Interview transcript

Terry Gerton There’s been a lot of talk lately, certainly from lawmakers, from senior military leaders about the topic of lawful and unlawful orders. Describe the current situation from your perspective.

Frank Rosenblatt Well, military members have special license to use violence in armed conflict but this license is not unrestrained. Otherwise, we would just have mobs working. So a professional armed force really depends on discipline, and a key ingredient of discipline is obedience. So military members, have to follow orders. If you don’t like what your boss says at Starbucks, then they can fire you, but they can’t prosecute you. It’s different in the military. There are consequences if you don’t obey what your superiors tell you to do. But at the same time, this doesn’t work like they tried to do at Nuremberg, where I was just following orders. We do not want or expect our military members to unthinkingly obey, so orders are presumptively lawful that they receive, but they also have a duty to disobey any orders that are manifestly unlawful.

Terry Gerton That can be a tricky situation in execution. Describe for me or define for me what makes an order lawful or unlawful.

Frank Rosenblatt Well, the standard of manifestly [unlawful] is that an ordinary person of reasonable sense and understanding would know right away, I’m just not allowed to do this. And the classic example people think about is the My Lai massacre when Capt. Medina supposedly told his lieutenant, Calley, go clear the enemy out of there. Lt. Calley then did his translation of this and said, kill everyone. And the soldiers who worked for Calley should have known. I think it’s helpful to look beyond the Calley example because I think the reality of orders is more complex. There’s a story about a dog handler at Abu Ghraib. He was trained in the use of the military working dog, but he was told by his superiors when he worked at the prison, we need you to derogate from your training a little bit. We want you to use these dogs to help us with interrogations and to scare the prisoners. And so he thought, sure, I’ll go ahead and do this because my superiors are telling him to. It’s questionable whether everyone in that situation would have said, I know this is wrong. But looking years later, the military court looked and said, nope, you shouldn’t have obeyed that order. It’s manifestly unlawful.

Terry Gerton So how does that differ from a personal disagreement? I don’t think that’s the right answer, but maybe it’s lawful, maybe it is not. How does a service member decide?

Frank Rosenblatt We do see this. Matters of conscience, religious belief, or politics are no excuse. You must follow the orders even if you don’t like the president, even if you find the mission to be wrong or even distasteful. We’re seeing a lot of this because, Terry, I work with an organization called The Orders Project. It’s ordersproject.com. It is part of our national institute. And we receive calls from people who have questions about their orders. And here we see the spectrum. People say, what if I’m asked to do this? Or I’m told that we’re going to Chicago. What should I do? And so the National Guard deployments are very interesting because the legal status of them changes by the day. We just saw a new decision on the National Guard deployments in Los Angeles. So let’s say we get a call from someone who says, I’m being told that I’m going to deploy to Chicago in a couple months. It would take a crystal ball, not legal analysis, to say that’s going to be lawful or unlawful. We just don’t know how the courts will decide. So in that hypothetical, we would say you do need to plan and go on this mission unless you have an opportunity to not re-enlist. That is something that you presumptively will have to do, even if deploying to Chicago wasn’t the reason why you decided to join the military.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Professor Frank Rosenblatt from the Mississippi College School of Law. He’s a recognized expert in military justice, a former U.S. Army JAG officer, and president of the National Institute for Military Justice. Frank, you were talking there about a situation where a service member has some lead time between what they’re being told they’re going to have to do and actually having to go do it. In some of these operations, though, they’re making decisions in real time. So what should folks be thinking about? You know, if they get an order to fire and they have seconds to decide whether to do that or not.

Frank Rosenblatt This is really happening. And I’ll tell you one scenario that people talk about that’s based on reality. Let’s say a senior elected official says, I want you to shoot protesters in the legs. Then you would think and know, OK, that’s not lawful. But it’s not as easy as that. Because if you say, sir, that’s  unlawful, that might just pull you out of the picture and not be part of more consequential decisions. So that person does not have time to call a lawyer. And it’s really a test of their own judgment and mettle. What we would not expect would be direct compliance with that order. We think maybe we could seek clarification or interpret this in a way and give guidance to subordinates that excises that illegal element. You could take that and then translate that as we need to demonstrate our presence. We need to comply with the law. In other words, I’m saying that there are times when military members should disobey orders.

Terry Gerton Typically, it’s going to be a senior official who’s making the decision. We don’t necessarily rely on the junior operator to make this call in live action. But if they do refuse an order that later turns out to be lawful, or they execute an order that later turned out to unlawful, what are the repercussions?

Frank Rosenblatt This is why it’s so tricky. It’s really a high wire act that we’re asking our military members to do. We are putting them in legal jeopardy when we are boundary pushing in how we do military operations. On the one hand, if you push back on something and you don’t comply, and it turns out that was a lawful order, then you’re going to face consequences for that disobedience. Everything from administrative sanctions to being removed from your job, possibly even a court-martial. But if you do something that you find out later is unlawful, you can also be punished for that.

Terry Gerton So what is the role of the Orders Project in helping to clarify this really complicated conversation?

Frank Rosenblatt This topic obviously has received a lot of nationwide attention lately, and what that means is there are a lot voices out there that represent different religious beliefs, political beliefs, and they’re saying is we want to help soldiers. Sometimes they’re urging disobedience. That’s not what we do. What we’re trying to do is, you know, the National Institute, we’ve been around since 1991, we’re a collection of military law experts, and we want there to be some sort of source that is authenticated that military members know that when I call this, I’m going to get it straight. I’m gonna hear from somebody who, you know, thumbs through the judge’s bench book, the manual for courts martial, and can actually tell me and give me sound legal advice that’s actually based in military law and not based on, you know, some other agenda.

Terry Gerton I think we haven’t heard the end of this conversation, we’re going to continue to follow through on it. So are there reforms or education efforts that you would suggest that could help military service members, political appointees better understand the issues that are at stake here and make the right call from the beginning.

Frank Rosenblatt What I would like to emphasize is, you know, I’m a law professor and a former judge advocate, but I actually want to de-emphasize the role of lawyers in this. I think that the issues with orders come when we ask people on the fly to do something that they haven’t had the time to think through, rehearse, and train upon. I think these issues, Terry, of lawful and unlawful orders come down to if it’s not a legal briefing that’s going to solve everyone’s questions. But when they can practice and build their expertise and competence and see where the boundaries are of their behavior. Every time our military goes to do something, whether that’s operating in cities in Iraq or now in these boat strikes in the Caribbean, if we have the chance to practice this and work through contingencies, then our military members will be emboldened, they’ll be more confident, they’ll know exactly what the right and left limits are.

Terry Gerton It feels like the military is being asked to push a lot of boundaries right now. Would you say from your perspective, we’ve been in situations like this before? Are there lessons we can learn from the past that would help us better define the space right now?

Frank Rosenblatt When we think back to 9/11, for example, there was a strong demand to immediately begin military operations. And there wasn’t really a lot of chance to rehearse this and to know exactly what we were doing and to integrate all of the different perspectives. But I do think what’s important in this is that we have a process. At every military operational command, there are staff officers who each bring a different level of expertise. There are commanders who are trained. If we let them function, let them do their jobs, and we do this without trying to rush people or without political interference. Now sometimes we have to respond to emergencies and there isn’t that time. But we should trust and we should have a lot of confidence in our military members and our commanders. They want to do the right thing. Let’s give them the tools and the opportunity and they won’t let us down.

Terry Gerton Where do you hope this current discussion of lawful and unlawful orders takes us? What do you think the outcome will be?

Frank Rosenblatt In some sense, the temperature has been awful hot on this, and it’s not really, I think, wise for this to be a political issue. And actually, if you listen to Republicans and Democrats, they’re largely saying the same message about this, but they’re not trusting the motives of each other. But maybe the bright side of this, the opportunity here, is the attention on this will give a greater appreciation for the difficulty that we put military members in when we rush them to do things, and when we are really pushing the limits of what we have done before, whether that’s boat strikes in the Caribbean or National Guard deployments in cities.

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Interview transcript

Terry Gerton We touched base with NobleReach back in the summer. How is the program going and what are you learning from your first placements?

Arun Gupta It’s a great question, Terry. We’ve now had two cohorts, one that’s gone through and completed the program and one, second one that we’ve launched. We just had the second one back for their first quarterly session  after being placed. And so let me give a little bit of context. the first one was entirely federal. So they were all in federal agencies across eight federal agencies, including Space Force, Navy, Commerce, CISA, HUD, FDA. And then the ones in our second cohort, as I talk about them, we’ve expanded into state and local as well. So they’re across 10 states. In the first one we had about 20, in the second one we have about 30. So in that context, with the ones that have gone through it, the first ones and have completed the program, I will say one can have a theory on the case about how it can change people’s lives, how it could change their perspective. It’s another thing to see it in action. You know, what we learned was the following. Look, this first cohort was there during a transition between administrations. So they started in the previous administration and obviously ended in this one. And what they found is that they were welcomed by both. They actually visited the White House with both administrations, and that’s a subtle but powerful thing to see, feel, and hear. That the idea of tech talent coming into government is not a political thing, it’s something that … is what’s good for the country. Second, I think what they all saw as well is that the kind of work and the types of problems that they were getting to work on were far more interesting and stimulating than when they looked at many of their peers at some of the more traditional kind of coming out of school jobs. So much so that when we talked to them after the cohort about how many of you want to stay in public service, over 80% of them were like, you know, they would to continue in public service in some capacity. So what we saw with this group is, you know, point one is that both administrations really welcomed them in the work that they were doing. Second, what they saw was the types of problems that they’re getting to work on were far more interesting than what they would see with their peers that are in the more traditional jobs, so much so that 80% of them continue wanting to stay in public service in the near term. Third, what we really saw with them as well was a sense of community. The importance of not just, you know, I think if each one had gone into their own agency on their own, it would have been a[n] okay experience. What made it really transformative was being part of a larger community as well, so that they can compare notes as to like, well, what’s Space Force doing versus Navy? And take those learnings back into the office. And I think that’s an important piece of it. Fourth, the mentorship that they got was greatly appreciated. And they talked about that and they talked about it in the context of not only mentors that were in public service, but a lot of the mentors that we assigned them or aligned them with had careers in both public and private. And I think that was really important, Terry, because I think they really noticed and saw that they’re not making a decision for life, but these are experiences that they are having and how they can benefit them over the course of their journey. Again, a very subtle but important aspect of like how we change the perception of coming into public services, not being something that you’re having to commit to for 30 years, but something that can be part of the fabric of your career journey.

Terry Gerton So you’ve talked to us a little bit about how the participants felt and what they learned. What kind of feedback did you get from the agencies? And can you talk a little more about some of the specific projects that your first and second cohorts are working on?

Arun Gupta Yeah, you know, look, I can give you the high-level kind of  work that they did. You know, we actually do a net promoter score. And so we take it seriously to see like, how are the agencies looking at what we’re doing? And in that context, you now, they were off the charts and all the agencies came back very strong with what they really appreciated was being done with the work that was being. But more importantly, not only with their capability but with their attitude. And, you know, there’s an interesting anecdote … with a couple of people in Space Force. The problem their team was trying to address had been addressed at Navy. And the team at Space Force didn’t have contacts at the Navy, believe it or not. But our scholar, you know, knew one of our scholars is at the Navy and reached out to him. And they then connected and then, you know, weeks later you had those two groups collaborating on a somewhat meaningful project. And I say that because, you know, with that, you can create a level of collaboration that is an unintended benefit to what happens. And that’s what we saw. Justin Fannelli, who’s over at the Navy and the CTO there — he and I just did a panel with them at NDIA to their board. And we had one of our scholars there that worked with them and, you know, the work that he was getting to do and the fact that, you know, Justin now takes the scholar to all his AI meetings, right? You know, sitting down with three star generals and talking to them about what they’re doing to the point where, you know, other groups and agencies go like, how do I get one of them? Right. And when I say one of them, it’s not only, again, someone that’s versant and capable in technology and AI, but it’s also someone that has this sense of mission and purpose, and is looking to marry that with that capability and curiosity, right. And so they can ask some of the more obvious questions and that could be curious around like … Why do we do things this way? You know, which can be very simple and very basic, but at the same time can be profound when you can say like, oh, if we used AI, we don’t need, we could do it this way, right? And so it’s beyond even just the projects. It’s inculcating a different way of thinking.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Arun Gupta, he’s CEO of NobleReach. The problems that you’re talking about are things that the OPM director, Scott Cooper, has himself spoken about recently, hiring more tech talent, making it easier to move between private sector and public sector and back again. How is NobleReach in this scholar program working with OPM to really tackle some of the institutional barriers that make that mobility hard?

Arun Gupta That was a great question. And look, we’ve … been collaborating with Scott and his team and think highly of the way that they’re thinking about, you know, the talent issue and how we can support that. And, you know, what we’ve seen is that there’s an alignment around a vision that we have to change the narrative that people need to think about coming into government for, you know, 30 years, but they can come in for two to three, much like we have Teach for America and have a profound impact not only on them but then on the organization as well. And so you know ways that we’re collaborating and talking about things is just sharing the learnings that we’ve seen, you know, because we’ve had the benefit now of two years of being out there with programs seeing what works for the students. You know, like what it meant, the types of mentors, even not even just having mentors but which ones work, which ones resonate, right? What do you need to see in the agencies? You need a city that makes an experience a really meaningful one for the students. You know, we call it the scaffolding. But what is the scaffold? It’s not only connecting them to the job, but it’s supporting them while they’re there. And how do we build that community? A big lever for us here is that it’s not about a transactional recruiting connection to a young professional to a job. But it’s building a broader community of what we call dual citizens, public-private sector citizens. Right, people that have had experience in both the public and the private sector, that can speak the language of both, that have, you know, understand the culture of both. But then over time have networks in both. And thereby we rebuild trust because they’re trusted in both areas. And so I think, you now, those are various ways that we’re collaborating with Scott. You know, being able to identify which agencies can benefit from tech talent today, the kinds of projects that we can leverage and I think the interesting thing is, and he’s been a great partner here is, people assume that the bottleneck is getting young professionals to come in and it’s not what we’ve seen in our numbers as we’ve been recruiting is that young professionals want to serve, they want to be doing something meaningful right now. I think there’s a lot of change taking place in society, geopolitical, technological, environmental. And this is a group that’s lived through COVID. And I think when you have that kind of change and the ground feels unsettled, you don’t focus as much on yourself, but you reach out to others for stability. And I that’s what’s happening. And so in that context, I think where Scott and his team can also be helpful is helping us identify the agencies. Because right now we’re doing that relationship by relationship, but being able to more broadly go to agencies and saying, You know, look, we really think this is important.

Terry Gerton So what’s next for NobleReach? You’re talking about cohorts in the numbers around 20 or 30. Do you see a massive scaling up to classes of 100 or 150? New agencies, new exposure? What’s next?

Arun Gupta Yes and yes, Terry. You know, I think, look, our North Star has always been to scale. Our end game isn’t to have 20 or 30, which is nothing wrong with that. I just think if we want to have impact, which is what we’re trying to optimize on, scale’s important. So, you know, I think in this upcoming year, we’re looking at hundreds, a couple hundred, and that includes federal, state, and local, and we’re seeing a level of broader interest around that. You know, our goal is to continue to scale to multiple hundreds, you know, get to a thousand, and, you know, really build because I think that’s where you start to change the social narrative as well, Terry. Because there’s a broader objective here. And that is to start, you know, restoring a level of respect again, for going and serving in public service, as Wendy Kopp would say as well. Like, having students do that in the earlier part of their career has a force multiplier impact on the kinds of careers they have and the impact they have over the rest of their career. And I think we’re at that interesting inflection point where we have the potential to shift — you know, we use this term internally, like shift from why to wow. And what I mean by that is rather than people asking, when you go, say you’re going into government to do work in AI, going like, why would you do that when you can do all these other things? They go, wow, you got selected to do that, right? And it’s that initial reaction by your peers that I think starts to set a tone. And I think with the folks that we’re chatting with, partners that believe in the same thing, and we’re seeing that with governors, we’re seen that with agency heads, you see that with someone like Scott, leadership at OPM, Michael Kratios at OSTP, that there’s a real desire to kind of like get young folks energized about this, and so that’s what we’re looking to do, and I think that the potential’s there.

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Interview transcript

Terry Gerton You have a recent article that warns about air traffic chaos, especially related to the shutdown that we saw in November. And once again, air traffic control was sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back. What were the key pain points that you saw?

Chris Edwards Well, when the federal government doesn’t decide on its annual budget and the appropriations process, sometimes we get a government shutdown, as most of your listeners know. And sometimes when shutdowns happen, it affects the air traffic control system because the air-traffic control system is run as part of the Department of Transportation, as kind of a regular bureaucracy. And so we’ve seen this sorts of interruptions on air traffic and control in previous shutdowns 2013 and 2018. And the recent one where the government shut down for a month and millions of American airline passengers were delayed and had their flights canceled.

Terry Gerton The Department of Transportation is now offering $10,000 bonuses to air traffic controllers who had perfect attendance. Is pay the key issue here?

Chris Edwards No, I think the problem is that the funding stream of our air traffic control system is the federal government budget. And I’ve written extensively about how other countries such as Canada and the U.K. Have taken their air traffic controls system and moved it out of the regular government budget and given it a dedicated funding stream. So in Canada, they set up a non-profit corporation. They put their air traffic controllers in there, and it’s funded separately by fees on airlines and airport landings. So the stream is insulated from political battles that may happen. Back in 2016, the House Transportation Committee here in the United States passed out a bill of, out a committee that would sort of set up a Canadian-style system where we’d set a non-profit corporate entity. We’d put the air traffic control in there, and we would fund that system separately from the regular government budget.

Terry Gerton That sounds similar to the way Amtrak is run, and they’ve certainly had their funding challenges there. How would it work differently for air traffic control?

Chris Edwards So Amtrak is still reliant on the federal government for money for capital investment. The way the Canadians and the British have set up their systems is that they are completely independently funded for both the operating and the capital purposes. So the Canadian and British air traffic control systems are not subsidized, which is the way I think it should be because aviation is an industry like any other. There’s no reason why users shouldn’t pay for services. Air traffic control is a service and I think that the cost should ultimately land on people who use the air traffic system.

Terry Gerton You mentioned capital investment there. Certainly, the FAA and Department of Transportation have spent, let’s say, tens of billions of dollars trying to modernize the next-gen air traffic control. And they haven’t been very successful yet. All of those funds would be passed on to passengers, right, airport passengers? How would we get enough capital investment to really move forward in those critical functionalities?

Chris Edwards So when you move the system to the private sector, like on the non-profit system, like in Canada, the system, of course, raises money through fees, as we talked about, but can also issue bonds to raise money for capital, just like private companies do. And that system has worked really well in Canada and Britain. In fact, both Canada and Britain, in some ways, their technology is more advanced than ours on air traffic control. You touched on the next gen system. As some listeners may know, the Government Accountability Office, the inspector general for the DOT has been complaining about FAA’s poor performance on its capital upgrades for years and years in fact for over two decades now there’s a long series of government reports criticizing the FAA For the excessive bureaucracy or the risk aversion. You know, they’re not getting the job done in terms of adding the advanced technology we need in our air traffic control system.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Chris Edwards. He occupies the Kiltz Family Chair in Fiscal Studies at the Cato Institute. I wanna explore a couple of other things about privatization with you because you’ve also made the argument that the TSA screening function should be moved out of government funding. Talk us through that logic.

Chris Edwards So the logic there again is, is partly that, I’d like to get the politicians and their micromanagement out of some of these functions where we can. I mean, to go back to the air traffic controllers for a minute, the Washington Post had a nice story a few weeks ago about how we only have one training academy for air traffic, controllers, and we have a short and a shortage now on a lot of air traffic control facilities. This is Partly because Congress hasn’t allowed the creation of an additional training academy for traffic controllers it seems to be that’s the sort of micro that the problematic micromanagement you get when congress tries to control these sort of functions. With airport screening the idea is you decentralize the screening to individual airports, you have the Department of Transportation do safety oversight like they like they do now but the actual screening would be controlled by airports. That would give airports more flexibility to meet the sort of individual demands and unique demands the airports face. And we wouldn’t get sort of system-wide problems. We wouldn’t these system- wide mistakes. We’d get different experiences in the airports. The airports could learn from each other. The way Canada does it is they contract out their services to big expert security agencies. And many European countries do this too. The British do this. And that system works well also.

Terry Gerton What does the airline industry have to say about these proposals to privatize?

Chris Edwards Well, back in 2016, the airlines, all of them, except Delta actually supported the privatization plan passed through the House Transportation Committee. So Delta was the outlier there. Most airlines were on board with privatization back then. I think that the airlines should rethink now that we’ve had another government shutdown. I worry that the budget battles in Washington are going to get bigger and nastier. Unfortunately, in coming years, because deficits and debt are going to keep growing, there’s going to be a lot of pressure to cut spending. So I think we need to — the airlines, the air traffic controllers union and others, the other stakeholders need to — rethink the funding for air traffic control because I think the budget battles are going to get worse in Washington.

Terry Gerton So if the airlines support privatization, what are the biggest political obstacles that you see that are keeping it from happening?

Chris Edwards Well, unfortunately in the American political system, you only sort of need, you know, one sort of veto point and a whole reform plan can go down. So back in 2016, the House Transportation Committee passes the reform bill through, but the Senate Transportation Committee wasn’t too excited about it. Back then President Trump in his first term supported the plan. His transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, supported it. And the air traffic controllers union supported this privatization back in 2016 as well because, again, they’re concerned about stable funding. And they looked at the Canadian system and they could see that it works very well. Indeed, back then in 2016, members of Congress went up to Canada, looked at this system and so did our air traffic controllers union. They all thought it worked very well and looked good, and that was sort of the basis for that reform bill. Today, I think we’ve had another government shutdown. There was very damaging. Millions of passengers were inconvenienced. The economy lost money from the shutdown. I think this is time, it’s time now for Congress to rethink the structure of our air traffic control system.

Terry Gerton Air traffic control is really a global industry. I mean, you get on a plane in Dallas and you fly to Frankfurt or in Seattle and you flight to Beijing. What are our international partners in air traffic control saying about the U.S. System and how they would like it to be improved?

Chris Edwards Well, the U.S. System, you know, works well. I don’t think we’re at the leading edge of technology anymore, but it does work well. We have a giant system, but I worry about the future. The skies are getting more crowded all the time. Aviation demand is going up. The skies you’re getting more congested. Our technology is falling behind. We hear that from the GAO consistently year after year. So we’re not at the crunch point yet, but I worry. We’ve got to invest more and move that technology ahead to make progress. I mean, just to give you one example on that, the U.K. And Canada are moving ahead with what are called remote towers. These are, rather than the traditional air towers you see at airports where you have the controllers up top looking at the airfields. Visually the new idea is you put a bunch of sort of fancy technology and cameras with different sort of visual wavelengths looking at airports and you have the controllers looking at the runways on big screens with all kinds of advanced technology. These systems save money and they’re safer. And London City Airport now has a system like this in place and Canada’s moving ahead with this as well. That’s the type of technology where the FAA has been really hesitant. I think because it’s a government agency, frankly, it’s a little too risk-averse. So I think by opening up air traffic control, we get more entrepreneurs in and more innovation. And just the last point on that is, we’ve seen this with NASA or the space agency, that by opening a little bit and letting entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos get in there with new ideas, new ways of doing things, I think it’s been very beneficial for America’s space agency. So I like that same sort of innovation in air traffic control.

The post What reforms can fix our fragile air traffic control system? first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Getty Images/iStockphoto/gorodenkoff

What happens if you let teens craft the rules that dictate their use of phones at school? You get policy ideas with a nuanced, holistic perspective that rival those being officially issued by the adults in leadership.

The University of Washington’s Youth Advisory Board, a group of approximately 20 teens from Seattle-area schools, recently published its first memo tackling this contentious issue. The memo weighs the pros and cons of phone bans and offers recommendations on how schools should draft and communicate their policies.

“The whole point of the memo was to bring teen experiences into real policy conversations,” said Jaden Hong, a sophomore at Eastlake High School and board participant. “I think it matters that our ideas get into the hands of the principals, district leaders and even state-level decision makers or legislators who are actively shaping phone and tech rules.”

The Youth Advisory Board’s memo was informed by a UW study and questionnaires on the impacts of phone rules at middle and high schools in Washington. The regulations ranged from all-day bans to restrictions during lunch and passing periods. The board’s key suggestions for high school policies include:

• Compromise: Preferred policies allow phone use during breaks between classes and lunch, but not during academic time, as opposed to all-day bans.
• Reframing: Use neutral language around the policy, avoiding polarizing terms like “ban” or “phone free.”
• Inclusion/communication: Input is needed from students, parents and teachers, and should include polls and classroom discussions to get buy-in. Clearly communicate the policies.
• Consistency: Make the rules school-wide and don’t vary them by teacher or class.
• Diverse needs: Students with responsibilities outside of school (like some jobs) or with medical needs require leniency.
• Social engagement: Educators need to foster social engagement during class lessons as well as structured social activities outside of academics.
• Digital wellness: Beyond tech literacy, teens welcome classes on digital wellness and the healthy use of devices.

What the research showed

Lucía Magis-Weinberg, a developmental psychologist and head of the International Adolescent Connection and Technology Laboratory at the UW, conducted the surveys that helped inform the students’ opinions. Roughly 4,400 students, teachers and parents responded to the initial inquiry.

In the answers to questionnaires, teachers emphasized that with limited phone access, there are fewer distractions in the classroom, more social engagement and less bullying. Teens said the restrictions reduced the amount of cheating.

On the downside, teens and parents were concerned that communications were more difficult, such as friends making plans, scheduling with family, or in the case of an emergency. Teens and teachers noted that phones had positive instructional uses and could aid students with specific academic or language challenges.

“As a student, sometimes it’s hard to look outside of yourself,” said Abbie Huang, a board participant who also attends Eastlake. She said that reading teachers’ comments on student engagement and realizing that a lot of students are OK with phone restrictions broadened her opinion.

“It was really cool to see other schools and the way they approached it, and just other people’s perspectives that I didn’t think about before,” she added.

Current policy landscape

The Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction allows local districts to set their own phone policies. The office reported that 75% of the state’s districts were implementing restrictions — either banning phones during class time or throughout the school day.

Oregon, by contrast, took a statewide approach, prohibiting phone use during school hours in the state’s K-12 public schools.

Seattle Public Schools has not issued a district-wide policy, though at least three public middle schools in the district have banned phones at school, and at least one high school prohibits their use during classes.

UW researchers shared the Youth Advisory Board’s memo at last week’s Washington Educational Research Association conference in Tacoma.

Broader tech concerns: AI and social media

Board participants agreed that student input is equally crucial for other pressing tech issues, including rising teen use of artificial intelligence and chatbots, as well as ongoing concerns about social media’s impact on young people.

“I really want to highlight how important it is to get the youth voice in there,” said Rotem Landesman, a UW graduate student in the Information School helping lead the Youth Advisory Board. Teens need to be represented in drafting policies and guidelines, she added, as tech is being integrated into schools “at such a rapid pace.”

Recent data from the Pew Research Center highlights the challenge:

• Some 64% of U.S. teens report having used an AI chatbot, and 31% do so daily.
• The vast majority of teens are engaging with social media, with 92% using YouTube and 68% on TikTok.

For both AI and social media, experts worry about mental health harms, misinformation, privacy and other concerns — while regulating the technology’s use remains difficult.

Sirjana Kaur, a senior at Redmond High School and board participant, said that her AP literature course forbids the use of AI due to concerns about cheating, requiring students to do all of their writing longhand and in class. The year-end AP test, which potentially provides students with college credits, will be done on a computer.

“There’s definitely a lot of work” to be done around AI regulations, she said. “I think there’s a balance that needs to be struck between avoiding AI, but also not making things even harder for students.”

Kraken-backed xStocks have gone live on the TON blockchain, allowing users to access tokenized versions of US stocks and exchange-traded funds directly inside Telegram through its built-in TON Wallet.

The move brings tokenized equities into one of the world’s largest messaging platforms, potentially expanding their reach beyond traditional crypto trading venues, according to a Thursday announcement.

Through the integration, users can buy, hold and transfer onchain representations of assets such as Tesla, Nvidia and the S&P 500 ETF without leaving the Telegram app.

xStocks Offer Onchain Price Exposure Without Direct Share Ownership

xStocks are designed as fully collateralized products, backed one-to-one by underlying equities and ETFs held through regulated partners.

The tokens track the price of the underlying assets but do not confer direct ownership of the shares, offering users price exposure in an onchain format.

The service is not available to US users and is restricted to jurisdictions where the tokens can be legally offered.

xStocks has not registered under the US Securities Act of 1933, meaning distribution relies on jurisdictional controls.

Tokenized equities are not new, but previous attempts struggled to gain traction. Liquidity constraints, regulatory uncertainty and limited distribution often confined earlier offerings to niche crypto platforms.

xStocks are going LIVE

Available today on @krakenfx, @Bybit_Official and being rolled out on @solana, this is the next step for internet capital markets.

Real assets, real value, for real people. pic.twitter.com/NQ1dKEfNjD

— xStocks (@xStocksFi) June 30, 2025

By embedding tokenized stocks inside a mainstream messaging app, Kraken and its partners appear to be testing whether access and ease of use can unlock broader adoption.

The TON Foundation framed the launch as a step toward bringing real-world assets into everyday digital activity.

TON Foundation president and CEO Max Crown said the integration allows users to hold and trade tokenized U.S. equities “with the same ease as sending a message,” while maintaining self-custody through TON Wallet.

For Telegram’s wallet ecosystem, the move builds on earlier experiments. Wallet in Telegram previously launched custodial access to stocks and ETFs through its Crypto Wallet product, which saw early demand despite limited geographic availability.

Telegram claims more than 900 million global users, while TON Wallet reports close to 100 million users, giving xStocks immediate exposure to a large consumer base.

RWA Tokenization Gains Momentum

Earlier this month, Libeara, the blockchain infrastructure platform backed by Standard Chartered’s venture arm SC Ventures, rolled out a new tokenized gold investment fund in Singapore, bringing one of the world’s oldest safe-haven assets onto digital rails.

The fund, launched in partnership with FundBridge Capital, allows professional investors to gain exposure to gold through blockchain-based tokens issued on Libeara’s ledger.

In a recent research, Web3 digital property firm Animoca Brands said that tokenization of RWAs could unlock a $400 trillion traditional finance market.

Animoca researchers Andrew Ho and Ming Ruan said the global market for private credit, treasury debt, commodities, stocks, alternative funds, and bonds represents a vast runway for growth.

“The estimated $400 trillion addressable TradFi market underscores the potential growth runway for RWA tokenization,” they wrote.

Meanwhile, according to the 2025 Skynet RWA Security Report, the market for tokenized RWAs could grow to $16 trillion by 2030.

The post Kraken-Backed xStocks Launch on TON, Bringing Tokenized US Stocks to Telegram appeared first on Cryptonews.

💾

Texas AG Ken Paxton is suing five TV makers over alleged ACR tracking that records what Texans watch at home. Here’s what the state claims, why it matters, and what to watch next.

The post Texas just put smart TV privacy lawsuit on trial, and it could affect your home appeared first on Digital Trends.

Defense technology companies broadly agree on what secure software looks like. Less consistent, though, is industry-wide understanding of the Defense Department’s mechanisms for demonstrating security compliance. Instead, stakeholders generally see a lack of “consistent and standardized methods for attestation processes,” according to recent industry feedback.

A new summary document released by Acting DoD CIO Katie Arrington compiled and analyzed industry responses to three separate DoD requests for information on advancing and securing software for the federal government.

“Overall, there was a strong call for the DoW to define a legitimate attestation, identify what is required to complete an attestation, and to ensure consistency of these standards across the DoW,” the document states. “Additional hurdles such as resource constraints, difficulties managing supply chain opacity, and cultural barriers further underscore the intricacies of enforcing a robust secure software development practice.”

In response to the DoD CIO’s requests for information under the office’s recently launched Software Fast Track Initiative, industry overwhelmingly pointed to established cybersecurity frameworks such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Secure Software Development Framework and the widely used Open Worldwide Application Security Project standards for managing software and supply-chain risk. More than 75% of respondents said they rely on NIST’s secure software framework, which aligns with DoD’s approach to software security and risk management.

But companies told Pentagon IT leadership that uncertainty around compliance remains a major obstacle. Vendors said it is unclear what qualifies as a valid attestation, what documentation must be included in a body of evidence, how often attestations are required and whether companies are allowed to self-attest to security practices or must rely on third-party assessments. Since NIST’s secure software guidance is designed as a framework rather than a checklist, vendors warned that compliance is open to interpretation and risks inconsistent application across the department.

Arrington announced the Software Fast Track, or SWFT Initiative, in April with the aim to reform the ways DoD buys, tests and authorizes secure software. Arrington has argued that the Pentagon’s existing processes for approving software are too slow. Since returning to the Pentagon in March in acting CIO capacity, she has pushed to overhaul the department’s legacy processes for buying software, namely the Risk Management Framework (RMF) and the authority to operate (ATO) approval process. She previously said she is “blowing up the RMF” and that she hopes ATOs are “something I never hear about again.”

The SWFT effort intends to shift away from rigid checklist processes toward dynamic, continuous authorization to operate. To inform the shift, the CIO office issued three requests for information asking vendors for insights around tools in use, external assessment methodologies, and how automation and artificial intelligence could help the department accelerate secure software adoption.

Not only did the first RFI, focused on Software Fast Track tools, reveal that companies are concerned about inconsistent attestation requirements, responses also flagged challenges with integrating the secure software framework into existing workflows. 

“The amount of evidence required for NIST SP 800-218 compliance would likely require automation and integration of multiple tools within existing infrastructure. Similarly, integrating manual documentation and effort into existing logical processes and workflows could be challenging,” the Software Fast Track RFI summary reads. 

At the same time, about 90% of respondents said they would provide software bills of materials — detailed inventories of the components used to build a software product — to the department. Most said those SBOMs would cover their own software.

Nearly all companies said they already perform software risk assessments and would provide DoD officials with risk assessments artifacts. Most said those artifacts are generated through automated tools, and the majority made clear “their willingness to provide these artifacts in an efficient manner through standardized formats and secure exchange processes.”

To that end, companies recommended allowing vendors to submit artifacts directly into DoD platforms such as Enterprise Mission Assurance Support Service (eMASS) through application programming interfaces to expedite software security reviews.

External assessments

Industry respondents said most companies already rely on a mix of internal and external audits to assess software security.

Internal audit functions typically include continuous monitoring, code reviews and regular red-teaming exercises designed to identify vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. Meanwhile, external assessments are often conducted by third-party auditors or independent penetration testers to provide objective validation of a company’s security posture. 

Top compliance regimes include the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, NIST cybersecurity standards and Service Organization Control (SOC), which “further evidences a mature security posture among organizations.”

At the same time, companies stressed that any external assessment functions would require clear guardrails. Respondents said assessment organizations should demonstrate relevant experience in high-security environments, secure data handling methodologies, established quality management and high degree of independence. Moreover, such assessments should be conducted by qualified personnel with industry-recognized certifications and a strong understanding of DoD security frameworks.

Applying automation and AI tools

Industry respondents said automation and artificial intelligence could deliver the biggest gains in speeding DoD software risk assessments, particularly by reducing manual paperwork and enabling continuous monitoring. Companies emphasized that automation and AI serve different purposes, with automation best suited for executing repetitive, rule-based tasks, while AI can “make decisions and learn to perform tasks with a human-like intelligence.”

Companies also warned about significant challenges in applying automation and AI. Vendors cited concerns around AI explainability, data quality and model reliability, noting that authorizing officials must be able to understand how risk determinations are made. 

Arrington said the Software Fast Track Initiative is on track to roll out early next year.

“People that think SWFT wouldn’t happen — joke’s on you. If it wasn’t for the furlough, that would have gone live in the beginning in November. So look in early January,” Arrington said during the Defense Information Systems Agency’s annual Forecast to Industry event on Dec. 8. “Software Fast Track: so you can ingest software and we can get it approved in days, not months and years. Making sure that we have a baseline called eMASS that can make sure that if an ATO is granted, then an ATO is reciprocated. We have the Software Assurance playbook. If anybody doesn’t know about that one, it’s when software has vulnerabilities. We work through them to remediate them, blowing up the RMF. We’re already starting to do it using continuous monitoring, the ten tenants of what it needs to be.”

The post Industry flags DoD’s lack of standardized software attestation processes first appeared on Federal News Network.

© The Associated Press

Senior House Democrats are calling on the Office of Special Counsel to investigate potential whistleblower retaliation after the Federal Emergency Management Agency renewed suspensions for FEMA employees who signed a public letter.

The FEMA staff were placed back on administrative leave despite an agency legal finding, referenced by the letter, that found the employees’ disclosure was protected by law.

In a Dec. 17 letter to acting Special Counsel Jamieson Greer, ranking members on several House committees said OSC should review the FEMA situation. OSC’s primary mission is to protect federal employees from prohibited personnel practices, especially whistleblower retaliation.

The letter comes after FEMA placed 14 signers of the “Katrina Declaration” back on administrative leave after briefly reinstating them earlier this month. At the time, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman said the employees “were wrongly and without authorization reinstated by bureaucrats acting outside their authority,” and that “the unauthorized reinstatement was swiftly corrected by senior leadership.”

More than 190 current and former FEMA employees signed the letter in August. FEMA subsequently placed staff who signed the letter with their names on administrative leave.

“We expect that the Office of Special Counsel will find clear evidence of whistleblower retaliation, reinstate the FEMA employees, and pursue disciplinary action against all officials who retaliated against them,” the Democrat letter states. “Should FEMA or DHS refuse to comply with your recommended actions, we urge that the case be referred to the Merit Systems Protection Board for proper enforcement.”

The letter was signed by House Homeland Security Committee Ranking Member Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Ranking Member Rick Larsen (D-Wash.), Committee on Oversight and Reform Ranking Member Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and Rep. Greg Stanton (D-N.Y.), ranking member on the infrastructure committee’s subcommittee on public buildings, economic development and emergency management.

Their letter references a Nov. 25 email from an employee in FEMA’s human resources branch to the supervisor of one of the suspended staff members. The email, shared with Federal News Network, references a report of investigation (ROI) and recommends the FEMA manager close the issue without any disciplinary action.

“Although the ROI substantiated the employee’s involvement with the so-called Katrina Declaration, FEMA’s legal counsel has advised that the employee’s actions are protected under the Whistleblower Protection Act (5 U.S.C. § 2302(b)(8)) and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” the employee wrote.

“These protections ensure that employees can disclose information related to misconduct, abuse, or violations of law without fear of retaliation, provided the disclosure is made in good faith and aligns with statutory protections. As a result, my recommendation is that this matter be closed with no disciplinary action,” the employee continued.

FEMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Staff who signed the letter and were placed on administrative leave have claimed DHS illegally retaliated against them. In September, they wrote OSC, congressional committees, and the DHS inspector general, urging them to investigate the situation.

The Katrina Declaration letter pushes back against many changes at FEMA enacted under the Trump administration and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. It warns that staffing cuts, a lack of experienced leadership, and other shake-ups at the agency have left it less ready to respond to a major disaster than at any time since Hurricane Katrina.

Noem shot back at the letter, arguing that “the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform.”

Meanwhile, the White House recently delayed the issuance of a long-awaited report by the Trump-appointed FEMA Review Council. The report was set to serve as a blueprint for the administration’s FEMA reforms.

The post House Dems call on OSC to review potential FEMA whistleblower retaliation first appeared on Federal News Network.

© AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar

A federal judge in San Francisco is reversing the terminations of hundreds of federal employees finalized during the recent government shutdown.

A preliminary injuction, signed Wednesday by Judge Susan Illston, orders the departments of Education and State, as well as the Small Business Administration and the General Services Administration, to rescind reduction in force notices for employees who were terminated between Oct. 1 and Nov. 12 — the start and end dates of the shutdown.

“Absent a contrary ruling from a higher court,” Illston is giving agencies until Dec. 23 to carry out the terms of her preliminary injunction.

“Defendants must do what the continuing resolution says. They may not take any further steps to implement or carry out a RIF through January 30, 2026, regardless of when the RIF notice first issued,” Illston wrote.

These agencies sent RIF notices to employees before the recent government shutdown. In most cases, separations were scheduled to take effect in October or November, during the shutdown.

The American Federation of Government Employees and the American Foreign Service Association, who are leading a lawsuit with other unions, argued agencies that finalized these RIFs during the government shutdown violated a stopgap spending bill passed by Congress that prohibited layoffs through Jan. 30, 2026.

The court issued a temporary restraining order earlier this month that blocked layoffs of nearly 250 Foreign Service officers from being finalized at the State Department. Those layoffs were originally scheduled for Nov. 10, but were pushed back to Dec. 5, and remain on hold.

The Trump administration has followed a narrower interpretation of the stopgap spending bill, and has only reinstated federal employees who received RIF notices between Oct. 1 and Nov. 12.

The continuing resolution Congress passed on Nov. 12 states that between Nov. 12, 2025 and Jan. 30, 2026, “no federal funds may be used to initiate, carry out, implement, or otherwise notice a reduction in force to reduce the number of employees within any department.”

It also states that “any reduction in force proposed, noticed, initiated, executed, implemented, or otherwise taken by an executive agency between October 1, 2025, and the date of enactment, shall have no force or effect.”

At a hearing before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Illston said she would grant the preliminary injunction requested by the unions, because the “chaotic nature of these RIFs has been continuing.”

“The continuing resolution, ending the longest shutdown the government has experienced to date, said that no federal funds would be spent RIF-ing people through Jan. 30. But that is not what is happening in some of these agencies,” Illston said.

The judge’s order will impact about 680 total federal employees. That includes nearly 250 Foreign Service officers at the State Department, 200 employees at GSA, 150 at the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, and nearly 80 at SBA.

During the hearing, Illston said she would consider the Justice Department’s request to delay her preliminary injunction from going into effect for a few days. This would give the Trump administration time to consider whether it will ask a federal appeals court to stay her ruling.

Illston said this would minimize some of the “whiplash” some federal employees have felt in other court cases, in which lower courts have reinstated them, only for an appeals court to allow layoffs to continue.

“They’d have to send a notice, and then another notice, and a notice saying, ‘Forget what we said yesterday.’ It would be terrible,” Illston said.

Brad Rosenberg, a DOJ attorney representing the Trump administration, said that rescinding layoffs now would be “logistically a big lift” for agencies, especially if the courts later allow those RIFs to proceed.

“If a RIF is rescinded, and if this court either decides at final judgment in this case, or if the government were to appeal, and an appellate court were to stay or vacate this Court’s preliminary injunction, government agencies would presumably have to start all over again with that, with that process, and it would be awfully hard to unscramble that egg,” Rosenberg said.

“That’s not going to provide the type of long-term relief that I suspect plaintiffs are seeking here,” he added.

Rosenberg argued that employees should bring their individual cases before the Merit Systems Protection Board. An appeals court recently allowed President Donald Trump to proceed with firing a Democratic member of the MSPB.

“This is merely the administration trying to carry out its policy objectives. And I realize that those policy objectives have consequences for individuals, and that they can be significant consequences, although we do think that those consequences can be remediated through proper channeling to the Merit Systems Protection Board,” he said.

Danielle Leonard, an attorney representing the plaintiff unions, said the “mandate was clear” from Congress, and that agencies should “nullify those RIFs.”

“We have Congress stepping in here and being incredibly clear about what the public interest needs in this very circumstance, and the public interest is in restoring these employees to their employment status and giving them clarity,” Leonard said. “Congress could have just said, ‘Stop.’ Congress could have just said, ‘Halt, let’s just freeze everything.’ They went further than that,” Leonard said.

Leonard said recently separated federal employees face “real and ongoing harm,” including eviction notices and unpaid bills.

“We have seen agencies exploit their lack of communication to keep employees in the dark, to keep them confused. They have not even told them whether they’re still employed when they directly ask. There absolutely has been harm,” she said.

AFGE National President Everett Kelley called Illston’s ruling “another victory for federal employees and for the rule of law.”

“When Congress voted to end the longest government shutdown in history, it spoke clearly and unambiguously that further reductions-in-force were prohibited, and any RIFs that occurred during the shutdown were required to be reversed. The administration’s continued defiance of that mandate is part of a troubling pattern of egregious actions against federal employees and the American public,” Kelley said.

John Dinkelman, president of the American Foreign Service Association, said Congress was clear that “reductions in force were prohibited” when it passed the continuing resolution, and that the administration’s efforts to proceed with RIFs were “unlawful.”

“Today’s ruling confirms this,” Dinkelman said.  “We will continue to fight to ensure that Foreign Service professionals are treated with the respect the law demands.”

The post Federal judge orders reversal of hundreds of layoffs finalized during shutdown first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Getty Images/iStockphoto/BrianAJackson

In outlining his top three priorities as the calendar turns into 2026, Federal Chief Information Officer Greg Barbaccia didn’t necessarily break new ground.

Barbaccia said in a video posted on X that since January, when he arrived in the position from the private sector, his focus has been on three specific areas.

“One, fixing the talent pipeline. We’re making sure we hire, train and empower the technical experts we need. We have exciting new initiatives related to that happening right now. Two, buy smarter. No more paying top dollar for tools we don’t use or can’t connect. We’re eliminating waste, duplication and decades old rules that slow us down. Follow along as we go on that journey together. And three, securing the foundation. We will be setting one standard for how government technology works for the American people, from our websites to our use of artificial intelligence,” Barbaccia said. “Over the next few months, I’ll share exactly what we’re doing and the results we’ve already seen. America is long overdue for a major tech upgrade, and we’re delivering it. My promise is simple, government tech will be transparent, efficient and worthy of the United States of America.”

Earlier this year, I was honored to be appointed White House Chief Information Officer. What do we do? The White House CIO role is about ensuring technology works for taxpayers and agency employees alike, from secure systems to seamless services. pic.twitter.com/DfMzRFfF5l

— Gregory Barbaccia (@GregBarbaccia) December 15, 2025

What is new about Barbaccia’s top priorities is how the Trump administration is starting to turn initiatives and plans into reality.

Take the goal of fixing the talent pipeline. It’s been clear the so-called Department of Government Efficiency went too far in cutting probationary employees and pushing others to take the Deferred Resignation Program. Add to that the administration’s hiring freeze, and the need to bring technology talent, along with many other types of expertise, back into government is clear.

To that end, the Office of Personnel Management is leading a new recruitment initiative, the Tech Force, with a goal of hiring 1,000 new employees for agencies that 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.

OPM Director Scott Kupor wrote on his blog that these early-career engineers will work “directly with the most senior leaders across cabinet-level government agencies to tackle our nation’s top technical challenges.”

“We are going to bootstrap a network effect to fuel the next 50+ years of government hiring by demonstrating the government offers brilliant engineers the opportunity to solve the world’s most challenging and largest scale technology projects and that the private sector values this experience by translating it into awesome post-government employment opportunities,” he wrote. “The more engineers we recruit into Tech Force, the more critical technical problems we will solve, the more Tech Force graduates take their skills to the private sector – that’s the flywheel that will enable us to grow a definitive, world changing pipeline of early-career talent into the federal government.”

Priority 2: Website modernization

The creation of the Tech Force also flows into Barbaccia’s third priority around securing the foundation and setting one standard for how government technology works for the American people.

OPM, working with the National Design Studio in the White House, launched the Tech Force website for potential engineers to learn more about the program and apply to join.

NDS, led by Joe Gebbia, who is the co-founder of Airbnb, has been rolling out an updated look to federal websites, starting with several new ones like Tech Force.

Gebbia, who President Donald Trump named as the nation’s first chief design officer in August, also recently unveiled merrychristmas.gov, which is highlighting 12 days of government design history. For example, day one, Dec. 14, focused on the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project’s poster program during the Great Depression, and day two, Dec. 15, highlighted the Great Seal of the United States, created in 1782.

Additionally, Gebbia today launched the new website Trumpaccounts.gov during an event at the Treasury Department, using similar design principles.

Barbaccia kicked off the website modernization effort last spring by asking agencies to consolidate and update their public-facing platforms. Barbaccia asked agencies to submit data to OMB about their public-facing websites, including the underlying technological infrastructure they run on and the contracts that support them.

The resulting data call from July showed that the 24 largest departments and agencies inventoried more than 7,200 total websites. Documents obtained by Federal News Network show agencies plan to eliminate 332 of those websites — less than 5% of their total web presence.

Priority 3: Software licenses

The software inventory and consolidation priority has been the most public facing of the three up until now.

GSA has led the effort under the OneGov strategy and now has created 15 enterprisewide software contracts with deep discounts.

Laura Stanton, the deputy commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service at GSA, said at the recent ACT-IAC Executive Leadership Conference that 43 agencies already have taken advantage of the enterprisewide contracts for artificial intelligence, for example.

GSA also has made the specific OneGov agreements public through its IT Vendor Management Office and is providing agencies with fact sheets and help to use the new discounted deals.

Birgit Smeltzer, the acting director of the Office of IT Products within the Office of Information Technology Category (ITC) in GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, said at the ELC conference that her office is helping others find and make the most of those OneGov deals.

“The culture shift that I’m seeing is agencies will move away from doing their own thing and come to us to help them create those contracts and get those cost savings through the OneGov strategy,” she said. “What we are hopeful for is that when the renewals start to come out [for existing contracts], we can start collecting that information and help agencies save even more money than they can on their current contract and bring them into the OneGov fold.”

The post Barbaccia’s 3 priorities for 2026 already in motion first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Amelia Brust/Federal News Network

Interview transcript:

Terry Gerton When we first spoke back in May, the Impact Project was just launching. So now that you’re six months old, what have you learned since then about how people are using the tool and how the project has evolved?

Abby Andre We’ve learned a lot since we launched. When we started, we had about 5,000 instances of government change mapped on our impact map. And now we have over 250,000 individual instances of change, not just to cross sectors, which is where we started looking at the whole country, and the whole host of changes we were seeing. But we’ve done some really deep dives into impacts in public health, AmeriCorps and most recently the security map. And we’ve been seeing a lot of journalists use the map. But increasingly we are talking to those who are really focused on the future, who really want to start thinking about how to respond to cuts and changes in federal policy in a way that can help restore services and start thinking about some creative ways to approach public service and government if the federal government is going to step back. So who now is going to step in?

Terry Gerton So tell us about some of the trends that you’re seeing now that you have so many data points.

Abby Andre I think the scope of impact is still the biggest one that we really hope folks looking at our maps will understand. Federal dollars are inherent to service delivery in every county across the country. Federal workers and public servants live in every state and almost every county. And so these impacts have been felt everywhere.

Terry Gerton And when you talked about public health and AmeriCorps, are there other projects or programs where you’ve seen specific impact?

Abby Andre I’ve been struck by impacts in food in particular. Very early on we saw a couple of COVID-era food programs cut. Local Food for Schools was one of them. And a lot of these gave farmers somewhere to send their fresh produce and folks in need of food, either kids or folks who were strapped in their budget, ways to access that really fresh, healthy food. And we have seen kind of echoes of that throughout the year, stories about food banks being in short supply and pantries not being able to provide what they needed. And then the uncertainty that we had around SNAP benefits during the shutdown really heightened people’s insecurity and concern about where they might be getting their next meal from.

Terry Gerton And now that we’re coming into the holiday season, any of those indicators flashing red for you?

Abby Andre I remain extremely concerned about food access, particularly among our most vulnerable families. I also remain concerned about people’s access to heating and cooling as we get into the colder months, while LIHEAP, the Low Income Energy Assistance Program, has not yet been fully cut, many of the staff have been lost and we’ve seen reports of interruption of services. And so I just continue to be really aware of the cumulative impact of cuts across sectors on families who rely on more than one type of government service, whether it’s food and health care, or food and energy and healthcare. If you see small cuts across those areas, it can have an outsized impact for those of us who are living paycheck to paycheck.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Abby Andre. She’s the founding executive director of the Impact Project. Abby, one of the newest features on the map is the security map. It’s a big new addition. Tell us about what prompted you to create it and how it fills a gap in understanding the kinds of threats that public servants are facing.

Abby Andre  I launched this map in partnership with the Public Service Alliance, which is led by Isa Ulloa. She’s a former fed, she worked at DHS. And she and I share a real value of public servants. Humanizing public servants was one of the original goals of the Impact Project. Her work at Public Service Alliance offers more affordable resources in security and privacy to make it safer for public servants to serve. She and I came together and started talking last May about the threat landscape facing public servants, in addition to the other burdens that they’re experiencing with the ecosystem of change. And we really agree that public service is patriotism and core to our country and our values. We wanted to build a tool that would help the American people understand who public servants are, and why we should value them.

Terry Gerton And as you look at the security threats, are there any trends that you see or things that surprise you?

Abby Andre This map is a little different than the Impact Project’s other maps in that we looked at 10 years’ worth of stories. We went back to try to get a sense for whether or not threats were increasing. So we, importantly, partnered with a couple of experts in the field — the Bridging Divides Initiative out of Princeton, Insight out of the University of Nebraska at Omaha — and their data all shows an uptick of threats over time, using methodologies that are slightly different from our own. So we wanted to dig in and see if we saw something similar, and we did. Over time, we’ve observed an increase in threats overall across red and blue states, but also a real increase in threats at the local level. I think many of us a decade ago, if you were asked about who got threatened for their work for the government, you would think about judges and elected officials, right? Now we know, and particularly since the beginning of the pandemic, that school board officials, librarians, city council members are really at the frontline of this surge in threats that we’re seeing nationwide.

Terry Gerton The map draws on pretty sensitive data — court records, partner data sets. How do you ensure that this is accurate but also transparent when you’re compiling such sensitive information?

Abby Andre That’s a really important question. We have to balance the desire to make the tool accessible and a source of education with our overarching need to keep public servants safe. From our end, we only use publicly available records. So if something is in a newspaper article, we’re willing to map it, but we do a couple of things to try and protect the identity of the people that we’re talking about, even if the identity was in the newspaper article. We scrub for names. We never include the name of a threatened person, or a perpetrator for that matter. And we also don’t geocode to a person’s address or place of work. Instead, we geocoded — which means, how do we put the dot on the map? We put in the zip code or the county so that you can still get a sense for the geographic spread of the threats, but the dataset couldn’t be used to find people.

Terry Gerton Those threats to local public servants could have a real chilling effect on the future of public service writ large. We all rely on librarians and police officers and school board officials to make our communities function. Are you seeing that kind of impact as you look at those trends?

Abby Andre We absolutely are. And it’s one of the reasons we made the map. We’re seeing that threatened people resign. We’re speaking anecdotally to folks who are opting not to run for office, who feel called to serve but don’t feel safe. And oftentimes these threats not only impact public servants, but their family members, their children. There was a story out of Minnesota that I found particularly moving about an individual who’d spent four separate rounds as a public school board official and resigned in the middle of his fifth tenure because the threats against himself and his office mates had become so severe. So, we not only lose that person in his last term, but his institutional knowledge. We worry a lot that the chilling effect at the local level in particular will drive people away from service. And PSA is one answer to that. But we hope overall that this map is a real call for more research, more common-sense solutions, and a return to seeing public servants as what they are. And that’s someone that really sacrifices for the good of the community and should be valued that way.

Terry Gerton Abby, thank you so much for pulling all of this together. You mentioned a couple of actions there, or mindset shifts, that you help people engage in as they see this data. Are there policy actions or other sorts of specific steps you’d like to see communities and governments take?

Abby Andre We will be launching a new map in addition to this that is a little bit more forward-looking in the spring. And we’re already thinking about the laws, whether it’s privacy laws, criminal laws, or laws specifically tailored to things like doxing or swatting — when someone’s information is published online, a false call goes into the police and somebody shows up at a public servant’s house. We have not done a good job holistically across the board of taking steps to protect public servants in a tailored way. And so we hope that the coming map and the materials that go with it will help identify best practices and really elevate the need for lawmakers and communities to be having conversations about steps around privacy, security and education that can help lower the temperature.

The post The Impact Project expands reach with new map exposing threats to public servants first appeared on Federal News Network.

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Interview transcript:

 

Terry Gerton GAO has put out a new report looking at the Coast Guard’s Offshore Patrol Cutters program. In fact, they got an additional $4 billion for this program in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act from last summer. Let me ask you to start by telling us what is this program, what are these ships, and why is it such a high priority for the Coast Guard right now?

Shelby Oakley These ships are a very high priority for the Coast Guard because they’re a workhorse. They’re intended to provide and do a variety of missions like search and rescue, and migrant interdiction, drug missions as well. And so you might imagine that makes up a significant chunk of the Coast Guard’s mission areas. And they’re intended to replace a class of ships called the medium-endurance cutters. And those medium-endurance cutters are really old, and they’re having a lot of challenges. They had a design life of 30 years and they are all well past that 30-year design life. So the gap between those medium-endurance cutters and the Offshore Patrol Cutters is getting bigger.

Terry Gerton So what prompted you to look at the program now? Is it just the size of it or the duration?

Shelby Oakley Given that it is one of the Coast Guard’s highest-priority programs, between it and the Polar Security Cutter, makes up a significant chunk of the Coast Guard’s acquisition budget. And so we really try and focus our reviews on the highest-priority acquisitions within the Coast Guard. And this certainly qualifies for it. But this isn’t the first time we’ve looked at this program. This is our third review of the Offshore Patrol Cutter over the past 10 years, and we also assess it every year in our DHS assessment of major programs. So we’ve had our finger on the pulse of this program for a while and have consistently been watching progress and challenges that it has experienced. This was a good time to take another look at the program because of where they are at in terms of construction and progress in that regard.

Terry Gerton So was third time the charm? Are they making progress or did you find some still serious systemic problems?

Shelby Oakley The program is divided into various stages, and that occurred because the original program was awarded to Eastern Shipbuilding Group. They experienced a devastating hurricane in 2018 that basically trashed all their facilities and really affected their ability to make progress on this program. At that point, the Coast Guard divided the program into stages. So, Eastern Shipbuilding Group kept the first four ships; that’s Stage 1. Austal was then awarded the next 10 ships; that’s Stage 2. And then there’s Stage 3, which is yet to be awarded. That gets you to the 25 ships. So Eastern Shipbuilding Group has remained extremely challenged in constructing the first four ships. And in the spring, the Coast Guard decided that they were going to basically cut bait on ships three and four from Eastern Shipbuilding Group. They terminated those for default. More recently, and basically the week we were issuing our report, Eastern Shipbuilding Group announced that it would no longer work on ships one and two. And so those first four ships are now sitting there at Eastern Shipbuilding Group in various stages of completion, anywhere from 6% to 75%, with big question marks around what’s going to happen with them going forward.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Shelby Oakley. She’s a director in GAO’s Contracting and National Security Acquisitions team. Shelby, that seems like a big sunk cost to just walk away from. What did your findings tell you about how Coast Guard has managed the design of these ships and the cost of these ships?

Shelby Oakley We have we have pointed out for years, and reiterated again in this report, about a number of decisions that the Coast Guard made that led to some of these outcomes. One of the biggest things that we have pointed to is that Eastern Shipbuilding and now Austal have been authorized to begin construction on these ships before the design of them is even complete. So imagine that, for your listeners: Let’s just say you’re building a house, and you’re designing this house and you’re trying to lay out where everything in the house is going to go. The plumbing and the bathrooms and the kitchen and everything. And the builder comes to you and says, you know what, we don’t need to know any of that stuff. We’re just going to start building. It always comes back to bite you. And that’s what happened with Eastern Shipbuilding Group. It led to a lot of rework where progress was made, construction was done, but then the design changed or matured, and you realize, oh shoot we need to route those pipes somewhere different. That amount of rework that happened really ends up adding a lot of time and money to the effort. And that’s exactly what we saw. We saw an increase overall for this program, a 57% cost increase in this program from initial baselines. OPC-1’s delivery, that’s the first ship built by Eastern Shipbuilding Group, was delayed by five years. So certainly those are some of the challenges that we’ve raised. And we’ve raised concerns about the Coast Guard’s oversight of this program as well too, both from the perspective of those decisions allowing design to progress, but also from a cost perspective. There’s a lot of questions about the fidelity of the cost estimates and the schedule estimates in this program that I think have come to bear, in terms of them being outdated before or right after they’re initially re-baselined. And so we’ve made some recommendations to the Coast Guard to improve things like their schedule estimates to bring more fidelity and oversight to the cost estimates for the program. For example, by estimating cost per ship versus for the overall program. A number of things over the years we’ve recommended for them to do and they’ve taken some action, but not in every case.

Terry Gerton Is this a problem that’s unique to the Coast Guard? I mean, the Navy buys and builds ships all the time. Does the Coast Guard or the Department of Homeland Security not have that same sort of institutional knowledge here?

Shelby Oakley So there’s a couple of things, I think, that I would call your attention to. The Navy has its own challenges and certainly, for your listeners, with the announcement a couple weeks ago about the cancelation of the frigate program for the Navy, where they’ve spent $4 billion trying to design a ship and construct a ship. And now they’re going to walk away from it. It’s kind of indicative of the overall status of shipbuilding in this country, that it’s extremely challenged. And part of the reason why shipbuilding is challenged in this country is because of workforce and facilities. We had years of declining shipbuilding in this county that led to declining workforces. The people to be able to do the welding, and the design efforts on these ships, are no longer around. Both the Navy and the Coast Guard are working to rebuild that. I would say, secondly, the Coast Guard doesn’t always get the tier one shipyards that the Navy does to build its ships. For example, with ESG, this award for OPC was its first government contract. Imagine trying to figure out how to work within government bureaucracy to build your ship when you’re used to your commercial business where it’s a lot different. That was definitely a challenge for Eastern as it made its transition to this program. I think that led to a lot of issues on the program.

Terry Gerton Well, looking ahead as the Coast Guard moves to hopefully Stage 2 and then Stage 3, what is the most important of your recommendations that you hope they get a handle on quickly?

Shelby Oakley The bottom line recommendation that we’ve been reiterating for a number of years is: Get that design stable before you start constructing any more ships. You don’t have the time or the resources to waste reconstructing things because the designs change. One of our recommendations on Stage 2 was don’t authorize Austal to build any more ships until they’ve completed their design. And so that’s a big one. But then I think another really important recommendation that we made is this Stage 3 award is looming. They have to award the remaining 10 ships. And our contention is, maybe you should operationally test the ships that you’ve built and make sure they do the things that you want them to do before you authorize a whole other set of 10 to be constructed. We really focused on trying to push the Coast Guard to get that type of knowledge before they issue that RFP for that third stage. We also hope at that time that they can incorporate more of our leading practices that we see commercial companies do, like adhering pretty strictly to the existing design and not making changes, and really ensuring that everything’s modeled in this 3D model that allows for real-time work between the Coast Guard and the builder to understand the effects of any design changes on it. And a number of other things in terms of those leading practices. But those two things I think would really help the Coast Guard ensure that they put this program back on better footing.

Terry Gerton And have the Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security been positive in their response?

Shelby Oakley They were positive in the response about the Stage 3 recommendation in terms of incorporating knowledge before. We’ll see if they actually adhere to that. They did not concur with the stabilizing the design for Stage 2 before authorizing additional ships. I think they feel confident enough in the design to feel like they’re good to go. But we’ve seen this story play out before both within the Coast Guard and the Navy where that confidence can be overstated sometimes, and so we’re hoping that they really take that one to heart.

The post Coast Guard’s biggest shipbuilding effort faces major design, cost risks: GAO first appeared on Federal News Network.

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Interview transcript: 

Terry Gerton You have written a paper that asks a very provocative question. How many people can the federal government lose before it crashes? What’d you find?

Elaine Kamarck Well, we found that in the midst of all the DOGE chaos, people were figuring out that, wait a minute, they were making some mistakes. Some of these mistakes were absolutely clear from the get-go and were reversed in 36 to 48 hours. The one that I think everybody has heard about is when they fired a couple hundred nuclear safety engineers. And these are the people who watch over our nuclear stockpiles, and not only for readiness, but to make sure there’s no accidents. The stockpile are pretty old, as people in that area will tell you. And so the danger of something leaking, something going wrong is real, and you need people watching this all the time. And you can’t just immediately turn around and go to the help wanted ads and find a nuclear safety engineer. They aren’t a dime a dozen on the streets. So that created a huge outcry. And it was about 36 hours before they were rehired. And of course, the thing that happened there was that they had cut off all of their emails and contacts, so they had to really scramble to rehire these people. Now, that’s a very dramatic example. But there’s other ones where we are waiting to see what these cuts have done. And the fact that there’s — what we did when we put together this paper was we started watching carefully news sources like your own, like Government Executive, et cetera, that really cover the federal government and of course the traditional news sources, and looking for stories that talked about rehiring civil servants who were either fired or who were offered the deferred resignation. And in a lot of these cases, the agency took back the offer of the deferred resignation. So in other words, what was happening during really the whole of this year, was firings, dramatic firings sometimes, reductions in force, whatever, and then pullbacks as people began to realize, particularly the political appointees, I think, in the agencies, because they knew they were on the line. It’s no accident that the Transportation secretary, Secretary Duffy, was the first person to yell at Elon Musk in a cabinet meeting. Why? Because he knows that this, what they were doing to the FAA and to the air traffic controllers was going to result in trouble. It’s going to be an accident. And of course, who would be the face of that trouble? It would be the Secretary of Transportation, and of course ultimately the President. So, he stood up, he was the first one that really stood up to Musk in front of the President, and I think increasingly that’s been happening in less dramatic ways. People have been saying, wait a minute, you just cut too much.

Terry Gerton The latest numbers from OPM say that 317,000 people have left working for the federal government, but 68,000 have entered. It’s not clear if they left and then came back or if those 68,00 are new hires, but the administration’s contention has been that federal government is too big and too bureaucratic. At what point did these reductions stop being about efficiency and really start creating systemic risk?

Elaine Kamarck Oh, I think they’re already creating systemic risk. And that’s why you get the dramatic examples like the nuclear safety engineers. Then you have the longer term examples. So for instance, everything that’s going on at the CDC, at the Centers for Disease Control, is increasing the probability of pandemics and outbreaks. So you can imagine measles outbreaks in the coming months or years. You can even imagine polio coming back because of what they’ve been doing, the denigration of science, et cetera. And suppose you or your loved one is suffering from a really serious cancer. All right, well, there’s been laboratories defunded and they see what they’re doing. So they defund them and then they put the money back. And they’ve done this with some of Harvard’s laboratories recently. The problem is, you interrupt research and you lose months, if not years of research. The mice die. The tests, all that stuff that goes on in a laboratory, which is so complicated, when you close down a laboratory, you lose time. And if you’re somebody who has got a terrible cancer and is looking for a breakthrough cure, every minute counts.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Elaine Kamarck. She’s director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution. Elaine, another one of the administration’s assertions is that AI can replace these folks, or automation will replace them, or we can contract it out. Can they? Are there some of these functions that just really require a human in a government chair to do the work?

Elaine Kamarck Most of them, frankly, require a human in a government chair. AI has huge potential. And back 30 years ago when we did Reinventing Government, the internet was just coming online for many people, because we were there, remember 1993 to 1996. So, when I went into the White House in 93, we didn’t even have the use of the internet. So as we went on, absolutely the internet was able to replace people. The technology did replace people. I have no doubt that that would be the case in AI. The problem is that AI is not ready for prime time and the DOGE people did not go about this with any sort of plan for which functions would do it. So, let me give you an example. I mean, 30 years ago, we really were convinced that eventually, technology would help us really get a handle on Medicare and Medicaid fraud. We’ve always known there’s a lot of fraud in there, but it’s a massive payment system and you have to have something that can sort of look through and find the patterns that are unusual. AI is going to be great for that. But did they announce that? I mean, the chaotic way makes us, everybody, suspicious that they just cut without a plan. And eventually, maybe in the next couple years, they’ll get a plan to use AI in this piece, but let’s face it, you can’t use AI in every place.

Terry Gerton Elaine, you have seen administrations come and go. You mentioned Reinventing Government back in the 90s. But if this administration sees the reduction in the federal workforce as a political win, at what point might they face the risk of having unintentionally weakened government capacity to deliver services? When did the people that government is supposed to serve figure this out and what happens when they do?

Elaine Kamarck Well, let me tell you something. They’ve already figured it out. So polling on DOGE is very unpopular with the public. Most of the public thinks, in the polls we have so far this year, they’re all the same, which was by about a 10 point margin, people think the government has gone too far. They think the cuts have gone too far. Now, when they will really feel it is when, and they are, if you’re a senior, you’re feeling it right now, or God forbid you’re turning 67 years old this year, and you’re trying to sign up for your Social Security benefits. You have three-hour wait times on the telephone, you have offices closing, even though Social Security keeps denying that they’re closing offices, and then GSA puts on their site that they are doing reductions in office space. I mean, so you’ve got two different agencies saying two different things. People are already feeling it on the service end. We had a little bit of a show of this in Texas with those terrible floods at the 4th of July, when you not only had NOAA asleep at the switch, but you had FEMA asleep at this switch. And that now, fortunately for the people involved, the state of Texas is a big state, a wealthy state with pretty good emergency response capacity. But what if they had been completely overwhelmed and needed outside help? So there’s a lot of ways that this is going to go wrong. And I think the public is already understanding that the cuts have gone too far.

Terry Gerton What will you be looking for come January when everybody’s sort of back after all of the holidays and before maybe another shutdown? What will you be looking for? What do you expect in terms of policy or action?

Elaine Kamarck It’s hard to say. I think I will be looking for more rehires, what we called in our paper rehires. More places where the cabinet secretary goes to OMB or an undersecretary and says, look, we’re in danger of this falling apart unless you have rehires. I think we’re going to have that. The bill that ended the shutdown, as you know, prohibits any more layoffs until the end January. So we’re obviously not going to have any more layoffs. But as I say in the paper I did on this for Brookings, the real effect of this was to cause people to leave. Either they took the deferred resignation or they retired when they were sort of just thinking about it or they took an early retirement offer or they took an old-fashioned buyout, and that, I think, is the most serious consequence, because think about it, who leaves their job? Well, either somebody who’s got a retirement set up and says, okay, I was going to do it next year, I’m going to it this year, because this place is crazy. Or somebody who knows they can get another job quickly, which means that some of our most talented people, probably younger people, left because they said, this is a crazy place to work. Not to mention the fact that you have an OMB director who constantly says things like he wants to make the federal worker terrified of going to work. I mean, that’s your legal definition of a hostile workplace. They have created a hostile work workplace for 2 million people. And so no wonder people are leaving. And that I think is the biggest consequence. And, so, the question is, can they get people back? Now, seeing what you’ve seen, suppose you’re a terrific cybersecurity person, and you’ve just gotten out of college a couple years ago. You’ve got a great resume. You know that field. We know that for decades now, the government’s been desperate to hire cybersecurity people. You have your choice of going to Chase Bank and doing cyber or going to Social Security or IRS or some other big government agency. What are you going to do? I mean, at these entry-level jobs, as we know, the pay is pretty even. So it’s not a matter of the pay diverging until you get into the upper levels, but the federal government is now run by people who constantly demean the federal workforce. Now, that can’t help hiring. So even if you’re trying to hire back, I think that it’s going to be difficult for the federal government to do that. And we’ll see what happens in January. And then, of course, the court cases. I haven’t even written about the court cases because I’ve been focusing on the operations of government. But there’s about 20 absolutely critical court cases that are going to have to wend their way through the system. And we’re going to see how much of this can be done. Because the nut of the argument is, if Congress has the authority to appropriate, and Congress appropriates money, and says, do this, do that with this money, and the executive says, oh, okay, we’ll do this, we’re going to do this with five people, and it is absolutely clear that you can’t do this with five people, is that a violation of the separation of powers? And that’s what we’re headed to. That’s really the issue that everybody is going to have to get their head around. And we’ll see if the courts offer any clarity on this in the coming months.

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Less than 24 hours after undergoing a heart procedure in an Indiana hospital, former NBA star and owner of the successful cannabis/hemp company Viola Brands, Al Harrington, was all smiles as we sat down to commence a candid conversation. That’s all you need to know about this extraordinary athlete’s toughness, tenacity and determination: When there’s a job to do, Al Harrington shows up and shines. And shine he did.

Born and raised in New Jersey, Harrington was the 25th overall pick in the 1998 NBA draft after being selected as a McDonald’s High School All-American. Bypassing college hoops altogether, Harrington played six seasons with the Indiana Pacers then spent the following decade with the Atlanta Hawks, Golden State Warriors, New York Knicks, Denver Nuggets, Orlando Magic and Washington Wizards before retiring in 2015. In all, Harrington played in 16 seasons in the NBA—that’s quite an impressive run to be sure.

So it wasn’t a complete surprise when Harrington applied that hard-earned discipline from his playing days to his next venture, Viola Brands, the largest Black-owned cannabis brand producing products since 2011. Currently available in nine states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania—Viola’s mission, according to Harrington, is to “increase equity and ensure Black and brown people are afforded the opportunity to be a part of a fast-growing industry that has historically left them disenfranchised.”

Viola Brands’ latest big moves involve his recent collabs with fellow former NBA star, Allen Iverson, by partnering in distributing the popular strains Iverson ’01 and ’96. Most exciting, perhaps, is the latest news out of this team: Viola Brands recently announced they’re once again partnering with Iverson as well as Horticulture Co. and Circle K to launch a line of Allen Iverson-branded, hemp-derived THC beverages called IVERSON. Circle K is the exclusive retailer for this national rollout, which is considered one of the very largest for THC products in American mainstream retail.

This is a very big deal.

It’s with this knowledge and energy that we entered our conversation with Al Harrington, the tough as nails, eloquent ambassador for all things cannabis. He’s all heart. But you already knew that didn’t you?

Let’s go back to when you were a McDonald’s High School All Star pick—you must’ve been pursued by every top college team—what went into the decision to go straight into the NBA draft?

Yeah, man. Well, my story goes, when I was young, I was always the clumsiest kid in the room. Never got picked to play sports. At the end of my eighth-grade year, I was diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatters, which is basically a huge growth spurt—I grew from 5’10” to 6’4” in one summer. When I got to high school, I wasn’t even gonna try out for basketball, but the JV coach, thank God, put me on the team. I was the worst player on the team. I couldn’t dunk. I couldn’t catch. But the next summer, I met this guy named Sandy Pyonin, who became my AAU coach, and that’s when everything changed, man. He taught me how to play basketball, how to dribble, shoot, run. Everything. I switched high schools and by my junior year, it all started to click. My senior year, I went to the Nike All-American Camp and ended up being MVP there, which put me in the top ten in the country. And I told my coach if I become No.1, I want to go pro. And he was like, “I don’t know about all that.”

It sounds as if you could’ve used a couple of years in college before going pro.

You know what, I probably could have. My AAU coach always says that. But I mean, shit, I played 16 years—so let’s not get it twisted. [Laughs] When I got to the league, I never, not once thought I didn’t belong. I never thought that my teammates, or the guys I played against, were that much better than me or that I should’ve gone to college. You know what I’m saying?

Let’s talk about New York City—I remember you with the Knicks, and all of a sudden, everything clicked for you. You scored more points than ever. Was something different playing at Madison Square Garden versus other places?

I’ll say why I had success in New York was really because I just never wanted to get booed. [Laughs] In New York City, they’ll boo your ass in a minute. So, I always made sure I had my best games in New York because I never wanted to get booed. But I can say I never got booed once in my two years playing there!

How did Viola, your successful cannabis brand since 2011, get its name?

So, my grandmother’s name is Viola. Right around the time I started playing for the Denver Nuggets, cannabis was just making its way onto the medical scene and I was reading about it every day in the newspapers—I’m a big newspaper reader—and at the end of that year, my grandmother came to see me play. When she got there, she was taking all this medication for high blood pressure, diabetes, glaucoma…I told her I’d just read that cannabis can cure glaucoma. She looked at me and she said, “Reefer?! Boy, you trying to get me to smoke reefer?! You outta your mind!” And she laughed and laughed. But the next day I come home and she’s sitting in the kitchen complaining about how bad her eyes hurt, and I told her “Grandma, look, you’re in a legal market here. Doctors recommend cannabis for patients dealing with what you’re dealing with, so why don’t you just give it a try?” I called a dispensary, and they recommended a strain called Vietnam Kush. We bought this Volcano bag system, had her go outside and she tried it. I asked her how she was feeling. She was crying, and she said, “I’m healed! I haven’t been able to read the words in my Bible in more than three-and-a-half years.” I hug her and we call my mother, and she’s telling her, “God gave me my sight back. Everything’s so bright.” That’s what inspired me to just start learning more about cannabis, weed, reefer—whatever you want to call it—because of the medicinal benefit—the miracle it was for my grandmother.

Did she live long enough to see the company?

Yep, she did. She died in 2021, so she lived to 91 years. When I launched the company, she came to the launch party. And after we got done with dinner and everything, we were driving home and she was like, “Al, that was a lot of people, and everybody was saying my name, my name was everywhere.” She’s like, “If anything happens bad, will I go to jail?” [Laughs]

Not only do you have the deep medical origin story, but Viola is legitimately committed to entrepreneurs of color.

I mean it’s always been the focus once I got into the industry. This industry isn’t easy and it’s not really set up for us to be successful, especially when people have limited resources. And after COVID, it’s been in this kind of wonky place because so many people lost money betting on these huge players that couldn’t produce. But you know, at the end of the day, it’s like sports—you come into a game with a game plan to stop Steph Curry, and if it don’t work, you got to readjust the plan. So, we’ve pivoted into the adult beverage space; we continue to stay relevant and make sure that we keep a seat at the table as this industry continues to evolve.

A few years ago, you wrote an article stating there was still a war on marijuana. Do you think that’s still in place, particularly given the recent—and shocking— federal ban on hemp Trump signed into law?

Yeah, you see it all the time, man. Obviously, it makes no sense, right? You’d think that train has left the station already when it comes to banning any cannabis at this point. But that’s just the world we live in, especially in the US. Like the fact that there’s still Red Dye 40 in damn near everything we eat—it’s so funny the things they choose to care about when there’s other things that are really, really affecting and hurting all of us, even children. It’s just a weird time and the war on cannabis is continuing. [US Senator] Mitch McConnell throwing that in there in a budget bill is just criminal, right? Because who’s gonna stop a budget bill to address a hemp ban?

And Trump’s not gonna read the fine print, as we know.

I mean, even if he did, he’s not going to stop it—people have been out of work for more than 40 days, right? He can’t stop that to say, “I don’t want hemp in there” and go back and forth. But there’s always gonna be hurdles along the way, ’cause we’re going through prohibition, and we’ll find a way to come out good on the other side, it’s just gonna take us more time and money—and energy that a lot of people don’t seem to have anymore, because we kinda tired and beat up from getting to where are today. But at the end of the day, we see how much good is done and it’d be crazy for us to stop now.

You said post-COVID’s been wonky for the cannabis industry and capital’s sort of dried up—what I’ve seen is a lot of consolidations and collaborations. I’ve seen your recent work with Allen Iverson. I see you with Ricky Williams. How have you teamed up, and how are collaborations a part of Viola now?

Being an NBA player for 16 years, I understand that no matter how good Reggie Miller was by himself, if it wasn’t all of us collectively working together, he ain’t gonna win no games. So that’s kind of how I see it. For me, being able to join forces with people that are like-minded and come from sports is important—I know that athletes don’t quit. And what we do is really intentional.

Is the Iverson collaboration just on the beverage line?

No, so we actually started our collaboration with Allen Iverson in 2021, and it started with just flower. Then it went from flower to vapes to edibles and pre-rolls. Then we started concocting these beverages about two years ago, and we did a collaboration with a company called Tempters, where we provided the terpenes. We’re coming up on our two-year anniversary with them. Last month, we launched the IVERSON beverage and we got a national mandate with Circle K. So we’ll be in 3,000 Circle Ks.

Huge news. What a massive win.

Thank you, bro. I mean that came together so fast, man. God has always been on my side. And the fact that we met Circle K when we did and they allowed us to get in on that fourth quarter set, which was already done six months ago, was a huge play for us. We have all of our beverage line in there, five different brands. Spec’s, which is the biggest grossing THC beverage liquor store chain in the country, based in Texas, we just launched in there last week, and we’re just growing it from there—Goody Goody, Total Wine, Gopuff, we’re working on more. Obviously, with this bill, they just snuck a monkey wrench in there, but we’re still business as usual, we’re just going to have to work and lobby. We got a year to fight it, and I think we’ll make some weight because these products are too good and they’re helping so many people.

We’ve seen a lot of celebrity brands who come into the space, and don’t succeed. Is Viola’s success also partly due because you do enjoy the plant and it’s part of your life? What are some of the strains or forms of consumption that you enjoy?

So for me, I prefer OGs, you know, I just love the way OGs make you feel, it checks all the boxes. It gives you the body high, a little bit of a head high and relaxes me. I’m not a big sativa smoker because it makes my heart race and I get in my head. For OGs, I like the Skittles for flavor and high, so we’ve been doing a lot of variations of cuts with Skittles. Lemon Cherry Gelato had a huge run; we’re doing a lot of crossing with that. We’re crossing a lot of stuff with Blue Nerds right now. I prefer a hybrid, because I don’t like being too high where I can’t do anything. I’m looking more for functional, right? And that’s what we brought to the beverages—I drink beverages every single day and I smoke more socially. All our beverages have clean ingredients—low sugar, low calorie. Always standing true to our roots of health and wellness. I’ve literally lost millions of dollars because I wanted to make sure we stayed with the quality. Bottom line? This brand has my grandmother’s name. If it’s not good enough for Grandma Viola to smoke, then we’re not allowing nobody else to smoke it. And to your point, I honestly believe that’s why we’re still here and well respected after all these years.

Yeah, nobody’s booing you in the cannabis space either, that’s for sure. 

No doubt. I still got that fear. [Laughs]

Where are you in five years?

In five years, man, I hope that we’re still in this game. I think we’ll have some of the best spirits in the cannabis space, maybe circle back to edibles. I think we’ll be one of the biggest brands in convenience, through Circle K, hopefully 7-Eleven and we’re talking to Target. You know, when I started I never would’ve thought that I’d ever be sitting in a store next to Doritos and Pepsi. [Laughs] It’s just amazing where we’ve come, and we’re not gonna stop. We’ll keep trying to break down all those damn barriers.

The post Al Harrington: The Heart of a Lion appeared first on Cannabis Now.

• The Pentagon inspector general found the Defense Health Agency failed to issue finalized guidance defining roles, responsibilities and access-to-care standards after reorganizing the military health system. The average wait for urgent medical appointments at military medical treatment facilities outside the United States stretched as long as 21 days in some locations, while routine appointments were delayed by as much as 37 days. Auditors also said many overseas facilities were understaffed and personnel working in military clinics and hospitals experienced burnout and low morale. The inspector general recommended that the DHA director track data on why personnel are leaving military medical facilities.
  (DoD IG finds long care delays, staffing gaps at overseas military hospitals - DoD IG)
• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services should consolidate its scanning contracts to boost its records digitization efforts. That’s one recommendation from the USCIS ombudsman’s latest annual report. It also said USCIS needs to standardize its scanning operations to ensure documents are appropriately tagged with searchable metadata. The report touts how artificial intelligence could help the agency create fully searchable records. USCIS has been on a years-long journey to digitize its records, but it still manages approximately 171 million paper files.
  (USCIS ombudsman annual report - Department of Homeland Security)
• The Treasury Department is looking for AI experts who can put their skills to the test. A new job posting is asking candidates to use these tools to write a 10-page analysis of metaphors used in The Great Gatsby, then summarize it into a 200-word summary. Candidates must then translate the essay into Spanish and Mandarin. They must also compare the book’s metaphors against three other novels of their choosing and then rewrite their essay in the style of a scientific paper.
  (IT specialist (artificial intelligence) - USAJobs)
• Lawmakers dropped several quality-of-life reforms for service members and their families while compromising defense policy legislation. Members of Congress once again rejected a proposal to expand eligibility for the basic needs allowance by removing basic allowance for housing from income calculations. Most lower-income service members don’t qualify for the stipend due to their housing allowance pushing them above the income threshold. While the program has had a low participation rate from the start, the Pentagon’s own survey estimates that about one-in-four service members struggle with food insecurity. Lawmakers also rejected a Senate-backed pilot program proposal to provide coupons to junior enlisted service members to purchase food at commissaries.
  (Lawmakers drop several quality-of-life reforms from final defense policy bill - Federal News Network)
• Agencies will soon see a more streamlined process when giving bonuses to their employees. The Office of Personnel Management is transferring the approval process for pay incentives off of its own plate, and instead making it the responsibility of individual agencies. The goal is to make it easier to offer bonuses to employees, and free up time for OPM to focus on other priorities. Despite the process change, OPM said it “does not know” if agencies will actually offer more recruitment or relocation incentives as a result. The final rule implementing the changes comes after OPM first proposed regulations in 2023.
  (OPM seeks to reduce ‘administrative burden’ by tweaking bonus approval process - Federal News Network)
• A new “Tech Force” hiring program from the Trump administration seeks to bring more technical expertise into the government’s ranks. The Office of Personnel Management said the new program will recruit 1,000 employees, for two years each, to work on IT modernization projects at various agencies. The new hiring initiative comes after more than 300,000 employees left government this year, due to the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the workforce.
  (OPM seeks early-career talent for ‘Tech Force’ federal hiring initiative - Federal News Network)
• The future of the Federal Emergency Management Agency is up in the air after a turbulent year. Former FEMA leaders said the agency needs clarity to move forward. Last week, the Trump administration delayed the release of the FEMA Review Council’s recommendations. Speaking at an event on Monday, former FEMA Administrator Pete Gaynor said the report was going to serve as a “north star” for the agency. “It was going to offer predictability to FEMA and to the entire emergency management enterprise that we were going to go somewhere transformative. And it hasn't happened, at least not yet. And I guess the biggest takeaway is, without the report, what happens next?” Gaynor said. White House officials canceled a scheduled FEMA Review Council meeting at the last minute on Friday. The council had been scheduled to vote on a draft of its final report.
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• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is exploring workarounds to stricter rules on telework as a reasonable accommodation. CDC supervisors have instructed staff to email their medical documentation directly to Lynda Chapman, the agency’s chief operating officer, to “bypass” the traditional reasonable accommodation system. Chapman will decide if employees are eligible for 30 days of telework as an interim accommodation. Two CDC employees told Federal News Network that Chapman is only approving interim telework in a few circumstances, including recovery from surgery, pregnancy or chemotherapy.
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Interview transcript:

 

Terry Gerton You have had such a remarkable career. You led workforce and transformation efforts across nine agencies, if I counted that right. What first drew you into public service?

Elizabeth Kolmstetter Yes, I’ve really enjoyed my career and the ability to move around in different agencies. I think what drew me first was my first job, which was at the FBI. And being part of, probably because of the law enforcement-public safety angle, I really appreciated and learned how hard people work, but particularly the men and women who put their lives on the line every day for the American people. They’re unsung heroes; you don’t see that, you don’t understand that unless you are in the organization. And that, I think, was really what bit me into the whole public service and really thinking about, as an organizational psychologist, thinking about what motivates people and really trying to understand how to bring out their best every day. When you work with extraordinary people who are giving everything they have to the American people through the agency, that really struck me as incredibly interesting, but also important. So I really started at the FBI 32 years ago, and I never looked back.

Terry Gerton Well, across three decades, I can imagine you’ve seen a lot of change in how the federal government manages, recruits, retains its people. Your last job, though, I think is fascinating. You were the first and the only chief people officer in CISA. How did that mark sort of a culmination of all the transition that you’d seen in workforce management space?

Elizabeth Kolmstetter We traditionally think of human resources or human capital as the life cycle of hire to retire. And I have been in that my entire career, in that field. But this new model, the thinking was that if you separate and have a chief people officer who could dedicate the time and effort and initiatives to the engagement, the recruitment, retention and what keeps people here, what skills we need to develop, our leadership which is so important to culture. And instead of fighting the HR operations because, you know, if someone’s not getting paid or somebody, you’re trying to hire that person, that’s always going to take priority over what we say is more strategic, more culture, longer-term engagement efforts. So being able to separate that and have both a chief people officer and a CHCO allowed us to really focus on the entire human experience at work. Really for cybersecurity, having to recruit and retain and motivate and develop that workforce was a priority for national security. So, very exciting.

Terry Gerton Well, following up on the government shutdown, organizational culture’s really taken a hit. I think it would be fair to say that. What advice would you have for folks who will be coming back into the HR space and trying to bring people back to work, trying to rebuild that culture? What lessons have you learned that you’d want to share with them?

Elizabeth Kolmstetter I certainly cannot underscore enough the importance of culture and engagement. You have got to keep people motivated in order to achieve these just enormous and daunting missions. And so I hope that the pedal will go back down on the initiatives and the importance on engagement and starting with leadership. But really my advice to all leaders and especially those who are in human resources is just keep focusing on the people. Let them know and appreciate them for their work, their effort, their skills, their dedication. I think that you just have to remind people why they’re here. I would say, look at the people that are working without getting paid. I mean, who else would do that but public servants who are so committed to why they work and what they do for this country? Remind people that’s why we’re here. Our goal and our mission is more important than ourselves. So being part of that is so important. I do believe that the public is even more recognizing that now, probably because the shutdown has gone on so long that the appreciation is there and the importance is there. It’s never gone away. And don’t get caught up in the rhetoric, because what the American people need is really dedicated, smart, innovative public servants. And they have them, they’re there, and they’re going to continue to do the best that they possibly can.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Elizabeth Kolmstetter. She’s the retired Chief People Officer for CISA and a newly elected fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. So Elizabeth, let’s pick up there. You’ve received lots of awards in your professional government career, but being elected a fellow of the National Academy is kind of a big deal. What does it mean to you personally?

Elizabeth Kolmstetter It is a very big deal, and I am incredibly humbled by this honor. I never thought that I would be named a fellow of NAPA. I have known NAPA, I’ve worked with NAPA, I have used NAPA to do studies at many of the agencies where I worked because they are so respected for their credibility, their research, their evidence base. It’s something I’ve always believed in because, of course I’m a psychologist, so I think science and data is really important. But being named a fellow, I think, is probably going to be one of the biggest hallmarks of my professional career, because it recognizes not just my background, but my contributions to public service. And my desire to keep giving now that I’m retired gives me a really important way to keep giving and keep seeking to improve public service, public institutions.

Terry Gerton The Academy really is a cross-sector community and your career has been sort of multisector. How do you plan to work with the Academy to advance good public administration?

Elizabeth Kolmstetter I am really going to be focused, I think, on the workforce part of things. Some of the grand challenges that NAPA has posted are about, obviously, reinvigorating public service but continuing to recruit and retain and motivate people into public service. Getting the story out — what is it like? What does it mean? Why is it important? And I also really believe in permeability. I don’t think you have to come and stay in one area anymore. There’s so much more mobility and opportunity. Come and be a public servant for a while, learn, understand, be part of that fabric, and then go do academia or private sector or nonprofit. But I think coming and going and crossing the different sectors is actually going to create more integration, more partnership across the sectors, which we need to advance our society, really. It’s not so much a great divide anymore like it used to be; it’s really an integrated partnership. So I would like to be part of that aspect and of course improving the public sector talent management program since that’s what I do. I think that we could modernize more and NAPA has had a long history of doing studies on modernizing talent programs again to bring out the best in the people that work in public sectors.

Terry Gerton Well, both of those recommendations, certainly the permeability and talent management, are aligned with exactly what the new OPM director says he wants to do. If you were advising him, where would you suggest that he watch out for landmines and maybe take advantage of opportunities?

Elizabeth Kolmstetter Well, I was very pleased to be able to hear the new director, Scott Kupor, speak at the NAPA conference last week and hear directly some of his ideas. I would say that he does need to keep listening, first of all learning where those landmines are, but also I love his bold move to do some more things that perhaps people say are more private sector, but they’re really cutting edge talent programs. Especially recognizing and rewarding top talent, which he is talking about, looking at how we compensate and reward excellence. I think he’s right on. We need to do that. I also think that we should look at more hybrid with employment at will. I don’t think that just coming in and staying and rewarding mediocrity is what the government needs anymore. Certainly I believe in job security — if you’re doing a great job and you’re continuing to develop your skills, we should recognize that. But I have seen over my career a number of people who kind of coast. I don’t think that’s a service to the American people. I do think we need to, again, reward and recognize continued growth and skills, especially in technology and AI and these new forms of getting work done, and I do not see that as much in the federal recognition program. So I’m on board with him trying to find a way forward that actually modernizes some of these traditional methods that we’ve used in the federal government.

Terry Gerton Elizabeth, what advice would you have for someone, a young person who’s thinking about joining public service, but maybe is disturbed at what they’ve seen in some of the later trends — what would you tell them?

Elizabeth Kolmstetter First of all, always keep an open mind when it comes to your career and opportunity, because you never know where that amazing opportunity is going to open. And I, myself, said I would never work for the federal government because I believed it was bureaucratic and slow. So I always tell people when I give career talks, I am an example of what not to do. First of all, never say never. But you asked if somebody was already open to it, and I would say, walk through that door, get some experience in the public sector. Because until you experience it, it’s hard to appreciate what it is and how it actually works. So I think rotations in the public sector — think AmeriCorps, which is the domestic Peace Corps — there are so many ways to do service to the society, whether it’s local, state or federal, and get that experience. Because being part of a team that is working for a mission that is bigger than profit or any of the different sectors: It’s a different feeling to be with men and women and people of all genders. What is that spark that makes us so dedicated every day to come and make a difference? And that is what you become, a fabric, part of the DNA. You become part of that. That becomes your value set, that we have to do better. We have to keep driving our society forward. And this is a great country with great people who deserve the best. So being part of that I think is very worthy, but don’t think of it as you have to go in and stay for your whole career — back to that permeability. Come in and have that experience and then go to the private sector, or go into nonprofit. But come and have experience, because then you know what it takes and you will always have those partnerships and network as you go forward.

The post From NASA to CISA, she’s shaped the federal workforce for three decades first appeared on Federal News Network.

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Interview transcript:

 

Terry Gerton I want to start with a topic that some of our listeners are writing in about. September 30 was the end of the DRP and the day before the shutdown. Folks who retired effective that day maybe are in a bit of a limbo about what the status is on their retirement packages. What are you hearing from OPM around the processing backlog?

John Hatton So OPM seems to be trying to tackle this issue. And we’ve seen some reporting on statistics from OPM, but that may not show the full picture. They have recently started reporting at least interim pay status. So once a claim gets to them, they have to initiate an interim pay, which is going to be some lower percentage than your full annuity typically. And they’re reporting it’s six days until interim pay. That doesn’t necessarily show how long it’s taking to get from when you submit in your retirement date application and when that claim gets over to OPM. We’re concerned that there is maybe some delays on the agency side, particularly impacted by the shutdown. I don’t think we have good data yet on that to say exactly where it is, but here are some numbers. Kapoor in September said there was about 60,000 retirements in the online retirement system. So not yet at OPM, but they had visibility into them. And about 35,000 in September. In October, OPM received 20,000 claims. So if there’s 35,00 in the system and only 20,00 got to OPM, that tells me there may be delay of at least 15,000 getting over to OBM. Now that also started the shutdown. I can only imagine that caused some delays getting over through the process at the agency level. OPM itself was not impacted by the shutdown in terms of retirement services. They are exempt. They are funded through trust fund dollars, so it wasn’t like they were shut down in terms of processing. But at the agency level, many people may not have been there. The other thing is they’re reporting retirement claims processing, and we don’t have the November figures in yet from OPM, so that’ll tell us a little bit more about how they’re doing. Their current stat on time to process the full claim is 66 days. That’s down from 79, so that sounds like a good thing. But again, we don’t have necessarily all the numbers visible. I think they’re doing a little bit better showing some of those different stats on interim pay and even survivor benefit processing, but there’s still a lot we don’t really know.

Terry Gerton So folks who are in this limbo status, who may not know where their file is right now, what’s your advice for them?

John Hatton Well, one, if you’ve done it through the online retirement application, you may be able to see if there’s an issue where it’s stuck at payroll, stuck at agency level and not over at OPM. And so maybe there’s somebody you can talk to at agencies. Now we’ve heard from some members that there’s nobody to talk to at their own agency. And maybe that’s because there’s been these large-scale reductions in force. It could have been a shutdown-related issue as well. So that’s not great advice. You can always try to call OPM, we always try to help our members, try to elevate claims when it’s taken a longer time. I think for a September retirement date with the amount of retirement claims coming in and with some potential delays at the agency level, we may not expect this to be kind of a super long time at this point. Now it gets into January, February, you don’t have a full retirement processing claim and I think that’s a much longer delay. There’s also often cases that just take a lot longer. So there’s simple cases where you’ve worked for one agency your whole life, and it’s pretty easy for OPM to do. But there’s other cases where you bounce around different agencies, maybe you left service, you came back; maybe you’ve worked under the normal retirement system, but separately under a special category where you have a higher multiplier; maybe some of your files are over at the National Archives, you have to get them there — so those types of things really delay the process and how long you get through the system. You see a degree of variability between different types of cases in terms of getting through OPM.

Terry Gerton That’s great advice. I’m speaking with John Hatton, the Staff Vice President for Policy and Programs at the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association. All right, John, let’s move into some other things that may be affecting federal civilians or the retired population. One of the things in the continuing resolution back in November included language blocking reductions in force. What are you seeing there in terms of compliance, notifications, people being brought back?

John Hatton Well, in terms of compliance, with those who were the shutdown RIFs, those for whom the administration took the opportunity to say, we are not required to do this function by Congress right now because we’re in a shutdown, there’s no appropriations law. They started the process of reductions in force for some people because of the shutdown. Those have been reversed; those people have been reinstated. Then there are other reductions in force that started before the shutdown. But the language in the continuing resolution was very clear. There’s no funds to be used to implement, initiate or even follow through on these RIFs. So the administration tried to go through with continuing to fire a group of State Department and Foreign Service employees. That was blocked by a court issuing a temporary restraining order against that, based on that continuing resolution language. So the good news is that language passed as part of the CR that was negotiated in by Sen. Kaine has been effective at stopping these reductions in force. Not just ones that were started in the shutdown, some of them were started before, and preventing any new ones from going on until at least January 30.

Terry Gerton With all of these changes in the delayed retirements and the high-rank freezes, what are you sensing is the mood among federal employees right now as we get to the end of this year and the start of a new one?

John Hatton Well, I don’t know that it’s good. I don’t think we’re at a point where it’s recovered from what has been a very tumultuous year, particularly coming off a shutdown where you had to work for a record amount of what I think was 43 days without pay. And other people were not working and coming back to large backlogs of work. Do you think, you know, there are some signs of hope for a return to a little bit more normalcy? And I think this blocking the administration’s reduction-in-force language, if we get full year appropriations bills done, I think that puts a little bit of a bit of a check on some of these executive actions. I think probably too late for many, but it may give a little bit more security for those currently in the federal workforce that have made it this far that maybe it won’t go further. So I think we’ll see. The Congress is still working through the appropriations process. They’ve only passed three full-year bills; I don’t expect they’ll pass all the bills, full-year, but in the Senate they’re trying to five bills passed, which would be the bulk of spending for the federal government.

Terry Gerton What are you tracking there in terms of federal pay raises for 2026?

John Hatton Well, the president in August issued an alternative pay plan that would provide a 1% across-the-board pay increase. I don’t expect that to change through the appropriations process. It doesn’t look like anything’s going to be passed this month. I mean, the Senate is trying to pass a five-bill package, but it looks like they’re having problems getting it through. So as long as Congress doesn’t say anything, I would expect that alternative pay plan to be implemented via an executive order. So at least a 1% pay increase next year for federal employees.

Terry Gerton That doesn’t seem like it’s keeping up with the cost of living adjustments.

John Hatton No, it is not. Certainly, the cost of living for everybody in America has continued to go up, as reflected by the consumer price index. Inflation is still at elevated levels, and this is coming on the heels of several years of very high inflation. So it’s not just the current increases in prices, but it’s catching up to the past increases. So that continues to be an issue, I think, for federal employees is that these pay raises, while it’s good to have something, it’s really not keeping up with these costs. I mean, just look at health premiums, which is not the entire basket of goods that you’re looking at, but health premiums went up 12.3% on average this year for enrollees. Clearly, 1% pay increase is not going to keep up with that. So more of your income is being pulled away into health care increases and all the other goods are going up at a higher rate as well. It makes federal jobs less competitive. And that comes on top of a year where the jobs just became a whole lot less secure than they used to be, when certainly the work that people have been putting in through their public service has been devalued, whether it be shutdowns or just rhetoric or the way people have been treated. So certainly been a tough year. I don’t think that 1% does nearly enough, but it is something. I think that’s likely what’s going to happen, even if it’s too little.

The post Some hopeful signs of stability for the federal workforce first appeared on Federal News Network.

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Interview transcript:

 

Terry Gerton I thought we would just take advantage of the end of December, the end 2025 and ask you to take a look. There’s certainly been no shortage of acquisition news and reforms, but as you think about the whole of the last 12 months, what really sticks out for you is the most significant changes that the Trump administration has made in acquisition?

Emily Murphy So I think there’s three things, or three groups of things I’ll say, that I think are very significant. The first one is just how involved the administration’s been in acquisition. They came in and the leadership on day one got very involved in government contracting. To this day we’re seeing reviews at the secretary level, administrator level, of procurement. But from day one you saw the leadership coming in at GSA and at other agencies making procurement and acquisition really a focus. They did those “defend the spend” reviews. So it’s been a much more intense focus on government contracting than we’ve seen in a long time. And then that was followed up with the three executive orders that I think of as going together that came out. Where the president looked at first — wanting the government to buy commercial when possible, saying that we are going to consolidate how procurement operated, we’re going to buy as one government, and that we were really empowering GSA on that level. And then announcing that we were going to rewrite the FAR. Then the third one has to be the actual FAR rewrite, which was an amazing amount of work that the OFPP, GSA, NASA, Department of War did in a matter of months. And we’ve got several agencies having adopted that deviation. So I think those would be the three things I’d point to as the biggest. There was so much that happened in 2025.

Terry Gerton When you think about those three together, what would you say the biggest impact has been, especially on the contracting community?

Emily Murphy The contracting community is still trying to figure out what the new normal is. Reviews, repricing OneGov initiative, the change in the workforce with the deferred resignation program and that fork in the road, there just aren’t as many people engaged in contracting anymore. And so everyone’s trying to figure out still how to execute. How do we get stuff done? And that’s probably the biggest thing I’ve seen affecting both industry and government alike on the government contracting side.

Terry Gerton Well, you mentioned the fewer number of contracting officials in the government. There’s been so many disruptions, the DRP, the shutdown, the continuing resolution. What is life like for the contracting workforce these days?

Emily Murphy Hectic. Again, contracting officers are very mission-oriented and rule-oriented people. So, they’ve got a conflict right now in that the rules are changing, which makes it hard for them to be as strict in adherence. And they’re trying to deliver on a mission that’s also really rapidly evolving with a lot less resources, but a lot of new tools also, like AI-empowered tools — GSA AI comes to mind. A very new approach to acquisition, in that they’re being told, “go out and look for commercial.” We’re going to get rid of a lot of the clauses that they’ve been trained to use from day one. Speed is important, but at the same time, knowing that there is a lot of oversight waiting for them. And when I say oversight, I don’t just mean the traditional oversight community, but you’ve also got a situation where the heads of agencies are reviewing individual procurements themselves, which is a very unusual situation to find ourselves in. So their bosses are looking very closely at the work they’re doing.

Terry Gerton Are you seeing any evidence of training or common guidance that’s going to help them pull all of those diverse stimuli together?

Emily Murphy I’ve got the say, the work when they did the FAR rewrite, the practitioner album, the companion guide, there are great resources there. It’s on-demand training, so you can go and look at it again and again and it’s short, to the point, you can get there. But there’s not the time for the traditional training that we’re used to, where someone would be going to DAU or FAI and taking a class. Very much it’s people need to be trained right instantly and be able to go in and put those in place, and a rewrite of the entire FAR is a pretty extensive thing to be training someone on. So, got to give credit to the folks who put that together. They put together as many resources as they could. But it’s going to take some time for that all to sink in and for us to see how it works. And remembering that most of it’s still being done via deviation and very few agencies have the same deviations right now. So the uniformity that we’ve come to expect with government contracting isn’t there right now. It’ll come back, but it’s not there right now.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Emily Murphy. She’s a senior fellow at the George Mason University Baroni Center for Government Contracting and former administrator of General Services Administration. All right, Emily, let’s turn to our crystal ball to looking ahead to 2026. With all of those changes that you just really quickly summarized for us, what trends do you expect to dominate acquisition in 2026?

Emily Murphy I think we’re going to have another year of reviews. I think that we’re going to continue to have scrutiny. I think there’s going to be a push to get the FAR rulemaking process done. I think that there’s going to be an increased push towards using CSOs, OTAs. Hopefully we’ll get SBIR reauthorized soon, because I think the nontraditional contracting is going to continue to be a key area of focus. And I think when you look at the PMA, we’re getting a very clear signal that there’s going to be more consolidation happening as well.

Terry Gerton Well, speaking of the PMA, there’s some things in it that you might expect to see, but some things that you might expect to see that aren’t in it. For example, customer experience and shared services that have been tent poles for several administrations.

Emily Murphy That’s true. I was surprised that shared services in particular isn’t called out explicitly. I think you can read it into a fair number of places, but it’s not called out as its own goal or as its own objective. When you think of the buying as one entity, smarter faster and cheaper, that seems to be pushing towards the idea of procurement as a shared service. The customer experience isn’t itself called out directly, but we do talk about leveraging technology to deliver faster and more secure services. We’re looking at trying to optimize the real estate portfolio so that people can have cost-effective locations for agency buildings. I don’t think that the customer’s written out, but they’re not called out explicitly in the same way they have been in the past.

Terry Gerton The language on “demand partners who deliver” seems to be sending a message to contractors and grantees.

Emily Murphy It is. They’re saying they want to contract with the best businesses. And that’s not surprising given that there’s been a lot of conversation about trying to redo past performance. And we’ve heard it both from Congress and from the administration that we need to be putting more focus on making sure we really are getting results out of our contracts. Holding contractors and grant recipients accountable is very much in keeping with the rhetoric we’ve heard over the last year, and those “defend the spend” conversations that have taken place between GSA and contractors and other agencies and their contractors since they’ve done those reviews. The OneGov deals very much are about demanding better pricing, demanding results. I was surprised to see that they were saying put political appointees in control of the grant process. GSA is not a grant agency; it wasn’t an area we spent a lot of time on. But I always thought that political appointees did best when we set the objectives, and then we let the career employees go in and implement them and hold them accountable for meeting those objectives, rather than actually running the process itself. But it will be interesting to see how that is implemented and what results are being prioritized.

Terry Gerton Exactly. And there’s one other piece here. The deliver results, but particularly by American. Do you feel like that’s getting more emphasis than it has in the past in this PMA?

Emily Murphy Absolutely. I think it’s, rebuild American industry through prioritizing and enhancing made-in-America execution. I’ll be curious to see what we actually mean by “made in America” versus — you’ve got buy America, you’ve gotten buy American, you’ve been made in America — and how they play out in the contracting process. There has been a lot more emphasis. When I was GSA Administrator, we launched the “Made in America bot” so that we could go through the schedules and quickly figure out where we had problems with incorrect labeling of Made in America. I want to make clear, it’s something that GSA and other agencies have always focused on in complying with the law, but to call that directly in the PMA suggests that there’s going to be an even greater focus on this.

The post Insights on how federal acquisition changed in 2025, what’s coming in 2026 first appeared on Federal News Network.

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