In his new role, Parekh will work closely with the Department of Commerce’s Office of Chief Counsel for Industry and Security and the Department of Justice to progress major corporate investigations, the BIS said Thursday.
Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Export Enforcement Matthew Axelrod said in a statement that Parekh’s appointment is an important step forward in efforts to bolster the U.S. administrative enforcement program.
A seasoned lawyer, the new appointee most recently served as a U.S. attorney in Virginia, where he supervised over 300 federal prosecutors, civil litigators and support personnel.
Recognized as the highest-ranking non-political official in the Eastern District of Virginia, Parekh’s career boasts more than 40 cases brought to verdict.
His previous work experience includes stints at the Justice Department, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the CIA as well as IBM and an international law firm.
Parekh joins the BIS following its implementation of revised rules concerning voluntary self-disclosures and penalty guidelines, which encourage companies to report violations in exchange for incentives or reduced fines.
The White House and members of the private sector have come together again to secure a new set of voluntary commitments to halt the proliferation of sexually abusive content aided by artificial intelligence.
Announced on Thursday, Adobe, Anthropic, Cohere, Common Crawl, Microsoft, and OpenAI signed various commitments promising to prevent the usage of their generative AI systems in creating sexually abusive content. This includes committing to responsibly sourcing datasets to train models, incorporating feedback loops and stress-testing to prevent AI systems from learning sexually abusive prompts, and removing explicit content from AI training datasets.
“Today’s commitments represent a step forward across industry to reduce the risk that AI tools will generate abusive images,” the release said. “They are part of a broader ecosystem of private sector, academic, and civil society organizations’ efforts to identify and reduce the harms of non-consensual intimate images and child sexual abuse material.”
The Biden administration has positioned itself to actively work with private sector leaders to help prevent the widespread misuse of generative AI systems, debuting a preceding series of voluntary commitments in the summer of 2023 to promote the “Safe by Design” AI posture the administration is championing.
Leadership at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy previously called for action to prevent the use of advanced AI systems to create sexually abusive material, as per President Joe Biden’s October 2023 executive order on AI and the 2022 Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization.
Payment companies have also agreed to join the fight to stop sexually abusive synthetic content. Cash App and Square both agreed to monitor and curb payments related to producing or publishing image-based sexual abuse, as well as expand participation in initiatives to detect sextortion schemes.
Google additionally agreed to begin adjusting its search engine results to combat non-consensual images, and Microsoft, GitHub and Meta have all made individual commitments to remove content that contains sexually abusive material, as well as strengthen their internal reporting systems.
Civil society groups, which signed commitments to help public and private sector entities monitor the results of such efforts, include the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative and the National Network to End Domestic Violence.
“Through a multi-stakeholder working group, they will continue to identify interventions to prevent and mitigate the harms caused by the creation, spread, and monetization of image-based sexual abuse,” the White House said.
When Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, met reporters earlier this year at its annual legislative conference, he was blunt about how the nation’s largest federal employee union would have fared if Donald Trump were reelected in 2020.
“The previous administration was trying to kill us,” Kelley said. “I believe that if they had two more months, we might have been dead. We just couldn’t take it anymore.”
Though Kelley thought unions at federal agencies are now better prepared for a renewed onslaught—thanks in no small part to an expansion of bargaining rights under President Biden—he warned that the Republican presidential nominee still represents an existential threat to both organized labor and the federal civil service writ large.
Experts say Trump and his former staffers have similarly honed their plans and tactics during their four years in the wilderness. While initiatives during the first Trump administration were often hamstrung by poor preparation, slow filling of jobs for political appointees, or were launched too late to be implemented, Trump and his advisers have indicated that if elected this fall, they will hit the ground running with an aggressive campaign to remake the federal government in his image.
Trump would likely revive many policies from his first term that hence were rescinded by his predecessor, including a trio of executive orders undermining the power of federal employee unions and making it easier to fire federal workers and disbanding labor-management forums at federal agencies.
And as part of his presidential campaign, he already has vowed to relaunch Schedule F, a plan to reclassify tens of thousands of career federal employees in “policy-related” jobs into the excepted service, effectively making them at-will employees. The initiative also would exempt those positions from most federal hiring regulations and requirements.
“Here’s my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all, and corruption it is,” Trump said in March 2023. “First, I will immediately re-issue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively. Second, we will clean out all the corrupt actors in our national security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them.”
He has mused about firing disloyal workers and prosecuting political foes as revenge for his ongoing legal woes. Indeed, the Republican party’s platform, finalized at its national convention in July, similarly makes overtures toward removing civil servants deemed resistant of the president’s policies or involved in his federal prosecution on allegedly retaining classified documents after leaving office and interfering in the 2020 presidential election.
“We will hold accountable those who have misused the power of government to unjustly prosecute their political opponents,” the document states. “We will declassify government records, root out wrongdoers, and fire corrupt employees.”
But to understand how a second Trump administration might differ in both methods and results, one must look at how Trump’s former personnel policy aides have spent the past four years.
Making lists and checking them twice
Undergirding Trump’s official campaign to return to the White House next year has been extensive work by former White House staffers and other conservative operatives determined to avoid the disorganized 2017 presidential transition.
The most prominent example is Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led $22 million project to establish both a policy roadmap and a database of 20,000 candidates for political appointments across government. Though Trump in recent months has disavowed the effort after Democrats seized on the unpopularity of its 900-page policy manifesto, the effort is led by former Trump aides, who in recent weeks have confirmed that their work on the potential transition remains ongoing.
In addition to making lists of people to hire under the next Republican administration, ex-Trump deputies also compiled a list of 50,000 current federal employees to convert to Schedule F and threaten with termination.
Democrats, good government experts and federal employee groups say the return of Schedule F would effectively end the 150-year-old merit based civil service system, first established by the Pendleton Act of 1883, which ended the spoils system. And some have noted similarities with an illicit effort by President Nixon to exert “political control” over the federal bureaucracy, with the key caveat that Schedule F proponents are seeking to implement the proposal through legal means.
“There is the possibility, as we see here, of not only an effort to try to completely transform the way in which accountability works in the federal government, but to be able to do it with the full consent of law in a way that the Nixon administration never had,” said Don Kettl, dean emeritus of the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and cofounder of a working group of experts opposed to Schedule F. “It would remove all of the political, constitutional and legal checks that the system current has. It’s worth thinking about how we might try to improve the responsiveness and accountability of the federal government, but is the fix an effort to try to politicize it?”
The Biden administration has taken steps to try to make it harder for a future administration to reinstate Schedule F, including publishing new regulations barring federal employees from losing their civil service protections due to an involuntary job reclassification. But Kettl said that would be nothing more than a speed bump—an enterprising future Trump administration staffer could be preparing new regulatory proposals to roll back Biden’s for quick publication either as a notice of proposed rule making or an interim final rule.
And any effort to block Schedule F’s implementation will be both time consuming and probably unsuccessful.
“Of course, any effort to try to launch Schedule F again would immediately be met with an effort to stop it in courts,” Kettl said. “But my conclusion is that it is probably constitutional. If unions and Democrats challenge it, they will probably lose. That path also would require finding a plaintiff with standing—someone who can prove they’ve been injured. It would take time to find the right plaintiff and to wait for the Trump administration to take action that frames the issues in just the right way . . . and then it goes through a tremendous maze of a process. It would probably take at least two years to resolve the constitutional questions, which at that point, even if Schedule F loses, it would provide two years for the administration to establish a new pattern of practice.”
Robert Shea, CEO of GovNavigators and a former associate director at the Office of Management and Budget during the George W. Bush administration, said that part of the risk of Schedule F is not just the potential for government experts to be replaced by party loyalists—it is the overall degradation of federal employment as a career.
“I think that government already doesn’t have a lot of tools at its disposal to recruit and attract people, and talented, independent civil servants are critical to the success of the administration,” he said. “If you not only dilute the protections that they enjoy, but then start replacing them with less talented people—people employed based mostly on their loyalty—then I think you greatly diminish the capability of the government to do its job.”
One proposal that likely won’t be back was the effort to dissolve the Office of Personnel Management and divvy its responsibilities up between the White House and General Services Administration, Shea said.
“My guess would be that OPM is basically reduced to a rubber stamp for a lot of the proposals we’re talking about like Schedule F,” he said. “You’ll probably have a lot of people leave OPM, but I don’t think eliminating the organization is in the cards. It’s such a buzzsaw on the Hill on a bipartisan basis.”
Shea said that given the level of preparation done by conservatives since Schedule F was first rescinded, observers should not underestimate the pace with which they reimplement the initiative.
“On or about Jan. 21, 2025, the administration will file a proposed regulation to repeal the recent regulations governing the General Schedule and limiting things like Schedule F,” he said. “They will replace it with a policy that reinstitutes Schedule F, and that will probably take 90 to 120 days to get all that done, during which agencies will be inventorying individuals they believe ought to be Schedule F, and then my guess is they’ll start firing a bunch of people and replacing them with loyalists.”
But others say the actual number of career civil servants who are purged could be lower than expected.
“The idea could be ‘transformation by intimidation,’ where you just make the point that you can [fire them] if you want to, and that you will if you feel it’s necessary, and the others will get the message,” Kettl said. “If that’s the case, most federal employees there would feel a strong temptation to head to the foxholes and keep their heads down. That’s bad and dangerous management, but it’s an effective method to carry out the goals of Schedule F.”
And if the goal is intimidation, Kettl said that could make it difficult for journalists and oversight organizations to monitor the program.
“To what degree are we going to know what’s happening out there?” he said. “To what degree are we going to have anything approaching real-time information? Will agencies report on it–and if so, to whom–about who is placed in Schedule F and how many have been eliminated and replaced? And how will we know that? It’s hard to have accountability without some measure of transparency, and there were no signs of it last time.”
Leaning on Labor
A second Trump administration would likely see the revival of an aggressive playbook to undermine the role of unions in the federal workplace. At minimum, Trump likely would sign executive orders reimplementing policies like forcing union officials out of agency office space, capping official time at 25% of the employee’s work hours, as well as rescinding Biden’s “worker empowerment” agenda.
Union leaders like Kelley say that they similarly have learned from their battles with management during the Trump era. Many labor groups have signed new contracts with agency management with terms that extend past 2028 or with additional provisions spelling out employees’ and the union’s rights. Many governmentwide policies are effectively held in abeyance until a union contract can be reopened or renegotiated.
For instance, the Environmental Protection Agency’s collective bargaining agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which was ratified in May and is set for implementation this fall, creates a new arbitration process by which employees can appeal disciplinary actions that they view as retaliation for pursuing science-based work.
“Our entire contract was taken away by the Trump administration, so we are very concerned that they will, again, target EPA employees for retribution for doing their jobs,” said Nicole Cantello, legislative and political coordinator for the council and a president of its Chicago local. “That’s why we tried to take the determination as to whether or not science is being practiced out of the hands of the agency.”
But other tactics, such as stacking the Federal Service Impasses Panel with conservative activists without mediation experience, shuttering labor-management forums at federal agencies and general adversarial relations would resume. Rich Couture, president of AFGE Council 215, which represents employees at the Social Security Administration’s Office of Hearings Operations, said that his union ensured that its contract would remain closed until October 2029 when the parties did limited renegotiations last year, though not all of its provisions would be immune.
“When we reopened parts of our contract, we were able to get a cooperation council process similar to the labor-management forums,” he said. “So the concern that we’ve got is if the Biden-era pro-union and pro-cooperation executive orders are rescinded under a second Trump term, these vehicles for cooperation, collaboration, teamwork and mutual problem solving will disappear, and we’ll find ourselves in a situation not unlike the first Trump administration where the relationship, such as it was, between labor and management was downright hostile.”
At SSA, which is struggling to overcome a customer service crisis brought on by decades of budgetary neglect and a projected 50-year staffing low by the end of this year, cleaving the relationship would mean ending ongoing joint labor-management efforts to improve operations, including revamping how the agency trains new employees in a bid to reduce attrition.
“Those projects, like the revised training model and some of the other things we’re working on, if they’re not completed, they’d likely be abandoned, depending on the tack leadership takes under a second Trump administration,” Couture said. “And those things that were accomplished—we may find ourselves back in a situation where the agency largely seeks to impose working conditions unilaterally on workers regardless of their obligations under the statute. And if we find ourselves in a situation where the entire federal sector labor-management apparatus is now arrayed against unions like it was under Trump . . . you know the prospects for making progress under those conditions are rather grim.”
Experts also expect a revival of efforts during the Trump administration to make it harder for unions to collect dues from employees. And ideas that never came to fruition, like Trump’s flirtation with outlawing unions at the Defense Department, could make a comeback.
“I think you’re going to see a more aggressive push,” he said. “I always say, ‘If I ever went back in time knowing what I know now, I’d be dangerous.’ At the beginning of an administration, you’re like, ‘What can I do? What can’t I? What happens if I do what I’m not supposed to?’ And you sort of find out that the risks on the management side that you’ll get in trouble are pretty low, because so few people give a shit about it . . . So issues targeting the civil service and unions in particular will be quicker and more stringent, because they’ve also done a lot more planning in that regard. And the Trump campaign tried to disassociate itself from Project 2025, but the people who will staff his administration wrote it, and I’m confident they will use that as a blueprint for dismantling the administrative state.”
Winston Beauchamp has taken on the role of director of security, special program oversight and information protection at U.S. Department of the Air Force.
The DAF official announced his new job on LinkedIn, where he also expressed gratitude to colleagues and partners from industry, with whom he had worked while serving as DAF deputy chief information officer, a position he held for nearly four years.
Beauchamp said he was especially thankful to former DAF CIO and past Wash100 winner Lauren Knausenberger and current DAF CIO Venice Goodwine, whom he described as “the exact leaders the DAF needed at the time.”
Beauchamp has held other roles within the Air Force, including enterprise IT director within the Office of the Deputy CIO. He has also been part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Lockheed Martin and GE Aerospace.
The Department of Defense said Palantir USG will provide research and development efforts centered on UCML.
Under the firm-fixed-price contract, the Palo Alto, California-based company is expected to be completed by Sept. 12, 2029.
Funding for the project will be determined with each order placed under the contract. Work location will also be specified upon issuance of each order.
The Army Contracting Command located in Adelphi, Maryland is the contracting activity.
Palantir is currently working with the Army to perform research and development to determine possible military uses for artificial intelligence and machine learning tools. The two parties agreed on the $250 million contract in 2023.
The Department of Defense wants to bring new industry partners into Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or CJADC2, through a new challenge on its Tradewinds marketplace.
This opportunity is focused on contested logistics and serves as a part of the DOD’s Global Information Dominance Experiments program, through which the department tests commercial capabilities — most notably artificial intelligence — in the context of joint force data sharing. Communications is the main focus of CJADC2, which aims to strengthen connectivity between U.S. forces, allies and partners.
GIDE began several years ago and was initially managed by the Northern American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern command. In 2023, the Chief Digital and AI Office assumed control of the program and realigned its goals to better suit the needs of joint warfighting.
Awards issued through the new challenge will represent iterations 12 and 13 of the program. GIDE 10, 11 and 12 took place earlier this year and were designed to cover global integration, joint kill chains and allied and partner integration, respectively, CDAO GIDE Director Col. Matthew Strohmeyer told DefenseScoop.
In July, the Pentagon hosted its first-ever GIDE Industry Insights Forum to deepen relationships with program participants. The event focused on collaboration opportunities — specifically those surrounding AI technologies — for both traditional and nontraditional partners as well as lessons learned from previous editions of GIDE.
DOD Seeking Data-Driven Logistics Capabilities
Efforts to advance CJADC2 through have shown that the DOD’s strengths lie in developing dynamic logistics plans. According to the notice, what the department needs from industry now is help in creating a “common, enterprise-level data ontology for logistics and sustainment” to solve decision making challenges posed by stovepiped data.
The latest GIDE challenge builds on a May contract award issued to Palantir for its Maven Smart System, which the DOD uses as the primary platform for enterprise CJADC2 workflows and intends to continue deploying as GIDE progresses, DefenseScoop reported. Capabilities pitched under the challenge are expected to “develop the global logistics data ontology in MSS while enriching current ontology and workflows with existing government logistics data.”
The challenge also presents industry with three new areas to focus on: live logistics and sustainment data; curated digital insights; and integrated applications. Proposers can submit ideas to address any number of these topics in the form of a video pitch.
What’s Next for CJADC2?
CJADC2 achieved minimal viable capability combining software applications, data integration and cross-domain operational concepts in February. Though details of what the capability was specifically developed for have been kept under wraps, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, a 2024 Wash100 Award winner, said the next step is scaling.
Executive Mosaic’s GovCon Index ended last week with an average of $5,256.32, a 1.07% drop from the previous week.
GovCon Index is an aggregate index that displays real-time data on the stock market performance of 30 notable government contracting companies. Users can leverage this information to evaluate the financial status of each organization and deepen their understanding of key trends in today’s GovCon market.
Multiple companies were able to break through last week’s decline with significant gains, most notably Palantir, which soared to the top of the ranks with an increase of 14.78%. In second place was The Carlyle Group (+7.04%), and Aerovironment followed with gains of 6.58%. Parsons (+6.44%) and V2X (+6.33%) secured fourth and fifth place, respectively.
GovCon Index’s daily performance was mixed last week, with frequent shifts between positive and negative territory. Its highest growth day was Monday, in which the average rose by 1.35%.
For a closer look at daily GovCon Index performance, check out last week’s market reports. To access the full list of tracked companies, click here.
Former President Donald Trump is safe after gunshots were fired Sunday near Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach, Florida, where the GOP presidential nominee was playing golf, the Trump campaign confirmed.
“President Trump is safe following gunshots in his vicinity. No further details at this time,” Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s communications director, said in a statement.
U.S. Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said on social media that “a protective incident” involving Trump occurred shortly before 2 p.m. Eastern and that the Secret Service was investigating the incident with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. He confirmed that Trump was safe.
Guglielmi added the two agencies would brief reporters Sunday afternoon.
Law enforcement has not identified a shooter and it’s not immediately clear if Trump was the intended target. The private golf club is about 4 miles from Trump’s primary residence at Mar-a-Lago.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, said on social media that she had been briefed and she is glad Trump is safe.
“Violence has no place in America,” she said.
The White House said that President Joe Biden had also been briefed.
“They are relieved to know that he is safe,” the White House said of Biden and Harris. “They will be kept regularly updated by their team.”
Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com. Follow Louisiana Illuminator on Facebook and X.
Next month, the Association of Commercial Space Professionals will be hosting the Space Nuclear Policy Summit in Washington D.C. It aims to get the two sides together, both nuclear and space, to help with some lingering questions. The future of space travel is going to require the aid of nuclear power, beyond the technical requirements for that are the regulatory and fiscal matters to deal with first. To get a preview of the discussions that will take place, we welcomed back Bailey Reichelt who is the co-founder of Aegis Space Law and Interim President of ACSP, as well as Caryn Schenewerk, president of CS Consulting.
Eric White The event is coming the first week of October to discuss space nuclear policy. Why don’t we just start out with how this all came together? Bailey, you were telling me a little bit of background of the coming together of the meeting of the minds between nuclear in space, and nobody’s really done anything like this on the regulatory front. So where do we begin?
Bailey Reichelt Absolutely. So I’ll start by telling you a little bit about [Association of Commercial Space Professionals (ACSP)]. If you’ve never heard of us, you’re in good company, because we’re about two years old and one of the board members, there’s a group of regulatory attorneys. And now we’ve been joined by other industry experts as well to organize, essentially, events that drive down regulatory barriers through providing education and advocacy. Again, just targeting the regulations around the space industry, and educating the industry on how to comply with them, how to deal with them and how to change them if you want them to be different or if there are gaps. As we’re going to talk about with the Space Nuclear Policy Summit. So ACSP exists to drive down those regulatory barriers for the space industry. We were doing a regulatory training event talking about export controls, government contracting, the couple of other topics out in Albuquerque earlier this year.
Bailey Reichelt One of the national labs, Sandia National Labs, actually attended that training in person, and we had a conversation about the commercial nuclear space industry and the role of the national labs in providing safety reviews as part of the launch licensing process. Now, the national labs have a lot of questions about how that rule changes for a purely commercial launch versus a government launch. They have a lot of questions in a lot of the companies they serve, and the commercial sector also have questions and they don’t have answers. So they said, I bet if we have questions of this nature about this one limited aspect of the launch licensing process, probably a lot of other questions out there and gaps in these regulations and an understanding of the policy. We went on a fact finding mission. This is ACSP interviewing companies in both nuclear and space, asking them where they’re at in this regulatory process or in the launch licensing process. And what their biggest obstacles that they were coming up against are. And what I discovered is companies are all over the board where they’re at in the process. Think Zeno Power might be the furthest along out of the companies I spoke to. And the issues actually were all different as well. They all understood each other’s issues, but they all had different priority issues. Then I realized, this is our agenda for this event. We’re going to talk through all of these different main issues, and that’s how we formed the agenda for the Space Nuclear Policy Summit.
Bailey Reichelt So we’re talking about things like the commercial Lunar payload services program with NASA, and how to go through the launch review process, the payload review process. If you are not shepherded by a government agency such as NASA, which historically a nuclear battery like on perseverance, would have been part of NASA’s purview. What do we do when it’s completely commercial? So we have a panel dedicated to that. We have the national labs talking about the safety reviews. We have a whole panel of commercial space perspectives of different companies talking about things like environmental impact assessments versus environmental assessments, and which one you might need for different types of nuclear sources. So a nuclear battery versus a fusion reactor. And we’re also going to be talking about part 440 in the Federal Register of the Launch regulations, which is specifically insurance, insurance requirements or indemnification requirements. And we’re going to be talking about that.
Bailey Reichelt We have Clarence Toliver, he’s an attorney that will be presenting some of his conclusions on that. And that sets us up for a whole panel of insurance companies and some government officials talking about is there an appetite to insure a commercial nuclear mission? Can we even make a commercial case regardless of if the regulations are clear or not? So we’re going to be talking about all those different issues. And then at the very end, we’re going to touch briefly on fusion and the lack of regulations around it, as well as regulations around the terrestrial landscape and lessons learned there. Concluding with our action items and takeaways. Hopefully the entire event funnels us towards clarity between industry and government on what the issues still are, as well as the misunderstandings and what we can do to make them clear going forward.
Eric White On that agenda. The indemnification panel will be actually hosted by Caryn, who also joins us here. So, Caryn, why don’t I get your take on the state of things, and are some of these hurdles that Bailey has laid out for us surmountable? You’re a space professional who’s had her foot in both of these arenas. What exactly is it that needs to be done on the government side and commercial side to make this really work as a viable technology for the future? I know that’s a loaded question, so feel free to answer.
Caryn Schenewerk So one of my consistent goals in supporting this amazing industry that is the space industry and, in this case, portion of that being the new nuclear power and propulsion activities that will support our goals for space exploration and space security, is to ensure that it’s the technology that is the challenge and not the regulations or the law. So to the extent that we can solve really hard technological problems and that those the solutions to those problems garner significant benefits to our civil, commercial and national security space interests, then we should not ever consider them insurmountable, to use your word. They should be ones that we bring open minds and dedicated time to solving. And so with this issue in particular, the oversight of commercial space activities that are of nuclear type. So whether it’s power or propulsion, we have a lot of challenges that we need to solve. And those regulatory challenges, I think we’re starting to really understand them in a way that lets us line them up and develop hopefully solutions. And we’ll have to test those as we have all the other regulatory solutions that we’ve devised to address technology as the technology has come forward and as we’ve worked to deploy that technology.
Caryn Schenewerk So in some cases, it’s problem that we have solved before. It’s just that we have to be creative with it every time that we face it, because it’s a new kind of technology and there are new challenges for regarding that particular type of technology. So in this case, I think the questions with regard to regulation of space nuclear systems and the liability questions, particularly with regard to Part 440, which is 14 CFR Part 440 is the liability and indemnification section of the FAA regulations governing launch and reentry, specifically. Those regulations don’t govern activities actually in space on celestial bodies, but you got to get to space. So we are going to have to get these systems to space, which means they’re going to be addressed or subject to some of the regulations that the FAA implements. So we had a task in the comm stack, and that task was to review the FAA advisory circular on part 450 .45-1 space nuclear systems, and to look at SPD six.
Caryn Schenewerk And then the other piece that I’ve been involved with was that the FAA’s the spark based advisory regulatory committee on 440. One of the tasks that we took on with that was a task of looking at whether the FAA should have been part 440 to provide liability protection to commercial launch operators from hazards associated with nuclear materials if the payload containing materials are approved by the FAA. And in the review of those various documents, I, like Bailey, spoke to experts in the technology leaders of companies that are likely to be regulated by this or face the challenges of liability, unfettered liability or the challenge of obtaining insurance and folks in the insurance market, etc.. And I think we have tried to do a good job of documenting the challenges. And I think it’s a matter of now figuring out how we work with the regulators and within industry to really recommend and start working towards implementing solutions.
Eric White Yeah. Has the attitude, I guess, of regulators been as open as it has been for the expansion of commercial space itself? You mentioned the benefits in the beginning. Do the benefits in their eyes outweigh the potential regulatory shortfalls that may come up as things progressed, as they always do in this field? What are those benefits? And as I mentioned in speaking with the regulators that you probably are speaking to on a regular basis, what is their sense and what do you gather from them?
Caryn Schenewerk So I think when you’re talking about regulators, whether it’s on this topic or any topic, it’s one thing to talk about regulators, it’s another thing to talk about government customers. So say the DoD or the scientific community. And so one of the things that is an interesting piece about space activities, particularly commercial space activities, is it’s very hard to explain sometimes what commercial space activities are, because commercial space activities are so incredibly ingrained in our government activities and interests, both on the national security and the civil space side. So a regulator may be interested in implementing their regulation to a T, and their job and goal is to implement that exactly to the best of their ability. Their goal may be to pursue the greatest level of safety or the most protective approach that they could possibly take. Another may be more that they see their role as coming to a conclusion that is, that balances various equities and interests versus the government customer who may see the need to appropriately regulate these things to protect the public safety, for example. But only so much as to not inhibit the technology that will be, in their minds, absolutely fundamentally important to achieving their mission and national security or a civil or scientific space mission.
Caryn Schenewerk So I think that people matter. And the people that are in the role as regulators, as individuals and what they bring to the table in terms of their skill set, their belief system, these all to some degree come to play in these conversations. And I’ll say unfortunately, in my opinion, because I’m a huge advocate for nuclear power, terrestrial and in space, I think that this is a topic that brings some baggage for some people. And the more that we can continue to talk about what the industry’s doing, the importance of its capabilities and myth, and actually what some people believe to be true about nuclear power and the risks of nuclear power, we will all be a lot better off. Because the technologies that we develop that will be deployed in space are technologies that will also benefit humanity here on Earth. And that is one of the things that I found to be most important to me about the work that I do and why I think it’s so important to support the companies that are undertaking these activities. And so I think when you talk about regulators, there are regulators that probably share that belief, and then there are regulators that do their job in a very directed way and only have limited tools. I think that’s one for the last point that I’ll make about the challenge for regulators, is what tools do they have, what training do they have, what knowledge they have, what technology tools can they utilize, and then how are they potentially handicapped by virtue of outdated regulations that they’re forced to implement against technologies that don’t fit that. And so the regulator, in my mind, is a sympathetic character for whom the rest of us need to be trying to figure out how we can support them in achieving the goal that we all want to achieve, which is an appropriate level of safety while facilitating technological advancement.
Eric White Yeah. Navigating the regulatory landscape is hard for anyone enough, as you mentioned, in the commercial space sector, and now you’re adding nuclear into it. That’s not going to make things any simpler. So that’s why events like this are, I imagine, meant to sort of bridge that gap. And Bailey, maybe you can fill in a little bit about the two sides coming together. This is a topic that is complex, to say the least, and it’s kind of the merging of two categories that are already complex. What can you tell me about bringing both sides to this discussion and helping everybody sort of get on the same page?
Bailey Reichelt That’s actually exactly the point I was hoping I would get to make. It is tailing right off of what Caryn said. It is so important that we have all parties in the room at the same time. One of the things that we forget is that regulators are coming from a government perspective. Perhaps they’ve never tried to make the commercial business case. They don’t know what the timelines are between investment and return on investment. Like if you’re dealing with venture capital, things like that. They’re not aware of maybe how soon you need to sign a contract, a launch contract to show investors versus how long it’s going to take you to get a full environmental impact statement. And those timelines can be really poorly matched up to the detriment of making a commercial business case. And it’s not the government’s job to understand how to run a business. And that’s why it’s so important that we come together and we have this conversation. And I think there’s like some moments that will happen for both regulators and industry. Industry also tends to think about things from the perspective of why are you standing in the way of our economy, government. But the government has a lot of priorities here and they also have directives they have to follow. And as Karen said, they have limited tools to work with. And we have to work collaboratively and educate each other on what those tools are and what the issues are. And then again, work together to come up with the solutions. It’s actually perfect that Sandia National Labs brought this to our attention, because they are a hybrid between the government, [Department of Energy (DOE)] and the commercial sector. And if they’re seeing this friction, they’re the clear case for why this conversation needs to happen.
Eric White And on that conversation, can you just give us some of the details for folks who are looking to attend and how they can do that?
Bailey Reichelt Sure. Yeah. So like we said at the beginning, the event is happening on Oct. 4. It’s at the National Press Club. It will just be one day from 8 to 5. You can buy tickets on ACSP website. If your industry, it’s 500 general admission, but students in government, it’s 250. We’re trying to get as many government participants in the room as possible. So please, if you have any questions, reach out to ACSP at infoatacsp.space or you can reach out to me Bailey Reichelt . Right now I’m on LinkedIn and all the places send me a message and I will get you the information that you need on this event. We really hope to get as many people in the conversation as possible.
Majidi’s resignation goes into effect in January 2025 but the official will stay on until a new director is selected, SRNL said Thursday.
“My decision to step down has not come lightly but I know instinctively that now is the right time for new leadership to take SRNL to another level,” Majidi, who has led the national laboratory since 2018, said regarding his upcoming departure.
In 2021, the SRNL director headed the establishment of Battelle Savannah River Alliance, of which he has served as president. BSRA has since handled the management and operation of SRNL as an independent national laboratory.
“With the establishment of Battelle Savannah River Alliance, I pledged to serve a three-year term and ensure a methodical transition to new leadership. I feel SRNL is positioned for successful further expansion and now is the time for me to announce my departure from SRNL and BSRA,” Majidi explained.
BSRA is working with SRNL to identify candidates who can succeed Majidi.
Regarding his work at the national laboratory, the outgoing director said, “Working together as one team, we succeeded in establishing SRNL’s independence – a monumental effort – and today I am proud to say we have a better laboratory in almost every aspect.”
