The Daily Scoop Podcast

A federal judge in Washington on Thursday denied a request by federal worker unions to halt the firing of probationary workers in the U.S. government, saying the court likely lacks the authority to hear the claims. Instead, the claims brought by the National Treasury Employees Union and others must be brought before the Federal Labor Relations Authority, Judge Christopher Cooper of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said in his opinion. The ruling is a blow to efforts by unions to protect their members from the mass probationary employee firings taking place across the government, as well as from further efforts by the Trump administration to reduce the size of the federal workforce. The Department of Transportation has tapped the chief technology officer of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to be its new chief information officer, according to an update to the agency’s site. Pavan Pidugu started as DOT’s new CIO this week, replacing Cordell Schachter, who left the role last month. Pidugu spent nearly five years as CTO at the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which focuses on preventing injuries and deaths in the trucking industry. Prior to his work in the federal government, Pidugu held several digital project management roles at Walmart and Target. 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.

Katie Arrington has been named the deputy chief information officer for cybersecurity and chief information security officer at the Department of Defense, a department spokesperson confirmed. She assumed the role effective Feb. 18. A familiar face, Arrington comes back to the Pentagon where she was the chief information security officer for the department’s acquisition and sustainment organization during the first Trump administration. She was best known for starting the Pentagon’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program over six years ago, which aims to improve the cybersecurity posture of the defense industrial base and contractors by requiring minimum cyber standards to bid on contracts. As the Department of Government Efficiency sets its sights on accessing sensitive taxpayer data, a coalition of union groups and advocates is suing the federal government to block the Elon Musk associates from entering Internal Revenue Service systems. In a lawsuit filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the Center for Taxpayer Rights, Main Street Alliance, the National Federation of Federal Employees and the Communications Workers of America allege that DOGE’s access to IRS systems has harmed their constituents’ privacy interests and exposed their private information to heightened risks. 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 National Science Foundation fired 168 probationary employees Tuesday as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal workforce, the agency confirmed. In a written statement, NSF spokesman Mike England pointed to President Donald Trump’s executive order last week that included plans to reduce the size of the federal workforce as part of the work of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. “To ensure compliance with this E.O. the National Science Foundation has released 168 employees from Federal service effective today,” England said. “We thank these employees for their service to NSF and their contributions to advance the agency mission.” He confirmed that all of the terminated employees were probationary. A federal judge Tuesday denied a request from Democratic attorneys general to temporarily cut off Department of Government Efficiency access to U.S. government IT systems, delivering a blow to states aiming to sideline the ongoing Elon Musk-led data expedition at agencies. Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the states did not show that they would “suffer imminent, irreparable harm absent a temporary restraining order.” The state AGs had argued that Musk’s actions in deploying DOGE surrogates to root around in federal computer systems violated the Constitution’s appointments clause due to the fact that he has not been nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Though no one has been more closely associated with DOGE than Musk, a Trump administration official said in a court filing Monday that the world’s richest man is merely a senior advisor to the president and not a DOGE employee or the DOGE administrator. 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.

American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley said the federal worker union would fight mass firings of government employees, calling the Trump administration’s actions a politically driven abuse of the probationary period. His statement comes after reports that probationary employees were fired from agencies across the federal government. In his statement, Kelley refuted claims that employees were fired for poor performance, saying “there is no evidence these employees were anything but dedicated public servants.” In response to a request for comment, a spokeswoman for OPM said “the probationary period is a continuation of the job application process, not an entitlement for permanent employment. The Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General said it has opened an audit into the agency’s payments system after Department of Government Efficiency liaisons accessed the personal and financial information of Americans stored by the Bureau of Fiscal Service. In letters to Democrats in the Senate and House, Loren Sciurba, Treasury’s deputy inspector general, said the OIG initiated the audit into Bureau of Fiscal Service systems before the lawmakers made the request last week. The audit will examine applicable payment system controls that have been in place since Oct. 1, 2024, in addition to the two most recent fiscal years “as it relates to alleged fraudulent payments.”

A source familiar with the inner workings of the U.S. Digital Corps, a two-year fellowship for early-career technologists to show coding work and work through interagency agreements across the federal government that is managed by TTS, said that DOGE representatives asked them and others to show coding work. The source said that the DOGE representatives asked them and others to show coding work that held sensitive information. A GSA spokesperson told FedScoop that Shedd initiated these meetings, and that “getting a sense of the technical work being performed by the organization is an essential part of understanding what the team is doing and what they are capable of.” Unions are challenging the Trump administration’s ‘deferred resignation’ offer to government workers, but lack the standing to do so, according to a federal judge in Massachusetts. This decision eliminated the temporary pause on the previously decided deadline for workers to accept the resignation offer and denied the unions’ attempt to seek a long-term hold on the deadline through a preliminary injunction. 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 is following suit with a memo from the Office of Personnel guidance that came out in January, giving agencies the authority to terminate employees who: “have served less than a year in a competitive service appointment, or who have served less than two years in an excepted service appointment.” Employees who fit this description, as well as temporary employees on appointments that are not meant to exceed a certain date, can be terminated without triggering MSPB rights." USAID employees reported being shut out of the Global Acquisition and Assistance System (GLAAS) and the related Phoenix system, which assist in agency procurment, according to two sources familiar with the matter. GLAAS is an adapted version of PRISM, a procurement tool that’s used throughout the federal government. The platform is connected to Phoenix, the agency’s financial management system, and highlights how much an agency’s operations depend on accessing just a handful of information technology systems. 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.

President Donald Trump accelerated his reduction of the federal workforce Tuesday with an executive order that minimizes agency hiring allowances, requiring four workers to depart for every one hire to be made. The order to implement Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency ”workforce optimization initiative” calls on the Office of Management and Budget director to submit a plan to reduce the federal workforce through those hiring limitations once the administration-mandated hiring freeze ends. Matthew Graviss, the Department of State’s first chief data and artificial intelligence officer, has left the agency, a spokesperson confirmed Tuesday. Graviss began as the department’s chief data officer in 2020 as the first person to hold the full-time role at the agency, in addition to serving as the agency’s top AI official. In a LinkedIn post about his move, Graviss called his time at the department an “incredible journey” and said he was proud of the work to modernize 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.

Federal employees would be banned from using the Chinese artificial intelligence platform DeepSeek on their government-issued devices under new legislation from a bipartisan group of House lawmakers. The No DeepSeek on Government Devices Act, introduced by Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., Darin LaHood, R-Ill., and 16 of their House colleagues Friday, comes after weeks of panic in Silicon Valley following the revelation that the Chinese startup’s AI models were comparable if not more advanced than offerings from U.S. companies. DeepSeek, a low-cost, open-source AI model, has since reported difficulties in registering new users thanks to “large-scale malicious attacks” on its services. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency placed several members of its election security group on administrative leave last week, multiple sources familiar with the situation told CyberScoop. According to one source, the moves happened Thursday and Friday of last week and were targeted at employees focused on CISA’s mis-, dis- and malinformation teams. The moves include four employees currently working on or assigned to the team, two more that left the team in the past four years but still hold positions at the Department of Homeland Security, and another two that work on elections misinformation or disinformation at DHS. A second source confirmed that some, but not all members of CISA’s election security team, were placed on leave last week. The extent of the teams impacted by the decree is unclear. 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 Thursday limited access to a Treasury Department payments system that various Department of Government Efficiency surrogates had burrowed into at the behest of Elon Musk. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, in response to a lawsuit from a coalition of labor unions against the Treasury Department and Secretary Scott Bessent, wrote in her ruling that the defendants cannot “provide access to any payment record or payment system of records maintained by or within the Bureau of the Fiscal Service.” Tom Krause and Marko Elez, two DOGE-connected “special government employees” of the Treasury Department, were granted “read-only” access to Bureau of Fiscal Service systems “as needed for the performance” of their respective duties, the judge ruled. The Office of Personnel Management released multiple memos this week that continue the Trump administration’s push to shift agencies away from career employees and toward more political positions across the government. OPM asked agencies in a Wednesday memo to identify all Senior Executive Service (SES) positions and make requests to keep those people in career roles if the agency head believes the “President’s goals and priorities would be better served by keeping” the status quo. OPM said the Trump administration received reports that agencies near the end of the Biden administration redesignated SES positions that are traditionally held by noncareer employees, labeling them as positions that can only be held by career employees under the titles “general” or “career reserved.” That comes after another OPM memo released this week pushed to classify chief information officers as general employees. 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 Energy on Friday replaced its chief information officer with a network engineer from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, FedScoop has learned. Dawn Zimmer — who’d been serving as Energy CIO since Ann Dunkin resigned from the role as the Biden administration left office — has been removed from the role by the department’s leadership, two sources with direct knowledge of the move told FedScoop. Zimmer was hired as Energy’s principal deputy CIO in November, and she has returned to that role. With Zimmer removed as acting CIO, Energy leadership has appointed Ryan Riedel to the role, according to one of the sources, who also shared a screenshot of Riedel listed as CIO in the department’s email directory. Riedel lists his current employment as a lead network security engineer at SpaceX on his LinkedIn. He joined the company in 2020 after previously serving at U.S. Army Cyber Command and in the U.S. Navy as an IT specialist, his profile shows. The change comes amid reports that members of the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency have entered the Department of Energy and at least one is accessing its IT systems. The U.S. AI Safety Institute has selected Scale AI as the first third-party evaluator authorized to assess AI models on its behalf, opening a new channel for testing. That agreement will allow a broader range of model builders to access voluntary evaluation, according to a Scale AI release shared with FedScoop ahead of the Monday announcement. Participating companies will be able to test their models once and, if they choose, share those results with AI safety institutes around the world. Criteria for those evaluations will be developed jointly by the AI data labeling company and the AISI. For Scale’s part, that work will be led by its research arm, the Safety, Evaluation, and Alignment Lab, or SEAL. Per the announcement, the evaluations will look at performance in areas such as math, reasoning, and AI coding. 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.