The Daily Scoop Podcast

The Department of Defense’s Office of the Chief Information Officer is considering reducing the number of Pentagon employees who have Microsoft 365 E5 licenses, as it works with the Trump administration to rein in federal spending. The DOD currently maintains more than 2 million Microsoft 365 E5 licenses across two separate programs — the Defense Enterprise Office Solution (DEOS) and the Enterprise Software Initiative (DOD ESI). Through the established contracts, Pentagon components can purchase software licenses for commercial Microsoft products, including Office 365 applications and other collaboration tools. But ongoing efforts spearheaded by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have prompted the Defense Department to review how many of those licenses it actually needs, Katie Arrington, who is performing the duties of Pentagon CIO, told DefenseScoop. Arrington said June 6 in an exclusive interview: “Our Microsoft 365 contract [is a] very big contract here in the Department of Defense. Does every individual in the Department of Defense need an [E5] license? Absolutely not.” With the department’s Deputy CIO for the Information Enterprise Bill Dunlap, Arrington has been working alongside her DOGE representative to review individual position descriptions and multi-level securities to determine what level of Microsoft 365 E5 license that person needs, she said. Other criteria being considered include user and mission requirements for office productivity software, as well as collaboration capabilities, a DOD CIO spokesperson told DefenseScoop. Ten congressional Democrats are demanding answers from Palantir about reports that it is aiding the IRS in building a searchable, governmentwide “mega-database” to house Americans’ sensitive information. In a letter sent Tuesday to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, the lawmakers argued that the creation of a database of that kind likely violates several federal laws, including the Privacy Act. The Democrats wrote: “The unprecedented possibility of a searchable, ‘mega-database’ of tax returns and other data that will potentially be shared with or accessed by other federal agencies is a surveillance nightmare that raises a host of legal concerns, not least that it will make it significantly easier for Donald Trump’s Administration to spy on and target his growing list of enemies and other Americans.” The letter, led by Senate Finance Committee ranking member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., follows New York Times reporting last month that detailed the expansion of Palantir’s federal government work under the Trump administration, noting that the data-mining giant has received $113 million since the president’s January inauguration plus another $795 million award from the Defense Department. According to the Times, Palantir has spoken to IRS and Social Security Administration representatives about buying its tech. The Democrats’ letter said Foundry — a Palantir data analysis and organization product — has been deployed at the departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health. 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.

OpenAI has made massive strides in recent months to position itself as a leading provider of foundational AI to the federal government. In fact, just Monday, the company launched what it’s calling OpenAI for Government, a new initiative focused on bringing its most advanced AI tools to public servants across the United States. A key driver of that work has been Katrina Mulligan, the head of the company’s national security policy and partnerships, who joined the Daily Scoop from the sidelines of the Special Competitive Studies Project’s AI+Expo in Washignton, D.C. During the conversation, Mulligan shared details about new work OpenAI is exploring with the U.S. national labs as well as how the company is navigating the complex federal business landscape. The Department of the Interior is evaluating the use of artificial intelligence as a potential tool to alleviate the backlog of probate cases it manages in tribal communities, per comments from Secretary Doug Burgum and an agency spokesperson. An Interior spokeswoman told FedScoop: “AI technology is being explored to further streamline the probate workflow especially in the realm of data entry and the ability to search multiple databases to find individuals. This is an ongoing internal process.” Michael Boyce, the inaugural leader of the Department of Homeland Security’s AI Corps, has left the position and joined U.S. Digital Response, a nonprofit that works with government agencies on technical projects on a pro-bono basis. Boyce, who stepped down from DHS in April, said in an interview with FedScoop that he’ll be an AI lead and generative AI technologist in residence at USDR focused on helping state and local governments deploy artificial intelligence, drawing on lessons learned from his time at DHS. Boyce’s exit comes amid an exodus of tech talent throughout the Trump administration, which has focused on reducing the workforce and pivoting from the top priorities of the Biden administration. Also in this episode: Mia Jordan, Industry Advisor for Public Sector Transformation at Salesforce, joins SNG host Wyatt Kash in a sponsored podcast discussion about how unified platforms help agencies modernize constituent engagement. This segment was sponsored by Salesforce. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is doubling down on its investment in blockchain intelligence technology, along with other investigative platforms. According to a notice of intent on a government procurement website, the Department of Homeland Security component aims to buy more technology from TRM Labs, which focuses on crypto risk management but also offers a bevy of forensics services for government clients. ICE this week also posted an intent to sole source similar technology from Chainalysis, which comes amid a series of planned purchases for other digital forensics tools. Both Chainalysis and TRM Labs have myriad contracts with federal agencies, including the FBI, the State Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service. In posting its intent to single source both TRM and Chainalysis technology, ICE is indicating there is no other provider that could reasonably provide the same services. Executives from high-tech firms Meta, OpenAI and Palantir are joining the Army Reserve at the rank of lieutenant colonel to serve in Detachment 201, a new “Executive Innovation Corps,” the service announced Friday. The move is the latest push by the department to tap into capabilities and know-how from Silicon Valley and the commercial sector. The new corps “brings top tech talent into the Army Reserve to bridge the commercial-military tech gap” and is “designed to fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation,” the Army stated in a press release. On Friday, the service is set to swear-in Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, OpenAI’s chief product officer Kevin Weil, Palantir’s CTO Shyam Sankar and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab who was previously OpenAI’s chief research officer. 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 an informative 45-day trial run, the Department of the Navy is getting set to expand its rollout of emerging AI capabilities for sailors, Marines and civilians to speedily adopt in support of their daily operations — via its new DoN GPT tool. Jacob Glassman, who serves as senior technical advisor to the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, told DefenseScoop Thursday that this is a new way for the Navy to rapidly innovate and rapidly prototype. GenAI encompasses the field of still-maturing technologies that can process huge volumes of data and perform increasingly “intelligent” tasks — like recognizing speech or producing human-like media and code based on human prompts. These capabilities are pushing the boundaries of what existing tech can achieve. Still, according to Glassman, the Navy has historically “struggled with AI adoption.” Amazon has received federal authorizations that allow Anthropic’s Claude and Meta’s Llama AI models to be used within high-sensitivity government computing environments, the company’s cloud computing division announced Wednesday. The company has achieved FedRAMP “High” authorization as well as at the Defense Department’s Impact Levels 4 and 5 for use of the two foundation models in AWS GovCloud, its government cloud environment, according to a blog post by Liz Martin, Department of Defense director at Amazon Web Services. That means it’s met the security requirements needed for the AI models to be used with some of the government’s most sensitive civilian and military information, and per Martin, it’s the first cloud provider to receive that level of authorization for Claude and Llama. 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.

Daily Scoop listeners and readers of FedScoop will recall the shocking news earlier this year when 18F, a decade-old digital services consultancy in the General Services Administration, was shuttered by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency. Members of the team have banded together since their termination to keep an active presence online through 18F.org in the wake of their dismantling. But the group isn’t going out without a fight. Several senior members of 18F in late May filed a class action appeal to the Merit System Protection Board claiming that GSA lacked a “valid reason” for firing them and targeted them as an act of “retaliation” for their political beliefs. In the appeal, they call for a hearing and to have their removal reversed. Lindsay Young is the former executive director of 18F and one of the name appellants representing the class in the appeal. She joins the podcast for a conversation about how the “deletion” of 18F went down, what she and her team have been doing since, and what they hope to accomplish with the appeal. U.S. officials violated federal privacy law and flouted cybersecurity protocol in sharing Office of Personnel Management records with DOGE affiliates, a federal district court judge in New York ruled Monday, granting a request for a preliminary injunction against the administration. In a 99-page order, Judge Denise Cote of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York concluded that federal worker and union plaintiffs had shown that the government defendants in the challenge shared OPM records with “individuals who had no legal right of access to those records” in violation of the Privacy Act of 1974 and cybersecurity standards. “This was a breach of law and of trust,” Cote said in the order. “Tens of millions of Americans depend on the Government to safeguard records that reveal their most private and sensitive affairs.” The ruling is the latest in a challenge to DOGE’s data access at OPM brought by a coalition of federal unions and current and former government employees or contractors. A new executive order from President Donald Trump aims to boost drone manufacturing in the United States, an effort the administration hopes will spur productivity and technological development and secure the country’s industrial base. Meanwhile, a second executive order aims to combat the risk that, as drone usage proliferates, the technology could also be used to threaten public safety and endanger critical infrastructure. The “Unleashing American Drone Dominance” and “Restoring American Airspace Sovereignty” executive orders, both signed last Friday, come amid growing concerns about the operation of the National Airspace System, the airspace the Federal Aviation Administration monitors for commercial flights, space launches, and other aerial activity. Drones, sometimes called unmanned aerial systems, are also used to smuggle drugs and assist in criminal activity. Unauthorized UASs have increasingly shown up near some nuclear facilities, military bases, and commercial airports, raising concerns, too. The new executive order on airspace sovereignty aims to combat the problem, broadly charging federal agencies to detect drone activity, which will require the use of tracking and identification technology. 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 Supreme Court handed a win to President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency on Friday, granting the efficiency unit access to records at the Social Security Administration. The unsigned opinion provides the Elon Musk-associated DOGE with even more access to sensitive government information to fulfill its mission of making government more efficient. Just last month, the team also gained access to payment systems at the Department of Treasury. The ruling also comes at an awkward time for the DOGE, as Musk — its creator — and Trump are in the midst of an apparent falling out on social media. Per the decision, a majority of the justices voted to grant the administration’s request to stay a lower court decision and concluded that “SSA may proceed to afford members of the SSA DOGE Team access to the agency records in question in order for those members to do their work.” Justices voted on political lines, with liberals Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor saying they would have denied the government’s application for a stay. Simultaneously on Friday, the Supreme Court handed a second win to the DOGE, shielding it from producing documents as part of a discovery process in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. More federal workers would have access to artificial intelligence training under a bill reintroduced in the House on Thursday by Rep. Nancy Mace. The AI Training Extension Act of 2025 aims to expand the Artificial Intelligence Training for the Acquisition Workforce Act, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022, by offering available AI training to more pools of federal employees beyond the acquisition workforce, including “supervisors, managers, and frontline staff in data and technology roles,” according to a release from the South Carolina Republican’s office. Chair of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation, Mace previously introduced the bill in 2023 during the 118th Congress with Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., who passed away last month. Rep. Shontel Brown, D-Ohio, is a co-sponsor of the reintroduced bill. 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 announced Thursday that it is releasing Claude Gov to U.S. national security customers, an exclusive set of artificial intelligence models that is already in the hands of some government agencies. The new government AI product, which Anthropic detailed in a blog post, comes as several companies compete to sell emerging technology tools to federal agencies. At stake is new business — and the prestige of working on serious government missions. Earlier this year, OpenAI released ChatGPT Gov, a specialized version of its chatbot. The company recently announced that the Space Force and the Air Force Research Lab were the product’s first customers. Meanwhile, Department of Government Efficiency representatives have reportedly been advocating for the use of Grok — the chatbot produced by Elon Musk’s firm xAI — within the Department of Homeland Security. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced plans this week to “reform” the department’s AI Safety Institute into a new body called the Center for AI Standards and Innovation. The new name signals a shift away from the term “safety” and toward a desire for rapid development of the technology, though the primary role of the renamed body appears to be more or less the same. The center, like the AISI, will continue to evaluate the capabilities and vulnerabilities of the growing technology and serve as the primary point of contact for industry in the government. “For far too long, censorship and regulations have been used under the guise of national security. Innovators will no longer be limited by these standards,” Lutnick said in a written statement. “CAISI will evaluate and enhance U.S. innovation of these rapidly developing commercial AI systems while ensuring they remain secure to our national security standards.”

The federal Technology Modernization Fund has had a bumpy relationship with congressional appropriators since its creation in 2017, and now the Trump administration wants to sidestep the appropriations process entirely to replenish the fund on an annual basis with unused money transferred from agencies. The White House on Friday quietly issued an in-depth appendix of its budget request for fiscal 2026, and executive agencies followed suit, publishing their annual budget justification documents. The General Services Administration, which houses the TMF program and disburses its funds, revealed in its 2026 justification that the Trump administration did not request any “new discretionary appropriated funding for the TMF” in 2026, instead proposing a new model for how it could pull money from other agencies, up to $100 million, to re-up the fund each fiscal year. “President’s FY 2026 budget request includes a governmentwide general provision that will allow GSA, with approval of OMB, to collect unobligated balances of expired discretionary funds from other agencies and bring that funding into the TMF,” the justification explains. “To further strengthen the TMF’s ability to help agencies kickstart or accelerate their urgent modernization efforts, GSA and OMB are committed to exploring alternative funding mechanisms.” Historically, the sitting administration has called on Congress to fund the TMF on an annual basis, with varying degrees of success. Pentagon procurement officials who are looking to up their expertise in buying cutting-edge tech for the U.S. military can now apply to join the 2026 Immersive Commercial Acquisition Program fellowship cohort, Defense Innovation Unit officials announced Tuesday. Next year will mark the fourth iteration of the educational ICAP initiative, which DIU runs in partnership with the Defense Acquisition University. This fellowship is designed to provide DOD’s leading procurement professionals with hands-on experience and virtual training to help them more effectively buy in-demand commercial technologies from non-traditional military contractors. DIU’s Deputy Director for Commercial Operations Liz Young McNally told DefenseScoop during a panel at the Special Competitive Studies Project’s AI+ Expo. “We have other acquisition officers from across the department who can apply to the year-long fellowship with DIU — to learn our process, how we work with industry, and then bring that back to wherever they’re going. And [the next ICAP application] just opened today.”If tapped for the fellowship, personnel will get a chance to work on a variety of real-world, military service-aligned projects alongside a DIU contracting officer, project team and commercial solution providers. The fellows will also gain in-depth instruction on a flexible contracting mechanism designed for rapid prototyping and acquisition of commercial tech, known as other transaction (OT) authority.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is implementing an AI chatbot called “chatCBP” for its workforce, following in the footsteps of similar federal government creations like DHSChat and StateChat. “CBP’s chatCBP is an AI-powered chatbot designed to improve efficiency and access to information for CBP personnel while meeting CBP’s security standards,” a CBP spokesperson told FedScoop in an emailed statement. The tool uses a large language model and gives workers responses and guidance in a conversational format “quickly and securely.” According to the spokesperson: “chatCBP offers features like document summarization, compilation, information extraction, and multi-file analysis, reducing the time spent searching for and interpreting documents.” News of the chatbot comes after other agencies within the federal government have launched their own internal chatbots in an attempt to more securely provide the type of generative AI assistance made popular by ChatGPT. That includes the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security, CBP’s parent agency. DHSChat, for its part, was announced last year and is similarly aimed at aiding workers with routine tasks. But, per the spokesperson, chatCBP is different in that it’s designed to meet unique operational needs that the subagency has, such as requiring more control over LLM development, monitoring, data management and security. Four senators asked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to reestablish the Cyber Safety Review Board, citing the need to investigate a landmark breach of telecommunications networks by Chinese hackers known as Salt Typhoon. In a letter last Thursday, the senators also said the board has conducted important oversight of other incidents before DHS removed its members in January, such as its report on a breach of Microsoft by other Chinese hackers. Democratic Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote in the letter: “The CSRB played a vital role in U.S. national security carrying out post-incident reviews and providing information and making recommendations to improve public and private sector cyber security. Therefore, we urge you to swiftly reconstitute the Board with qualified leaders to shape our nation’s cyber response.” Warner is the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence panel, and the four members sit on either the Intelligence Committee or the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. DHS purged all members from its advisory boards and committees in January. While the later disbanding of other boards has drawn some concern, the removal of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency-led Cyber Safety Review Board’s members has drawn the most negative reaction from the cybersecurity community. It halted a Salt Typhoon investigation that had only just begun.

Billionaire tech titan Elon Musk’s time as a “special government employee” is coming to an end, but the DOGE team at the Defense Department will soon have greater influence on Pentagon contracting. Since President Donald Trump began his second term in January, Musk has spearheaded the Department of Government Efficiency’s push across the federal government to find “waste, fraud and abuse,” slash certain types of spending and cut the workforce. A DOGE team was set up at the Pentagon — as well as other federal agencies — to implement those efforts. Musk wrote Wednesday night in a post on X that his time as a special government employee was coming to an end but: “The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.” In a sign that DOGE’s influence will continue at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a new directive this week giving those personnel more oversight of contracting efforts. Hegseth wrote in a May 27 memo to senior Pentagon leadership, combatant commanders, and DOD agency and field activity directors that: “The Department of Defense (DoD) Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team will have the opportunity to provide input on all unclassified contracts. The Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment (USD(A&S)), or its designee, will coordinate with DOGE to ensure that the opportunity for review of the Performance Work Statement/Statement of Work, accompanying estimates, deliverable descriptions, and requirements approval/validation documents, occurs when the requirements package is provided to a DoD contracting office to initiate a procurement or prior to the package being provided to a non-DoD assisting agency (e.g., General Services Administration).” In a video released Wednesday on X, Hegseth said the Pentagon had already saved more than $10 billion working with DOGE on previous efforts to review spending, including from a “line-by-line audit of over 50 contract vehicles.” Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced Thursday that the government would build a new supercomputer powered by NVIDIA chips and based at a department user facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Officials said the supercomputer will be named Doudna after UC Berkeley scientist Jennifer Doudna, who co-invented CRISPR gene editing technology and won the Nobel Prize back in 2020. The Doudna supercomputer, which is geared toward high-performance computing and training artificial intelligence technology, will be based at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. It is only the latest Energy Department project designed for the AI age: El Capitan, a supercomputer based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and currently the world’s fastest, is also designed with machine learning in mind, as is Frontier, a DOE supercomputer housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. A spokesperson would not comment further on how the Doudna supercomputer’s speeds might compare to other systems. Government supercomputing projects, including those focused on AI, are now supported by the same national laboratory system that incubated the Manhattan Project, which produced the world’s first atomic weapons. 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.