATO’s Combined Communications-Electronics Board as an interoperable standard for cross-border use. The underlying point is that nations need assurance that sensitive information can be shared with allies without losing control over how it is handled or exposing it to unnecessary risk.

On a broader level, these issues are indicative of a more general move towards comprehensive zero trust architectures across both public and private sectors. Civilian organizations that don’t already have adequate measures in place would be well advised to take note, particularly in light of the extremely damaging ransomware attacks that continue to make headlines.

Paul Farrington is chief product officer at Glasswall.

The post Why deeper defense collaboration demands a zero trust approach to cybersecurity first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Getty Images/Askhat Giliakhov

Earlier this year, the Government Accountability Office shared a report on AI agents as policymakers look to balance the promise of the new capabilities with concern about potential misuse and other unintended consequences.

The report will help support a shift that’s already happening related to AI agents. We’re no longer asking what generative AI can create, but what autonomous AI can do. These systems are no longer simply responding — now, they sense, plan and act.

The GAO’s report isn’t an “AI 101,” but rather sets a baseline for government to make informed, mission-driven choices before AI agents become haphazardly embedded in critical operations. The message is clear: Don’t just adopt AI, adopt it smart.

There are steps agencies can take to facilitate smart adoption from the start of their AI journey. To prepare, they will need to increase digital literacy, recognize and understand the shift from genAI to agentic AI and identify where they are on the spectrum of autonomy.

Increasing digital literacy

AI systems can create great efficiencies, but they also require a significant shift in thinking, skill sets and workflows for federal employees.

A major part of this is understanding the data. Government wants to move away from rigid systems of record and into an approach where data can move around freely. Users who were hired to become experts on one tool for a particular mission need to increase their understanding of all aspects of the project and the tools that touch it.

Workers who use government datasets require a deeper knowledge of this information. Government datasets are particularly complex, requiring an understanding of nuances around source, frequency of updates, data quality and legal constraints.

These users need to understand what’s available, how it’s structured and its limits in order to ask AI the right questions and receive valuable responses. Poorly framed questions can result in incomplete, inaccurate or misleading answers.

At a basic level, there are some skills all government employees need to prepare for a workplace that benefits from agentic AI.

Even non-technical staff need to understand the data landscape, enabling collaboration with IT and data teams to accelerate problem-solving and innovation. All government employees must be able to navigate dashboards and basic tools, ask sharper, more targeted questions of data and AI, recognize limitations like bias, gaps or outdated info, and make decisions informed by facts, not assumptions.

Shifting from GenAI to agentic AI

Overall, we’re seeing a major shift from AI pilots to solutions. Within that, we’re seeing an overall transition from generative to agentic AI. This requires both understanding the limits of agentic AI and how to show results and deliver return on investment.

As the GAO’s report recognizes, use of agentic AI in government is currently limited to software development and autonomous vehicles — but it ultimately will enable more complex tasks and support all federal agencies.

As government use of agentic AI expands, we’ll see increased efficiency and greater overall support for the workforce. Agentic AI shines by performing rules-based, repeatable tasks that slow humans down — ideally, it will amplify, not replace humans.

When looking to identify prime candidates for agentic AI projects, agencies should prioritize routine but labor intensive workflows that follow clear rules. These can include tasks like document processing, data entry and compliance checks.

AI is also valuable in situations where it can triage, recommend or surface insights, then passing final decision making on to a human. Knowledge management and retrieval is also an ideal function for agentic AI, helping government workers to quickly find accurate, relevant information.

There are a few ways agencies can prepare for this shift, beginning with an inventory of automation-ready workflows and investment in data readiness and workforce upskilling.

Understanding the spectrum of autonomy

Like the move from cloud-first to cloud-smart, agencies need to understand the spectrum of autonomy.

The question is not whether to use AI agents. It’s how to match the right level of autonomy to the mission, with governance scaled to the risk. As a guideline, less agentic AI is the right fit for routine, low-risk, high-volume tasks. Overall, for these types of programs, agencies should be thinking about efficiency with guardrails.

For example, cyber defense functions like detecting anomalies, auto-triaging alerts, isolating compromised assets and generating response playbooks for security analysts do not require much agentic AI support. On the other hand, tasks like autonomously containing active intrusions, dynamically adjusting network defenses and escalating only edge cases or ambiguous threats to human operators greatly benefit from the use of agentic AI.

Similarly in the realm of logistics and supply chain, tasks like anticipating demand surges using predictive analytics, automatically initiating replenishment and suggesting optimized delivery routes for approval only require a low level of agentic AI, while it plays a more significant role for dynamic rerouting shipments in response to disruptions or coordination of cross-agency assets.

Through reports like the recent one from GAO and other guidelines and efforts by the federal government, agencies are positioned for significant progress and increased efficiencies in the years to come. Agentic AI will undeniably become a core piece of agencies’ technology toolsets — now is the time to prepare.

Laura Stash is executive vice president of solutions architecture at iTech AG.

The post GAO on AI agents: Lead with intelligent AI adoption first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Federal News Network

• Federal retirement numbers at the Office of Personnel Management are continuing to skyrocket. In November, OPM took in another 23,000 applications from retiring employees. That’s on top of more than 20,000 that entered OPM’s systems in October. Together, those numbers mean retirement applications are triple the volume they were at this time last year. In total, OPM’s retirement inventory is now closing in on 50,000 applications that are still awaiting finalization.
  (November 2025 retirement processing report - Office of Personnel Management)
• A group of lawmakers found the Pentagon has diverted at least $2 billion intended for barracks repairs, school upgrades and training programs to support the southern border mission. The department shifted approximately $1.3 billion to pay for the deployment of troops to the border. About $420 million was moved to assist with immigration detention operations and over $40 million was used to pay for military deportation flights. The diverted funds were meant to support projects including elementary schools at Fort Knox, an ambulatory care center and dental clinic, a jet-training facility in Mississippi and Marine barracks in Japan. DoD also sent the 10th Mountain Division, which was trained to conduct large-scale combat operations, to the border.
  (DoD diverts over $2 billion to fund border mission, lawmakers say - Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.))
• Next week marks the busiest week of the year for the Postal Service. USPS said it’s prepared to handle millions packages and pieces of mail during its peak season. But it’s also setting deadlines to ensure delivery before Christmas. USPS generally recommends sending first-class mail and Ground Advantage packages no later than Dec. 17 to ensure delivery by Dec. 25. USPS said customers should also allow addition time for shipping to or from Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and U.S Territories.
  (The Postal Service Is ready for the busiest week of 2025 - U.S. Postal Service)
• The Defense Department is accelerating its preparation for post-quantum cryptography. The Pentagon's CIO is preparing a new requirement for all military services and defense agencies to identify, inventory and report all cryptography used in any type of system. But before the CIO releases that policy, Katie Arrington, who is performing the duties of the DoD CIO, said in a new memo that each component must identify key personnel who will be responsible for migration to PQC and associated coordination. These leads will oversee the creation and maintenance of the system inventory, as well as several other responsibilities including PQC acquisition requirements within the component, quantum-attack risk management plans and the tracking of all tests, evaluation and PQC readiness efforts relevant to the component's systems.
  (DoD CIO tells services, agencies how to get ready for post-quantum cryptography - Defense Department)
• Tenable became the third contractor to sign a OneGov agreement with the General Services Administration this month. Under the deal announced yesterday, Tenable will offer its cloud security enterprise solution to agencies at a 65% discount off its list price on the GSA schedule. The prices are good through March 2027, but agencies would see 3% annual increase in their prices on multiple-year task orders. GSA also signed OneGov deals with Palo Alto Networks and SAP in December. In all, 17 vendors now have OneGov deals.
  (Tenable becomes third vendor to sign OneGov deal this month - General Services Administration)
• A bill to restore collective bargaining for federal employees has cleared the House. All House Democrats, along with 20 Republicans, voted in favor of the Protect America’s Workforce Act, resulting in a vote of 231-195 to pass the legislation. If enacted, the bill would nullify President Donald Trump’s executive orders to cancel collective bargaining agreements at most agencies. Federal unions are now urging the Senate to take up the companion bill.
  (House passes bill to restore collective bargaining for federal employees - Federal News Network)
• Service members will see a 4.2% average increase in their basic allowance for housing in 2026. But the actual increases military households will receive will vary depending on where they are stationed and their pay grades. The calculation of the allowance is built to cover approximately 95% of average costs for off-base housing and utilities, leaving a roughly 5% out-of-pocket expense for service members. In 2026, these amounts range from $93 to $212. The new housing allowance rates will take effect Jan. 1, 2026. The department estimates it will pay $29.9 billion in housing allowances to approximately one million service members.
  (Service members will receive a 4.2% boost in housing allowance in 2026 - Federal News Network)
• Hundreds of federal office space leases were terminated this year, but still far from targets set by the Department of Government Efficiency. GSA carried out 260 lease terminations, saving about $112 million in annual costs. That’s about 30% of the approximately 900 lease terminations it sent to landlords earlier this year. GSA began its mass termination of governmentwide leases in the early days of the Trump administration. But by March, the agency began walking back hundreds of them. Former DOGE leader Elon Musk said in a recent interview that DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts were “somewhat successful.”
  (GSA terminated hundreds of federal office space leases, but far less than DOGE targets - Federal News Network)

The post Federal retirement numbers continue to rise first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Federal News Network

Interview transcript

Terry Gerton It has been a tough year for the federal workforce. I don’t think that’s an understatement, but here on the Federal Drive, we focused a lot on the impacts on individuals. And with you I want to take it up a level and really talk about leaders and managers. What have been the biggest challenges for federal managers throughout this year?

Laurin Parthemos I would say without a doubt, it’s the uncertainty that people are seeing within the day to day. As a leader, having to navigate a field where you don’t know what is going to come next is increasingly difficult, especially in times where you don’t have necessarily the number of resources that you truly need to get the job done. And we’re seeing that really play out in terms of both performance, in terms of how things are getting produced, how quickly they’re getting produced, but also just on the health from a psychological standpoint of the individual employees that are within the workforce and especially on the federal side. And how do we really make sure that we create, as leaders, a space where we can allow them to thrive as much as possible in this particular scenario? And how do we suppress that survive response to all the uncertainty and all of the nuance that is happening in the day to day that we’re seeing?

Terry Gerton We have talked a lot here about organizational health and how organizational health depends on individual worker health and how that health often depends on mental health. Seems like all of those connection points are under a lot of stress.

Laurin Parthemos I, Yeah, unequivocally agree with that. Realistically speaking, at Kotter, our research validates that point that organizations that are anchored in adaptability and resilience are those ones that outperform. And as we see, especially in the federal space, it’s difficult to build that resiliency consistently because of the amount of uncertainty that we’re seeing. And so because there’s that pull dragging people down, the level of anxiety, the lack of ability to actually meet your day to day needs as we’re seeing shutdowns happen, there’s an end-level performance there that’s happening at the department and agency level that as leaders, it’s [about] trying to figure out how we can give as much stability as possible to our teams without necessarily knowing what we’re capable of promising. And how do we make sure that we’re communicating in a way that we’re not just waiting until we have a definitive answer, but we’re walking alongside our team saying, I also don’t know. But here’s what we’re going to do.

Terry Gerton You mentioned a term earlier, psychological safety. Can you break that out for us and tell us what it means both from the employee perspective and the leader-manager perspective?

Laurin Parthemos Absolutely. From that psychological safety perspective, we see the massive erosion in the sense that as people are showing up to work, what was once seen as an incredibly stable job and a mission-driven job working for the federal workforce. Some of those tenets about why people joined the service are no longer there because that stability is no longer there. Don’t know if layoffs are coming. We don’t know if we’ll be in another shutdown. And what that really boils down to is how do I feed my family? How do I make sure that I can pay my own bills? And without that level of safety, of knowing that I have stability in my job and I can think through how do I perform and I can think through creative, innovative ways to get things done. Without that, you won’t see any level of performance. And it’s really been a sticking point for many people that I’ve been speaking to within the agencies.

Terry Gerton  Are you seeing that agencies have groups of employees maybe pitted against each other? We had furloughed and accepted folks. So many people worked but without pay and others didn’t work and, you know, are there internal issues that leaders and managers are going to need to deal with?

Laurin Parthemos None that anyone has openly admitted to me. I will leave it at that. But it is a natural feeling to say, if we’re working on a skeleton crew, so to speak, and some of our team is furloughed while others are not, what does that look like when we all rejoin together? There’s going to be those who are frustrated because they’ve had to work so hard during that furlough time without pay. There’s those that are — that were not furloughed that had to depend on each other that maybe their teammates weren’t showing up in a way that they necessarily resonated with because they might not have been giving their full selves because of the frustration of what they were dealing with. So I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily that people are pitted against each other, but more so that there’s an understandable level of frustration given the ecosystem that they were subjected to. And how do you work through that as a leader saying, for this time, we are all together. There is a potential that we will be in another shutdown. And what does that look like? And how can you really work with your team to make sure that you’re front-running any of those issues and thinking through the scenario planning to make sure that you have what you need and your team members understand the purpose and what we’re really trying to accomplish at its core so you can prevent any of those frustrations as they bubble up.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Laurin Parthemos. She’s a principal and public sector lead at Kotter. Laurin, the shutdown has come up a couple of times in our conversation. We’re deep into the holiday season that comes with its own kind of stress. And when everybody’s sort of fully back in January, they’ll be staring potentially at another shutdown across several agencies. So if you’re a leader in this scenario, maybe what’s on your New Year’s resolution list to think about how do you reset for the work beginning in January?

Laurin Parthemos I think that’s a great question because as I’ve talked to many leaders throughout this time, a lot of people are talking through what does Q1 look like or what does it immediately look like for what I need to accomplish? But we really need to be thinking longer term than that. And we really need to be thinking through what are our priorities and what are we deprioritizing? Because as we think about the impact that the shutdown had, I believe it was the Professional Services Council that has a statistic that it takes three to five days, not business days, but days to reset for each day of shutdown in terms of an agency’s performance, considering that it was 43 days. That’s up to seven months in order to get back to a stable state. So we’re going to be working in an environment that is over capacity and behind with significant backlog. So making sure that if you’re anchoring on a, why are we doing what we do, what is our goal as a team and anchoring each task underneath that to that why, it will help prioritize what needs to be accomplished while simultaneously actively advocating for what no longer needs to be done during this time of prioritization. And that act of advocating needs to happen within your own team. Across teams and also going up the chain as well to make sure that there’s a consistent understanding of what are we trying to accomplish? Because if you only focus on one small group, there’s going to be a lack of understanding more broadly. And that will help teams as they go into January with the potential of another shutdown. So knowing what are we trying to accomplish, what happens if we do, what happens if we do not shut down? And how can we come together to make sure that despite the headwinds, we are going to accomplish whatever we can. And I will say a key for this is it’s not just the priorities that we need to accomplish, but it’s also how do we, as leaders, implant short-term wins, as we like to call them at Kotter. So what are some small things to show that we’ve accomplished something? We’ve been successful. No matter how big or small, it does not matter, but it’s something that you can celebrate around and rally around to get people energized. So it’s not just a heavy weight of a continual backlog, but saying we did something and we’re making progress.

Terry Gerton  What might be one or two things that a team leader or a mid-level manager could actually do to get their team refocused on the why, on the priorities, on the outcomes? Should they have a potluck? Should they like have a team day? What are some things that you recommend, actual steps?

Laurin Parthemos What I would say is it’s very team dependent, to be quite honest with you, because you could say, let’s do a pizza party. And that will resonate so well with some groups, and others will see it as tone-deaf in a way, saying, that’s great that there’s food here, but do you not see what’s happening around us? And so I would say, first and foremost, as you’re thinking about the state that individuals are in, it’s that heavy survive of freeze, likely. And it’s making sure that as you think through what state these individuals are in, you’re going on a listening tour, so to speak, to figure out what they actually need and want and then respond in kind to the culture of that particular group. So it very much could be a potluck. It could be that part of your planning as you’re thinking about going into January, you know your team will have heavy amounts of furloughs. And realistically speaking, the median federal employee only has about a week of pay in their bank account. So is it that we know this team is going to be furloughed? So let’s think about meal trains. Let’s think about how we can support each other in ways that are not just from a work perspective, but from a human element, because we are here for a mission. You’re not joining the federal service to become the most rich and famous. You’re doing it because you believe in the cause. So come together around that cause and find ways to truly support your people in the ways that you’ve find that they need to be supported as a leader.

Terry Gerton  I’ve been speaking with Laurin Parthemos. She’s a principal and public sector lead at Kotter. Laurin, thanks so much for grounding us back in what’s really important. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. We’ll post this interview at federal newsnetwork.com slash Federal Drive. Listen to the Federal Drive on your schedule and on your device. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast.

 

The post Federal leaders face the challenge of restoring stability and agency performance after months of workforce disruption first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Federal News Network

Interview transcript

Terry Gerton We’re going to talk about the National Defense Authorization Act. It’s in its final stages. It’s not a short read, 3100 pages. But there’s a lot of particular detail in there, especially around changes to cost and pricing rules. Start kind of at the headline level. What’s the big news that you want people to know?

Zach Prince Sure. So we’re still digesting this. So, you know, I wanna caveat that, you know, it is 3,100 pages and there’s a lot here, and it might not become final. But I think Congress has been listening while industry over the past many years has been saying that they’re reluctant to invest too heavily in defense when Congress makes programs subject to annual appropriations that might, for seemingly no apparent reason, go away after major investments have been made, when huge regulatory burdens can get imposed, like the cost accounting standards, which deviate substantially from generally accepted accounting principles or GAP, and things like certified cost of pricing data are required and just a slew of regulatory requirements that come with doing business with the government. These are real burdens to industry and real burdens to investors thinking about getting involved in the space. So listening to all of that, Congress took quite a bit of action in this NDAA.

Terry Gerton Let’s talk about some of those. You mentioned cost accounting standards. One of the biggest shifts is bumping that threshold from $50 million to $100 million. Who does that help? And what kind of burden does it remove?

Zach Prince So just as a bit of background, the cost accounting standards are accounting rules that apply to certain contractors, contractors that have contracts over size thresholds when otherwise exemptions don’t apply. They were imposed starting in the late ’60s, an effort spearheaded by the late Admiral Rickover and this I think mistaken belief that contractors were using accounting practices to get something over on the taxpayer. And so all these rules mostly came into effect in the ’70s and have stayed essentially the exact same since then, with some slight tweaks around the edges. But they deviate substantially from the accounting practices that most companies would otherwise have implemented. So they require really sweeping shifts in the way that you do a lot of your basic accounting as a company, and they apply on a contract by contract basis. So you might only have one or two contracts that are subject to CAS as opposed to your general gap rules. But because it’s very challenging to have two different sets of books and records, you might just have to implement these very annoying onerous rules across your entire organization, at least across your segment. I don’t want to go too far into the weeds. There’s a lot of complication here. It’s a burden and It doesn’t apply to small businesses, but it does apply to quite a lot of companies that would have large government contracts. And companies don’t want to trigger the threshold that gets them into CAS-covered contract performance because of the burden.

Terry Gerton And so by raising it to a $100 million, more folks will not have to worry about that conversion, right?

Zach Prince Yeah, that’s right. But the — I’d say the bigger item here that’s kind of buried, and if you look at the congressional report that they issued from the conference, it kind of ignores this, even though I think it’s a much bigger deal. It raises the exemption floor. So there are two different types of CAS coverage. There’s modified CAS coverage and there’s full CAS coverage. The full is the much more onerous one, but a contract is entirely exempt from CAS, full and modified if it’s below certain dollar threshold. So the $100 million, formerly $50 million, that’s for full CAS. But a contract is totally exempt from CAS no matter what under the previous rules, if it was below $2 million or $2.5 Million, with the threshold changed. Now they’re raising that to $35 million. So huge, huge difference. And it makes a difference not just for modified CAS, but also for full CAS, because full CAS coverage is triggered by either a single contract of $100 million or greater, or net $100 million in the prior cost accounting period. So if you had $200 million in contracts in the prior year, none of which exceeded $35 million under this new regime, you still are not going to have a contract subject to full CAS. So I don’t know what the numbers exactly are in terms of impacted contractors, but I have to imagine that this is gonna exempt. A whole slew of contracts that previously would have been subject to CAS.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Zach Prince. He’s a partner at Haynes Boone. So some people may be wiping their brow and thinking they’re gonna get a reprieve here. But Congress has asked for a report on how many of these changes are gonna play out. What would success look like? What do you think they’re hoping the impact of some of these changes will be?

Zach Prince So I think that they’re hoping this is going to spur greater investment, particularly by successful commercial technology companies and by successful investors in the defense space and particularly cutting edge defense tech. If you look at the multi-year appropriation provisions that are part of this NDAA, I mean they touch on some of the really interesting and important areas for advancement, like material composition issues, hypersonics, things along those lines, autonomous programs of various sorts, that we really are concerned that we could lose an edge to competitors overseas and that there needs to be substantial private sector money to go into because there needs to be huge scientific breakthroughs and that stuff’s costly.

Terry Gerton Tell us a little bit more about the multi year provision because you mentioned up front that companies are reluctant to invest if they’re gonna be on an annual appropriation cycle.

Zach Prince Yeah, and we’ll see how some of this plays out. But I think we all are familiar with major defense programs over the years that have been abruptly cut back for various reasons. But if you look at the Zumwalt class destroyer, for example, where there was a huge buy that was initially authorized and that was then cut back, which of course means that suddenly the R and D costs that were distributed over, say 20 ships, are now bunched into three or four. And now the program looks like it costs way more than initially was planned on a ship by ship basis, which technically is true, but is not really true overall and it results in scrutiny and program cancelation. So yeah, I think from my experience talking to folks in the private sector, they hear about programs like that where there’ve been huge investments that things are then abruptly cut, and they don’t want to get involved in the ecosystem that has those problems. And they know that, especially recently, when we’ve got CR after CR, you can’t rely on Congress necessarily to provide funding in a timely fashion, even for pretty important programs.

Terry Gerton There’s another newsy bit in here. You and I talk quite a bit about contract protests. There’s a provision that allows DoD to withhold payments during protests. Spin that out for us a bit.

Zach Prince Yeah, this is one that I’ve been watching pretty closely for a while, and we’ll see how it plays out, but there’s been a concern I continue to maintain that this concern is not supported by the data, but concern that incumbent contractors will protest at GAO, which has a mandatory stay that kicks in, in order to take advantage of a bridge contract that might be issued. Then the government says, Okay, well, you’ve lost the contract, but you’re still doing the work, we need the work to continue. We can’t go ahead and override the stay without some scrutiny. So we’ll just give you a 100-day bridge contract while this plays out. You’ll get whatever revenues you’re gonna get from that period, and continue. You know, I do think that this is a non-issue. it ignores the fact that protests are very expensive. The revenues you might get over a 100-day period are really not particularly significant in the grand scheme of things, especially when you’re irritating your customer. The data don’t show that this is abused very much, other than the idea that incumbents do protest more, but they also win more, which suggests that they’re in a better position to know when their problems in a procurement. But set all that aside, DOD in prior years has said, Well, Congress, we can’t require disgorgement of profits for these bridge contracts, which is what Congress had considered before as something that might remedy the situation because we don’t track the data. How do you calculate what a profit is for this period of time? So in response, Congress has come back and said, okay, so we’re just going to authorize contracting officers to withhold payments, period, under these bridge contracts up to 5 percent of total amounts that would be owed, and that those amounts up to that 5 percent threshold, which I think they established because it’s a rough order of magnitude of what profits might be, that could be deemed forfeit if there’s a decision ultimately that the protest lacked any legal or factual basis. So there are a lot of terms here that are gonna need careful definition and a lot of uncertainty of who’s implementing this, how you’ll challenge it, where you’ll challenge it. I mean, I think that this is a can of worms to address a problem that’s not real, but nonetheless, this is this is what Congress ended up doing.

The post New rules in the NDAA aim to cut red tape in defense contracting—but will they deliver? first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Federal News Network

Early in the Trump administration, the Department of Government Efficiency directed the General Services Administration to cancel hundreds of leases for governmentwide office space.

GSA officials say they successfully terminated hundreds of leases this year, but far fewer than goals set by DOGE.

The latest data from the Government Accountability Office shows GSA carried out 260 lease terminations, saving about $112 million in annual costs. GAO’s findings match up with data available on DOGE’s website. Several sources, including employees at GSA’s Public Buildings Service, told Federal News Network that overall, the agency finalized about 30% of the approximately 900 lease terminations it sent to landlords earlier this year.

GSA began its mass termination of governmentwide leases in the early days of the Trump administration. But by March, the agency began walking back hundreds of those lease terminations, after officials discovered that closing down these offices would impact public-facing benefits and services.

These updated figures come at a time when government officials are taking stock of DOGE’s impact, and whether agencies came close to achieving the Trump administration’s government efficiency goals.

Former DOGE leader Elon Musk told former DOGE spokeswoman Katie Miller in a recent interview that DOGE’s cost-cutting efforts were “somewhat successful,” but said he wouldn’t do it over again.

“We were a little bit successful. We were somewhat successful,” he told Miller.

Andrew Heller, GSA’s acting Public Buildings Service Commissioner, told members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee that the agency disposed of 90 properties owned by the federal government in fiscal 2025, eliminating 3 million square feet from the government’s real estate portfolio.

Heller told lawmakers that GSA has identified another 45 properties for “accelerated” disposal. But GSA hasn’t updated its list of properties since May.

“The government no longer needs, nor can it afford to maintain the amount of real estate it currently owns. With your support and with the necessary resources, GSA is well-positioned to right-size the portfolio to support this shared goal,” Heller said at a public buildings subcommittee hearing.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers praised GSA for its cost-cutting efforts, but agreed it still faces major work in shrinking the federal government’s massive real estate portfolio.

“That’s an achievement, but there was also significant chaos and mixed messaging surrounding the disposal of buildings and the termination of leases,” Committee Ranking Member Rick Larsen (D-Wash.) said at Thursday’s hearing.

Subcommittee Ranking Member Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.) called DOGE a “textbook example of what happens when you chase cuts without understanding value.”

“It drove federal property decisions at a speed and scale that outran planning operational needs and basic due diligence. Agencies were told to vacate buildings before replacement space was ready. These decisions were driven by targets and assumptions, not by reliable, validated information about how federal space was being used or which functions depended on it,” Stanton said.

Subcommittee Chairman Scott Perry (R-Pa.) said GSA is “taking aggressive action to reduce costs,” but said GSA needs to address its growing maintenance backlog.

“Shaving off excess, however, will not unilaterally rectify the numerous challenges we face in federal property, as the maintenance of the buildings is becoming increasingly costly to keep up,” he said.

Under the USE IT Act that former President Joe Biden signed into law at the end of his term, all agencies, starting in January 2026, must be able to show that their buildings meet at least a 60% utilization rate, or come up with plans to relocate. Next month, GSA and the Office of Management and Budget will submit plans to consolidate federal agency headquarters in the national capital area to meet the minimum 60% building occupancy rate target.

The Trump administration has already used this benchmark as justification for moving the Department of Housing and Urban Development out of its headquarters, and moving HUD employees to the National Science Foundation headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia.

More broadly, GSA is trying to move more agencies to leased office space, because the agency faces a multi-billion-dollar maintenance and repair backlog on buildings it owns.

Michael Capuano, a member of the Public Buildings Reform Board, which advises GSA on underutilized federal properties it should sell, told the subcommittee that about $50 billion is needed to address a backlog of deferred maintenance and repairs in federal buildings. GSA currently receives about $600 million annually to address those needs. Given those spending levels, Capuano said GSA’s portfolio would have to shrink by about 80% to keep up with its maintenance backlog.

“Everyone realizes this is unrealistic and undesirable,” he said.

Capuano said shifting agencies out of government-owned buildings and into leased office space “does solve many problems.” Agencies, he said, can more easily expand or shrink the amount of office space they need with leased space, and “taxpayers are not forced to pay for empty space that needs maintenance.”

GSA is asking Congress for $365 million for an “optimization” fund that would help it dispose of more underperforming buildings.

“We need to get access to this funding to make some of these improvements happen,” Heller said.

GAO added federal real estate to its list of high-risk federal programs this year, citing a ballooning backlog of maintenance and repair needs. According to GAO, the backlog more than doubled between fiscal 2017 and 2024, from $170 billion to $340 billion.

“Right-sizing the federal government’s real property holdings is long overdue,” Heather Krause, GAO’s manager director of physical infrastructure, told lawmakers.

GSA is trying to manage its governmentwide real estate portfolio with a smaller workforce.  The agency started this year with more than 5,600 employees, but cut its workforce by about 45% under the Trump administration. Heller said GSA rescinded layoffs for about 400 PBS employees, and that almost 300 employees agreed to return to work. He told lawmakers the agency is taking a closer look to see if there are any “additional gaps in our workforce.”

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said there are some federal buildings in D.C. that GSA should offload, but said the agency “has not been coordinating closely enough with D.C. on the disposal of federal buildings.”

“These disposals would save the federal government money, generate tax revenue for D.C., increase housing supply and lead to new mixed-use neighborhoods,” Norton said. “I am deeply concerned that the Trump administration has not developed a plan to dispose of federal buildings in D.C. in a manner that benefits both federal taxpayers and D.C.”

Capuano said that incomplete data makes it harder for the board to identify underutilized federal buildings. GAO reported in 2020 that 67% of addresses in the Federal Real Property Profile were incorrectly formatted or incomplete.

“None of us are in favor of leaving empty buildings in the portfolio. However, it is difficult to locate them,” he said.

The PBRB is set to disband in December 2026. Capuano recommended that Congress either reauthorize the board to continue its work, or pass legislation to create a similar entity, “if for no other reason, to keep the other agencies’ feet to the fire.”

The post GSA terminated hundreds of federal office leases, but far less than DOGE targets first appeared on Federal News Network.

© AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File