All posts by : Shamima A

The U.S. Space Force and Boeing will work together to enable the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle to perform a series of aerobraking maneuvers to alter its orbit around Earth while using minimal fuel.

The Space Force said Thursday the Boeing-built X-37B spacecraft will execute a series of passes using the drag of Earth’s atmosphere to change orbits and safely dispose of its service module in compliance with space debris mitigation standards.

“This novel and efficient series of maneuvers demonstrates the Space Force’s commitment to achieving groundbreaking innovation as it conducts national security missions in space,” said Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall.

Once aerobraking is complete, the spacecraft will resume efforts to meet its test and experimentation objectives.

“This first of a kind maneuver from the X-37B is an incredibly important milestone for the United States Space Force as we seek to expand our aptitude and ability to perform in this challenging domain,” said Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman.

Kendall and Saltzman are both 2024 Wash100 awardees.

Young Bang, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, said the military branch is considering developing a separate path or a sub-path within the software acquisition pathway for artificial intelligence to accelerate the development and deployment of AI tools to warfighters, Federal News Network reported Thursday.

“Let’s figure it out. Let’s be creative. Let’s put things together. Let’s put a [Middle Tier of Acquisition pathway] with a software pathway and work with [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] to get to something faster for AI because as fast as the software pathway is, we need a faster path for algorithms,” said Bang.

According to FNN, the current software pathway requires programs to achieve a minimum viable capability release, or MVCR, within a year.

With the MVCR, the initial version of a functional capability is handed over to service personnel.

“What we’re saying is there’s great utility in a software pathway, but if we use a software pathway for algorithms — overnight is a good example, but some of these can actually take a little bit longer, but still a week. And if we think about that, a week versus an MVCR in a year — the timelines don’t align,” the 2024 Wash100 awardee noted.

This content is provided by Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Open Season for federal employees starts Nov. 11, 2024, which makes now the ideal time to see how you can make the most of your current health benefits throughout the remainder of the year.

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At FEP, we’re dedicated to our members’ health and well-being. With Open Season fast approaching, we encourage you to see what the Benefit of Blue^® can do for you.

Open Season is November 11 – December 9, 2024.

Learn more here

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

More than a dozen federal statistical agencies produce data sets that drive policy decisions in government and business decisions across the economy.

The Office of Management and Budget, underscoring the value of that data, is setting a standard for trustworthy government statistics.

OMB, in its “trust regulation,” published in the Federal Register on Friday, is taking steps to ensure statistical agencies produce “accurate, objective and trustworthy information.”

Chief Statistician of the United States Karen Orvis wrote in a blog post Thursday that the final regulation ensures statistical agencies “remain safe places for the collection, maintenance, and sharing of information critical to government decision making,” while protecting the privacy of individuals and organizations.

“Federal statistics are produced as a public good, whose value is rooted in public trust.  Maintaining and bolstering public trust in our nation’s statistics is absolutely critical,” Orvis wrote.

The regulation, required under the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, comes a few months after the American Statistical Association published a report warning that statistical agencies are having a harder time producing quality data.

In addition to budget and staffing shortages, the report found declining trust in the federal government corresponds with lower response rates to statistical surveys.

The report also warns federal statistical agencies lack “professional autonomy” from their parent agencies, and that they remain vulnerable to political meddling and improper influence.

The Trump administration, for example, pushed for adding a citizenship question to the 2020 census. The Supreme Court, however, blocked the Census Bureau from adding the question to decennial count forms.

The administration also pressured the Census Bureau to produce a report on the number of undocumented people in the U.S.

Former Chief Statistician of the U.S. Nancy Potok said the regulation spells out the “respective roles and responsibilities of not only the statistical agencies themselves, but the parent agencies in which they reside.”

“Finding the balance between professional autonomy for the statistical agencies to produce objective, trustworthy statistics and still serve the policy objectives of the president and executive branch political appointees has been a decades-long struggle,” Potok said.

“This is a big step forward in articulating what that balance should look like. Now we have to wait and see if there are mechanisms to enforce the regulation,” she added.

The final regulation states the federal statistical system “continues to provide the gold standard for impartial, trusted federal statistics foundational to informing decisions across the public and private sectors.”

The federal government has 16 federal statistical agencies, which have anywhere from 10 to 7,000 full-time employees.

“Increasingly, collaboration is required across the Federal statistical system to unlock greater efficiencies and leverage diverse expertise,” the regulation states.

The Data Foundation President Nick Hart said in a statement Friday that the rule “marks an important milestone in implementing the Evidence Act.”

“The success of this rule will depend on meaningful collaboration across the federal data ecosystem, far beyond recognized statistical agencies and units,” Hart said. “The Data Foundation urges statistical agencies to work closely with chief data officers, evaluation officers, performance officers, chief information officers, chief financial officers, and other key data leaders to ensure this rule supports a comprehensive, government-wide approach to evidence-building activities and responsible data use,” the foundation wrote.

Hart told Federal News Network in an interview that OMB’s regulation recognizes statistical agencies are no longer just producing discrete figures — such as gross domestic product or unemployment rates — but also coming up with objective measures of how government programs are operating.

“That’s really the broad intent of the Evidence Act, to not just understand how our government works, but help it work better,” Hart said.

Hart said OMB’s trust regulation also sets a standard for statistical agencies ahead of the president election in November and in anticipation of a new administration.

“Regardless of who wins that election, this will be a regulation that goes forward into the next administration, and into the executive branch going forward,” Hart said.

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) is set to publish an implementation strategy for its National Background Investigation Services (NBIS) program, a crucial step in getting the long-delayed initiative back on track. 

Once fully implemented, NBIS will serve as a “one-stop shop” background investigation system, offering security clearance applications, case management tools, and continuous vetting data, among other features. The IT system is critical to implementing the federal government’s “Trusted Workforce 2.0” initiative, a set of the largest reforms to personnel vetting processes, including security clearances, public trust and credentialing, and background investigations.

The NBIS program, however, has faced cost and performance issues — the Defense Department indicated earlier this year NBIS was not on track to meet key milestones.

“We all know that we’ve had some delays at DCSA with NBIS, but we have a new timeline that’s with [the Office of the Director of National Intelligence] right now under review. We’re all in — this is something that we view as can’t fail, and the timeline is the best plan that I’ve seen so far. I think it’s rooted in a lot of solid thought and partnership across the stakeholder community,” Jonathan Maffet, the executive program manager at DCSA said during the Professional Services Council’s Defense Conference Tuesday.

The second phase of the Trusted Workforce 2.0 calls for streamlining all of the security clearance policies that have been put in place over the course of the past 70 years. The initiative also instructs a shift from a periodic reinvestigation model for security clearances to a continuous vetting model.

Matthew Eanes, the director of the Performance Accountability Council program management office, said the transition has pushed legacy systems to their limits.

“There’s three phases of the Trusted Workforce. Phase Two was to do the policies, but it was also to implement what we called transitionary states. We essentially pushed as far as we could push with the legacy capabilities, and stretched them to the seams, then found some duct tape and stretched them a little bit further. And where we found ourselves, we were out of duct tape. The remaining implementation of Trusted Workforce is largely dependent on the critical path for NBIS,” Eanes said.

Eanes said the new implementation strategy, along with all the milestones associated with the strategy, will be published this week on performance.gov. 

There is also a push to implement a set of end-to-end shared services — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is developing tools such as Scattered Castles, a system that tracks security clearances, and a new tool called Transparency of Reciprocity Information System (ToRIS).

ToRIS will address the reciprocity challenges across intelligence agencies and allow employees’ clearances to follow them when transferring between departments.

“It’s kind of like the one missing puzzle piece that sits in between the IC elements. It’s going to fill the data sharing gap between them so we can move people between IC elements faster,” Eanes said.

ODNI just recently received funding for ToRIS — there are no timelines for the development of ToRIS yet, but there are tentative dates for the project’s development. 

Eanes said the dates are “going through coordination right now” and will be posted on performance.gov “in a couple of weeks.”

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

With Congress recommending both guardrails and a “full steam ahead” mindset for federal artificial intelligence deployments, agencies will feel the pressure to deliver AI-enabled services to citizens quickly. But how do they know their bots will not introduce harm and put individual team members, their organizations and the citizens they serve at risk?

Government agencies have an obligation to provide accurate information to citizens, and a bad bot can have both legal and moral implications. Last year, for example, the IRS was cited by the Government Accountability Office for its use of AI in flagging tax returns for audit, after the technology was found to possibly include unintentional bias. The IRS had humans in the loop with this system, but other guidance from the executive order and other directives appeared not to have been implemented at the time the potential for bias was discovered.

The IRS incident is a reminder of how important it is for agencies to do everything possible to avoid risk to citizens and safeguard government and personal data, before risk becomes reality. That may sound daunting, but federal guidance and frameworks highlight what is needed, including understanding AI risks, having DevOps and DevSecOps teams operate concurrently, establishing an independent red team that ensures the model delivers the highest quality results, and more, even if details on how to do this are not as clear. However, leaning on best practices already defined in data security and software development overall provides a clear path for what is needed to ensure AI does not introduce risk.

Keep risk front and center

Validating AI can be daunting because many AI models make a tradeoff between accuracy and explainability — but it’s necessary to mitigate risk. Start by asking questions that quality assurance (QA) would ask about any application. What’s the risk of failure, and what’s the potential impact of that failure? What potential outputs could your AI system produce? Who could it present them to? What impact might that have?

A risk-based approach to application development isn’t new, but it needs to be reinforced for AI. Many teams have become comfortable simply producing or buying software that meets requirements. Additionally, DevOps processes embed quality and security testing into the process from the beginning. But since AI requires taking a hard look at ways the system might “misbehave” from its intended use, simply applying the current QA processes is the wrong approach. AI cannot simply be patched if it makes a mistake.

Adopt an adversarial mindset

Red teams are routinely deployed to uncover weaknesses in systems and should be used to test AI, but not in the same manner as with traditional application development. An AI red team must be walled off from the day-to-day development team and their success and failure.

AI red teams in government should include internal technologists and ethicists, participants from government-owned laboratories, and ideally, trusted external consultants — none of whom build or benefit from the software. Each should understand how the AI system may impact the broader technology infrastructure in place, as well as citizens.

AI red teams should work with an adversarial mindset to identify harmful or discriminatory outputs from an AI system along with unforeseen or undesirable system behaviors. They should also be looking specifically for limitations or potential risks associated with misuse of the AI system.

Red teams should be free of the pressures of release timing and political expectations and report to someone in leadership, likely the chief AI officer (CAIO), who is outside of the development or implementation team. This will help ensure the effectiveness of the AI model and align with the guardrails in place.

Rethink validation to development ratio

Advances in AI have brought massive improvements in efficiency. A chatbot that might have taken months to build can now be produced in just days.

Don’t assume AI testing can be completed just as quickly. Proper validation of AI systems is multifaceted, and testing time to development time ratio will need to be closer to 70% to 80% for AI rather than the typical 35% to 50% for enterprise software. Much of this uplift is driven by the fact that the requirements are often brought into sharp relief during testing, and this cycle becomes more of an “iterative development mini cycle” rather than a traditional “testing” cycle. DevOps teams should allow time to check training data, privacy violations, bias, error states, penetration attempts, data leakage and liabilities, such as the potential for AI outputs to make false or misleading statements. Additionally, red teams need their own time allotment to make the system misbehave.

Establish AI data guidelines

Agencies should establish guidelines for which data will and will not be used to train their AI systems. If using internal data, agencies should maintain a registry of the data and inform data generators that the data will be used to train an AI model. The guidelines should be particular to each unique use case.

AI models don’t internally partition data like a database does, so data trained from one source might be accessible under a different user account. Agencies should consider adopting a “one model per sensitive domain” policy if their organization trains AI models with sensitive data, which likely applies to most government implementations.

Be transparent about AI outputs

AI developers must communicate what content or recommendations are being generated by an AI system. For instance, if an agency’s customers will interact with a chatbot, they should be made aware the content is AI-generated.

Similarly, if an AI system produces content such as documents or images, the agency might be required to maintain a registry of those assets so that they can later be validated as “real.” Such assets might also require a digital watermark. While this isn’t yet a requirement, many agencies already adopt this best practice.

Agencies must continually monitor, red team, refine and validate models to ensure they operate as intended and provide accurate, unbiased information. By prioritizing independence, integrity and transparency, models built today will provide the foundation agencies need to improve operations and serve citizens while maintaining the public’s safety and privacy.

David Colwell is vice president of artificial intelligence and machine learning for Tricentis, a provider of automated software testing solutions designed to accelerate application delivery and digital transformation.

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

With former President Donald Trump’s campaign still not accepting the government’s offer of services meant to help with presidential transition planning, good government officials are warning that the continued delays pose a “real risk” to government operations.

To ease the process of moving into a new administration in January, both major party’s campaigns have the option to access resources from the General Services Administration and the White House ahead of Election Day. But so far, Trump’s campaign has missed multiple deadlines to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) and begin receiving those resources.

“So much of what they will need in order to be prepared to run our government depends upon having access to information and resources that are dependent upon that MOU with GSA,” Max Stier, the Partnership for Public Service’s president and CEO, told reporters during a press conference this week. “They have more time to get it done, but the clock is running.”

Both campaign transition teams also had an Oct. 1 deadline to sign an MOU with the White House to define the terms of their access to agencies, including personnel, facilities and documents after the election. A Biden administration official said an MOU with Harris’ transition team is in place, and they are “actively working” with the Trump transition team to complete an MOU.

“The federal transition coordinator has engaged both eligible candidate transition representatives to negotiate memoranda of understanding,” the official said in an email statement.

Both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris previously named leaders for their transition planning teams, which officials at the Partnership said is an important step in the process. But without signing an MOU with GSA, those leaders and their teams will have a harder time getting transition planning work off the ground and running.

Through an MOU with GSA, presidential campaign teams can get access to space, supplies and information ahead of the November election. The idea is to have a solid footing in transition planning ahead of Election Day, making for a smoother transition to a new administration once a winner of the presidential election is determined.

The Sept. 1 deadline for signing an MOU with GSA has come and gone, but Partnership officials said signing an agreement is still important, especially as time runs short before the Nov. 5 election.

“A new president, on day one, will be responsible for addressing incredibly diverse and complicated issues,” Stier said. “You need to have real-time information about what those are, and you need to have people read into them so that they are actually ready to be able to help lead those agencies. There will be a career workforce that will be in place, but for that political team to understand what’s going on, they need that MOU, and they need the time to be able to actually understand that landscape.”

A GSA spokesperson said in an email to Federal News Network that GSA has extended offers of services to both major party candidates and is prepared to begin providing services to the Trump transition team once an MOU is executed. GSA has entered an MOU with the Harris transition team, the spokesperson said, which outlines terms for using federal office space and various resources, such as office equipment, communications and IT services.

What transition planning resources does GSA offer?

According to the Harris transition team’s MOU with GSA, her campaign has access between now and Nov. 5 to 20,000 square feet of office space in D.C., enough to house about 100 staff members. They’ll also be able to get office furniture, equipment, secure laptops and software for their work in planning the transition process.

Through an MOU, GSA can also offer transition teams cybersecurity protections, as well as the ability to identify campaign team members who might need immediate security clearances following the November election.

“You really do want to be moving forward as fast as you can, getting people cleared, so that they are going to actually have access to information that is non-public and classified,” Stier said. “It will be a real problem if they don’t have the MOU in place.”

Under the Presidential Transition Act, GSA also offers a “resume bank” to both transition teams, once an MOU is in place.

“For either candidate, who is in the position to be accepting hundreds of thousands of resumes in the next few months, having something like that established before the election is very useful,” Valerie Smith Boyd, director of the Partnership’s Center for Presidential Transition, told reporters during this week’s press conference.

If the Trump team signs an MOU with GSA, all the same resources will be available to his staff as well. GSA said it offers information and assistance on an equal basis, regardless of party, and separates each team’s spaces both physically, and over IT networks. GSA also assigns separate staff members to support the teams onsite.

Trump’s transition team did not share any details with Federal News Network on when or if there were plans to sign an agreement with GSA, or how far along the team currently is in its transition planning work.

Recent reforms present new challenge for agencies

The upcoming presidential transition will also be different in part because it’s the first election since the passage of the Presidential Transition Improvement Act. The 2022 law made reforms to “ascertainment” — the process that gives the presumptive election winner access to resources and the ability to coordinate with agencies to prepare for an administrative transition.

After GSA delayed support during the 2020 presidential transition, the Presidential Transition Improvement Act changed GSA’s role by requiring an “equitable” release of transition services to both candidates, in the case that there’s not a clear winner immediately after the election. If there is still not a clear winner five days after the election, GSA would have to offer resources to both candidates until there is a clear winner.

But Partnership officials said those reforms also present agencies and career federal employees with a new challenge — the possibility of having the additional work of collaborating with two sets of transition planning leaders, rather than just one. The career federal workforce has been through the presidential transition process many times over, but the changes from 2022 could make the process more cumbersome — especially without enough leg work done ahead of Election Day.

“Federal agencies are doing the hard work of preparing for what may be double the effort that they usually spend in the transition process,” Smith Boyd said.

Right now, both campaign teams “are understandably focused on who’s going to what battleground state,” Stier said. “But the end result here is, who’s going to be actually ready to keep us safe and run our government effectively?”

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

The Transportation Department’s recipe for RICE all starts with the same basic ingredients.

RICE, which stands for registration, inspections, compliance and enforcement, is a technology platform that nearly every office and modal needs.

Cordell Schachter, the chief information officer of the Transportation Department, said there are numerous platforms across the agency and all need a standard set of functions to begin with.

“Let’s build in-common on any on a platform that has an authority to operate (ATO) from a cybersecurity perspective, that then we can flex to meet the unique needs of each of those operating administrations so that DevSecOps discipline is provided consistently across the whole platform, but yet we still provide an opportunity for each business owner or operations owner to come and get what they need from the platform ,” Schachter said on Ask the CIO.  “So the inspection of a vehicle that’s under one administration’s responsibility would be different from a different kind of vehicle or conveyance, and we want the platform to be able to accomplish all of that.”

Schachter made moving to modern development techniques one of his three top priorities. Within that area, DoT is moving toward a DevSecOps methodology, taking advantage of low-code platforms and cloud services.

Over the last year or so, DoT has launched that common platform and started developing applications in a more agile way.

“In the next year or years, hopefully we’ll get the chance to move from that first not even just crawling, but just thinking where we wanted to crawl to and now we’re someplace between crawling and walking. I’m looking forward to being able to run and really develop these things at scale, and also give the taxpayers a better deal because they’re going to invest in that RICE platform once, and then hopefully save money as it’s reused for those custom purposes,” he said.

One big challenge, Schachter said, is he doesn’t have a good idea of how many RICE platforms already exist across the operating models. Part of the reason for that is because not every system provides the four ingredients and many just need one or two.

Solving DoT’s mission challenges

Schachter said his team is trying to assess just how many of these RICE platforms, partial or full, exist and should have a better idea in 6-to-12 months.

The RICE platform modernization effort is one example of DoT’s ongoing digital transformation and security initiatives.

Schachter said all of these efforts are more focused than ever on aligning incentives with intentions. This means holding vendors accountable for meeting specific service levels as well as ensuring their workforce has the necessary skills to help DoT modernize.

“When we now replace legacy applications with low code or no code platforms, then that’s the kind of relationship that we want. It’s newer for us than the way we previously operated. The contracts we write, the solicitations that we let, are going to be different than what we have in the past. So we’re going to need partners who work with us to get it right,” he said. “Our intention is to have a modern system that’s always available, that’s secure, that maintains privacy, that does what it’s supposed to do, and now the incentive should be, because vendors are in it to earn a reasonable profit that they do that, but accept the responsibility that goes with the intentions that I stated.”

Schachter added that there may be different requirements for different platforms, but it all comes back to solving DoT’s mission challenges.

Ongoing portfolio deep dives

Internally, the DoT’s CIO’s office is driving down a similar path with employees.

Schachter said training is now a requirement from the entry level General Schedule positions to the most senior GS and then Senior Executive Service positions.

“We’ve made a lot of progress in establishing an internship program as well as formalizing our training programs and communicating expectations. We are making sure that our teams know that there’s resources available for them to be trained on a regular basis,” he said. “We expect our staff to have two weeks of training a year. That’s the minimum, and some of that’s going to be self-directed study, online information, formal courses available online, or it could be a classroom, if that’s the only way it’s delivered.”

Additionally, he has ensured there is funding for employee training by working with DoT leadership, specifically in the budget office, to make it a “must have” expense and not a “nice to have” one.

Another way DoT is aligning incentives with intentions is through budget and portfolio deep dives with each office and operating administration.

Schachter said these analyses focus on IT, customer experience, cybersecurity and funding.

“We realized some of the reason why the systems are the way they are is the only way to have funded them in the past, would have been to take money out of mission and of other things that that operational administration was supposed to do. I think we need to grow the pie bigger if we’re always robbing from the left pocket to put enough money in the right pocket, and then we’re not really making progress,” he said. “Given the imperative to be more cyber secure, which everyone will agree with on the top line, what is that going to take? We need to be more descriptive of what that cost is. How do we do those two things? How do we generate the right level of support? I’m giving people very specific examples of the need while still maintaining security. And I can tell you, it’s a challenge, but one that we have to accept and drive through.”

The cost models just don’t focus only on cybersecurity, but extend to paying for development, modernization and enhancement too.

“We’ve done a lot of work over the last year or so talking with every operating administration, with their staff, building up our staff within the CIO organization, specifically to address these questions. We realized, just like our technologies were a little long in the tooth, well so are some of our cost models. So not only do we have to update the technologies, we also need to update those models as well,” Schachter said. “We really are trying to obey both the spirit and the letter of the [the Federal IT Acquisition and Reform Act] and at the same time do the very best job we can to give people the best service at the best price.”

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

• Federal employees impacted by Hurricane Milton are eligible to use paid leave donated by their colleagues. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has established an “emergency leave transfer program” for those under threat from the hurricane. The OPM program lets feds donate their unused time off to a leave bank. Feds impacted by the hurricane can then use the extra paid time off during the emergency, without having to dip into their own leave hours. The emergency leave program for Milton comes about a week after feds affected by Hurricane Helene received the same options from OPM. Employees should contact their agency’s HR office for more information.
• Many federal retirees will get a 2.5% cost-of-living adjustment for their retirement annuities next year, but not everyone gets that full COLA. Retirees in the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS), just like every year, will receive a smaller cost-of-living adjustment. In 2025, that means they’ll get a 2% COLA. The initial rationale for giving FERS annuitants a reduced COLA was to try to balance the scales with those in the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS). But federal advocates and some lawmakers have called the difference “unfair” and have pushed to give FERS annuitants a full COLA rather than the reduced amount. This year in particular, concerns are growing as the smaller COLA is coupled with a significant health premium increase of 13.5% for feds in 2025.
• A Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) database left some personally identifiable information on VA employees and veterans viewable to all users. Now three VA whistleblowers are getting recognition for reporting the problem. The Office of Special Counsel found VA officials violated federal law and department policy by not restricting access to these records. The VA whistleblowers received this year’s Public Servant Award from OSC. The VA has since updated its database so that records are only accessible by VA employees with a valid business reason.
• Military installations in Florida avoided severe damage after Hurricane Milton made landfall Wednesday night. U.S. Special Operations Command and U.S. Central Command remain evacuated from McDill Air Force Base. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon’s top spokesperson, says both commands “continue to operate out of multiple locations, ensuring no degradation to operations.” As of Thursday morning, the Florida National Guard has deployed over 6,500 Guard personnel. The response includes over 500 high water vehicles, 26 helicopters and over a dozen watercraft to assist with recovery efforts. Another 3,000 National Guard members from 19 states are also ready to provide further support if needed. Two-hundred fifty personnel from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are assisting with tasks, including temporary roof repairs, managing debris, controlling flooding and clearing waterways.
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scientists faced retaliation over chemical safety disagreements. The EPA’s inspector general’s office says scientists were passed over for promotions, received lower performance evaluations and got reassigned to other parts of the agency — all over disagreements about chemical safety. EPA scientists generally face a 90-day deadline to assess new chemicals for commercial use. Kyla Bennett, the director of science policy for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility says scientists were pressured to avoid backlogs. “They would do these risk assessments on new chemicals, and they’d say, ‘OK, we found that this one causes cancer,’ for example. And the managers would say, ‘No, no, we don’t want to say that,’ and they’d delete the cancer designation. And it was happening over and over and over.”
• The annual governmentwide customer satisfaction survey puts the General Services Administration (GSA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) at the top for IT services. Employees at the NSF and the GSA gave their Offices of the CIO high marks in a new survey. As part of the President’s Management Agenda’s business of government priority area, OMB and GSA surveyed more than 246,000 employees about their satisfaction levels across back-office functions. In the IT category, NSF employees’ ratings lifted the agency to the top across four of seven areas, including IT equipment, IT functions and IT support. GSA employees’ ratings lifted their agency to first or second in six of seven areas, including receiving the top rating for IT communication and collaboration.
• Federal employees are telling the General Services Administration they like the co-working space pilot launched just over a year ago. GSA says the program, which started in July 2023, has hosted more than 1,100 employees from 78 departments and 85% of them say they plan to return to the co-working space. Employees can take advantage of these government-managed office spaces in six cities, including Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Tacoma, Washington. Later this year, GSA says the federal co-working program will launch a digital booking system pilot, letting users make and manage their own reservations.
• The Defense Department is exploring the idea of creating a separate path or a sub-path within the software acquisition pathway specifically for artificial intelligence. An alternate path would allow the department to iterate more rapidly and accommodate the faster cycles of development that AI requires. Deborah Rosenblum, the acting deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, says it will most likely be done through the software pathway given its inherent flexibility and agility.

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