The Daily Scoop Podcast

Days before the Biden administration is set to leave the White House, it issued Tuesday an executive order aimed at shoring up the nation’s AI infrastructure, including through the operation of data centers, in an effort to ensure that the growing technology will be built and operated in the U.S. Specifically, the order outlines requirements for federal agencies — including the departments of Defense and Energy — to identify sites that the government could lease to the private sector for the construction and operation of frontier AI data centers, as well as clean energy facilities to serve those centers. The order instructs those organizations to review competitive proposals to construct AI infrastructure on those sites. The order appears to be a direct response to AI companies, such as OpenAI and Microsoft, which have emphasized the importance of investment in data center infrastructure to meet AI’s massive data processing and training needs. The Office of Personnel Management has a new top IT official: Melvin Brown II is now the agency’s chief information officer following Guy Cavallo’s retirement from federal service. Before his promotion, Brown was the deputy CIO at the agency and served in that role since January 2021. In a written statement, an OPM spokesperson said Brown “has been an integral leader in delivering many of OPM’s accomplishments in modernizing IT.” That includes the agency achieving an “A” score on its Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act, or FITARA, scorecard, which tracks agency progress in multiple IT areas. Prior to joining OPM, Brown directed enterprise business management within the Small Business Administration’s Office of the CIO and was a senior adviser to the Department of Homeland Security’s Presidential Transition Office. 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 mentioned last Tuesday, Mina Hsiang, administrator of the U.S. Digital Service, is one of the many technology officials who will depart federal service with the forthcoming change in administrations later this month. Hsiang, a longtime government digital services leader, was tapped to lead USDS at the beginning of the Biden administration and has now seen that role through to the term’s end. In the second part of a two-part exit interview with FedScoop reporter Caroline Nihill, Hsiang gives her closing thoughts as she wraps up her time at the helm of the government’s technology tiger team. In the headlines today: A draft cybersecurity executive order would tackle cyber defenses in locations ranging from outer space to the U.S. federal bureaucracy to its contractors, and address security risks embedded in subjects like cybercrime, artificial intelligence and quantum computers. The draft, a copy of which CyberScoop obtained, constitutes one big last stab at cybersecurity in the Biden administration’s eleventh hour. The order is follow-up to an order published in the first year of his presidency, The new order gives agencies 53 deadlines, stretching in length from 30 days to three years. Also: The Department of Health and Human Services has three new officials to lead its artificial intelligence, technology and data work. According to biographies posted HHS, Alicia Rouault is the department’s new associate deputy assistant secretary for technology policy and chief technology officer, Kristen Honey is the department’s chief data officer, and Meghan Dierks is the chief artificial intelligence officer. The three new officials join the department after it announced a reorganization of its health, data, AI and cyber portfolios in July. As part of those changes, the chief technology, data and AI roles moved from the department’s Assistant Secretary for Administration, where the Office of the Chief Information Officer is housed, to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information 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.

Federal agencies would be required to track and report computer usage for teleworking employees under new legislation from a Senate Republican. The Requiring Effective Management and Oversight of Teleworking Employees (REMOTE) Act, from Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, would charge executive department heads with enacting policies that record the login activity and network traffic of teleworkers’ government computers. Managers of teleworking staffers would be required to “periodically review” the traffic generated by those workers and collect a variety of relevant data, including average number of daily logins and average daily duration of the connection to the applicable computer network. Ernst said in a statement: “While DOGE stands ready to clean house, I will be leading the fight in the Senate to disrupt the business-as-usual bureaucrats who spent the last four years out of office.” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks is poised to complete her tenure at the Pentagon under the Biden administration — and she’s been in direct contact with officials on President-elect Donald Trump’s Agency Review Team preparing for the upcoming transition, according to her top public affairs advisor Eric Pahon. In responses to questions from DefenseScoop last week, Pahon discussed Hicks’ plans and priorities for her final days helping steer the Defense Department’s major technology programs. He shared that QUOTE “her priorities today remain the same as they have been since her first day in office: Foremost, in support of the secretary and president, she is maintaining her focus on ensuring that DOD can outpace strategic competitors like the [People’s Republic of China] by fielding more combat-credible capabilities at greater speed and scale, continually iterating on novel operational concepts, distributing and hardening our force posture, and leveraging our unparalleled ability to generate innovation with and through America’s private sector." The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The White House announced Tuesday the official launch of the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark, a cybersecurity labeling initiative aimed at enhancing the security of internet-connected devices. The initiative tackles rising consumer concerns about the security vulnerabilities of “smart” devices essential to modern homes. As households become more dependent on interconnected gadgets — with a 2023 Deloitte study revealing that the average U.S. household has 21 connected devices — the threat of cyberattacks becomes increasingly significant. These threats include hackers gaining unauthorized access to home security systems and illicit recordings through unsecured cameras. The Cyber Trust Mark aims to reassure users by offering clear security evaluations of the products they use every day. Anne Neuberger, the White House’s deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, told reporters Tuesday that consumers don’t have the confidence that they can connect a device at home and know that their private pictures and communications will be secure and the new program takes on that problem in a bipartisan and voluntary way. President Joe Biden on Saturday signed into law the Government Service Delivery Improvement Act, legislation that targets improving customer service interactions with the government. The bill was first introduced by Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., Byron Donalds, R-Fla., Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., and William Timmons, R-S.C., in October 2023. Now as law, it requires the Office of Management and Budget to choose a senior official as a “Federal Government Service Delivery Lead” to coordinate government service delivery improvement within agencies. That service delivery lead would also work with new agency-appointed senior officials, who must be named within a year of the bill’s enactment, to oversee their organizations’ delivery improvements. 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.

Guy Cavallo, the chief information officer of the Office of Personnel Management since July 2021, will retire from federal service on Jan. 13, he confirmed to FedScoop. Cavallo leaves federal service having held several top technology roles over the past decade, including as deputy CIO of the Small Business Administration and executive director of IT operations at the Transportation Security Administration. He also served as OPM’s principal deputy CIO and acting CIO before being named permanent CIO. As the longest-tenured CIO of OPM in recent memory, Cavallo led that charge on a two-year sprint replacing or migrating over 50 applications from legacy on-premises data centers to the cloud and the launch of the new Postal Health Benefits System last year for more than 1.7 million postal workers and retirees. He touted the system as fully operational 100% of the time with no unscheduled downtime throughout the Open Season. The Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office recently completed a pilot exercise with tech nonprofit Humane Intelligence that analyzed three well-known large language models in two real-world use cases aimed at improving modern military medicine, officials confirmed Thursday. In its aftermath, the partners revealed they uncovered hundreds of possible vulnerabilities that defense personnel can account for moving forward when considering LLMs for these purposes. A Defense Department spokesperson told DefenseScoop the findings revealed biases that could impact the military’s healthcare system, such as bias related to demographics. They wouldn’t share much more about what was exposed, but the official provided new details about the design and implementation of this CDAO-led pilot, the team’s follow-up plans and the steps they took to protect service members’ privacy while using applicable clinical records. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

Mina Hsiang, administrator of the U.S. Digital Service, is one of the many technology officials who will depart federal service with the forthcoming change in administrations later this month. Hsiang, a longtime government digital services leader, was tapped to lead USDS as the beginning of the Biden administration and has now seen that role through to the term’s end. In a two-part exit interview with FedScoop report Caroline Nihill, Hsiang shares some of the highlights from the past four years — including a partnership with the Social Security Administraiton and the success of digital initiatives supporting COVID-19 vaccines and test kits — as well as her parting thoughts on her role, the need for technical leaders inside government agencies, and much more. The Defense Department has tapped Kratos to develop a testbed for hypersonic vehicles under the Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed 2.0 program, the company announced Monday. The other transaction authority agreement is for Task Area 1 of MACH-TB 2.0, an initiative that broadly aims to expand options for the Pentagon to demonstrate and validate hypersonic weapons and related technologies. If all options are exercised, the deal has a performance period of five years and a total value of $1.45 billion — the single largest contract ever awarded to the contractor. Former Defense Department Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy is now working at Boeing as the organization’s chief information digital officer and senior vice president for information technology and data analytics, the company announced Jan.3. Deasy served as the Pentagon CIO during the first Trump administration starting in May 2018 and oversaw a variety of high-profile modernization initiatives. He was at the helm when the department moved to large-scale telework as employees adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic, helped stand up the Joint AI Center and led the charge to enterprise cloud through the JEDI contract. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency unveiled a detailed set of guidelines Wednesday to safeguard the mobile communications of high-value government targets in the wake of the ongoing Salt Typhoon telecom breach. The guide aims to help both political and federal leadership harden their communications and avoid any data interception by the Chinese-linked espionage group. As of earlier this month, government agencies were still grappling with the attack’s full scope, federal officials told reporters. Among the targets were officials from both presidential campaigns, including the phone of President-elect Donald Trump. The advisory details several key practices intended to mitigate risks associated with cyber threats and raise awareness on techniques that can thwart any type of malicious actor. The FBI’s ability to fully embrace artificial intelligence has been hamstrung by funding constraints and various workforce and technical challenges, according to a new watchdog report. The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General said the FBI has “demonstrated initiative” and taken steps to “integrate AI capabilities in a manner consistent” with guidance from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. But substantial progress has been difficult to come by due to barriers that have “impeded” more “accelerated adoption” of AI. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

A consolidated list of federal artificial intelligence use cases released by the White House on Wednesday shows agencies more than doubled the amount of uses reported last year. Per the 2024 consolidated inventory, which is available on the Office of Management and Budget’s GitHub, 37 federal agencies have reported 1,757 public AI uses. A consolidated list released by the White House last year documented 710 use cases. The top three categories of uses, per a Chief Information Officer Council post Wednesday, were “mission-enabling (internal agency support), health and medical, and government services (includes benefits and service delivery).” The consolidated inventory is the product of an annual AI inventory process that was initially established in December 2020 and has continued to evolve. It gives the latest snapshot of how the federal government is handling the rapidly growing technology and reflects the Biden administration’s safety-based approach to AI. Federal civilian agencies have a new list of cyber-related requirements to address after the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Tuesday issued guidance regarding the implementation of secure practices for cloud services. CISA’s Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 25-01 instructs agencies to identify all of its cloud instances and implement assessment tools, while also making sure that their cloud environments are aligned with the cyber agency’s Secure Cloud Business Applications (SCuBA) configuration baselines. CISA Director Jen Easterly said in a statement that the actions laid out in the directive are “an important step” toward reducing risk across the federal civilian enterprise, though threats loom in “every sector.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

House AI task force members on Tuesday touted the long-awaited release of their report outlining recommendations to Congress on the federal government’s adoption of AI, while confirming that lawmakers are in conversation with the incoming administration about the very same topics. The nearly 300-page report digs into a plethora of areas that the emerging technology touches, including the government’s own use of AI, along with recommendations concerning AI governance and the AI workforce. Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., co-chairman of the task force, said during a press conference Tuesday that legislators and the incoming Trump administration are discussing what could be done to the executive order that the Biden White House released last fall, what items need legislative action and how efforts might be “harmonized” between the legislative and executive branches. Adele Merritt has been named the top IT official for the National Institutes of Health, giving the agency a permanent chief information officer for the first time in roughly two years. Merritt, who was most recently the CIO of the intelligence community, began her roles as CIO and director of the agency’s Office of the Chief Information Officer on Monday, NIH Director Monica M. Bertagnolli said in a written announcement. According to Bertagnolli, Merritt comes to NIH with more than 20 years experience in cyber and national security operations and has held positions across the government intelligence community. 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 federal government journeys into uncharted territory with the adoption of AI, it’s no surprise that the nation’s space exploration agency is one of the most innovative among the bunch. Krista Kinnard is NASA’s Digital Transformation, Culture and Communications Lead and was recently promoted to that agency's deputy chief AI officer, where she'll continue to play a key role shepherding the cultural push behind the agency’s AI revolution. The Daily Scoop recently caught up with Kinnard at ACT-IAC’s Imagine Nation ELC event in Hershey, Pa. During our conversation, we touched on her role at the agency and how it relates to AI, the progress the agency has made in adopting AI, and what’s ahead. The Department of Homeland Security has built an artificial intelligence-based chatbot it’s calling DHSChat, the latest in a string of agency experimentations with generative AI. DHSChat is designed as a chatbot meant for internal use within the agency, according to a press release shared Tuesday. The tool was developed by DHS’s AI Corps and its director, Michael Boyce, after employees experimented with commercial generative AI tools, including Claude and ChatGPT. In a statement, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that the “cutting-edge tool” would help workers across DHS “draft vital reports, summarize critical information, develop new software, streamline administrative tasks, and much more." The Department of Health and Human Services was among the first federal agencies to release its 2024 AI use case inventory Monday, reporting a roughly 66% increase in uses from the previous year. In a post accompanying the inventory, Steven Posnack, HHS’s principal deputy assistant secretary for technology policy and principal deputy national coordinator for health IT, highlighted the health agency’s increase from 163 to 271 use cases and noted the varying stages of development. The new figure, for example, includes uses for operation and maintenance and in acquisition and development, as well as 16 uses that are retired. The inventory comes as agencies across the federal government are expected to release new and expanded lists of AI use cases for 2024. 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.