Federal contractor Core4ce has acquired Azimuth as part of a push to expand its national security capabilities in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, threat protection, artificial intelligence and machine learning and warfighter support.
Core4ce said Tuesday Azimuth President and CEO Valerie Rossi will join the company as senior vice president and business unit manager of advanced mission solutions.
Chales Rossi, most recently executive VP with oversight of strategic growth and customer relations, will take on the roleof VP and senior account executive at Core4ce.
Merging The Forge With AAIM Lab
The transaction will combine Core4ce’s innovation incubator, called The Forge, with Azimuth’s AAIM Lab, which stands for autonomy, AI and machine learning.
The combination of research and development efforts of AAIM Lab and The Forge will enable Core4ce to advance the development of new capabilities in autonomous systemms, predictive analytics and ML-driven sensors while accelerating the transition of new tech platforms from the research phase to operational deployment to support Department of Defense and Intelligence Community customers.
Core4ce CEO Mike Morehouse said Azimuth’s R&D, operations support, AI/ML and engineering capabilities make it a great addition to the company.
“By partnering with Azimuth, we’ll be able to reach a broader range of customers, offer an integrated suite of complementary services, and ensure that the warfighters defending our country have the best possible tools and support,” Morehouse added.
With the acquisition, Core4ce will now operate with nearly 650 employees focused on delivering data and cyber operations support to national security agency customers.
About Azimuth
Ohio-based Azimuth is a woman-owned small business founded by Valerie Rossi in 2001. It provides R&D and technical support, security and threat analysis, programming and policy support, operational and administrative management and database and modeling support for national security clients.
The company’s customers include the U.S. Air Force, Air Force Research Laboratory, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Iridium said Tuesday its share of the contract modification is valued at $239 million over a period of five years.
Under the award, the GDMS-Iridium team will work with SDA and related stakeholders to build a ground system and oversee the integration of the ground enterprise with the agency’s Tranche 2 constellation.
The companies will also provide engineering design and analysis, maintenance, testing, infrastructure management assistance and site support.
Scott Scheimreif, executive vice president of government programs at Iridium, said the company will leverage its years of experience in commercial low Earth orbit development and operations to deliver an innovative ground system to SDA and warfighters.
“Iridium is excited to be part of this groundbreaking SDA program with our partner General Dynamics Mission Systems,” Scheimreif added.
The satellite communications company said the SDA award follows an operation and integration contract awarded in 2022 to develop ground entry points and operations centers and manage systems integration services and network operations.
“Seal of the United States Department of Defense (2001–2022)”, www.defense.gov/Brand-Guide, Licensed under Public domain
A Department of Defense report has found that defense spending in fiscal year 2023 in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., including DOD contract obligations, payroll spending and grant awards, totaled $609.2 billion, reflecting a $50.5 billion increase from the previous fiscal year and accounting for 2.2 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product.
DOD said Tuesday approximately $431.4 billion, or 71 percent, of the total defense spending went to contracts for various products and services.
According to the FY 2023 Defense Spending by State report, the Pentagon’s personnel payroll accounted for $167.4 billion, or 27 percent, and grant spending accounted for $10.4 billion, or 2 percent, of the total spending.
“This report is an enabler for the Department’s state and local partners to better understand and develop civilian innovation and modernization initiatives for the continued responsiveness of the defense industrial base and supply chains to our national security needs while also ensuring local infrastructure and services can sustain our local installations and the communities that host them and our military families,” said Patrick O’Brien, director of the Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation at DOD.
According to the report, Texas, Virginia and California were the top three recipients of defense contracts, personnel spending and grants in fiscal year 2023.
Texas landed the top spot with a defense spending total of $71.6 billion in FY 2023, an increase of $8.9 billion over the prior fiscal year.
When it comes to defense contract recipients, Lockheed Martin topped the list of 10 contractors with $61.4 billion, followed by RTX at $24.1 billion and General Dynamics at $22.9 billion.
“Businesses small and large across America are the heart of our industrial might, and this report is a tremendous resource that our state and local partners can use to better understand defense spending in their areas and strengthen supply chains,” said William LaPlante, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment and a three-time Wash100 awardee.
The Department of Health and Human Services has unveiled the final copy of the 2024–2030 Federal Health IT Strategy.
Through the strategy released on Sept. 30, HHS aims to improve care procedures for patients, caregivers, healthcare providers, public health officials and others throughout the healthcare community using IT.
You can learn more about the recent developments of the federal health IT strategy from the health professionals working to make it possible at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2024 Healthcare Summit on Dec 11. At the event, healthcare industry luminaries will discuss the future of telehealth while navigating the transforming regulatory landscape, so secure your tickets now!
The assistant secretary for technology policy within the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology worked alongside more than 25 federal agencies to produce the strategic roadmap. They then turned to members of industry for comments on the March-published draft.
The 4 Tenets of HHS’ IT Strategy
The HHS health IT plan focuses on four goals — promoting health and wellness, enhancing the delivery and experience of care, accelerating research and innovation and connecting health systems with health data.
Micky Tripathi, assistant secretary for technology policy and national coordinator for health IT at the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, said, “The release of our latest health IT strategy is a culmination of partnerships across the federal government to examine the forces shaping the healthcare ecosystem today and to craft a set of strategies to guide how to prioritize resources, align and coordinate federal health IT initiatives and activities, signal priorities to industry and benchmark and assess progress over time.”
The fourth goal, which aims to bring connectivity throughout all domain areas, will promote advanced communication principles for caregivers and physicians.
Michele Ellison, general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission and chair of the company’s Connect2Health task force, said, “The plan recognizes how our health system can benefit from cutting-edge communications infrastructure, particularly in rural and underserved areas – enabling us to better engage individuals, their caregivers and physicians across the care continuum and drive high-quality care while lowering cost.”
Claim your spot at the 2024 Healthcare Summit before it’s too late to join the conversation and gain insight into how IT modernization is changing the landscape of healthcare procedures!
The NSF said Friday a memorandum of understanding was signed between the NSF TIP and SPRIND during the latter’s fifth-anniversary celebration in Leipzig, Germany.
The transatlantic partnership will leverage the SPRIND Challenge model to streamline the process of selecting and conducting translational research and establish the foundation for new industries. Through the MOU, U.S. and European innovation ecosystems will come together to support unconventional problem-solving approaches and turn research into tangible applications and products.
Erwin Gianchandani, NSF assistant director for TIP, said the partnership enables the sharing of talents, ways of thinking, policy environments, facilities and markets between the two nations.
“Our historic partnership with SPRIND offers a transformative new approach to accelerating the development and translation of breakthrough technologies for maximum national, societal and geostrategic impacts,” said Gianchandani, adding, “Our partnership with SPRIND will help us find new ways to advance TIP’s mission as codified in the ‘CHIPS and Science Act of 2022’ and ultimately contribute to the U.S. economy.”
Rafael Laguna, founding director of SPRIND, stated that the agency was established in 2019 to bridge the gap between research and commercial viability.
“Inspired by DARPA and adapted to our mission to help innovators until the project can stand on its own, we developed comprehensive tools to finance new technologies at a stage when private investors are not yet ready to take on the financial risk,” commented Laguna.
NASA has sent into space its Europa Clipper spacecraft for an anticipated seven-year journey seeking to probe life-sustainment signs on Jupiter’s ice-covered moon Europa.
The spacecraft lifted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocketMonday at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA said.
The voyage of Europa Clipper, the agency’s largest spacecraft built for a mission to another planet, is expected to cover 1.8 billion miles. It will travel on a trajectory that will tap gravity assists from a Mars flyby in four months and then another flyby assist back to Earth in 2026. The spacecraft is anticipated to start orbiting Jupiter in April 2030 to set 49 flybys over Europa.
Europa Clipper’s science experiments on the moon flybys, programmed to as close as 16 miles to the surface, is scheduled to start in 2031. The spacecraft carries nine science instruments, with cameras and ice-penetrating radar among them. The science instruments will operate in concert to investigate Europa’s icy surface, deep interior and thin atmosphere.
NASA deployed in the spacecraft its largest solar arrays ever used in an interplanetary mission to power Europa Clipper’s instruments.
Maxar Technologies’ SSL unit, one of the companies that secured a NASA contract for the Europa Clipper instrumentation, was tasked to provide a remote engineering unit providing an interface between the spacecraft’s flight computer, thermal sensors and attitude control systems.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, a 2024 Wash100 Award winner, congratulated the Europa Clipper team on the launch that he described as the start of “the first journey to an ocean world beyond Earth.” He added, “By exploring the unknown, Europa Clipper will help us better understand whether there is the potential for life not just within our solar system, but among the billions of moons and planets beyond our sun.”
The Government Accountability Office found that the Social Security Administration is facing challenges in recovering the $62 million it spent on a service launched in 2020 to combat synthetic identity fraud due to a low number of industry subscribers.
SSA aims to recover all Electronic Consent Based Social Security Number Verification service rollout costs by the end of fiscal year 2027 in compliance with a 2018 law; however, it only collected about $25 million in user fees as of the end of FY 2023, meaning it will need to collect about $14 million annually to meet its goal, GAO said in a report released on Thursday.
The government watchdog also found that the agency did not follow guidance and best practices for service cost estimation.
Subscription data through December 2023 showed that the service has not significantly increased users since enrollment opened in FY 2022. Collections also decreased after the SSA increased fees in July 2023.
Despite the challenges, SSA officials told GAO that they did not plan to take significant steps to increase the use of the service which, according to subscribers, provides difficult-to-interpret verification results.
To resolve the issue, GAO made recommendations to the SSA, including implementing appropriate controls over IT investments, updating cost estimation guidance and developing strategies to expand service use.
The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center is collaborating with the Department of Energy laboratories to build a new data-streaming pipeline that would allow researchers to analyze data in real time.
The project aims to integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning-powered software into computing systems to achieve faster and more accurate results for scientific experiments, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory said Monday.
Called Intelligent Learning for Light Source and Neutron Source User Measurements Including Navigation and Experiment Steering, or ILLUMINE, the five-year project is part of efforts to expand connections between DOE computing centers and research facilities under the U.S. national laboratory system.
According to Jana Thayer, technical research manager at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, ILLUMINE aims to transmit experimental data to a remote computing facility without saving any information to a disk.
The project attempts to realize the ability to analyze the data of an ongoing experiment for optimal research results, which means “faster times to solutions and more accurate science,” Thayer said.
Additionally, the project will get a boost from high-performance computing centers, which would “expedite the data analysis process and alleviate in-house data storage issues,” Valerio Mariani, head of the LCLS Data Analytics Department at SLAC, explained.
Currently, the ILLUMINE project is using the Summit supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and will soon shift to Frontier, which take over from Summit when it is decommissioned by the end of 2024.
The SPH-M program aims to use advanced technology to enhance the self-propelled howitzer’s mobility, survivability, reliability, supportability and lethality.
According to Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, program executive officer of the ground combat systems, the Army is exploring U.S. and international options for available and mature industry solutions to address its critical capability gaps.
“The performance demonstrations will support the Army’s pivot from development to procurement of a mature, available and non-developmental system,” said Dean.
The demonstrations are scheduled to start in November and targeted to wrap up by the end of the year.
If any of the selected vendors would showcase suitable prototypes, the Army could opt for a follow-on competitive evaluation, which may result in a production contract award.
Federal HR leaders need to do more to support officials working outside of the continental United States to combat higher-than-average attrition rates for government jobs in remote locations, the Government Accountability Office reported Tuesday.
Historically, attrition rates among federal workers in the “non-contiguous U.S.,”—that is, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands—has hovered moderately higher than within the continental U.S. Between fiscal 2018 and fiscal 2022, attrition in the non-contiguous U.S. increased from 8.5% to 10.6%, while attrition in the continental U.S. federal workforce rose from 7.9% to 10.0%. In fiscal 2023, attrition fell to 8.2% for federal employees in the continental U.S. and 8.8% in Hawaii, Alaska and the territories.
Contributing to the higher attrition rate are a number of financial factors, of which only some can be ameliorated by employing agencies, including high housing costs and high prices for staple goods and low access to physicians who participate in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program or Federal Employees Dental and Vision Insurance program.
While initiatives like the federal government’s locality pay program, which aims to reduce the federal-private sector pay gap within a given region, and cash recruitment, relocation and retention bonuses exist to combat those costs, they are not particularly effective in practice.
While Alaska- and Hawaii-based feds receive 32% and 22% boosts to basic pay through the locality pay program, employees in the offshore territories only receive the base Rest of U.S. boost, in addition to the remains of the sunsetting Cost of Living Allowance program. And agency officials said that they often don’t have enough funding appropriated to make full use of retention and relocation bonuses.
Agency officials in the non-contiguous U.S. also report difficulty hiring for vacant positions, due to the remote locations and a much smaller talent pool than in the 48 contiguous states. Common complaints about the federal hiring process’ length and complexity are exacerbated when recruiting from the territories’ local population, GAO found.
“Agency officials across the locations we visited cited difficulties getting through the federal application process, including the time it takes to apply for a position, which dissuades candidates,” the report states. “In addition, various agency officials in Hawaii and Pacific territories shared that cultural barriers affect the application process. For example, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islander culture places great importance on humility, and, therefore, may not be comfortable labeling themselves as experts in their respective fields despite having the qualifications, according to agency officials. This cultural difference can prevent certain applicants from moving forward in the process.”
And once people are hired, it can be harder to retain them. That’s in part because there frequently are fewer mid-level positions in these locations, meaning in order to ascend the career ladder, employees must leave federal service or transfer to the mainland to acquire new skills and experience.
And conducting training with employees outside of the continental U.S. is hampered as well, with multiple agencies reporting that their live training often occurs outside of business hours for employees in Alaska or the Pacific islands.
While some of the agencies surveyed for GAO’s report documented meetings between headquarters staff and officials at facilities outside of the contiguous U.S., GAO recommended that they redouble those efforts and provide more consistent and helpful guidance on how better to utilize the various hiring and pay authorities to improve hiring and retention.
While most of the agencies studied for this report, including the Fish and Wildlife Service, the National Parks Service and Social Security Administration, concurred with GAO’s recommendations, the Homeland Security Department argued that its existing outreach efforts to remote officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Transportation Security Administration were sufficient to close the associated recommendation.
“DHS did not agree that FEMA needs to evaluate the agency’s efforts to obtain and use feedback on hiring and retention practices,” the report states. “DHS stated that FEMA holds regular and recurring meetings with hiring managers in the noncontiguous U.S. to obtain feedback and provide guidance on recruitment and retention practices. We provide examples of such meetings and guidance in the report. However, as discussed in the report, we heard from multiple officials in the noncontiguous U.S. that they experience challenges due to their headquarters office not fully understanding their needs.”
