The Daily Scoop Podcast

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.

House Republicans on Wednesday temporarily blocked Democratic efforts to subpoena Elon Musk, turning back an attempt to bring the tech billionaire before Congress to answer questions about what his Department of Government Efficiency delegates are doing in federal agency computer systems. During a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the size of the federal government, ranking member Gerry Connolly, D-Va., moved to subpoena Musk to face the committee as a witness at the “earliest possible moment.” Connolly’s Democratic colleagues supported the motion, but lost out to Republicans, tabling the motion. Democratic calls to hear from Musk follow the ongoing DOGE-led shutdown of USAID, the alleged sidestepping of federal law at the Office of Personnel Management via an email server, and the granting of systems access at the Treasury Department to DOGE workers. The Trump administration has requested input from the public as it seeks to develop its own path forward on artificial intelligence policy. A Federal Register post for public inspection Wednesday requests feedback on the AI “action plan” that President Donald Trump directed under his Jan. 23 executive order on the technology. That order directed agencies to review AI actions taken under Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, which Trump rescinded on his first day in office, and said the country’s policy on the technology is “to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security.” It also set a 180-day timeline for a new action plan that’s in line with that policy to be delivered to the president. 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 memo from the Office of Personnel Management has recommended that federal agencies reclassify the position of chief information officer, in what appears to be an attempt to make the technical position far more political than it’s previously been. Specifically, the new designation would have the chief information officer serve as a “general” employee rather than a “career reserved” employee. General employees, according to OPM, can be filled by a range of people, including “career, noncareer, limited term or limited emergency” senior executive branch appointees. Career reserved positions, meanwhile, are supposed to be impartial and can only be filled by career appointees. The memo argues that CIOs have served increasingly policy-based positions, given their focus on issues including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and machine learning. The document argues that reclassifying the position could also help increase the potential talent pool for CIOs. A coalition of labor unions is suing the Treasury Department and Secretary Scott Bessent over the disclosure of Americans’ personal and financial information to Elon Musk and the tech billionaire’s Department of Government Efficiency surrogates. In a lawsuit filed Monday to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the Alliance for Retired Americans, the American Federation of Government Employees and the Service Employees International Union allege that the Treasury Department under Bessent allowed Musk and his DOGE associates to access the personal information of millions of individuals who have transacted with the federal government. That personal information includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, birth places, home addresses and telephone numbers, email addresses, and bank account information, according to the lawsuit. A Treasury employee initially prevented DOGE workers from accessing those records, the department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service. But according to the lawsuit, once Bessent was confirmed, he placed that employee on leave and provided the DOGE crew with “full access to the Bureau’s data and the computer systems that house them.” 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.

Last month, the Harvard National Security Journal published what’s thought to be the first legal scholarship on the subject matter of unidentified anomalous phenomena, the modern term for UFOs. Dillon Guthrie — a D.C.-based attorney who has served as a counsel at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, an advisor on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and a legislative aide to Senator John Kerry — is the author of that article. In it, he attempts to analyze legislation and other government efforts to keep pace with UAP research and to continue to bring awareness to the topic. Pentagon correspondent Brandi Vincent, who regularly covers the Defense Department’s growing investigations into UAP reports for DefenseScoop, recently sat down with Guthrie to discuss his new article and his thoughts on the federal government’s work — from Congress to the DOD — around UAP. The Trump administration’s broad efforts to remake the U.S. government have been met with widespread criticism from federal workers. On Tuesday, dozens of federal workers and their supporters gathered outside the Office of Personnel Management in Washington to push back on Musk’s apparent leadership on the Trump administration's efforts to reshape the workforce. They also carried signs with phrases like “arrest Elon,” “stop the coup” and “fork Musk.” Some even held forks in reference to OPM’s “Fork in the Road” email about deferred resignation. That offer echoed a message Musk sent to Twitter employees after he bought the company and was also the title of an art piece Musk said he commissioned. The protests come after reports that Musk and his DOGE team entered OPM and stood up an unauthorized, insecure commercial server connected to other agency systems to support the sending of mass email blasts to the entirety of the federal workforce, to include the aforementioned Fork in the Road email. USAID is turning off government devices for employees tending to the agency’s missions around the world, several sources told FedScoop. As the future of the agency remains unclear — Secretary of State Marco Rubio is now reportedly its acting administrator — the disconnections risk the safety of U.S. government workers based in dangerous and hard-to-access regions. Several people familiar with the matter confirmed that USAID workers are having their phones disconnected. Those whose devices have been deactivated can assume they’ve been placed on leave, one person said, since those deactivations are outpacing formal human resources notifications. A second person familiar said that the phones of USAID workers who are currently abroad have also been disconnected. A third USAID employee confirmed earlier Monday that agency employees in the West Africa region lost access to their computers and phones, and that some Washington, D.C. offices — like the Office of Transition Initiatives — had experienced the same. The same employee later told FedScoop that they had also lost access to their email address with no warning. Thousands of USAID email accounts had been deactivated, one source said, following widespread reports that the Trump administration plans to shut down the agency and possibly integrate it with the State Department. 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 UH-60M Black Hawk helicopter that fatally collided with an American Airlines passenger plane Wednesday night over the Potomac River was not equipped with experimental autonomous flight capabilities, defense officials familiar with the ongoing federal investigation told DefenseScoop. There’s said to be no survivors in the aftermath of the tragic crash, which happened around 9:00 p.m. local time on a notoriously highly-congested flight path in the National Capital Region. The Army is closely supporting the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board-led investigation into the incident, officials said. In statements, press briefings and one-on-one conversations Thursday, several defense officials shed new light on the mid-air collision. Their comments confirm that — despite the Army’s unfolding experimentation with AI and autonomous software — the helicopter involved was not equipped with or deploying any such systems. More than 200 state and local governments are using a new, nonpartisan talent program called Civic Match that’s connecting outgoing federal workers and campaign staff with new government jobs. The Civic Match program, which was launched in November by the workforce nonprofit Work for America, is a talent matching platform designed to help federal employees remain in public service, but at the state and local level. More than 1,200 outgoing federal workers and campaign staffers from both Democratic and Republican campaigns have signed up to use the platform, and 220 state and local government hiring managers are reviewing those candidates for placement in government, according to program organizers. 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 main website for USAID went offline this weekend and thousands of staffers may have lost access to their email accounts amid rumors that the Trump administration intends to eliminate the agency. The website went dark after staffers associated with the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency gained access to the domain and then blocked USAID employees, a person familiar with the matter told FedScoop. The source said around 2,000 email accounts associated with USAID workers have since been deactivated. USAID did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication. The news follows a massive and sudden pause on American international aid that’s shaken global development groups charged with disbursing critical and life-saving resources. An all-staff email distribution list at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was bombarded with crude emails last Thursday night, prompting a review by its top IT official. The emails included an “Important Weather Alert” about a “99% chance of shit showers” over the next four years, a subscription confirmation for Scientology Today, and crude and inflammatory messages critical of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Some of those emails were obtained by FedScoop and others were posted online to X and Reddit. The incident has sparked a review by NOAA’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, according to an email shared by a spokesperson for the weather and climate 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.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order Monday night tasking the Pentagon to build a plan for a multilayered missile defense system underpinned by both space-based sensors and interceptors. Under the directive, titled “Iron Dome for America,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is required to develop “a reference architecture, capabilities-based requirements and an implementation plan” to address emerging aerial threats against the U.S. homeland. The strategy, due to the president in the next 60 days, must focus on defense against ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles and other aerial platforms. An artificial intelligence advisory panel created during the first Trump administration is delivering the president a list of 10 actionable AI priorities to pursue as he begins his second term. The National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee, established under section 5104 of the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act and signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2020, voted Tuesday in favor of a 10-priority draft document of “timely AI policy issues and proposed solutions.” The recommendations laid out in that document, NAIAC said, should “provide an opportunity for the administration to achieve its goals to advance the United States’ continued AI leadership and competitiveness.” 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 lawsuit filed in federal court Monday alleges that the Office of Personnel Management set up an on-premise server to conduct last week’s mass email blast to federal employees and store information it received in response without doing a privacy impact assessment on the system as required by law. Filed by two anonymous federal employees in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the class-action lawsuit calls for OPM to stop the use of the system until the agency can show that it’s lawfully conducted a privacy assessment. The two employees accuse OPM officials of deploying the new server — which is said to be “retaining information about every employee of the U.S. Executive Branch” or potentially doing so through systems linked to it — in a “rapid” manner without building proper security measures into it or assessing the privacy impacts as required by the E-Government Act of 2002. The Trump administration said it is offering “deferred resignation” options to federal employees who agree to leave their positions within seven business days, the latest in a series of actions aimed at slashing the government’s workforce. In an email that the Office of Personnel Management said was sent to federal employees Tuesday, the White House presented government workers with a “deferred resignation offer.” Federal workers who accept that offer by Feb. 6 “will retain all pay and benefits regardless of your daily workload and will be exempted from all applicable in-person work requirements until September 30, 2025 (or earlier if you choose to accelerate your resignation for any reason),” the message posted on OPM’s website 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 Defense houses one of — if not the biggest — workforces in the world. It is a Fortune 1 company, if you think about it that way. And managing a workforce that large and complex doesn’t come easy. However, the department believes that modern technology can play a role in making workforce management more effective. To discuss that, Wyatt Kash recently spoke with Mark Gorak, principal Director for resources & analysis in the office of the DOD CIO, about the digital tools and resource the department is leaning on to modernize it workforce management and the challenges such a large enterprise faces in managing its workforce. The Trump administration has made its pick for federal CIO, FedScoop has learned. Two sources familiar with the matter confirmed that Greg Barbaccia has been hired for the federal CIO role within the Office of Management and Budget. He replaces Clare Martorana, who served in the role for nearly the entirety of the Biden administration. In the short time the role has been vacant since Martorana stepped down Jan. 20, Deputy Federal CIO Drew Myklegard has filled it in an acting capacity. Barbaccia comes to the role with a background of mostly private-sector experience, though he started his career in the U.S. Army, according to a public bio. He then went on to build a resume as a technology leader at Palantir, where he spent a decade in roles including head of intelligence and investigations; blockchain company Elementus; and San Francisco-based credit underwriting technology company Theorem, where he was most recently CISO before taking the federal CIO role. OpenAI has announced a new more tailored version of ChatGPT called ChatGPT Gov, a service that the company said is meant to accelerate government use of the tool for non-public sensitive data. In an announcement Tuesday, the company said that ChatGPT Gov, which can run in the Microsoft Azure commercial cloud or Azure Government cloud, will give federal agencies increased ability to use OpenAI frontier models. The product is also supposed to make it easier for agencies to follow certain cybersecurity and compliance requirements, while exploring potential applications of the technology, the announcement said. Through ChatGPT Gov, federal agencies can use GPT-4o, along with a series of other OpenAI tools, and build custom search and chat systems developed by 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.

The FedRAMP Emerging Technology Prioritization Framework, which was established last year to accelerate the use of systems like artificial intelligence in the federal cloud, has been eliminated as part of President Donald Trump’s rescission of the Biden administration’s AI executive order. A person with direct knowledge of the matter confirmed the program no longer existed. The Emerging Technology Prioritization Framework, which recently switched to a rolling application process, aimed to allow cloud service providers to request prioritization of cloud services associated with emerging technology in the FedRAMP authorization process. The framework’s final draft was issued last summer, requiring interested cloud providers to apply for prioritization by the end of August 2024. The General Services Administration, which operates the FedRAMP program, said initial determinations would be announced the following month. Pete Hegseth, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Pentagon, was confirmed as the next secretary of defense after Vice President JD Vance cast the tiebreaking vote in the Senate Friday night. Senators voted 50-50 before Vance had to be called in to tip the balance. Hegseth will take the helm at the Defense Department as the DOD gears up for potential wars against high-tech adversaries such as China. During his confirmation process, Hegseth pledged that as defense secretary he would prioritize investments in AI, drones and counter-drone systems, among other technologies that he considers key to military modernization. Soon after his confirmation, Hegseth issued a message to the military on Saturday that expressed his intent to quickly field emerging capabilities to deter China and others. 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.