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

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