The Daily Scoop Podcast

Congressional Democrats want answers from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency https://cyberscoop.com/cisa-credential-leak-congress-demands-answers/ on GitHub in an incident that the security researcher who discovered it called one of the worst leaks he's ever seen. Other security professionals also voiced concern Tuesday about the leak and the potential for abuse by any malicious parties who got a hold of the information. Security firm GitGuardian said it discovered a public GitHub repository last week that exposed credentials for privileged AWS GovCloud accounts and internal CISA systems dating back to November. The repository, apparently maintained by a contractor, was named “Private-CISA.” Krebs on Security first reported the incident. A GitGuardian researcher said his main fear upon verifying the leak was real “is that a state actor will get the data and might be able to do bad stuff.” State-based attackers who obtained the credentials “might be able to gain persistence,” the researcher said, calling it worse than an attacker destroying a database or having an intruder gain access to a government system. The Office of Personnel Management would get a better handle on the federal biotechnology workforce under a pair of bills from a bipartisan House duo. Introduced Wednesday, the Federal Biotechnology Workforce Assessment Act directs OPM to coordinate with agency heads on defining the federal biotech workforce, in addition to assessing current and future needs for those “bio-literate” federal employees. The bill from Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Rich McCormick, R-Ga., shared first with FedScoop, is aimed at ensuring the federal government workforce keeps the country a step ahead of China in the biotech space. Priority No. 1 for OPM's assessment is identifying the total number of biotech positions required at federal agencies. The legislation is focused specifically on the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Interior, State, and Treasury, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the offices of the Director of National Intelligence and the U.S. Trade Representative.

After the White House's move last year to kill Direct File, three senators are asking the congressional watchdog to examine the alternative program the Trump administration is pushing: the IRS's beleaguered Free File system. In a letter sent Sunday to acting Comptroller General Orice Williams Brown, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Angus King, I-Maine, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., requested a Government Accountability Office investigation into Free File, an IRS partnership with private tax prep companies. The partnership has been heavily scrutinized over the course of Free File's 20-plus-year existence, with critics pointing to scant consumer use, hidden industry costs and data privacy issues. “Due to this history of misconduct, we have serious concerns that Free File cannot efficiently, effectively, and securely serve the taxpayers who are statutorily entitled to free tax filing services,” the lawmakers wrote. Direct File, the IRS's consumer-praised free electronic filing tool, was launched in the aftermath of an April 2022 GAO report that recommended the tax agency develop new no-cost filing options. Under the Biden administration, the IRS launched a pilot program of Direct File in a dozen states in 2023, and doubled the number of participants the following year. The Trump administration quickly terminated the program, however, pointing to high costs and low user uptake during the purposefully limited pilot seasons. Federal agencies would be required to develop artificial intelligence standards and use the National Institute of Standards and Technology's AI guidelines under a bipartisan bill introduced Thursday. Led by Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., the bill would require agencies to use the Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework, developed by the NIST in 2023, and work with the agency in developing other consistent standards and guidelines. Reps. Zach Nunn, an Iowa Republican, and Don Beyer, a Virginia Democrat, co-sponsored the bill, with Beyer calling it “a natural starting point” to ensure agencies have the tools they need to navigate AI's complexities. “This bill lays the foundation for harnessing the power of AI for the benefit of the American people, while upholding the highest standards of accountability and transparency,” Beyer said in a statement. The bill would also direct NIST to recommend training and use the standards when acquiring any AI systems or services.

All active-duty Marines and reservists must complete a new Basic AI Course before the end of the calendar year, according to a new directive. The announcement comes amid a broader push by the Marine Corps, and the Defense Department writ large, to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence capabilities for warfighting and back-office functions. One of the strategic goals outlined in the Corps' AI implementation plan, released last year, is to develop an “AI competent workforce.” “Emerging and disruptive technologies (EDT) offer the potential for Marines to gain a decisive advantage but also create the possibility of an adversary exploiting these technologies more effectively. Among these EDTs, artificial intelligence (AI) stands out as the first among equals, demanding our immediate and focused attention,” officials wrote in the new MARADMIN message, which was approved by Lt. Gen. Benjamin Watson, deputy commandant for training and education. The Corps is now implementing a “broad educational framework” with a goal of ensuring that “AI-trained Marines are supported by informed peers and leaders” across the service, according to the announcement. The Basic AI Course, which officials estimate will take 45 minutes for service members to complete after logging into the MCELE system, is designed to give troops a “foundational understanding” of artificial intelligence, including key concepts and use cases, such as how AI can support decision-making. Sean Plankey, most recently the nominee for director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is joining defense technology company UFORCE as its U.S. chief executive officer. The London-based company created out of nine Ukrainian-based firms announced Plankey's move Monday less than a month after he withdrew his nomination amid difficulties overcoming objections from senators who had placed a hold on it. Plankey's a cyber veteran of the first Trump administration but also had been serving as senior adviser on the Coast Guard at the Homeland Security Department, retiring from the Coast Guard this year. UFORCE makes combat drones for air, land and sea and plans to have its first U.S.-made unmanned surface vessels hitting the water by this summer. The startup reportedly brought its valuation to $1 billion earlier this year. “The United States and its allies are looking for defense technology partners that can move quickly, innovate continuously and deliver systems already proven across theaters of combat,” Plankey said in a statement. “UFORCE is uniquely positioned to meet that demand and we will do that by manufacturing these capabilities in America.” CISA has gone without a permanent director for the entirety of the second Trump administration, and the president has yet to put forward a nominee for the position since Plankey's withdrawal last month.

The Office of Management and Budget plans to make public at least some of the technology contract data it's collecting from agencies, per the government's top IT official. Under a March memo, certain chief information officers are required to update OMB each month on contracts they or their subordinates have approved. That same memo also mandates data collection about pricing and agency use of services from vendors themselves. The memo received some positive reception as a possible method to better inform procurement decisions, but a common critique was that it provided no assurances the information would ever be transparently published. Despite citing data standards consistent with the OPEN Government Data Act — a law that requires agencies to publish non-sensitive information in machine-readable and open formats by default — the memo did not state whether the information would be publicly disseminated. When asked by FedScoop recently whether public sharing is part of the plan for that information, Greg Barbaccia said: “Absolutely. This is the citizens' data.” The format that might take is less clear, however. Barbaccia said it “remains to be seen what amount we could share responsibly” and he would “have to take that back and think about that a bit.” The White House is keeping an eye on Immigration and Customs Enforcement's progress on a plan to deploy wearable identification technology for its agents, according to ICE Assistant Director Matthew Elliston. The Department of Homeland Security's fiscal 2027 budget proposal, set by the White House, allocates $7.5 million for the agency's Science and Technology unit to develop critical technologies that strengthen the component's ability to execute its mission. If passed, a portion of those funds would go to delivering operational prototypes of smart glasses that will “equip agents with real-time access to information and biometric identification capabilities in the field,” per the budget justification. “We have been toying with the idea of wearable facial matching” technology, Elliston said during AFCEA Bethesda's LEAPS Summit Thursday in Washington, D.C. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

A group of 32 congressional Democrats is calling for the Federal Aviation Administration to help hold Immigration and Customs Enforcement accountable following reports that the Department of Homeland Security unit is withholding aviation data. While deportation flights significantly increased last year, data about the air operations is difficult to find, according to the House members' letter to FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford. The representatives are asking for a detailed report about ICE's use of the Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed (LADD) program and whether the FAA is aware of additional data-suppression methods contributing to the decreased transparency. The program “was established to enable private aircraft owners and operators of non-commercial flights to filter their flight data from public display websites,” the coalition said in the letter sent Monday. “ICE's use of this program to obscure routine government operations and suppress information about deportation flights is out of the scope of this program, and therefore inappropriate and dangerous.” The price tag for the Golden Dome for America could reach $1.2 trillion to develop, deploy and operate over 20 years, according to a new report published Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office. The updated cost estimate is based on a “notional” missile defense architecture that broadly includes capabilities outlined in President Donald Trump's 2025 executive order calling for Golden Dome's development. CBO's projections are significantly larger than the $185 billion already budgeted for the project — with space-based interceptors (SBIs) accounting for over half of the office's estimate. “Of the $1.2 trillion amount, acquisition costs for the notional [national missile defense] system would total just over $1 trillion,” the report stated. “The most expensive component is the space-based interceptor layer, which accounts for about 70 percent of acquisition costs and 60 percent of total costs.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

If you ask Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor how he thinks about the role of AI in his agency's mission, he'll tell you he sees two different prevailing perspectives: one with a “big OPM” mission and another for “little OPM.” At least that's how he described it to me recently at UiPath's Fusion conference in Washington, DC. During our interview, Kupor shared about juxtaposition, emerging AI use cases that OPM is driving forward, and much more. The Department of Homeland Security intends to continue its work with Cellebrite, a provider of digital forensics hardware and software tools, according to forecast documents released last week. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as the department's Homeland Security Investigations unit, plan to award a five-year, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract with a $100 million ceiling to the vendor later this year. Cellebrite's products enable the agency to access data from cellphones, tablets and — more recently — unmanned aerial vehicles. The Israeli firm's data extraction capabilities are “the most widely utilized and deployed computer forensic tool” within HSI, per the document. Cellebrite has been deployed across DHS, including its reported use within the Secret Service to break into the phone of the man who shot President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., in 2024. DOGE's playbook for using artificial intelligence to eliminate regulations was on full display at the Department of Housing and Urban Development last summer with the introduction of an AI tool built for the “extermination” of federal housing rules. Documents obtained by Democracy Forward via Freedom of Information Act requests reveal a PowerPoint presentation delivered at HUD on SweetREX, a tool named for DOGE associate Christopher Sweet, according to Wired reporting last August. The new documents, shared with FedScoop, laid out a multistep process in which all HUD regulations would be analyzed by the AI. The tool would then provide recommendations to “keep, delete, or partial delete” each rule, per the presentation. Attorneys would review the suggestions and agency staffers would make the final decision. HUD regulations cover everything from the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sex in mortgage assistance to providing legal aid for foreclosure-related issues. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Federal CIO Greg Barbaccia has tapped the Department of Education's chief information officer as the government's new No. 2 IT official. Thomas Flagg will take over as deputy federal CIO after spending more than 11 years at the Department of Labor and leading Education's IT shop since October 2024. In an email sent Thursday to agency CIOs and shared with FedScoop, Barbaccia said there was “an overwhelming amount of interest” in the deputy role “from an exceptionally strong field of candidates.” Flagg stood out due to the “depth and seriousness of his experience across multiple technology leadership roles,” Barbaccia wrote, pointing to his time at the Department of Education and DOL. The hiring of Flagg gives the White House its first permanent deputy CIO since September 2025, when Drew Myklegard left the public sector to become Carahsoft's executive director of government programs. Since then, the acting deputy federal CIO position has been held by Jay Teitelbaum, an Office of Management and Budget, U.S. Digital Service and Department of Homeland Security alum. The Trump administration is redirecting a cybersecurity scholarship program that requires recipients to work in government service toward artificial intelligence, leaving some current program scholars dismayed and bewildered. In an email to participating school program coordinators obtained by CyberScoop, the Office of Personnel Management and National Science Foundation said the CyberCorps Scholarship For Service program would now be known as CyberAI SFS. The email reads: “The SFS students we enroll today will not be employable when they graduate in 2-3 years without significant AI background. Any SFS student in this new program must be proficient in using AI in cybersecurity or providing security and resilience for AI systems. Therefore, new students in the legacy CyberCorps program must learn to acquire AI expertise to augment their cybersecurity expertise.” It also explains that “new SFS scholars will not be accepted to the Legacy CyberCorps(C) program without a description on how they will develop competencies at the intersection of cybersecurity and AI.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The Office of Personnel Management is applying artificial intelligence to modernize the writing of position descriptions in the hiring process. OPM Director Scott Kupor touted the agency's new USA Class tool during an interview at the UiPath Fusion conference, presented by FedScoop, as a way to streamline notoriously slow and complex federal hiring. The federal government “has a lot of jobs,” the director said, with more than 600 classifications and a workforce north of 2 million civilian federal employees. “So the ‘n factorial' is pretty significant.” Kupor said OPM sought to leverage AI's strength in digesting large volumes of information — in this case, thousands of existing job descriptions — to train a model, and then prompted it to create new position descriptions aligned with OPM's classification standards. Federal hiring managers then review the outputs to ensure accuracy, further strengthening the model. The Pentagon plans to require service members to complete cybersecurity training once every three years, DefenseScoop has learned, a move that will scrap an annual mandate and is set to upend the Army's recent shift to a five-year requirement. In a Sep. 30 memo, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the military to “restore mission focus” by reducing, consolidating or eliminating a slew of mandatory courses, such as cybersecurity training, that he said were distracting from the military's core job of fighting wars. Hegseth did not specify by how much the services should “relax the mandatory frequency” of cybersecurity training, and by February, the Army issued its own directive that required soldiers to take the course once every five years instead of annually, DefenseScoop reported. But more than a month after the service's directive, the Pentagon is moving to require troops to conduct cybersecurity training once every three years, according to a recent memo reviewed by the publication and a senior defense official, which would effectively overrule the Army's move. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is urging critical infrastructure owners and operators to plan for delivering essential services under emergency conditions – potentially for months at a time. The federal government's top cybersecurity agency warned that state-sponsored hackers, particularly two Chinese groups known as Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon, continue to threaten critical sectors like electricity, water, and internet. The agency is now working with the private sector to protect operational technology – the systems that control the heavy machinery and equipment that powers most critical infrastructure – from attacks that enter through business IT systems or third-party vendor products. The initiative — known as CI Fortify – will include CISA conducting targeted technical assessments of critical infrastructure entities and aims to create plans that “allow for safe operations for weeks to months while isolated” from IT networks and third-party tools. Leonel Garciga left his role as the Army's chief information officer last week, the service announced Tuesday. His departure from the job had been anticipated. Garciga, a Navy veteran who has served in the federal government across intelligence, information technology and engineering sectors for nearly three decades, was selected as the Army's CIO in July 2023. He stepped down as CIO on May 1 during a ceremony that highlighted his “many accomplishments advancing the Army's digital transformation, cybersecurity, and data strategies,” according to a social media post from his former office. As the Army's CIO, Garciga was responsible for ushering the service through a tumultuous time in the digital domain amid heightened cybersecurity risks, AI advancement, and the military's push to access and streamline its own vast data repositories. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Eight U.S. technology companies have signed formal agreements to deploy their frontier AI capabilities on the Defense Department's classified networks “for lawful operational use,” according to a Pentagon press release published Friday. DOD's new deals with SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle follow a major contract dispute between the department and Anthropic that culminated earlier this year over potential ethical constraints that accompany the use of AI in warfare and for national surveillance. “Integrating secure frontier AI capabilities into the Department's Impact Level 6 (IL6) and Impact Level 7 (IL7) network environments will streamline data synthesis, elevate situational understanding, and augment warfighter decision-making in complex operational environments,” officials wrote in Friday's press release. A bipartisan congressional push to codify a National Science Foundation-based artificial intelligence research enabler continued this week with the reintroduction in the Senate of the CREATE AI Act. The bill from Sens. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., Todd Young, R-Ind., Mike Rounds, R-S.D., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., would establish the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) that would give AI researchers, educators and students more access to tools, data and other information to help develop new systems. Heinrich, founder and co-chair of the Senate AI Caucus, said in a press release that the NAIRR would go a long way toward “democratizing access to AI,” ensuring that American workers are prepared for the future and primed to lead “rapid advancements” with the emerging technology that boost the U.S. economy. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The White House wants to revamp federal contracting practices by making cost-reimbursement structures the exception, not the rule, per an executive order signed Thursday. President Donald Trump's order calls on the federal government to view fixed-price contracts with performance-based considerations as “the default and preferred method of procurement.” Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins told lawmakers Thursday that the VA's beleaguered electronic health record modernization efforts have turned a corner with the successful rollout of the system this month at four Michigan facilities. Collins said the April 11 deployment of the EHR at hospitals in Detroit, Ann Arbor, Battle Creek and Saginaw “has been phenomenal, even by industry standard.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Two DOGE associates dispatched to the Treasury Department in the early days of the second Trump administration flouted various IT security rules while the agency itself fell short on implementing proper cyber controls, a new watchdog report found. The Government Accountability Office examined access that a pair of DOGE staffers had to Bureau of the Fiscal Service payment systems from Jan. 20-April 11, 2025. The Office of Management and Budget's public tally of governmentwide AI use again grew in 2025 — this time amid the Trump administration's push to use the technology in the name of efficiency. Per OMB's recent publication on GitHub, the U.S. government reported about 3,600 AI use cases across agencies, a nearly 70% increase in disclosed applications of the technology from the previous reporting year. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Less than two weeks after the IRS wrapped what its CEO called the “most successful filing season” in history, the House passed a pair of bills aimed at giving the tax agency better tech for its next go-round. The lower chamber cleared the BARCODE Efficiency Act and the Taxpayer Experience Improvement Act this week, teeing up the modernization-focused pieces of legislation for the Senate. The Department of Labor aims to unveil its AI workforce hub in “the coming months,” an agency official told FedScoop Tuesday. The concept of a Labor-managed AI workforce hub was first introduced in President Donald Trump's AI Action Plan last July. The portal will feature recurring analyses and actionable insights meant to inform workforce and education policy, per the plan. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

One of the largest federal government labor unions expects to lose tens of thousands of members due to the Trump administration's crackdown on collective bargaining agreements, a new court document shows. The National Treasury Employees Union said in a filing that President Donald Trump's April 2025 executive order on exclusions from federal labor-management relations programs and subsequent Office of Personnel Management rule making has resulted in “irreparable harm” to the labor group. The Department of Justice charged a senior enlisted soldier assigned to U.S. Army Special Operations Command for allegedly using insider knowledge to bet on the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro via a prediction market site before the raid was made public. The DOJ accused 38-year-old Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke — who officials said was involved in the planning and execution for Maduro's capture by special operations forces in January — of using classified information to place tens of thousands of dollars worth of bets on Polymarket in the days before the mission, according to court records. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The General Services Administration announced 17 new Presidential Innovation Fellows, refreshing the technologist-focused program. A release shared with FedScoop ahead of the announcement described the 2026 cohort as “experts from top tech companies, startups, and organizations around the country.” Per that announcement, the fellows will serve their yearlong tours of duty at 10 federal agencies. The PIF program is located under GSA's Technology Transformation Services and has been around since 2012. The Treasury Department's loss of “confidence” in Booz Allen Hamilton led to the agency's decision to cancel its contracts with the consulting firm earlier this year, Secretary Scott Bessent said earlier this week, a surprise move that came years after a former employee leaked tax returns to media outlets. Booz's response to Bessent's new comments was that Charles Edward Littlejohn's conduct more than five years ago occurred on government systems, not Booz Allen systems. The firm said that it stores no taxpayer data on its systems and has no ability to monitor activity on government networks. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has tapped Palantir for IT modernization and other digital work as part of a $300 million Blanket Purchase Agreement that continues the data analytics and software giant's bonanza of business under the Trump administration. The first task order under the BPA, announced this morning, formalizes USDA's work with Palantir — specifically the agency's National Farm Security Action Plan and its “One Farmer, One File” initiative. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins previewed the launch of a “single, streamlined record that follows the farmer” during a February event in San Antonio, but the new task order makes it official. The Federal Aviation Administration is making progress on its goals tied to the modernization of the systems powering air traffic control and the National Airspace System, according to Administrator Bryan Bedford and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. The Department of Transportation officials were two of the speakers that gave updates on the initiative during the agency's Modern Skies Summit at its headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

House Democrats are calling on the Trump administration to scrap its plans to collect health data about federal workers from insurance companies. The lawmakers argue that the sensitive information could be used to target employees seeking care it disagrees with. Signers of the letter, which was led by House Oversight ranking member Robert Garcia of California, were specifically concerned about the potential targeting of federal employees who have accessed abortion care, contraceptives, in vitro fertilization (IVF), gender-affirming care, pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for the prevention of HIV, or any other health care services targeted by Republicans.” The Federal Trade Commission is poised to deepen its involvement in curbing the use of AI for malicious purposes, including the spread of nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes and voice cloning scams. Last year, Congress passed the Take It Down Act, a law that allowed for criminal prosecution of individuals who share or distribute nonconsensual, intimate images and digital forgeries, including those that are AI-generated. Also in this episode: Salesforce Public Sector Strategist Mia Jordan joins host Wyatt Kash in a discussion about how the emerging “agentic enterprise” model could help government eliminate fragmented workflows and operate more efficiently. This segment was sponsored by Salesforce. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The Energy Department might be all in on artificial intelligence, but the increasing apprehension among the American public is starting to pose a challenge, according to the agency's top official. During a budget hearing on Capitol Hill last week, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told lawmakers that “The country as a whole is going very negative on AI, and this is a risk,” AND that “It will be a loss to America if we stop this development and this investment and this improvement.” The DOE under Wright has a major role to play in the Trump administration's ambitious, AI-focused Genesis Mission, with plenty of focus on the national laboratories, especially. Wright said he views opposition to AI as a risk that's “very real” and “growing, particularly across rural America.” Maj. Gen. Christopher Niemi has been nominated to serve as the Air Force's first-ever chief modernization officer as part of a reorganization of the service's Air Force Futures. The Trump administration announced Niemi's nomination for promotion to three-star general last week. If confirmed by lawmakers, he would serve in a dual-hatted position as both the Air Force's deputy chief of staff for strategy, design and requirements and the service's official chief modernization officer, according to an Air Force spokesperson.

Elon Musk-led xAI is pursuing a FedRAMP High Authorization as part of the company's efforts to expand adoption of its tool Grok across federal agencies and their workflows. The company's authorization pursuit is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a partnership first reported Monday by Fast Company and confirmed by FedScoop through a source familiar with the matter. Typically, the metaphorical rubber stamp indicates a high level of rigor and shows that a tool is ripe for the federal government's most sensitive workloads. To meet the FedRAMP High requirements, xAI will need to adhere to more than 400 security controls, a third-party assessment and documentation reviews for its Grok Enterprise for Government tool. All in all, the process could last a couple of years, according to estimates from accounting firm Schellman. Despite the lengthy road ahead, xAI's pursuit of the authorization is already sending signals to federal agencies that the company is serious about courting them. For some, however, Grok's infamous reputation could precede any security standards badge it may earn. Funding has emerged as a key factor in determining whether the Department of Energy can keep pace with its ambitious Genesis Mission timeline, according to Carl Coe, the agency's chief of staff. Speaking at AITalks on Tuesday, Coe called Genesis a massive project that needs funding to reflect that. The Genesis Mission is framed by the Trump administration as a national effort to stand up supercomputers, double the productivity of the country's research-and-development budget and launch a platform that combines quantum, high-performance computing and AI advancements. The effort kicked off in November via an executive order. Coe, who previously served as DOE's Department of Government Efficiency lead, said that even though the White House allocated a good amount [of funding], Energy needs a lot more. Budget season is underway with the release of the White House's agency-level funding proposals earlier this month, offering a peek behind the curtain at what could potentially be coming DOE's way. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The Department of Transportation is launching a new campaign with a focus on gamers as part of an air traffic controller hiring push, according to a Friday announcement. The agency is targeting early career professionals for the technical role as it prepares to open its annual hiring window next week. “To reach the next generation of air traffic controllers, we need to adapt,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement. “This campaign's innovative communication style and focus on gaming taps into a growing demographic of young adults who have many of the hard skills it takes to be a successful controller.” The hiring push aims to attract candidates with “demonstrated high cognitive functions,” multitasking skills, spatial awareness and problem solving, according to the agency. The agency said the effort is focused on reaching talented young people pursuing alternative career paths, many of whom are active in gaming, adding that “feedback from controller exit interviews reinforces this, with several controllers pointing to gaming as an influence on their ability to think quickly, stay focused, and manage complexity.” The Navy plans to use underwater drones in the coming days as part of its new effort to clear Iranian mines from the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. Central Command announced Saturday. The strait is a critical maritime chokepoint for oil exported from the Middle East, and reopening it to more shipping traffic has been a top objective of President Donald Trump amid the shaky ceasefire between the United States and Iran that began a few days ago and paused Operation Epic Fury, the military name for the American war effort against Tehran that kicked off Feb. 28. Last month, the New York Times reported that Iranian forces were using small boats to lay mines in the Strait of Hormuz. On Friday, the outlet reported that the Iranians cannot locate all the mines they placed and lack the capacity to remove them, citing U.S. officials. Centcom, which is overseeing Epic Fury and other American military efforts in the Middle East, announced in a press release Saturday that its forces had begun “setting conditions” for clearing the devices, stating that the guided missile destroyers USS Frank E. Peterson (DDG 121) and USS Michael Murphy (DDG 112) “transited the Strait of Hormuz and operated in the Arabian Gulf as part of a broader mission to ensure the strait is fully clear of sea mines previously laid by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The deadline for federal agencies to implement risk management practices for high-impact AI use cases — or terminate them — has come and gone, but a handful of departments are still working to complete their requirements. FedScoop reached out to 28 federal agencies to inquire about the steps they have taken to ensure compliance within the April 3 timeframe. Some agencies fulfilled the requirements, like the Labor Department, NASA, the VA, State, GSA, and the EPA, while others reclassified use cases or still have a couple boxes to check. A few appear to have missed the deadline entirely. As outlined by an Office of Management and Budget memorandum, uses considered high-impact are required to comply with minimum risk management practices, which include pre-deployment testing, impact assessments, adverse impact monitoring, adequate human training and assessments, appropriate fail-safes that minimize harm, consistent appeal processes, and options for end users to submit feedback. The Department of Justice is asking Congress for a major boost in fiscal 2027 to the fund it uses to support IT modernization and enterprise cybersecurity, with the entire increase going directly to the agency's zero-trust cybersecurity architecture. DOJ has requested $149 million for its Justice Information Sharing Technology fund as part of the Trump administration's fiscal 2027 budget request. Congress appropriated $38.5 million for the program in the past two fiscal years. The primary difference between this request and the funding enacted in the most recent years prior is the $110.3 million that DOJ says it needs to support its migration to a zero-trust architecture for its unclassified and national security systems. To put that into perspective, Justice requested a more meager $11.8 million increase to the JIST fund's topline in fiscal 2026 for “cybersecurity posture enhancement,” which it did not get. In its congressional budget justification for 2027, Justice explains that despite an industrywide shift to zero trust as the cybersecurity model of choice in response to the SolarWinds attack on federal agencies in 2020, its funding for cyber was cut by $108 million in fiscal 2024 and remained essentially flat since then. “Enacted funding levels over the past three years are below the level required to cover DOJ's over 275,000 endpoints and approximately 160,000 users,” the budget document states, adding that “the current funding levels impact the Department's current defenses and constrain its ability to adapt to evolving threats.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement surpassed its arrest goals in fiscal 2025 thanks to technology additions and data-sharing partnerships across the agency and federal government, according to the Department of Homeland Security's latest annual performance report and plan. ICE more than doubled its fiscal 2025 goal with 167,651 arrests of individuals with criminal convictions or with pending criminal charges, a 106% jump from the prior year, the agency said in the report published Friday. The DHS unit has since increased the future annual target to 400,000 arrests. “This increase was achieved by strengthening partnerships with other agencies, improving data and technology for identifying cases, and focusing enforcement efforts on public safety threats,” DHS said. The agency has ramped up its technology use, embedding tools closer to core law enforcement operations. The U.S. military launched more one-way attack drones Monday against Iran, U.S. Central Command announced Tuesday, adding that “hundreds” of unmanned platforms have been involved in Operation Epic Fury in various roles to date. Tuesday's announcement comes several weeks after Centcom noted that it had employed long-range kamikaze drones in combat for the first time during the early days of the Iran war, which President Donald Trump commenced on Feb. 28. Those platforms, known as the Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack Systems (LUCAS), were reverse-engineered and are similar to Iran's Shahed weapons. In early March, a Centcom spokesperson told DefenseScoop that “LUCAS drones remain ready for employment.” Centcom's post on social media platform X on Tuesday did not disclose whether the one-way drone attacks launched last night included LUCAS platforms or other systems, or how many were deployed in the assault. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

After slashing IT spending across civilian federal agencies last year, the White House's fiscal 2027 budget calls for a return to pre-Trump levels and then some. Though the proposal from President Donald Trump is just a starting point for haggling in Congress over what will ultimately be spent, the summary document released Friday projects $75.7 billion in federal civilian IT spending, up from $67.9 billion in fiscal 2026 and $75.1 billion in fiscal 2025. It doesn't include the Department of Defense's IT budget request, which in fiscal 2026 was a whopping $66.1 billion on its own. Despite the upward trend for overall spending on tech, OMB's budget request calls for a small decrease in funding for cybersecurity across all civilian agencies — falling from about $12.5 billion this year to $12.2 billion for 2027. This trend tracks with the Trump administration's decision to cut the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's budget by $707 million. The largest IT investments are slated for the Department of Veterans Affairs ($12.2 billion), the Department of Homeland Security ($11.7 billion) and the Department of Health and Human Services ($9.5 billion). The General Services Administration is lobbying once again to rely on the transfer of unobligated appropriations from other agencies to support projects under the Technology Modernization Fund.The Trump administration included a provision in its fiscal 2027 budget justification for GSA “to collect up to $100 million in funding that would otherwise be unavailable for obligation from other agencies and bring that funding into the TMF.” The proposed funding mechanism comes after GSA included similar but broader language in its fiscal 2026 justification, calling for “both currently available funding and unobligated balances of expired discretionary funds from other agencies [to] be transferred into the TMF.” Ultimately, the appropriations laws passed by Congress for 2026 included a pair of statutes that allowed for those transfers to happen with limits — though it's unclear how or if GSA has used the authority. It also gave the TMF a $5 million plus-up and extended the fund's authorization through the end of fiscal 2026. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The Office of Management and Budget is asking federal IT leaders to provide more information about what they buy and collect more data about those purchases from the private sector. A Tuesday memo mandates certain agency chief information officers both provide OMB with monthly updates on contracts that they or their subordinates approve, as well as require vendors to provide details about pricing and agency use of those services. “It's time to put all the cards on the table,” Federal CIO Greg Barbaccia said in a video about the memo posted to LinkedIn. “At the end of the day, this is about using taxpayer's dollars responsibly, buying smarter, and making sure the government is actually getting value from the technology it depends on.” The Trump administration has already made moves to consolidate IT contracting under the General Services Administration and, more broadly, collect and share better data about federal acquisitions. The new memo appears to bring specific actions to achieve those policies directly to CIOs. The policy, which was signed by OMB Director Russell Vought, points to a statutory requirement that CIOs in Chief Financial Officers Act agencies — a cohort of roughly two dozen larger government departments and entities — must sign off on IT contracts and agreements. One of the House's top voices on artificial intelligence wants to put an independent federal agency in charge of ensuring the data and algorithms behind foundation models are made public. Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., co-chair of the Congressional AI Caucus, is part of a bipartisan trio behind a bill introduced last week that would require the Federal Trade Commission to establish requirements for foundation model transparency. The bill, co-sponsored by Reps. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., and Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., calls on the FTC to work with the Commerce secretary, the Office of Science and Technology Policy director and the head of the National Institute of Standards and Technology on those requirements. The federal leaders would also seek input from standards bodies, academics, tech experts, civil rights advocates and consumers. Beyer, who has pursued graduate work in machine learning, said in a press release that consumers deserve more information about AI foundation models that are “commonly described as a ‘black box'” — meaning users aren't privy to why a model may provide a particular response. Giving users more information, such as what the model bases it results on and how it was built, would go a long way toward changing that element of the unknown, the Virginia Democrat said. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The Department of Health and Human Services is reshuffling its top officials for data, artificial intelligence, and technology back under its chief information officer, undoing a 2024 reorganization of those roles under the Biden administration. In a Tuesday announcement, HHS said the department's chief AI officer, chief technology officer, and chief data officer would move from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy/Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, known as ASTP/ONC, back to the Office of the Chief Information Officer. The department is also ending the dual title of ASTP/ONC and reverting it back to just ONC. According to the press release, the reversal is aimed at reinforcing “OCIO's statutory responsibility for enterprise IT, cybersecurity, and data operations.” The move, the department said, also enables ONC to focus on its mission of health IT policy standards and certification. HHS CIO and acting CAIO Clark Minor said in a statement included in the release that the move allows the department to “move faster on shared platforms, protect our systems more effectively, and support ONC and the operating divisions with the technology capabilities they need to innovate for patients.” The Biden-era reorganization was first announced in July 2024 and generally moved functions away from the OCIO, with a goal of clarifying and consolidating those responsibilities. The Federal Communications Commission has tapped the Food and Drug Administration's former chief digital officer as its new IT chief, the independent agency announced Monday. Farhan Khan, who left the FDA for a private-sector role in August 2025, takes over as the FCC's chief information officer following the retirement of Allen Hill last October. Deputy CIO Don Tweedie had been serving in the role in an acting capacity since then. At the FDA, Khan oversaw digital transformation projects for the agency, managing a $200 million budget and team of more than 400 staffers, according to the FCC's press release. Khan began his federal career as a team lead with the Department of Justice in 2009, per his LinkedIn profile. He later served as the Department of Transportation's director of infrastructure, the FDA's CTO, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s IT infrastructure operations chief, and the U.S. Army's director of architecture and integration for the senior executive service. As the FCC's CIO, Khan — who holds a master's degree from George Washington in information systems — will be charged with overseeing the agency's overarching technical priorities, leading modernization efforts and securing data. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Accenture Federal Services and Booz Allen Hamilton will take the lead on contracts to help the National Weather Service replace a legacy IT system and transition its weather data and resources to cloud-based technology. The two contracts, announced last week, are aimed at transferring the functions of the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) to two new tools in a move the agency says will improve availability of that data to forecasters across the nation. Among the anticipated benefits: access to the systems away from home offices and ability for forecasters to provide remote backup. As it stands, the AWIPS is an on-premises system and deployed at roughly 170 sites across the country, per a request for information the agency posted on the modernization effort last year. But that structure has drawbacks, Ken Graham, director of the National Weather Service, told FedScoop via email, pointing to the fact that the current operational system is physically installed and tied to each NWS office separately, limiting employees' ability to easily work alongside decision-makers, like local emergency operational centers.The two new cloud-based systems will change that, allowing forecasters to conduct their work — including creating and distributing forecasts and warnings — “without being tied to a specific location,” Graham said. Three years after launching a dashboard to provide agencies with a governmentwide view of the federal cybersecurity workforce, the Office of Personnel Management has stopped using the tool for its own planning, a new report found. According to the Government Accountability Office, OPM and five of the six other agencies examined by the congressional watchdog are no longer using the Cyber Workforce Dashboard, which went live in April 2023. The agencies cited “limitations” with the product, “including communications with OPM, access, functionality, and use of data,” per a GAO press release. The dashboard, which came out of a working group co-chaired by the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of the National Cyber Director, was created to support agencies in cyber workforce planning, helping them make data-driven decisions for current and future requirements. Overseen by the Strategic Workforce Planning and Forecasting Methods team under OPM's Workforce Policy and Innovation group, the dashboard tracked cyber workforce data for all 24 Chief Financial Officers Act agencies, as well as OMB, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Archives and Records Administration, according to the GAO. In conducting its audit from January 2025 to March 2026, the watchdog was told by OPM officials that the human capital agency was not using the dashboard for its own cyber workforce planning purposes. The other agencies audited by the GAO were the Small Business Administration, the National Science Foundation, the General Services Administration, and the departments of Justice, State and Treasury. The GSA is the only one that still uses the tool. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

A federal judge in California granted Anthropic's request for a preliminary injunction Thursday, preventing implementation of President Donald Trump's governmentwide ban on its technology and the Pentagon's designation of the company as a supply-chain risk. In her decision, San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Rita Lin said the government's actions appeared to be “designed to punish Anthropic” rather than protect national security. Her order blocks the defendant agencies from carrying out the ban on Anthropic's technology and halts any Department of Defense actions to implement, apply, or enforce the company's supply chain risk designation pending the final result of the case or further notice from the court. The ruling, for now, is a win for Anthropic and its supporters. Given the potentially wide-ranging impacts of the litigation, the company has attracted a broad coalition of backers in its legal fight — including industry competitors, federal workers, as well as legal and policy analysts. The Department of Energy is getting ready to bring on technologists from the governmentwide hiring initiative known as Tech Force, according to an IT official at the agency. Tech Force launched in December as a program trying to fill gaps across federal agencies with workers serving two-year stints. A few agencies have already made selections, the Energy Department technology leader said during a panel at the EIE Summit on Thursday in Washington D.C. Bridget Carper Arnone, deputy CIO for architecture, engineering, technology and innovation with the DOE's OCIO, said the department hasn't “started the actual interviews, but they've gone through the first level where a crossagency panel has deemed them qualified.” The Energy Department had an initial wishlist of 10 developers, she said, but budget constraints are playing a role. DOE received more than 100 applicants for the software engineering role and around 175 for the data scientist position. The other hurdle for the Energy Department is compliance considerations. Only a certified classification specialist has the authority to approve a position description. Arnone said she used Joulix, the DOE's generative AI tool suite, to speed up the process of writing the position description and is now waiting on the specialist to classify it. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

As the Trump administration makes a bid to hire more young people in the federal government via the Tech Force, the leader of the Office of Personnel Management told lawmakers he doesn't believe stability is the biggest draw for the next generation. Director Scott Kupor told lawmakers on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government at a Wednesday oversight hearing that he doesn't “think young people actually think about 40-year careers. I think they think about small increments.” Kupor said that's why the Tech Force — the administration's program to fill federal tech vacancies with early career workers — was designed to be two years. He later stated that he doesn't “think stability for young people is the most compelling message.” The comments arose in an exchange between Kupor and Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., the ranking member of the subcommittee, about the message that OPM is sending to attract younger people to the federal government. The technology industry is heavily represented in President Donald Trump's first list of appointees to restock a White House science and tech advisory panel. Among the 13 appointees to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) were Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle's Larry Ellison, Google's Sergey Brin, and Nvidia's Jensen Huang. That panel will be co-chaired by David Sacks, Trump's AI and crypto czar, and Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.The PCAST has been around for decades as a way for the White House to receive feedback from scientists, engineers, technologists, and representatives from the private sector. While Trump announced the re-establishment of the council via executive order in January 2025, there hadn't yet been details on its membership. In addition to the Wednesday list, the White House said it expects to announce more appointees “in the near future along with information about the Council's first meeting.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The General Services Administration has proposed draft contract language that would define the government's relationship with AI service providers in a major federal acquisition program in the aftermath of the fallout between the Defense Department and Anthropic. The proposed language includes terms and conditions for government data use, defines what it means for AI to be unbiased, creates a requirement to use only “American AI,” and establishes a responsibility for contractors to enforce terms and conditions on the AI they deploy. Notably, it also includes language that echoes the very policy at issue in Anthropic's ongoing battle with the Pentagon that led to the company's governmentwide ban and designation as a “supply chain risk.” Under the draft, the government would be granted a “contract for any lawful Government purpose.” According to Anthropic's legal challenge, its dispute with the Defense Department hinged on a policy that the military could make “all lawful use” of the technology. That change, Anthropic says, would have eliminated the company's restrictions on use of its products for “lethal autonomous warfare” and mass-scale surveillance of Americans. A nonprofit advocacy group is suing the Social Security Administration to release records on an agreement DOGE made to share voter data with a non-government source, and other documents regarding the improper use of Americans' data. In a lawsuit filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, Democracy Forward seeks to compel the SSA to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests linked to a “voter data agreement” revealed in a January court filing. That filing from the Department of Justice, which is part of a lawsuit by several labor groups over DOGE's handling and exposure of personally identifiable information, detailed coordination between two members of Elon Musk's tech collective embedded at SSA and an advocacy group seeking “evidence of voter fraud.” The DOJ said in that filing that in March 2025, a political advocacy group asked those DOGE representatives for Social Security data to analyze state voter rolls. Per the filing, the group's “stated aim was to find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States.” One of those DOGE members signed a “Voter Data Agreement” in his capacity as an SSA employee and sent the document back to the group on March 24, 2025. Democracy Forward, which represents the federal unions at the center of that lawsuit, immediately filed a FOIA seeking a copy of the voter data agreement, plus all emails between the parties. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Amid ongoing conflicts and looming threats from peer adversaries like China, conversations around the American defense industrial base have shifted from capacity to resilience and speed. Meanwhile, software, AI and autonomy have emerged as key drivers for modern military operations, and with that, the DIB has evolved to incorporate new, non-traditional vendors that don't see themselves as prime defense contractors. That transformation and fielding efforts to bolster it are the focus of the Pentagon's Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy, led by Hon. Michael Cadenazzi. Cadenazzi joining the Daily Scoop to discuss the new and ongoing policy efforts of his office to wrap its arms around, support and grow the modern defense supply chain, the challenges it faces, how it can keep pace with commercial innovation, and what comes next. The cost to run Direct File for the 2025 tax filing season was tens of millions of dollars less than what the IRS estimated it would be, according to a new watchdog report. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that the IRS ended up spending $16.2 million on the since-cancelled free electronic filing service in fiscal 2025 — far shy of the $61.2 million projected by the IRS. That $45 million gap appears to undercut one of Direct File opponents' main complaints about the customer-praised digital initiative: that it was supposedly an inefficient use of government resources. However, TIGTA noted some caveats to that finding: The IRS initially “overestimated” how many people would use Direct File and how many “assistors” would be needed to support them. Just 751,000 taxpayers registered with Direct File for its limited second season; the IRS estimated that 32 million taxpayers would be eligible to use the tool, according to the Treasury watchdog. Of those who registered, 59% did not ultimately submit a tax return through the system. The Federal Aviation Administration is collecting information about the evolving operational and infrastructure needs of airports, given the increasing integration of unmanned aircraft systems. The FAA aims to catalog and inventory best practices for airport design standards and standalone facilities, called droneports, as part of the request for comment published in the Federal Register on Monday. The Department of Transportation component wants to interview representatives from equipment manufacturers, unmanned aircraft system vendors, the military and other stakeholders. After the comment period closes next month, the FAA will use responses to inform a report that will then shape operational evaluations and standard-setting tied to the integration of drones. The information-gathering effort comes amid a heightened focus on drone and counter-drone technologies. The FAA laid out plans to create an office overseeing the integration of drones and other advanced aviation technologies as part of its broader organizational overhaul beginning in January. Just days later, the FAA reopened a request for information centered around the handling of UAS and proposed policies for location-tracking, data-sharing and detection technologies. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The Defense Department and its federal partners issued a warning Friday to drone operators, threatening to impose massive fines, imprisonment and other measures on those who illegally fly unmanned aerial systems in restricted airspace. Drone incursions over stateside military bases and other restricted areas have been widespread in recent years as commercially available systems proliferate. Just this week, the head of U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command revealed that American forces recently identified and defeated a small UAS threat over a “strategic” U.S. installation. Agencies operating near the southern border have also been using weapon systems, including high-energy lasers, against suspicious drones, raising safety concerns among agencies like the FAA. Two incidents in Texas last month led to temporary airspace closures. The federal government restricts who can fly UAS over certain areas, such as military facilities and civilian airports, to protect national security and public safety. In a press release issued Friday, the DOD, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security and the FAA touted the government's detection capabilities, declaring that Uncle Sam has a “zero-tolerance policy” for illegal drone operations and threatening rule violators with “severe consequences,” including potential fines upwards of $100,000, criminal charges, incarceration, and the confiscation of their systems. The White House registered two new government domains last week: alien.gov and aliens.gov, according to publicly available federal records. Their appearance comes about one month after President Donald Trump announced plans to direct the long-anticipated release of U.S. government records about unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) and extraterrestrial beings. Those new domains were not connected to websites as of Wednesday morning. But public data managed by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reveals that both sites were registered Tuesday evening and are hosted on Cloudflare servers. Shortly after Trump's disclosure order in February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon was keen to comply and had started actively working on the initiative. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

A new Office of Personnel Management hub for shared human resources services is open for business, the agency announced Tuesday. In a memo to federal agency leaders, OPM Director Scott Kupor said the HR Shared Service Center aims to “reduce fragmentation” within the government and allow agency staff to focus on their mission rather than administrative work. Per the memo, that new center provides a “comprehensive” suite of functions, such as benefits management, payroll administration, performance management, recruitment, training, and workforce planning. Using those services is voluntary for agencies and is a fee-for-service model. At least eight federal entities have already indicated they will make the transition, per the memo. Those include the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Government Ethics, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The announcement is the latest development in the Trump administration's broader push to consolidate HR services across the government. That plan, called “Federal HR 2.0,” aims to create a single personnel management platform for the federal government as a way to save money and reduce duplicative systems. The Federal Aviation Administration is gathering information from potential private-sector partners to inform the buildout of its defenses against cyber and quantum threats, according to documents published this month. The cybersecurity-focused market survey and quantum-related request for information are targeting the systems at the core of the Department of Transportation component's multiyear, multibillion dollar modernization initiative: the National Airspace System and Air Traffic Control. The FAA is looking for vendors that could improve its information security and operations, such as penetration testing, vulnerability evaluations and incident response coordination among other tasks. The scope of the project also includes assessing the current NAS cybersecurity posture to identify capability gaps, test emerging tech tools and recommend improvements. The DOT component is also planning to move its NAS, ATC and IT systems infrastructure to post-quantum cryptography, a concept centered around mitigating attacks from future quantum computers by adopting new encryption methods. “Without quantum‑resistant, crypto‑agile security, the NAS cannot achieve the reliability, performance, or international leadership required in the decades ahead,” the FAA said in its RFI published last week. “FAA therefore views PQC not as a compliance exercise, but as a foundational enabler of modernization — one that must be embedded into every vendor solution, every system upgrade, and every step of the Brand New Air Traffic Control System.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched a strategy and guidance for use of artificial intelligence on Thursday, setting a direction for the agency's own work and providing resources for public health officials across the country. Those documents point to a desire to promote adoption of the technology, empower the workforce to use it, and ensure the tools are governed properly. But, more uniquely, the publications encourage the use of “agentic” or “deep research” AI uses — those that can autonomously carry out specific tasks — which CDC is already tapping into. Almost 10% of CDC's roughly 100 AI use cases were agentic tools in 2025, according to the Department of Health and Human Services' recently reported AI use case inventory. Its share of agentic uses makes up roughly a third of such deployments across the department. As a result, the CDC's new strategy includes specific language to leverage that technology to support public health, strengthen research and data management, and improve access to data. And simultaneously, the agency released specific guidance for state, tribal, local and territorial (STLT) public health authorities on the use of AI agents for research based on experiences from its own exploration. The White House is launching a task force aimed at eliminating fraud in federally run programs — a goal that will be pursued largely through beefed-up data-sharing processes. The executive order signed Monday by President Donald Trump is framed through the lens of various fraud cases in Minnesota involving Medicaid, a Department of Agriculture child nutrition program and Small Business Administration loan programs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Investigations into the alleged fraud began under the Biden administration's Department of Justice, but the scandal has since been wielded by the Trump White House to freeze funds and strip away benefits from residents of the Gopher State. Under Trump's new order, the task force will be charged with developing a national strategy to combat fraud in federal benefit programs. The EO calls specifically for new measures to improve eligibility verification processes and create controls to prevent the disbursal of improper payments. The task force will also be required to “promote the facilitation of information and data sharing and coordination between State, local, tribal, and territorial governments and the Federal Government, and benefit-providing agencies and law enforcement agencies,” per the order. Interagency data-sharing would additionally be prioritized as part of an overarching enforcement push aimed at disrupting and dismantling “fraud networks and facilitators,” the EO states. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The Army has awarded a mega contract to Anduril Industries that the U.S. military hopes will boost its ability to defeat drone threats. The Pentagon unveiled the $20 billion firm fixed-price deal Friday evening as part of its daily list of contract announcements. That announcement addressed the types of technologies involved, but was scant on details about the mission areas the capabilities would be applied toward. Under the agreement, Anduril will “consolidate current and future commercial solutions — including the proprietary, open-architecture, AI-enabled Lattice suite, integrated hardware, data, computer infrastructure, and technical support services — into a unified, mission-ready capability supporting the Army's evolving operational and business needs. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of March 12, 2036,” according to the contract announcement. A separate news release from the Army-led Joint Interagency Task Force 401 — which is focused on strengthening the U.S. government's drone defenses overseas and stateside — about the contract stated that the organization has “championed a groundbreaking enterprise-level agreement to provide a cutting-edge command-and-control solution through a strategic action.” Defense contractors are in the throes of becoming compliant with Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification standards. And now, in response to findings from the Government Accountability Office, a senior Pentagon official said the department plans to evaluate and define outside variables that could hinder the defense industry's ability to comply with new standards set by the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification 2.0 model. According to a study published by the GAO last Thursday, the Defense Department has done significant work to build a comprehensive strategy for implementing CMMC 2.0 cybersecurity standards. However, the report found that the department has yet to completely identify factors beyond its control that risk the program's overall success. “CMMC planning documentation identifies processes that can help address external factors, including a program waiver process,” the report stated. “However, CMMC planning documentation does not systematically identify the external factors that could affect reaching each goal.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Staff in the upper chamber of Congress now have the go-ahead to use Senate data with three popular generative AI chatbots thanks to approval from an office that oversees the legislative body's administrative operations. A recent notice from the Senate Sergeant at Arms' chief information officer announced the approvals for Microsoft's Copilot, Google's Gemini, and OpenAI's ChatGPT, expanding on previous policies. That memo was previously reported by the New York Times and independently obtained by FedScoop. According to the document, Copilot is integrated into the Senate's Microsoft 365 environment already, and more information about licenses for Gemini Chat and ChatGPT Enterprise will be coming within the next 30 days. Each Senate employee will be able to get one license for either Gemini or ChatGPT at no cost. Approval of the tools comes as entities across the federal government — including Congress, executive agencies, and the federal judiciary — have been navigating their own use of the growing technology to reduce administrative toil and assist staff. The Senate, for its part, previously allowed ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Microsoft's Bing AI chat in 2023 at “moderate” risk levels, but they were only for research and evaluation or use with non-sensitive data. The new approvals are less restrictive on the type of data that can be ingested, opening the door to more widespread use. The architect of the Department of Veterans Affairs' artificial intelligence program and digital modernization strategy is leaving the agency after nearly nine years. Charles Worthington, the VA's chief AI officer and CTO, said in a LinkedIn post Thursday that “the time is right” for him to step down from his posts. A Harvard grad, Worthington joined the federal government in 2013 as a Presidential Innovation Fellow. He parlayed that experience into a role as senior advisor to the federal CTO, where he co-created the U.S. Digital Service following the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov. After nearly three years with USDS, including as the White House tech office's acting deputy administrator, Worthington moved on to the VA in 2017. In addition to leading the agency's digital modernization work, he also supported its adoption of commercial cloud infrastructure, oversaw the creation of vets.gov, rebuilt va.gov and launched VA Notify, per a congressional bio and his LinkedIn profile. In addition to boosting digital services for veterans, Worthington worked in recent years to spur AI adoption across the agency. Under his watch, the VA emerged as one of the most prolific AI users in the federal government, with an inventory that's now 367 use cases strong. Included in that tally is the agency's VA GPT chatbot.Worthington, who also served on the Technology Modernization Fund board for four years, didn't reveal in his LinkedIn post where he's headed next. But he said his time with the VA “has been the most important work” of his career. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

U.S. government agencies continued to have low compliance with a statute designed to ensure that federal websites, software, and other products are accessible for people with disabilities, according to a recent federal review. In a new report, the General Services Administration found that alignment with the accessibility statute known as Section 508 was a 1.96 on a 5-point scale, continuing a trend of lacking compliance. GSA reported that roughly half of agencies didn't review accessibility for their most-used information and communication technology tools, and the majority of agencies don't conduct usability testing with people who have disabilities before resources are deployed or published. The poor compliance showing follows similar findings from past GSA reviews and indicates that more work is needed to help agencies comply. As a result, GSA concluded its report with recommendations that Congress both update the statute to clarify requirements and strengthen enforcement and oversight of agency compliance. The annual report is required by statute and was prepared in consultation with the White House Office of Management and Budget and the U.S. Access Board, an independent agency that establishes Section 508 standards. The report includes responses from 212 agencies, parent agencies, and other components. Its publication follows changes to the review process aimed at reducing the reporting burden on agencies. The top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is demanding a full, independent investigation into new reports of DOGE representatives improperly accessing and transferring Social Security Administration data. In a press release sent Tuesday, Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., said “new disclosures revealed DOGE personnel may have broken federal law and exposed Americans' most sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers.” The release came shortly after the Washington Post reported that an SSA whistleblower said a former DOGE engineer put sensitive information from two agency databases — Numident and the Master Death File — on a thumb drive and planned to share that data with his private-sector employer. Democracy Forward, which represents several labor groups in a lawsuit against SSA over DOGE's “unprecedented data grab,” filed a notice of factual development Tuesday in response to the Post's reporting. The new court filing said the revelations in the article “are consistent with the substantial issues … of disclosures beyond SSA and the federal government as a whole and the ongoing risk of further disclosures of such uncontrolled data.” Peters' press release references the Post's story, but also highlights a January court filing from the Department of Justice that disclosed the use of an unapproved third-party server and communication between DOGE and an advocacy group seeking “evidence of voter fraud.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Anthropic's $50 billion commitment for data-center construction projects in New York and Texas still made it on a list of investments the Trump White House said it helped secure, despite an ongoing feud between the company and the U.S. government. That tally, which was posted in a release online Sunday and emailed Monday, listed Anthropic's commitment among dozens of other private-sector investments related to American manufacturing, energy, and AI infrastructure projects that companies have announced during President Donald Trump's second term. Other investments on that list include those from Apple, Meta, Nvidia and Amazon. Anthropic's inclusion comes after a disagreement between the AI company and the Pentagon over guardrails for using its technology culminated in a governmentwide ban against the company and the DOD's determination that it's a “supply-chain risk.” Ironically, the White House release introduces the list with a statement that companies are moving to “strengthen domestic supply chains,” among other things. FedScoop contacted spokespeople at the White House and Anthropic, but neither provided comment before publication of this story. Anthropic's partner on the project, Fluidstack, didn't respond to a FedScoop request for comment. The Senate on Tuesday voted to confirm Army Lt. Gen. Joshua Rudd as commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the NSA, ending nearly a year of leadership uncertainty at the agencies and putting a new chief at the helm amid an ongoing war with Iran. Rudd, who previously served as deputy commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and worked in the special operations community, was nominated in December by President Donald Trump for the dual-hat role of Cybercom and NSA boss, despite having a limited cyber background. In April 2025, the Trump administration fired Air Force Gen. Timothy Haugh as head of those organizations without providing a public explanation. Since then, Cybercom and NSA have been led by Army Lt. Gen. William Hartman, who stepped in as acting director. Hartman was ultimately passed over to hold the roles on a Senate-confirmed basis. Rudd, who will pin on his fourth star following his confirmation, is entering the job as Cybercom supports U.S. military action against Iran during Operation Epic Fury. The command also played a support role in Operation Midnight Hammer against Iran last year and Operation Absolute Resolve in Venezuela in January, which included the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in Caracas. In addition to assisting other combatant commands and the joint force, the organization is tasked with conducting so-called “hunt forward” operations on overseas networks, defending the Department of Defense Information Network (DODIN), and bolstering America's ability to resist and respond to cyberattacks. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Anthropic's relationships with other federal contractors face irreparable harm following the Trump administration's governmentwide ban on the company and determination that it's a “supply-chain risk,” the Claude maker said in a lawsuit filed in a federal district court Monday. The legal challenge against the Pentagon, as well as multiple federal agencies and officials, seeks immediate and injunctive relief from President Donald Trump's directive banning the company from government use and the Department of Defense's designation of the company as a supply-chain risk. Among its arguments, Anthropic alleges the actions violate federal administrative procedure law, the company's right to free speech, and are beyond existing legal authority. The lawsuit also provides new details about the ramifications for Anthropic's work with other companies contracting with the federal government. At least one federal contractor that Anthropic has worked with to build custom applications has already “indicated that it may suspend that work or even remove Claude from existing deployments,” and others the company has worked with “are raising concerns, pausing collaborations, and considering terminating contracts,” according to the lawsuit. “Anthropic has no way to obtain redress from the government for those economic harms,” the company said. It estimated the actions by the Trump administration could jeopardize “hundreds of millions of dollars in the near term.” This one's also related to the government's ban of Anthropic, and the Secret Service can be added to the list of federal agencies or offices that said they won't use the company's Claude tool. The Department of Homeland Security component had used Anthropic's Claude models for code generation, a focus area for many organizations, according to Secret Service CIO and Chief AI Officer Chris Kraft. “That application does have the ability to leverage Claude models … but they're easy to change out,” Kraft said. “There's a whole list of a bunch of different models that you can choose from, and we will follow the guidance and leverage other models.” The Secret Service joins a growing group of agencies that are phasing out Anthropic's technology following the company's clash with the Department of Defense in late February. Software developers at the Treasury Department had been using Claude Code, though Secretary Scott Bessent said last week that the agency is terminating use. The Office of Personnel Management, NASA, the Commerce Department, the General Services Administration and Department of Health and Human Services are untangling Anthropic from AI use cases, if they haven't stopped using Claude already. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The Office of Personnel Management removed Claude and added Grok and Codex in an update to its public disclosure of AI use cases dated Wednesday. Removal of Claude comes after a disagreement between its maker, Anthropic, and the Department of Defense over the technology's guardrails culminated in President Donald Trump issuing a governmentwide ban on the company late last week. In the following days, numerous federal agencies have made moves to stop using Anthropic's services, including OPM. While the changes to the disclosure were made at the same time, Grok and Codex were not added as the result of Claude's removal, OPM spokeswoman McLaurine Pinover said in an emailed response to FedScoop. The human capital agency is “constantly working to provide the best tools to the OPM workforce. These initiatives were already underway,” Pinover said. According to the new inventory, the “first production use” for both tools is listed as the first quarter of 2026. Pinover confirmed that date references the calendar year rather than fiscal year. Grok, a product of Elon Musk's xAI, is listed as in production, and Codex, a coding specific AI tool from OpenAI, is being deployed in a sandbox phase — which generally describes a kind of controlled environment. OPM also added several other systems that deploy AI to its public disclosure, including Wiz, Zendesk, Waze, Google Maps, and the Apple iPhone. James “Aaron” Bishop has been tapped to serve as the Pentagon's chief information security officer and deputy CIO for cybersecurity, the department announced on social media Thursday. He assumed the role of CISO in an acting capacity on Feb. 27, according to a LinkedIn post from the Office of the Chief Information Officer. In his new position, he'll work under DOD CIO Kirsten Davies and be responsible for providing policy, technical, program and oversight support to the CIO on all cybersecurity matters. Bishop previously served as CISO for the Department of the Air Force, which includes the Air and Space Forces. According to his Air Force bio, his prior jobs in the private sector included CEO and founder of the Quantum Security Alliance, CEO and founder of Eigenspace, vice president and CISO for Science Applications International Corporation, and general manager of Microsoft's National Security Group, among other roles. David McKeown, who previously served as the department's CISO, deputy CIO for cybersecurity and special assistant for cybersecurity innovation, plans to leave government service for the private sector, according to the announcement. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

A range of AI use cases — from coding assistance to workflow automation — face alteration or retirement as federal agencies work to comply with a Trump administration directive to remove Anthropic tools from their systems within the next six months. The recent clash between the Claude maker and President Donald Trump comes after federal officials have spent years building up AI capabilities in government, including tools from Anthropic. Now, a growing list of agencies are immediately dropping use of those services, and in some cases, replacing it with other providers. In recent days, the Department of Treasury, the Office of Personnel Management, NASA, and the International Trade Administration all indicated to FedScoop they have stopped or plan to stop using Anthropic technologies in the wake of the ban announced via Truth Social. That adds to previous statements and internal communications at the Department of Health and Human Services, the State Department, and the General Services Administration. Trump's directive is the result of an escalated disagreement between Anthropic and the Department of Defense over how the technology should be used. While Trump accused Anthropic in his social media statement of attempting to “strong-arm” the DOD with its terms of service, CEO Dario Amodei said the company simply wanted to maintain safeguards to ensure that its technology would not be used in mass surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. The Secret Service is gearing up to launch what CIO and Chief AI Officer Chris Kraft is calling a new AI Program, which will act as a working group that comes in and helps IT teams. Kraft told FedScoop at Secret Service headquarters Wednesday in Washington, D.C., that the group will consist of 10 members initially and will also be tasked with identifying areas of opportunity to implement AI and other emerging technologies. Kraft said that “having that internal expertise, I believe, will be really transformational for us.” The Secret Service already uses AI technologies for license plate identification, facial recognition and other threat analysis. The AI group will focus on iterating existing use cases, as well as others like expanding counterfeit currency identification. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

More than 70 Democrats in the House and Senate are pushing the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general to open a new investigation into the agency's “warrantless purchases of Americans' location data.” In a letter sent Tuesday, the lawmakers tasked IG Joseph Cuffari with investigating whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement is purchasing illegally obtained location data about Americans, how that data has been used, whether audits of employee access to uncover abuse are occurring and the policies governing data usage. “Location data is extremely sensitive, and can reveal someone's religion, their political views, medical conditions, addictions, and with whom they spend time,” the Democrats said. “It is for that reason that ordinarily, the government must obtain a warrant from a judge in order to demand such data from phone or technology companies.” The letter comes nearly three years after an initial IG report found that Customs and Border Protection, the Secret Service and ICE violated federal law through warrantless purchase and use of location data. As part of that 2023 report, the watchdog office said the DHS components did not adhere to established privacy policies, nor did they develop sufficient guardrails before procurement and use. The chief information officer at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency announced his departure Tuesday, ending his nearly five-year run at CISA. Robert Costello, an 18-year veteran of the Department of Homeland Security, posted about the move on LinkedIn.nCostello's tenure had recently grown turbulent, with conflicting accounts of whether the since-departed acting director of CISA, Madhu Gottumukkala, had tried to force him out. Costello last week received transfer orders for possible reassignment to another agency. “Serving as CIO at CISA has been one of the greatest privileges of my career,” he said. “Together, we strengthened our cybersecurity posture, modernized critical systems, and built capabilities that will endure. I am incredibly proud of what we accomplished as a team. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The high-stakes dispute between Anthropic and the U.S. military led to a sweeping decision Friday by President Donald Trump to remove the AI startup's technology from all federal agencies. Already, several agencies are taking action. The General Services Administration, Department of State, and Department of Health and Human Services immediately indicated in public statements, comments, or internal emails that they were moving to boot Anthropic. The fallout is sure to continue as agencies untangle the Claude maker from their workflows. The clash centered on the Defense Department wanting Anthropic to remove stipulations that limited the military's use of the startup's technology in real-world operations, DefenseScoop previously reported. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement Thursday that the company could not accede to the request “in good conscience. Madhu Gottumukkala is out as acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, with current agency executive director for cybersecurity Nick Andersen replacing him as the interim leader. News of Gottumukkala's departure breaks one day after CyberScoop reported on widespread dismay with the agency's performance during the first year of the Trump administration, with significant criticism aimed at Gottumukkala's leadership on both sides of the aisle after a number of unflattering stories about his stewardship. “Madhu Gottumukkala has done a remarkable job in a thankless task of helping reform CISA back to its core statutory mission,” a Department of Homeland Security official told CyberScoop Thursday. “He tackled the woke, weaponized, and bloated bureaucracy that existed at CISA, wrangling contracts to save American taxpayer dollars.” Gottumukkala, served as chief information officer under then-South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, now secretary of DHS, before he was picked as deputy director of the agency. Sean Plankey's nomination to serve as full-time director of CISA has stalled, leaving Gottumukkala as the acting director in his place. Gottumukkala will take on a new role at DHS, as director of strategic implementation. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security is impacting the preparation of cities hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup, according to stakeholder testimony Tuesday. Beginning Sunday, Secretary Kristi Noem halted all non-disaster-related Federal Emergency Management Agency response efforts and scaled back FEMA operations to “bare-minimum, life-saving operations only.” Host city representatives said the agency has yet to send out the $625 million investment — referred to as the FIFA World Cup Grant Program — that Congress already appropriated as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The FIFA World Cup Grant Program is meant to support security activities, including training and readiness exercises, cybersecurity defense and operational requirements associated with increased information sharing and analysis needs. With just over 100 days before the World Cup festivities begin, officials advocated for the release of funding during a House Homeland Security hearing. The Department of State announced nearly 50 indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity awards under its Evolve program aimed at IT modernization last week. In a notice posted to SAM.gov, the department said 28 contractors had received awards spanning five function categories for services related to IT management, cloud and data centers, application development, network and telecommunications, and end user support. The contract has a ceiling of $10 billion and a base period of one year plus six one-year option periods. Of all the categories, cloud and data center services and application development had the most awardees, with 14 and 13 respectively. Leidos and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) had the highest number of awards across the categories, winning four contracts each. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Cybersecurity has been getting bigger recognition as an integrated enabler in key U.S. military operations in Iran and Venezuela. That comes on the heels of the Pentagon last year introducing a new cyber mission force generation model as part of the larger Cybercom 2.0 effort. So, who better to discuss the growing prominence of cyber in the defense space than the principal cyber advisors of the various branches overseeing cyber-kinentic integration. At CyberTalks, Daily Scoop host Billy Mitchell hosted a panel with those leaders and a representative from industry to hear the latest on this emerging space. Joining him on the panel were the PCAs from each service — Ann Marie Schumann of the Department of the Navy, Wanda Jones Heath of the Department of the Air Force and Brandon Pugh of the Army — as well as Dave Galoppo, senior director for full spectrum cyber at GDIT. The Department of Energy is rapidly building out multidisciplinary teams to support the Genesis Mission as it prepares to unveil a minimum viable product later this year, according to a senior agency official. The format for the demonstration is to be determined, but progress is palpable. “We're going to show quite a lot of results this year,” Darío Gil, DOE's under secretary for science and director of the Genesis Mission, said in an interview with FedScoop. “We're going to show results on our progress of building AI supercomputers … the software and the agentic framework.” The agency also plans to showcase the efforts behind the data curation used to train “next generation” AI and the results tied to the application of AI in science and engineering, he added. The Genesis Mission launched in November 2025 by way of an executive order that tasked the Energy Department with leading a national, coordinated effort to accelerate innovation and discovery with the latest advancements in AI, quantum and high-performance computing. As part of the initiative, the agency is working to build an integrated platform that draws on federal scientific datasets and expertise from public and private sectors. A demonstration of the Genesis platform's initial capabilities is required by mid-year, according to the deadlines outlined in the presidential directive. A pullback of educational requirements for federal contracting jobs, including in technology work, moved one step closer to reality Monday. The Skills-Based Federal Contracting Act (H.R. 5235) sailed through the House and now awaits Senate consideration. The bill from Reps. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., and Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., would ban minimum education requirements for personnel in some contracts. Introducing the bill on the House floor ahead of Monday's vote, Rep. William Timmons, R-S.C., said the legislation ensures federal contractors can “hire who they want to hire without additional red tape.” Mace, who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation, recounted January 2024 testimony from an IBM executive who said “federal contractors are rarely able to place an individual without a four-year degree on a technology services contract, regardless of their qualifications.” Mace said the issue goes “beyond technology and service contracts,” affecting work across the federal government. Eliminating four-year degree requirements would do away with “a paper ceiling” that blocks “talented Americans” from pursuing opportunities in the billion-dollar industry that “shapes the entire labor market,” she said. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

After a series of protests that led to a protracted evaluation period, the General Services Administration is moving forward with the Alliant 3 procurement, announcing Friday the first round of awards for the governmentwide IT services contract. GSA said in an online award notice that it received 133 proposals for the Alliant 3 Governmentwide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) solicitation and selected 43 winners for the first phase. Those not chosen are still eligible for future award phases until the agency has selected all 76 recipients, per the notice. The announcement comes more than a year after the GSA issued the request for proposals for the next iteration of the GWAC award, which has no maximum dollar ceiling, due to unsuccessful bid protests from multiple vendors. The latest iteration of the vehicle is a multiple-award, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract for a variety of IT-based services that builds upon the GSA's Alliant and Alliant 2 GWACs. With these awards, agencies can issue task orders for services including cybersecurity, data solutions, systems engineering and cloud services, the GSA said. Longtime government contractors like Maximus, Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics Information Technology, and Leidos were among the 43 phase one winners. Democratic lawmakers are once again pushing back on the Department of Homeland Security's expansive use of surveillance technology, with more than a dozen members of a House Oversight subcommittee expressing concern in a letter to Secretary Kristi Noem over the agency's processes for collection and analysis of cellphone data.The representatives pointed to recent reports of the agency procuring tools from Penlink, which is said to collect cellphone location data and allow customers to search for devices, and Paragon, a vendor known to enable access to a mobile device without the owner's knowledge or consent. Without guardrails, these tools introduce risks to data privacy and civil liberties, according to the signatories of the letter, which was led by Rep. Shontel Brown of Ohio, ranking member of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation. “Location data can reveal intimate details of a person's life, including where they live, work, worship, go to school, or seek medical care,” the lawmakers said. “DHS could use these tools to identify individuals for targeting based solely on their presence in certain locations, without a warrant or probable cause and regardless of their citizenship or residency status.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Federal Chief Information Officer Greg Barbaccia will be adding two new titles — at least temporarily — to his work in government. The General Services Administration announced Thursday that Barbaccia will join the agency as the acting director of Technology Transformation Services. He'll be replacing Thomas Shedd, one of the few officials left at the agency who helped carry out the so-called Department of Government Efficiency's cost-cutting initiative last year. Shedd will remain at the agency as its senior advisor for fraud prevention, which the GSA said is “an area of increasing importance for the agency and the administration.” The federal CIO was also tapped as senior advisor to the GSA administrator, the agency said. In this role, advising former privacy equity executive Edward Forst, Barbaccia will focus on “emerging technologies, best practices in digital delivery, and cross-government collaboration.” The Pentagon will adhere to existing laws and regulations associated with surveillance, security and democratic processes as it fast-tracks the military's frontier AI adoption, but it won't permit companies supplying the technology to determine its rules for operation, Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael told DefenseScoop. His comments come as the Defense Department is locked in a high-stakes dispute with Anthropic about the U.S. military's use of the startup's Claude AI model in real-world operations. During a meeting with a small group of reporters on the sidelines of the annual Microelectronics Commons summit Thursday, Michael provided updates on the department's GenAI.mil rollout and pushed for the ethics-related rift between the Pentagon and Anthropic to be resolved. “I believe and hope that they will ‘cross the Rubicon' and say, ‘This is common sense. The military has certain use cases. There are laws and regulations that govern how those use cases can be done. We're willing to comply with them,'” he said. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Inadequate information-sharing and deficient data practices across the Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Defense were to blame, in part, for the midair collision near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport last year, according to the National Transportation Safety Board's final report. NTSB found that the FAA's Air Traffic Organization was “made aware of and had multiple opportunities to identify the risk of a midair collision between airplanes and helicopters,” yet insufficient data analysis, safety assurance systems and risk assessment processes “failed to recognize and mitigate.” While the Army was “unaware” of certain risks tied to DCA due to a nonexistent flight safety data-monitoring program for its helicopters, NTSB also found the Army had a weak safety management system that failed to consistently detect hazards. “The limited access to and use of available objective and subjective proximity data hindered industry and government stakeholders' ability to identify hazards and mitigate risk,” NTSB said in its report. As part of NTSB's analysis, the watchdog had 50 to 60 staff members on the investigation, who gathered 19,000 pages of evidence, Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the NTSB, testified during a Senate hearing Thursday. The collision, ultimately, was preventable, she said. After successfully launching its own internal chatbot and normalizing the use of artificial intelligence tools for translation, summarization and other diplomatically beneficial uses, the State Department is eyeing the next step in its journey with the emerging technology. “We're going to roll out agentic AI,” State Department CIO Kelly Fletcher said Thursday during the FedScoop-produced GDIT Emerge event in Washington, D.C. “We're going to continue to embed AI in our systems.” The State Department has been a federal leader in AI adoption, reflected in robust use case inventories and a general embrace of the technology at its highest levels. Current tech leaders remain focused on trying to “democratize access to generative AI” throughout the agency, Fletcher said. That likely means that any shift toward agentic AI won't come with a snap of the fingers. Still, the department is currently looking to “consolidate and standardize and simplify around commodities,” she said, which could cover everything from end-user devices to help desks. “It sounds really wonky,” Fletcher added, but “the more you can make it easy for people to do their job, to reduce administrative friction, the better off you're going to be, right? Part of that is agents. Part of that is consolidation.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Customs and Border Protection has increased deployments of surveillance technology along the northern border over the past five years despite sluggish hiring levels of IT personnel needed to monitor the tech, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office published Thursday. The staffing rate for information systems specialists has remained below target levels for half a decade but the gap has widened since 2023. CBP officials pointed to low pay, a lengthy background investigation process, a limited local applicant pool, high cost of living and minimal career advancement opportunities as drivers of attrition and the inability to fill open positions. GAO conducted the audit over a nearly two-year period, starting in April 2024 and concluding this month. In examining CBP's northern border facilities, the watchdog found that CBP did not have a strategy to address the critical staffing gap. The Department of Health and Human Services made several changes to its IT leadership recently, including the addition of a new acting deputy chief information officer and acting deputy chief AI officer. A webpage listing leadership within the Office of the Chief Information Officer currently has David Hong as acting deputy CIO and Arman Sharma as acting deputy chief AI officer. Meanwhile, Kevin Duvall, who was previously deputy CIO and acting deputy CAIO, is no longer on the page. The apparent change-up comes amid reports of a personnel shake-up at the health agency. On Friday, CNN reported that two top aides to Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were departing and new senior counselors would be installed. Those changes were related to preparations for midterm elections, per CNN. It is not clear if the IT leadership changes were for similar reasons. While there is no public indication of when Hong and Sharma began serving as acting deputies, the changes appear to have been made recently. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel — not American service members — shot down an object with a military laser earlier this week near El Paso, Texas, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation. Troops with Joint Task Force – Southern Border were not authorized to shoot down drones in the area. The task force — which works hand-in-hand with federal law enforcement and serves as the primary military entity for the U.S.-Mexico border mission — trained CBP personnel on the equipment who used it during the incursion. A source familiar told DefenseScoop that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved the transfer of a military counter-drone system to CBP. Sources did not identify the specific laser system that was used. U.S. Border Patrol falls under CBP. The operation reportedly caused interagency turmoil between the Pentagon and Federal Aviation Administration, prompting the latter to issue a 10-day flight restriction that lasted only hours into Wednesday. The Internal Revenue Service moved forward this week with plans to involuntarily move employees with no direct tax experience to perform customer service and analysis duties for this year's filing season. According to email notices obtained by FedScoop, multiple IRS employees from the agency's IT and human capital office were informed Monday that they were assigned to a 120-day involuntary detail to the agency's Taxpayer Services division, as either a customer service representative or a tax examiner. The detail, effective Feb. 22, could be extended beyond the four-month period, per the notice. Joseph Ziegler, the agency's chief of internal consulting, stated in the notice that neither position will require direct engagement with taxpayers or answering phones, adding that the tax filing season is the “most important time” of the year for the agency. It is unclear how many employees were affected by the temporary reorganization, but it follows a series of shakeups and losses for the agency. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's top official rejected claims from lawmakers Tuesday that the Department of Homeland Security component is building a database for protesters. The alleged detractor database has been referenced in several reports by think tanks, letters to DHS officials from lawmakers and in interviews with border czar Tom Homan. During Tuesday's House Homeland Security Committee hearing, Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif., cited a well-circulated clip of an ICE agent in Portland, Maine, telling a person videotaping that she would be added to a “nice little database.” “I can't speak for that individual,” said Todd Lyons, who serves as acting director of ICE. “But I can assure you that there is no database that's tracking United States citizens.” Despite Lyons' pushback on the database claims, skepticism is persistent as stakeholders point to reports to the contrary. FedScoop reached out to DHS for clarification. Tricia McLaughlin, the agency's assistant security for public affairs, reaffirmed that there is no database of domestic terrorists run by DHS. “We do of course monitor and investigate and refer all threats, assaults and obstruction of our officers to the appropriate law enforcement,” McLaughlin said in an email. “Obstructing and assaulting law enforcement is a felony and a federal crime.” A recent attempt at a destructive cyberattack on Poland's power grid has prompted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to publish a warning for U.S. critical infrastructure owners and operators. Tuesday's alert follows a Jan. 30 report from Poland's Computer Emergency Response Team concluded the December attack overlapped significantly with infrastructure used by a Russian government-linked hacking group, and that it targeted 30 wind and photovoltaic farms, among others. CISA said its warning was meant to “amplify” that Polish report. In particular, CISA said the attack highlighted the threats to operational technology and industrial control systems, most commonly used in the energy and manufacturing sectors. And CISA's alert continues a recent agency focus on securing edge devices like routers or firewalls, after a binding operational directive last week to federal agencies to strip unsupported products from their systems. “The malicious cyber activity highlights the need for critical infrastructure entities with vulnerable edge devices to act now to strengthen their cybersecurity posture against cyber threat activities targeting OT and ICS,” the alert reads. CISA urged owners and operators to review the Polish report, as well as security guidance from other U.S. agencies. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Many Americans by now have received their W-2s or other important tax documents, which can only mean one thing: it's officially tax filing season. You might be ready to submit your documents, but is the IRS itself ready? That's a big question mark looming over the 2026 filing season after the tax agency unleashed seismic cuts to its workforce last year and has pumped the breaks on many of its efforts to modernize. Matt Bracken, editor in chief of FedScoop, has kept close watch of the IRS under the second Trump administration, chronicling the cuts made in 2025 and measuring the possible impact that could have on processing times and backlogs during this filing season. Matt joins the podcast to discuss the outlook for 2026 tax filing, how AI comes into play and much more about the tax agency's ongoing efforts to modernize. The Defense Department announced Monday that it will incorporate OpenAI's ChatGPT into the military's generative AI platform that's already being used by more than a million personnel. ChatGPT has been wildly popular in the commercial sector since it was widely released in 2022. Now the Pentagon plans to add the tech to its GenAI.mil system, which DOD leadership — including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — have been pushing hard for the department's employees to use since it was launched in December. The Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force and Marine Corps have already adopted the system as their preferred generative AI platform. The Department of Energy is launching a Genesis Mission Consortium as its latest move to deepen the public-private partnerships fueling the AI platform. The initiative, announced Monday, will facilitate structured partnerships as well as working groups, which will focus on ensuring model validation and reliability, addressing data governance and compliance standards, enabling federated data sharing and accelerating research throughput via reduced operational bottlenecks. The consortium will act as a “collaborative hub” and a “single, coordinated access point” for members and resources, according to the agency. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.