The Daily Scoop Podcast

The Army will be creating a marketplace to better match drones with units based on their requirements. With so many vendors providing a variety of unmanned aerial systems, it can be difficult for formations to determine if certain systems will in fact meet their needs. Col. Danielle Medaglia, project manager for UAS at program executive office for aviation, shared details about the new initiative during a recent teleconference, saying it is meant to ensure drones products do what they advertise they can do, along with confirming NDAA compliance and other specs. The forthcoming marketplace is part of the drone revolution occurring within the Pentagon. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a directive last month on “Unleashing U.S. Military Drone Dominance,” which sought to improve how the department develops and employs small UAS. That directive calls for every squad to be equipped with low-cost, expendable drones by the end of 2026. Army offiicals called the new marketplace and approach a “fundamental shift” in how traditional acquisition is conducted. The goal is to get systems into the hands of troops as quickly as possible. The Pentagon’s two-year public competition to spur the development of cyber-reasoning systems that use large language models to autonomously find and patch vulnerabilities in open-source software concluded Friday with $8.5 million awarded to three teams of security specialists at DEF CON. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s AI Cyber Challenge seeks to address a persistent bottleneck in cybersecurity — patching vulnerabilities before they are discovered or exploited by would-be attackers. DARPA Director Stephen Winchell said: “We’re living in a world right now that has ancient digital scaffolding that’s holding everything up. A lot of the code bases, a lot of the languages, a lot of the ways we do business, and everything we’ve built on top of it has all incurred huge technical debt… It is a problem that is beyond human scale.” The seven semifinalists that earned their spot out of 90 teams convened at last year’s DEF CON were scored against their models’ ability to quickly, accurately and successfully identify and generate patches for synthetic vulnerabilities across 54 million lines of code. The models discovered 77% of the vulnerabilities presented in the final scoring round and patched 61% of those synthetic defects at an average speed of 45 minutes, the competition organizers said. The models also discovered 18 real zero-day vulnerabilities, including six in the C programming language and 12 in Java codebases. The teams’ models patched none of the C codebase zero-days, but automatically patched 11 of the Java zero-days, according to the final results shared Friday. Team Atlanta took the first-place prize of $4 million, Trail of Bits won second place and $3 million in prize money, and Theori ranked third, taking home $1.5 million. The competition’s organizers allocated an additional $1.4 million in prize money for participants who can demonstrate when their technology is deployed into critical infrastructure. 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 U.S. judiciary announced plans to increase security for sensitive information on its case management system following what it described as “recent escalated cyberattacks of a sophisticated and persistent nature.” In a Thursday statement, the federal judiciary said it’s “taking additional steps to strengthen protections for” that information. It also said its “further enhancing security of the system and to block future attacks, and it is prioritizing working with courts to mitigate the impact on litigants.” The statement from the third branch comes one day after a Politico report revealed that its case filing system had recently been breached. That report cited unnamed sources who were concerned that the identities of confidential court informants may have been compromised. While the federal courts’ statement acknowledged a recent escalation in cyberattacks on its case management system, it didn’t confirm details of the reported breach. In response to a FedScoop request for additional information about the reported attack, a spokesman for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts declined to comment and pointed back to the statement. The reported hack and statement come after a cyberbreach of the same system in 2020. In early 2021, during a hack of SolarWinds’ Orion products, the federal courts disclosed that it found “apparent compromise” of the Case Management/Electronic Case Files system (CM/ECF) and was investigating the matter. Its statement after that breach similarly indicated that “federal courts are immediately adding new security procedures to protect highly sensitive confidential documents filed with the courts.” Jamie Holcombe is joining Maryland-based technology company US AI after wrapping up roughly six-and-a-half years as the chief information officer of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Holcombe, who served as both CIO and chief AI officer at USPTO, will be vice president of the AI firm, with a focus on scaling its technology throughout the federal government, according to a Thursday announcement from US AI shared with FedScoop. Holcombe’s last day at the agency was Wednesday, according to a USPTO spokeswoman. Deborah Stephens, deputy CIO for the agency, will serve as acting CIO. At USPTO, Holcombe oversaw “one of the federal government’s largest IT transformations,” per the announcement. That work included leading the agency’s transition to a cloud-first environment and the launch of its AI Lab, where USPTO can test use cases. As part of his new role, Holcombe will work to expand US AI’s Intelligent Computing Platform, which is aimed at accelerating the adoption of AI in sectors that are highly regulated, across government. He will also lead the company’s strategy to align its technology with its use in public sector and regulated areas, scaling codeless and zero-trust tools, and build on the company’s “values of clarity, security, and accessibility in AI deployment.” 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 been on a roll lately, negotiating what it calls OneGov agreements with some of the federal government’s biggest IT vendors. On Thursday, GSA announced it has negotiated a governmentwide purchasing agreement with Amazon Web Services that could save agencies up to $1 billion through credits for AWS services. The deal is the latest in a flurry of OneGov agreements GSA has initiated under the Trump administration to consolidate and centralize IT purchasing at scale and unlock greater, consistent savings for civilian agencies, rather than agencies negotiating one-off contracts with vendors themselves. As part of the governmentwide package, AWS has come to the table offering direct incentive credits that could total up to $1 billion in value for cloud services, modernization support and training. The deal will run through Dec. 31, 2028. In addition to streamlining federal IT procurement by working as a single, unified federal entity, GSA’s OneGov initiative also aims to work directly with technology developers themselves, rather than intermediaries such as value-added resellers. As such, GSA touts the potential for additional savings by contracting directly with the cloud giant for its services. That deal comes just a day after GSA announced a similar one with OpenAI that will offer its ChatGPT tool to federal agencies for just $1. It marks the artificial intelligence firm’s latest effort to expand use of its generative AI chatbot across the federal government. Like the AWS deal, GSA said the agreement with OpenAI supports the White House’s AI Action Plan, which encourages widespread adoption of AI in the federal government. Through the partnership, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise product can be purchased by federal agencies for $1 per agency for one year. GSA called this a “deeply discounted rate.” Commenting on the deal, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement: “One of the best ways to make sure AI works for everyone is to put it in the hands of the people serving the country.” 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 Senate voted to confirm Sean Cairncross as national cyber director Saturday, giving the Trump administration one of its top cyber officials after a more than five-month process. The vote was 59-35. President Donald Trump nominated Cairncross on Feb. 12. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing on his nomination in early June, then voted to advance him that same month. At his hearing, Cairncross said he’d be focused on policy coordination. He fielded questions from senators about his lack of cyber experience, the biggest cyber threats, cuts to federal cybersecurity personnel and more. Cairncross has held leadership positions inside and outside of government where there’s been a tenuous connection to cybersecurity. He served as CEO of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a foreign aid agency, in the first Trump administration, along with roles in the White House. He’s also a former top official at the Republican National Committee. Despite that, Cairncross has the vocal support of a number cyber experts and past government cyber officials. A new commission has been established to chart a path toward developing an independent Cyber Force for the U.S. military. The commission was started by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in partnership with the Cyber Solarium Commission 2.0 project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. While there have been calls historically to create a new dedicated, standalone cyber service, the effort has gained steam in recent years. Congress has sought to address these shortfalls, mostly through studies, previously. The fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act initially mandated a study for alternate organizational models for military cyber elements, to include a Cyber Force, which was considered a watered-down version from previous drafts. The new commission won’t be examining the efficacy of a Cyber Force — something congressional studies have already been tasked with doing — but rather, looking at the foundational issues of establishing that type of entity such as the organizational structure, core functions, roles and responsibilities, and necessary authorities. 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.

Organizations and leaders representing the interests of statistical professionals and public data access strongly criticized President Donald Trump’s order to fire the leader of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after lower than expected jobs numbers Friday, saying his comments undermine public trust in that information. Their responses came after Trump posted on his social media site Friday afternoon with allegations that Commissioner Erika McEntarfer “faked” BLS statistics in an effort to help Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, pointing to instances of revisions — which are a standard part of the agency’s process. Trump’s comments and order to fire McEntarfer appeared to primarily be in response to a BLS jobs report that showed lower figures than anticipated, which sent shockwaves through the statistical community. Multiple leaders, including his own former BLS commissioner, spoke out against the action in no uncertain terms, saying the president’s comments politicize the data. President Donald Trump has nominated Edward Forst, a longtime financial services executive, to serve as the next administrator of the General Services Administration. The nomination was received in the Senate and referred to the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Thursday, congressional records show. According to his LinkedIn profile, Forst was most recently the chairman of Lion Capital, a private equity firm, and previously served as president and CEO of Cushman and Wakefield, a real estate services firm. Earlier in his career, Forst spent nearly 17 years at Goldman Sachs, and in 2008, he served as an adviser to the Treasury secretary for a year, per his LinkedIn. The nomination follows various staff shakeups at GSA and comes just weeks after Trump tapped State Department leader Michael Rigas to serve as GSA’s acting 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.

The General Services Administration is looking into how it can implement its internal artificial intelligence chatbot across the federal government, the agency’s top AI and data official said Thursday, the latest indication that the Trump administration is planning on streamlining government access to AI. The new initiative marks the “next iteration” of the GSAi platform, Zach Whitman, the agency’s chief AI officer and data officer, said during a speech at the Digital Government Institute’s annual convention in Washington, D.C. The GSA rolled out GSAi internally in March after a lengthy research and development process, which involved an AI safety team that evaluated a number of major AI vendors. Like other AI chatbots available to the public, the tool was initially designed to respond to user prompts and assist in basic tasks. GSAi gives users access to a number of models, including ones from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, and aims to increase workflow efficiency at the agency. This next chapter, Whitman said, is “one where other agencies could use what we have, use it in an isolated environment, use it for their specific purposes and own it in a tenant-based model.” The Trump administration on Wednesday announced an initiative to improve the digital health ecosystem for patients and providers, leaning on the voluntary support of dozens of health and tech companies. More than 60 companies — including data networks, health systems and providers, and developers of AI and other applications — have committed to improving the flow of electronic health information, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. That group of adopters includes tech leaders such as Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Google, and OpenAI. The announcement comes after a May request for information that generated nearly 1,400 comments, which “were instrumental” in forming the initiative, according to CMS. It also appears to primarily be a collaborative effort between CMS and the Department of Government Efficiency. In addition to CMS’s announcement, the White House held an event Wednesday with remarks from CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, DOGE acting director Amy Gleason, President Donald Trump, and Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In her remarks, Gleason spoke about her daughter’s experience navigating the health system as someone with a rare disease and the difficulty posed by transferring physical copies of her medical history from place to place. 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 digital footprint left by DOGE in agency computer systems and IT networks would be thoroughly examined under legislation introduced Wednesday by a trio of Senate Democrats. The Pick Up After Your DOGE Act from Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts would require the administrator of the Elon Musk-created tech collective to provide a full accounting to the U.S. comptroller general of all the agencies and IT systems that DOGE accessed. Those systems would then be subject to comprehensive performance and security audits. “The DOGE-boys have weaseled their way into Americans’ most sensitive data systems, claiming to hunt ‘waste, fraud, and abuse,’ while actually creating waste, fraud, and abuse. They’re destroying Americans’ trust in once-reliable government systems and could be hawking your stolen data to their friends in Big Tech and AI,” Whitehouse said in a press release. He added that the Pick Up After Your DOGE Act protects seniors and all Americans by fixing any bugs or backdoors that DOGE may have purposefully or negligently created in Social Security, Medicare, and other highly sensitive government data systems. The audit would be conducted by the Government Accountability Office, which has been bombarded with congressional requests to probe DOGE’s agency IT dives since the beginning of the Trump administration. The United States Military Academy abruptly ended the appointment of Jen Easterly to a high-profile academic position in West Point’s Department of Social Sciences, according to a memorandum issued Wednesday by the Secretary of the Army. On Tuesday, the academy announced that Easterly was named as the next Robert F. McDermott Distinguished Chair, a department position created in 1943 to bring a leading scholar, practitioner, or expert in the fields of social sciences — such as economics, political science, or international relations — to West Point. In a since-deleted LinkedIn post, the academy welcomed the former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency director and academy alumnus after “an extraordinary career of service in the public and private sectors,” adding that her “unique perspective — combining military experience, advanced academic training, private sector innovation, and senior government service — makes her ideally suited to guide discussions on the critical issues facing our nation and the world.” After the announcement, far-right activist Laura Loomer suggested on X that Easterly should not be named to the position, due to her work under the Biden administration, allegedly with Nina Jankowicz, who served as the executive director of the Disinformation Governance Board of the United States. (Jankowicz later Wednesday posted on BlueSky that she had never worked with Easterly.) On Wednesday, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll announced in a post on X that the position would be rescinded, and a full review of the academy’s hiring practices would be conducted. 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.

There’s a new position in the U.S. government: Federal chief artificial intelligence officer. Gregory Barbaccia has begun to refer to himself as the Federal CAIO, in addition to his current role as the federal government’s chief information officer. A recent interview with CNBC referred to him this way and a federal official focused on AI confirmed to FedScoop that Barbaccia had used that title in a recent meeting. In a social media post last week, Barbaccia also used both titles. The new title comes amid the Trump administration’s continued focus on federal adoption of artificial intelligence. It follows the White House AI Action Plan, which was released last week and endorsed “transformative use of AI [that] can help deliver the highly responsive government the American people expect and deserve.” Still, the AI Action Plan makes no mention of a new position of CAIO for the whole federal government. Neither does the executive order that established the council or subsequent Office of Management and Budget actions. There was no federal CAIO in the Biden administration, and it’s not clear any formal action has been taken to establish the position. Federal agencies are increasingly turning to generative artificial intelligence to further their missions, according to a new watchdog report that found use cases of the emerging technology jumping by ninefold in a selection of nearly a dozen agencies last year. In a report published Tuesday, the Government Accountability Office said generative AI use cases across a group of 11 federal agencies increased from 32 to 282 cases from 2023 to 2024, per an analysis of those agencies’ inventories. The GAO laid out several ways these agencies harnessed generative AI last year, stating the technology can “improve written communications, information access efficiency, and program status tracking.” Examples included the Department of Veterans Affairs using automation for medical imaging processing in veterans’ diagnostic services, along with the Department of Health and Human Services’ initiative to extract information from publications regarding the containment of the poliovirus. HHS reported the largest jump out of the 11 agencies, going from seven generative AI use cases in 2023 to 116 in 2024, according to the report. 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 Democrats are raising alarms over the government’s use of Grok, Elon Musk's AI chatbot. They express concerns about its controversial background, especially after reports of its antisemitic content. Meanwhile, a Starlink outage has revealed the military's vulnerability, impacting essential communications. The integration of AI in government and military reliance on satellite services are hot topics, reflecting broader issues around technology and ethics.

The likely successor to the late Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., hopes to continue his former boss’s commitment to federal IT reform if elected to Congress, while also gearing up to build his own legacy in the era of DOGE. Democrat James Walkinshaw told FedScoop in an interview last week that carrying on Connolly’s federal IT advocacy is especially important to him as widespread workforce and program cuts present new challenges for the government’s IT staff and related initiatives. While issues like IT modernization and procurement might “become less and less sexy by the day” amid other controversies in Washington, Walkinshaw said he is a “believer” that Congress should keep its foot on the pedal in this space. Walkinshaw, who served as Connolly’s chief of staff for 11 years, is vying for Virginia’s 11th congressional seat this fall to succeed the late congressman following his death from cancer in May. He currently serves on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. During the interview with FedScoop, Walkinshaw shared his thoughts on the lasting impacts of DOGE, his concerns with agency adoption of AI and his policy goals, if elected. The IRS has lost a quarter of its workforce since the beginning of the Trump administration, including thousands from the tax agency’s IT business unit, according to newly released watchdog data. A snapshot report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that more than 25,000 IRS employees either took the deferred resignation offer, retired or were separated from the agency in another way, while nearly 300 staffers were terminated via reduction-in-force actions. Combined, those departures represent 25% of the agency’s workforce, which has downsized from roughly 103,000 staffers to 77,428 as of May. According to TIGTA, the IRS’s IT business unit has lost 25% of its staffers over the same period, leaving the division with just over 2,100 employees. The IT management job series across agency units is down 23%, per the report. TIGTA also confirmed previous FedScoop reporting on the IRS’s move in late March to place nearly 50 IT executives on administrative leave. Among those employees, 26 eventually departed via Treasury Department incentive offerings, while another 22 are still on admin leave, per the watchdog. 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.