The Daily Scoop Podcast

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.

The Department of Homeland Security's watchdog office has launched an audit of the agency's privacy practices amid allegations that DHS and its components have used facial recognition tools and other technologies to collect data broadly and violate civil liberties.

The Office of Personnel Management finalized a new classification Thursday for career federal workers in policy-related roles that will effectively make them easier to terminate. The new “Schedule Policy/Career” creates an administrative category for nonpolitical “career” federal employees who work in roles that are defined as influencing policy. Workers added to that classification will be converted to “at-will” employees and will no longer be eligible for adverse action procedures or the ability to appeal terminations. Roughly 50,000 employees will be subject to the change, per an estimate in the final rule. Despite the administration's assertion that the new schedule is for “accountability” and will not be subject to political loyalty tests, federal employee advocates have long argued the policy is a thinly veiled attempt to strip career employees of safeguards in an effort to replace them with workers who are politically aligned with the president. The announcement from OPM on Thursday stated that the final rule explicitly does not allow discrimination based on politics, prohibits use of the new schedule to reshape the workforce or conduct mass layoffs, and would protect whistleblowers. OPM also stated that it would take on a role to review agency actions to ensure they are compliant. A Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency order published Thursday directs federal agencies to stop using “edge devices” like firewalls and routers that their manufacturers no longer support. It's a stab at tackling one of the most persistent and difficult-to-manage avenues of attack for hackers, a vector that has factored into some of the most consequential and most common types of exploits in recent years. New edge-device vulnerabilities surface frequently. Under the binding operational directive CISA released Thursday, federal civilian executive branch (FCEB) agencies must inventory edge devices in their systems that vendors no longer support within three months, and replace those on a dedicated list with supported devices within one year. To aid agencies in following the directive, CISA is producing a list of end-of-service edge devices. CISA developed the directive in conjunction with the Office of Management and Budget, and puts a bit more muscle behind a decade-old OMB circular on agencies phasing out unsupported technologies. Despite being called “binding operational directives,” CISA has no authority to mandate that agencies carry out the orders — although agencies have demonstrated they usually seek to follow them, and there are ways that CISA can work to ensure compliance. The private sector pays attention to CISA's directives even though they don't apply to companies. 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 House Oversight and Government Reform Committee advanced several tech-related bills Wednesday, including legislation to strengthen the Technology Modernization Fund, reform federal IT procurement and pare down educational requirements for agency cybersecurity roles. The TMF, which was created by law in 2017 to fund tech modernization projects across agencies, has been the subject of much hand-wringing in govtech circles after Congress let the funding vehicle expire late last year. The Modernizing Government Technology Reform Act (H.R. 2985), however, would get the TMF back on track, reauthorizing the TMF and its governing board through 2032. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who chairs House Oversight's Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation Subcommittee, said it was her “privilege” to work with former Rep. Gerry Connolly on the bill before he died of cancer last May, calling the late Virginia Democrat one of TMF's “strongest supporters” and a “good-faith partner” on the bill. Rep. Shontel Brown, D-Ohio, ranking member of the cybersecurity subcommittee and co-sponsor of the TMF bill, said extending the TMF “is critical to ensuring federal agencies, many of which still rely on outdated IT systems, can modernize their infrastructure and defend against growing cyber threats.” In addition to reauthorizing the TMF, the bill would require agencies to “fully reimburse the fund” at levels that ensure it remains operational through 2032, per the bill text. The legislation also requires agencies to pay back administrative fees and create inventories of their legacy IT. The bill also included an amendment from Rep. James Walkinshaw, D-Va., Connolly's longtime chief of staff, that would require the Government Accountability Office to issue biannual reports on how TMF funds have been used to address legacy IT projects the watchdog deems high-priority. Improving government IT systems is also top of mind in the Federal Improvement in Technology (FIT) Procurement Act (H.R. 4123), which advanced out the committee by a 42-0 margin. The legislation would streamline the federal procurement process for small businesses and push federal contracting officers to examine larger acquisitions “where the potential for waste, fraud and abuse is high,” said House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer. The Kentucky Republican noted that the bill would increase the micro-purchase threshold from $10,000 to $25,000 and raise the simplified-acquisition threshold from $250,000 to $500,000. 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 Education Department's workers union is pushing back after more than 100 technology-related employees lost their collective bargaining protections last month under an executive order citing national security and cybersecurity risks tied to their roles. About 120 employees in the agency's Office of the Chief Information Officer and Federal Student Aid's Office of the Chief Technology Officer were told late last month they no longer had union protections due to the nature of their positions, according to AFGE Local 252, which represents Education Department employees. The notification came nearly nine months after President Donald Trump signed an executive order ending collective bargaining rights for labor unions at various federal agencies. The order included some agencies in their entirety, along with some positions across the government that have a determined “primary function” involving intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work. While the CTO and OCIO employees work with technology that could have cybersecurity ties, AFGE Local 252 argues this does not involve intelligence work that would warrant such a ban. “The Department of Education does not engage in any intelligence, counter-intelligence, investigative, or national security work,” AFGE 252 President Rachel Gittleman told FedScoop in an interview, suggesting the move is “just a way to strip labor rights of our federal workforce.” The FSA CTO office specifically does “work on technology” and products, but not information resources management, as the order states, Gittleman explained. FSA employees primarily focus on the office's website, income-driven repayment applications, FAFSA, and public service loan forgiveness applications. An American stealth fighter jet shot down an Iranian one-way attack drone in the Arabian Sea Tuesday after it “aggressively approached” a U.S. aircraft carrier “with unclear intent,” according to a statement from U.S. Central Command. Just hours after the shootdown, two Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps ships accompanied by another unmanned aerial system — this one an Iranian Mohajer drone — approached a U.S.-flagged tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, threatening to board and seize the vessel, the statement from Centcom spokesperson Capt. Tim Hawkins said. The dual incidents could spell increased tensions between Washington and Tehran after President Donald Trump threatened military action against Iran over its deadly suppression of protests last month and amid broader nuclear negotiations that could begin this week. The jet, an F-35C Lightning II, launched from the USS Abraham Lincoln, which was transiting the Arabian Sea roughly 500 miles from Iran's southern coast, Centcom said. The Centcom statement did not identify the unit the jet belongs to, but Marine Fighter Attack Squadron-314, the Black Knights, were photographed by the military operating off the Lincoln several days ago. The long-range Iranian drone — a Shahed-139 UAS known for its use in the Russia-Ukraine war and being reverse-engineered into a U.S. military one-way attack drone — “continued to fly toward the ship despite de-escalatory measures taken by U.S. forces operating in international waters,” the command said. The F-35C shot it down “in self-defense” and to protect the Lincoln and her crew, according to the statement, which said that no service members were harmed and no American equipment was damaged. 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 part of its effort to root out the waste and abuse of government resources, the Trump administration has recently placed fraud squarely in its crosshairs. With that, senior government officials and other policymakers have pointed to the need for stronger and more prevalent identity verification to combat fraud. An expert in digital identity verification, Jordan Burris, former chief of staff to the federal CIO during the first Trump administration and part of President Biden's term and now head of public sector at Socure, joins the Daily Scoop to discuss the ongoing issues around identity fraud, the U.S.'s journey to a national digital identity verification system and why Washington has struggled so much to get identity right. The Department of Energy is piloting Grok, the generative AI tool from Elon Musk's xAI, within its Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, according to the agency's AI use case inventory. The pilot began at the end of June 2025 and has been used to find general answers to questions, summarize information and create documents. The Grok pilot comes at a time when the Energy Department is pursuing ambitious AI goals as part of its role in leading the Trump administration's Genesis Mission. Energy Secretary Chris Wright has repeatedly characterized the AI effort as “the Manhattan Project of our time.” Grok has been a controversial addition to the federal government's workflows since the start, following its posting of racist and antisemitic comments last July. A group of more than 30 advocacy organizations called on the Office of Management and Budget to prohibit the use of Grok across the federal government just a month after xAI launched “Grok for Government” last summer. Grok has continued to dominate headlines in the months since. The chatbot has generated biased or misleading claims, garnering the attention of foreign governments and domestic watchdogs. The Department of Veterans Affairs has tapped former government technology leader Zack Schwartz to serve as the next principal deputy assistant secretary for the agency's Office of Information and Technology. In this role, Schwartz will “oversee technology strategy, daily IT operations, cybersecurity, systems modernization, and service delivery across the department,” VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence wrote in a LinkedIn post Monday. Schwartz will work under Lawrence, who also serves as the agency's acting chief information officer and assistant secretary for OIT. Schwartz joins the VA with more than a decade of government IT experience, having previously served at the Department of Commerce and the Census Bureau. These roles involved work on modernization and agency-wide transformation initiatives, Lawrence said. Schwartz announced the move on LinkedIn Sunday evening, writing that he appreciates “the many colleagues across VA who supported my transition and welcomed me into the role.” Schwartz most recently served as the chief information and technology officer at Events DC, an events hosting company, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The U.S. government wants the rest of the world to adopt its artificial intelligence cybersecurity standards, a top official with the Office of the National Cyber Director said Thursday. As part of an effort to advance American AI, the administration will be “undertaking diplomacy efforts to promote American AI cybersecurity standards and norms, establishing industry best practices for secure AI deployment and harnessing the full potential of AI tools,” said Alexandra Seymour, principal deputy assistant national cyber director for policy. Seymour's comments at the 2026 Identity, Authentication, and the Road Ahead Policy Forum in Washington, D.C. partially reflect the Trump administration's AI Action Plan released last summer, which said the departments of Commerce and State would “vigorously advocate for international AI governance approaches that promote innovation, reflect American values, and counter authoritarian influence,” but doesn't explicitly mention international promotion of cybersecurity standards. Some of that effort has already materialized, with internationally oriented guides released in both May and December. The United States also isn't the only one looking to influence international standards for AI security. AI also figures into the yet-to-be-released national cybersecurity strategy that Seymour's office has been developing. And it dovetails with a pillar of the strategy focused on defending federal networks. Seymour said: “While AI is already helping industries enhance security and address the challenge of escalating cyberattacks, this administration will promote the rapid implementation of AI-enabled cyber defensive tools to detect, divert and deceive threat actors who continue targeting our vital systems and sectors on our federal systems. We must get our house in order. They need rapid modernization, and we're working on policies to harden our networks, update our technologies and ensure we're prepared for a post-quantum future.”

The U.S. government has backed out of an organization it helped found that's aimed at improving how governments can better serve their citizens. The Open Government Partnership announced Wednesday that the U.S. had formally withdrawn its membership, adding to a growing list of organizations the administration has departed. Despite the U.S. being one of the founding nations of the organization in 2011, the General Services Administration's head, Edward Forst, wrote to the group's leadership this month to notify them of the decision. Per a copy of that letter published by OGP, Forst said the country's participation in the organization “has become at best ineffective and at worst detrimental to advancing” principles outlined in the nation's founding documents, though he didn't cite specific documents. Forst implied that the body “seeks to erode U.S. national sovereignty” and went on to blame its “embrace of divisive ideological agendas” as a reason the nation dropped its membership. Forst wrote: “Racial identity politics, anti-police bias, LGBTQ+ advocacy, feminism, and climate alarmism have increasingly dominated OGP's policy agenda. These divisive agendas, driven by extreme ideological cliques, have destroyed the ability of OGP to credibly operate as a voice for transparency.” That rhetoric echoes the Trump administration's controversial efforts to remove diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, from the federal government — whether through the termination of grants, positions, organizations, or data points. Democratic Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine of Virginia are asking the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general to look into the agency's broad data collection and analysis processes, according to a letter sent to the DHS IG on Thursday. The duo tasked Inspector General Joseph Cuffari with investigating the methods of data storage and use for personally identifying information, whether DHS immigration enforcement activities are based on data coming from other agencies or third parties, and where DHS collects data from, among other topics. The senators wrote in the letter: “We write to you to express our concern that the Department of Homeland Security is collecting sensitive personal data that can be used to circumvent civil liberty protections, including those guaranteed under the Fourth Amendment. This matter deserves your office's immediate attention, and we request that your office audit DHS' immigration procurement activities to determine whether they have led to violations of federal law and other regulations that maintain privacy and defend against unlawful searches.” Lawmakers have kept their eyes on the use of technology within the department, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in particular. In recent months, DHS has aimed to broaden its authorities by amending rules around data use and collections. Lawmakers have warned of eroding privacy protections and public trust if safeguards aren't established. 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 Homeland Security is actively working on 200-plus artificial intelligence use cases, a nearly 37% increase compared to July 2025, according to its latest AI inventory posted Wednesday. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a driving force behind the growth. ICE added 25 AI use cases since its disclosure last summer, including to process tips, review mobile device data relevant to investigations, confirm identities of individuals via biometric data and detect intentional misidentification. Of the newly added uses at ICE, three are products from Palantir, which has been a notable — and at times controversial — technology partner for the U.S. government under the Trump administration. Quinn Anex-Ries, a senior policy analyst focused on equity and civic tech at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit technology policy organization, told FedScoop: “This inventory is coming out at a moment where there are significant, widespread questions about the legality of actions being taken by DHS and their potential infringement on the civil liberties and privacy of millions of people across the country.” Anex-Ries added: “There are some initial indications that the inventory leaves us wanting for more.” The annual inventory process stems from a 2020 executive order during the first Trump administration that was later enshrined into federal statute. The Department of Transportation is reopening a request for information that centered around the Federal Aviation Administration's handling of unmanned aircraft systems. In this extended, two-week comment period, the FAA is seeking additional insights on aircraft location-tracking devices, detection technologies and safety standards as it looks to finalize the drone-related rules. The FAA has already received around 3,100 comments and hosted two listening sessions with relevant stakeholders, according to the extension announcement scheduled to be published Wednesday on the Federal Register. Still, the FAA wants to “ensure that it fully understands” comments surrounding its proposed policies for location-tracking, data-sharing and detection technologies. The initial inquiry was set in motion by President Donald Trump's June executive order, called “Unleashing American Drone Dominance.” The president directed the FAA to publish a final rule that would enable drone-based Beyond Visual Line of Sight operations for commercial and public safety purposes within 240 days, which would be Feb. 1. The original RFI had a broader scope and concluded in October despite receiving two requests for an extension. 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 Pentagon said it consolidated policies around protecting American military facilities from drone threats after unclear guidance that left base commanders scrambling on how to respond and years of increased unmanned aerial system sightings over key Defense Department assets. Drone incursions over American military bases jumped considerably over the last several years, alarming officials, and a Pentagon watchdog report released last week said the DOD's confused policies meant some facilities in the U.S. couldn't adequately protect themselves. Following the release of the Defense Department Inspector General report last Tuesday, which noted dire gaps in military counter-UAS policy that limited base responses to drone threats, the Pentagon said it had already adjusted its guidelines last month in an effort to give commanders “expanded authority and flexibility needed to dominate the airspace above their installations.” Countering drones in the U.S. is complex and has been a yearslong, thorny problem for the military, especially as the tech becomes ubiquitous for both hobbyists and adversaries. Stateside drone defense means navigating a delicate balance between protecting military installations while avoiding civilian harm or infrastructure damage. But the issue is only growing, top military officials have said, and the new guidance is the latest attempt by the Pentagon to manage it. The policies, which the release said was signed on Dec. 8 by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, expanded base commanders' defensive area around facilities, explicitly identified any unauthorized drone surveillance over installations as a threat, allowed UAS sensor data sharing between other federal agencies and authorized top service leaders to designate facilities as “covered,” a special classification that allows for drone defense. With tax filing season officially gearing up, the Treasury Department's watchdog is warning the IRS that its workforce reductions and delays to modernization projects have left the tax agency in a precarious position. In a memo sent Monday to the IRS commissioner, Diana M. Tengesdal, deputy inspector general for audit, wrote that the agency's cuts have brought staffing back to October 2021 levels, prior to the Inflation Reduction Act funding infusion aimed at strengthening enforcement on wealthy individuals and corporations and modernizing antiquated IT systems. The loss of personnel has led to a backsliding on previous agency priorities, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration official noted, pointing specifically to a pandemic-created backlog of tax returns awaiting processing. The tax agency had made serious strides in addressing that backlog, TIGTA found in a September 2023 report, but Trump administration staff cuts combined with the recent government shutdown have led to inventory levels that are 129% higher than pre-pandemic figures. “Inventory that is not worked during the current processing year will be carried into the 2026 Filing Season and may affect the IRS's ability to timely process tax returns during the filing season, especially with reduced staff,” Tengesdal wrote. “This could result in delays in taxpayers receiving refunds and could result in the IRS paying interest,” she continued. 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 leaned into its role as a central, shared services provider for the rest of the federal government during the second Trump administration. In particular, it has taken a leadership position centralizing most federal procurement under one roof and serving as a sort of clearinghouse for federal AI efforts. With so much transformation underway, the GSA during Trump 2.0 has taken on an even brighter spotlight, fueling federal operations. Miranda Nazzaro is the FedScoop reporter covering GSA during this pivotal time, and she joins the podcast to discuss some of the agency's top priorities, from OneGov and the TMF to eliminating woke AI, among others. The Treasury Department said Monday that it would cancel all of its contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton, linking the decision to a former employee now serving prison time for leaking tax returns. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a three-paragraph press release that the agency's 31 contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton — worth $21 million in total obligations and $4.8 million in annual spending — would be scrapped as part of President Donald Trump's push to “root out waste, fraud and abuse.” “Canceling these contracts is an essential step to increasing Americans' trust in government,” Bessent said. “Booz Allen failed to implement adequate safeguards to protect sensitive data, including the confidential taxpayer information it had access to through its contracts with the Internal Revenue Service.” A Booz spokesperson said in an email to FedScoop that the firm was “surprised by this announcement” — especially given Treasury's reasoning regarding Charles Edward Littlejohn, who between 2018 and 2020 leaked the confidential tax returns and information of hundreds of thousands of taxpayers. “Booz Allen fully supported the U.S. government in its investigation, and the government expressed gratitude for our assistance, which led to Littlejohn's prosecution,” the Booz spokesperson said. “We were surprised by this announcement and look forward to discussing this matter with Treasury.” Per the Treasury release, the IRS determined that the data breach affected roughly 406,000 taxpayers. Littlejohn, who was sentenced to five years in prison last January after pleading guilty to one count of disclosing tax return information without authorization, leaked the returns of Trump, Elon Musk and other wealthy individuals to a pair of news organizations. NASA has a new top official for artificial intelligence and data. Kevin Murphy began serving in an acting capacity in both roles Nov. 30, 2025, NASA spokesperson Jennifer Dooren confirmed to FedScoop in an email. He replaces David Salvagnini, who was the agency's CDO for roughly two-and-a-half years, and CAIO for just over a year-and-a-half. Salvagnini was the agency's first-ever CAIO. According to Murphy's LinkedIn, he has been at NASA for over 17 years. He first served as a system architect at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and has held a series of data-related roles, including chief science data officer. As the agency's lead for data science, Murphy has already worked to advance technologies — such as cloud computing, machine learning, and data platforms — for use with NASA's scientific data, per an agency bio. He also oversees the agency's high-end computing capability (HECC) portfolio, which deploys computing technologies to support large-scale modeling, simulation and analysis at the agency. Murphy's designation as acting CAIO and CDO comes after Salvagnini announced his plans to leave the agency in a LinkedIn post roughly two months ago. In that post, Salvagnini said he opted into the Trump administration's deferred resignation program. He said he began his transition Oct. 31 and would retire from federal service in the spring of 2026.

The General Services Administration is seeking input from the technology reseller community on how the agency can improve the federal procurement process, particularly regarding value-added resellers (VARs). The GSA issued a request for information Thursday, stating that it hopes to receive cost-reduction strategies for products resold to the government rather than those purchased directly from vendors. VARs, a type of government reseller, purchase infrastructure or software from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and enhance them with certain features or services before reselling to the government. An analysis of major VARs found significant differences in the services offered and markup percentages applied to the vendor pricing, according to the RFI. The market research will help determine whether the agency needs additional controls to ensure the government receives fair and reasonable pricing when markups exceed a specified percentage threshold, per the document. “The RFI seeks to gain a clearer understanding of the value added by resellers, and the resulting impact of these services on pricing and the ability to meet the government's requirements,” GSA wrote in a press release Thursday. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is “trying to automate as many of our business functions as possible,” the Department of Homeland Security component's top IT official said at an event Thursday in Washington, D.C. Dustin Goetz, ICE's chief information officer, said onstage during a Homeland Security and Defense Forum event that the agency is already tapping its automation toolset for compliance checks on applications, code review and identification of issues in infrastructure — but it's now looking to beef up capabilities. Goetz pointed to lower-level roles in cybersecurity, the service desk and administrative functions as prime areas for automation, saying those things can be automated with the data the agency currently has, it just needs to train models. Additionally, ICE has started using an internal AI chatbot called Stella, a project led by the DHS division's chief innovation and AI officer. The agency is open to bringing on industry partners to sharpen the tool and help ICE reach its automation goals. 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 congressional spending bill could offer a lifeline to reauthorize the Technology Modernization Fund, which expired last month and froze nearly $200 million in unused funds. Congressional appropriators released the final slew of fiscal 2026 spending bills Tuesday, allocating more than $1 trillion to federal agencies and extending various laws or programs. Among the extensions is the reauthorization of the TMF through FY2026, or Sept. 30. It comes just over a month after authorization of the innovation funding vehicle expired Dec. 12. TMF was created in 2017 to fund technology projects across the government, but the bill that made it also set an expiration date that only Congress can extend. Lawmakers failed to move forward with standalone legislation to reauthorize the fund last month, and efforts to include it in larger spending packages also fell flat. Trade groups and IT industry experts were disappointed at the time, telling FedScoop in previous interviews that the expiration was not representative of the issue's typical bipartisan support. Some pinned the blame on procedural hurdles in Congress, including the 43-day-long government shutdown that pushed various nonfunding priorities toward the end of the year. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., introduced bills in the last three Congresses to reauthorize TMF beyond 2025, but they did not make it out of the Senate, where they have at times faced pushback from congressional appropriators. Members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency embedded in the Social Security Administration potentially exposed personally identifiable information via a third-party server, the Department of Justice said in a court filing that also revealed coordination between DOGE and an advocacy group seeking “evidence of voter fraud.” A lawsuit filed last February by the AFL-CIO and other labor groups against the SSA sought to cut off DOGE's access to sensitive data housed in agency systems. In March, the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland issued a temporary restraining order to limit that access. But after an SSA records review of the agency's “former DOGE Team for audit and litigation purposes,” the DOJ said in a filing dated Friday that “communications, use of data, and other actions” were found to be “potentially outside of SSA policy and/or noncompliant” with the court's order. One of those instances involved DOGE's sharing of data via a third-party Cloudflare server — a system that is “not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA's security protocols,” the DOJ wrote. 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 Homeland Security would need to follow stricter guidelines when using mobile biometric applications under legislation introduced Thursday by the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee and other Democrats. The Realigning Mobile Phone Biometrics for American Privacy Protection Act seeks to prohibit the use of such technology except for identification at ports of entry, bars DHS from sharing the apps with non-law enforcement agencies, and implements a 12-hour storage limit on data in the apps. The legislation points to the DHS app Mobile Fortify, other mobile identification apps and potential successor apps as the prime targets. If the bill gains ground, DHS would need to remove the technology from any non-DHS IT systems and workflows outside the ports of entry. Mississippi's Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, said in a press release accompanying the bill's introduction: “DHS should not be conducting surveillance by experimenting with Americans' faces and fingerprints in the field — especially with unproven and biased technology. We can secure the Homeland and respect the rights and privacy of Americans at the same time.” The bill's other co-sponsors are Democratic Reps. Lou Correa of California, Shri Thanedar of Michigan, Yvette Clarke of New York, Grace Meng of New York, and Adriano Espaillat of New York. In written statements, members pointed to concerns around privacy, constitutional violations, civil liberties and the technology's potential deficiencies. The Army's top civilian leader said that the service will “kill NIPR” at multiple locations — likely starting next month — in an experiment to see if commercial internet solutions would be more effective. Speaking to soldiers at a town hall at Fort Drum, New York, on Monday, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said “we're going to bring you down to the commercial internet and we think it will solve all sorts of problems.” If the evaluation is successful, the Army will scale it across the service, he added. NIPR, which stands for Non-classified Internet Protocol Router, is the military's communication network for unclassified information. Defense Department personnel can access commercial browsers or email through NIPR, for example, but the network is owned and secured by the military. An Army spokesperson told DefenseScoop that the service is evaluating “a shift” from NIPR to a commercial solution that can handle data at Impact Level 5. IL5 includes Controlled Unclassified Information, according to the Defense Information Systems Agency, which is considered sensitive and necessary to protect, but does not meet criteria for classification. The spokesperson said that the evaluation is intended to “cut costs, boost performance and enhance cybersecurity.” They added that the effort was in coordination with the Pentagon's Office of the Chief Information Officer, DISA and other military services. 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 pair of Democratic lawmakers are reviving a push to guarantee federal agencies that use artificial intelligence systems have a civil rights office dedicated to curbing “bias and discrimination” in AI. Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., reintroduced the Eliminating Bias in Algorithmic Systems (BIAS) Act on Thursday. If enacted, federal agencies that use, fund, or oversee the development of AI algorithms would be required to establish civil rights offices staffed by experts and technologists. According to the bill text, these experts would focus primarily on bias, discrimination or other harms, including the impact on certain communities, groups or individuals, or bias against certain characteristics related to race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, disability and more. These offices would also be mandated to report their efforts to Congress. The bill comes as federal agencies race to adopt and integrate AI into their workflows. Government watchdogs found the use of generative AI in federal agencies “rapidly” jumped from 2023 and 2024, with that number expected to have increased over the past year. Markey's office noted federal agencies often lack civil rights offices “whose principal mission is to protect vulnerable communities,” and the ones that exist often are not required to have staff familiar with algorithmic bias. The Department of Homeland Security is finalizing plans for a new body that would replace the functions of the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Advisory Council (CIPAC) and serve as a communications hub between industry and government to discuss ongoing threats to U.S. critical infrastructure, including from cyber attacks. Under previous administrations, CIPAC served as a nerve center for federal agencies, industry and other stakeholders. While industry widely praised its utility, the council was one of many DHS advisory bodies that were shuttered last year by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem when President Donald Trump returned to office. Now, according to multiple sources, a proposed regulation for a new replacement council is in the final stages of review and approval from Noem's office. The new body will be called the Alliance of National Councils for Homeland Operational Resilience, or “ANCHOR,” and will also serve as an umbrella organization for other federal sector risk management agencies. Its goal is to restart conversations and planning around infrastructure security that took place under the previous CIPAC, according to a former DHS official. 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 leaving her role performing the duties of the chief information officer for the Department of Defense last month, Katie Arrington has taken a new position as CIO at quantum computing company IonQ. Arrington will step into the role Jan. 19, reporting to the company's COO and CFO Inder Singh, IonQ announced Wednesday. Kirsten Davies was nominated by President Donald Trump in May 2025 to be the Defense Department CIO, and it took most of the remainder of 2025 for the Senate to confirm her into the role. She was sworn in just before the Christmas holiday, at which point Arrington stepped away from her service to the Pentagon. In joining IonQ, Arrington will serve on the company's executive team. As CIO, Arrington will continue to support the U.S. military from a different vantage, leading modernization and security of IonQ's enterprise systems in support of its mission to deliver quantum capabilities to American warfighters. Before rejoining the Pentagon a year ago, then as deputy CIO for cybersecurity, Arrington had a previous stint as CISO in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, where she was largely responsible for the development of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program. Now: President Donald Trump re-nominated Sean Plankey to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Tuesday, after Plankey's bid for the position ended last year stuck in the Senate. It's not clear whether or how Plankey's resubmitted nomination will overcome the hurdles that left many observers convinced his chance of becoming CISA director had likely ended, but it does definitively signal that the Trump administration still wants Plankey to have the job. Plankey's nomination was included in a batch sent to the Senate announced on Tuesday. CISA spent all of 2025 under Trump without a permanent director. Trump nominated Plankey, who held a couple cybersecurity roles in the first Trump administration, to lead CISA in March. He got a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing in July, then won approval from that panel that same month. But Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., had placed a hold on Plankey's nomination over a Coast Guard contract that the Homeland Security Department had canceled in part. While he awaited confirmation, Plankey had been serving as a senior adviser to the secretary for the Coast Guard. A spokesperson for Scott did not immediately respond to a request for comment. North Carolina's GOP Senate delegation also had placed holds on DHS nominees related to disaster aid to their state. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said last week that the holds would remain until Secretary Kristi Noem appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee. A White House official had denied reports that Plankey's nomination was all but over last year. “President Trump has been clear that he wants all of his nominees confirmed as quickly as possible, including Sean Plankey, who will play a key role in ensuring a strong cyber defense infrastructure,” the official told CyberScoop. Asked Wednesday at the Surface Navy Association national symposium about what he was doing to convince senators to lift their holds, Plankey answered, “The administration, the White House has to say that this is a priority of us.” 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.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared his team's long-awaited new plans to outpace U.S. adversaries by rapidly advancing the military's arsenal of AI, drones, hypersonics and other disruptive technologies — and drastically reshaping the Pentagon's approaches for safely deploying them. Speaking onstage at SpaceX's Starbase launch site in Texas, during a tour hosted by its billionaire CEO Elon Musk, Hegseth said: “In short, when it comes to our current threat environment, we are playing a dangerous game with potentially fatal consequences. We need innovation to come from anywhere and evolve with speed and purpose.” Hegseth's speech and three accompanying memorandums released Monday reveal the Trump administration's latest, fast-moving and multifaceted vision to overhaul the Defense Department's technology enterprise and dismantle perpetual barriers that have historically slowed the military's commercial capability adoption. Hegseth said that old era ends today, and that the department is done running what he called a peacetime science fair while our potential adversaries are running a wartime arms race. The revamped structure notably aims to anchor a “unified innovation ecosystem built around six execution organizations” that will now collectively operate under the purview of DOD Chief Technology Officer and Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael. Those newer and more legacy entities include: the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO); Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); Defense Innovation Unit (DIU); Office of Strategic Capital (OSC); Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO); and Test Resource Management Center (TRMC). Senate and House appropriators are eyeing White House work on IT, artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure — and a continued presence for DOGE — as part of their fiscal year 2026 bill to fund Financial Services and General Government. On the executive branch funding released Sunday for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, lawmakers agreed on $124.3 million for salaries and expenses in the White House's Office of Administration, with up to $12.8 million used for IT modernization. No more than $10 million of that IT pie should be spent for security and continuity of operations improvements. The Information Technology Oversight and Reform (ITOR) bucket, which historically has supported the Office of the Federal CIO and the now-defunct U.S. Digital Service, would receive $8 million under the new budget. House Appropriations Republicans said in their press release that that money would be used to fund the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which has replaced USDS as the U.S. DOGE Service. That $8 million figure is a fraction of the Trump administration's initial ask. In its June 2025 budget proposal, the White House requested $45 million in funding for DOGE, the Elon Musk-created group that led the decimation of the federal workforce in the early days of the Trump administration under the auspices of rooting out waste, fraud and abuse of agencies, but ended up raising government spending. The White House also sought $19 million for the ITOR account. 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 Homeland Security is launching a new office focused on unmanned aircraft systems that will oversee strategic investments in drone and counter-drone technologies. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in the Monday press release: “We are entering a new era to defend our air superiority to protect our borders and the interior of the United States. This will help us continue to secure the border and cripple the cartels, protect our infrastructure, and keep Americans safe as they attend festivities and events during a historic year of America's 250th birthday and FIFA 2026.” The creation of the dedicated office builds on preceding efforts to beef up drone and counter-drone technologies. In December, FEMA awarded $250 million in grants for counter-drone capabilities to the 11 states hosting FIFA World Cup 2026 matches and Washington, D.C. DHS also expanded authorization the same month to allow state and local law enforcement to combat drone threats, according to the announcement. The department is also fielding proposals from industry partners for a $1.5 billion contract that will facilitate the procurement of these technologies for Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The new Program Executive Office has “already begun its work,” according to DHS. The drone-focused entity is finalizing a $115 million investment in counter technologies that will support the two upcoming celebrations. The funding and focus come amid heightened risks regarding threat actors' use of unmanned aircraft systems. DHS said Monday that the agency has conducted 1,500-plus missions to address illicit drone activities since 2018. Unauthorized drones have impeded sporting events, disrupted public gatherings and sparked concern among residents. Calls on Congress to put money into the Technology Modernization Fund may have been answered — albeit at much lower levels than what the General Services Administration-run funding vehicle for agency IT projects has been accustomed to. Senate and House Appropriations Committee lawmakers released a package of conferenced bills Sunday to fund several federal agencies through the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, including GSA. Tucked into the 488-page agreement was a note that $5 million would be provided to the TMF, “to remain available until expended.” The appropriations bills must still be passed by both chambers of Congress and signed by the president before the funding can take effect. The potential funding comes as the TMF expired last month for the first time since it was created in 2017, freezing nearly $200 million in funding for agency technology projects. The program has enjoyed bipartisan support since its launch nearly a decade ago: former Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., was a staunch advocate for the program until his death from cancer last year, while Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., has led a sustained push for TMF's reauthorization. The fund has similarly strong backing from civic technologists and industry groups, and a spokesperson for the House Oversight Committee told FedScoop last month that its reauthorization was a “high priority” that the Office of Management and Budget also supported. Nevertheless, efforts to get TMF reauthorization through the fiscal 2026 National Defense Authorization Act didn't pan out, leaving the program out in the cold. 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 Small Business Administration is enlisting Palantir's help in its nationwide probe of suspected loan fraud, as yearslong fraud allegations in Minnesota draw national attention. According to federal spending records, the SBA signed a $300,000 contract with the data analytics and software giant last week. The contract's description read “SBA Fraud Prevention Pilot and Bootcamp,” and has a projected end date of April 4. The contract, signed through the General Services Administration's Multiple Award Schedule, was made public just days after SBA Secretary Kelly Loeffler announced that the agency had suspended 6,900 Minnesota borrowers for alleged fraud following its review of thousands of pandemic-era loans administered to the state. Loeffler said the borrowers were approved for 7,900 Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and Economic Injury Disaster (EIDL) loans totaling about $400 million. When asked about the Palantir contract, SBA spokesperson Maggie Clemmons pointed to the agency's Minnesota probe, writing: “We're now expanding our investigations nationwide as part of a broader zero-tolerance policy on fraud.” Clemmons added: “The agency has multiple audits underway, from pandemic-era programs to federal contracting, and will work with law enforcement to hold fraudsters accountable and put the criminals who have cheated American taxpayers behind bars.” The Office of Personnel Management launched a new workforce data website last week, replacing an antiquated interface and aiming to bring more transparency to federal employment figures. OPM officially announced the new Federal Workforce Data site last Thursday, with data up to November for most categories. That site includes accessible statistics of interest — such as a reduction of 220,000 workers under President Donald Trump — as well as multiple interactive charts that users can filter by agency, timeframe, or other factors. In a written statement, OPM Director Scott Kupor called the website “a major step forward for accountability and data-driven decision-making across government.” While federal workforce data has long been made publicly available online, the old interface, FedScope, was cumbersome and offered data updates on a quarterly basis that lagged by months. In addition to a more modern interface, the new website adds datasets for payroll and recruitment, and promises updates on a faster monthly interval. Per a note on the website, FedScope will no longer be available as of Jan. 28. Despite controversy over the Trump administration's efforts to shrink the workforce, publication of the website was immediately well received by federal data users and advocates. In comments to FedScoop, several sources both applauded the new website and noted that interest in improving the publication of federal workforce data began before the current administration. 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.