The Daily Scoop Podcast

Cybersecurity has been getting bigger recognition as an integrated enabler in key U.S. military operations in Iran and Venezuela. That comes on the heels of the Pentagon last year introducing a new cyber mission force generation model as part of the larger Cybercom 2.0 effort. So, who better to discuss the growing prominence of cyber in the defense space than the principal cyber advisors of the various branches overseeing cyber-kinentic integration. At CyberTalks, Daily Scoop host Billy Mitchell hosted a panel with those leaders and a representative from industry to hear the latest on this emerging space. Joining him on the panel were the PCAs from each service — Ann Marie Schumann of the Department of the Navy, Wanda Jones Heath of the Department of the Air Force and Brandon Pugh of the Army — as well as Dave Galoppo, senior director for full spectrum cyber at GDIT. The Department of Energy is rapidly building out multidisciplinary teams to support the Genesis Mission as it prepares to unveil a minimum viable product later this year, according to a senior agency official. The format for the demonstration is to be determined, but progress is palpable. “We’re going to show quite a lot of results this year,” Darío Gil, DOE’s under secretary for science and director of the Genesis Mission, said in an interview with FedScoop. “We’re going to show results on our progress of building AI supercomputers … the software and the agentic framework.” The agency also plans to showcase the efforts behind the data curation used to train “next generation” AI and the results tied to the application of AI in science and engineering, he added. The Genesis Mission launched in November 2025 by way of an executive order that tasked the Energy Department with leading a national, coordinated effort to accelerate innovation and discovery with the latest advancements in AI, quantum and high-performance computing. As part of the initiative, the agency is working to build an integrated platform that draws on federal scientific datasets and expertise from public and private sectors. A demonstration of the Genesis platform’s initial capabilities is required by mid-year, according to the deadlines outlined in the presidential directive. A pullback of educational requirements for federal contracting jobs, including in technology work, moved one step closer to reality Monday. The Skills-Based Federal Contracting Act (H.R. 5235) sailed through the House and now awaits Senate consideration. The bill from Reps. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., and Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., would ban minimum education requirements for personnel in some contracts. Introducing the bill on the House floor ahead of Monday’s vote, Rep. William Timmons, R-S.C., said the legislation ensures federal contractors can “hire who they want to hire without additional red tape.” Mace, who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation, recounted January 2024 testimony from an IBM executive who said “federal contractors are rarely able to place an individual without a four-year degree on a technology services contract, regardless of their qualifications.” Mace said the issue goes “beyond technology and service contracts,” affecting work across the federal government. Eliminating four-year degree requirements would do away with “a paper ceiling” that blocks “talented Americans” from pursuing opportunities in the billion-dollar industry that “shapes the entire labor market,” she 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.

After a series of protests that led to a protracted evaluation period, the General Services Administration is moving forward with the Alliant 3 procurement, announcing Friday the first round of awards for the governmentwide IT services contract. GSA said in an online award notice that it received 133 proposals for the Alliant 3 Governmentwide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) solicitation and selected 43 winners for the first phase. Those not chosen are still eligible for future award phases until the agency has selected all 76 recipients, per the notice. The announcement comes more than a year after the GSA issued the request for proposals for the next iteration of the GWAC award, which has no maximum dollar ceiling, due to unsuccessful bid protests from multiple vendors. The latest iteration of the vehicle is a multiple-award, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract for a variety of IT-based services that builds upon the GSA’s Alliant and Alliant 2 GWACs. With these awards, agencies can issue task orders for services including cybersecurity, data solutions, systems engineering and cloud services, the GSA said. Longtime government contractors like Maximus, Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics Information Technology, and Leidos were among the 43 phase one winners. Democratic lawmakers are once again pushing back on the Department of Homeland Security’s expansive use of surveillance technology, with more than a dozen members of a House Oversight subcommittee expressing concern in a letter to Secretary Kristi Noem over the agency’s processes for collection and analysis of cellphone data.The representatives pointed to recent reports of the agency procuring tools from Penlink, which is said to collect cellphone location data and allow customers to search for devices, and Paragon, a vendor known to enable access to a mobile device without the owner’s knowledge or consent. Without guardrails, these tools introduce risks to data privacy and civil liberties, according to the signatories of the letter, which was led by Rep. Shontel Brown of Ohio, ranking member of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation. “Location data can reveal intimate details of a person’s life, including where they live, work, worship, go to school, or seek medical care,” the lawmakers said. “DHS could use these tools to identify individuals for targeting based solely on their presence in certain locations, without a warrant or probable cause and regardless of their citizenship or residency status.” 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 Chief Information Officer Greg Barbaccia will be adding two new titles — at least temporarily — to his work in government. The General Services Administration announced Thursday that Barbaccia will join the agency as the acting director of Technology Transformation Services. He’ll be replacing Thomas Shedd, one of the few officials left at the agency who helped carry out the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s cost-cutting initiative last year. Shedd will remain at the agency as its senior advisor for fraud prevention, which the GSA said is “an area of increasing importance for the agency and the administration.” The federal CIO was also tapped as senior advisor to the GSA administrator, the agency said. In this role, advising former privacy equity executive Edward Forst, Barbaccia will focus on “emerging technologies, best practices in digital delivery, and cross-government collaboration.” The Pentagon will adhere to existing laws and regulations associated with surveillance, security and democratic processes as it fast-tracks the military’s frontier AI adoption, but it won’t permit companies supplying the technology to determine its rules for operation, Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael told DefenseScoop. His comments come as the Defense Department is locked in a high-stakes dispute with Anthropic about the U.S. military’s use of the startup’s Claude AI model in real-world operations. During a meeting with a small group of reporters on the sidelines of the annual Microelectronics Commons summit Thursday, Michael provided updates on the department’s GenAI.mil rollout and pushed for the ethics-related rift between the Pentagon and Anthropic to be resolved. “I believe and hope that they will ‘cross the Rubicon’ and say, ‘This is common sense. The military has certain use cases. There are laws and regulations that govern how those use cases can be done. We’re willing to comply with them,’” he 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.

Inadequate information-sharing and deficient data practices across the Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Defense were to blame, in part, for the midair collision near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport last year, according to the National Transportation Safety Board’s final report. NTSB found that the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization was “made aware of and had multiple opportunities to identify the risk of a midair collision between airplanes and helicopters,” yet insufficient data analysis, safety assurance systems and risk assessment processes “failed to recognize and mitigate.” While the Army was “unaware” of certain risks tied to DCA due to a nonexistent flight safety data-monitoring program for its helicopters, NTSB also found the Army had a weak safety management system that failed to consistently detect hazards. “The limited access to and use of available objective and subjective proximity data hindered industry and government stakeholders’ ability to identify hazards and mitigate risk,” NTSB said in its report. As part of NTSB’s analysis, the watchdog had 50 to 60 staff members on the investigation, who gathered 19,000 pages of evidence, Jennifer Homendy, chairwoman of the NTSB, testified during a Senate hearing Thursday. The collision, ultimately, was preventable, she said. After successfully launching its own internal chatbot and normalizing the use of artificial intelligence tools for translation, summarization and other diplomatically beneficial uses, the State Department is eyeing the next step in its journey with the emerging technology. “We’re going to roll out agentic AI,” State Department CIO Kelly Fletcher said Thursday during the FedScoop-produced GDIT Emerge event in Washington, D.C. “We’re going to continue to embed AI in our systems.” The State Department has been a federal leader in AI adoption, reflected in robust use case inventories and a general embrace of the technology at its highest levels. Current tech leaders remain focused on trying to “democratize access to generative AI” throughout the agency, Fletcher said. That likely means that any shift toward agentic AI won’t come with a snap of the fingers. Still, the department is currently looking to “consolidate and standardize and simplify around commodities,” she said, which could cover everything from end-user devices to help desks. “It sounds really wonky,” Fletcher added, but “the more you can make it easy for people to do their job, to reduce administrative friction, the better off you’re going to be, right? Part of that is agents. Part of that is consolidation.” 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.

Customs and Border Protection has increased deployments of surveillance technology along the northern border over the past five years despite sluggish hiring levels of IT personnel needed to monitor the tech, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office published Thursday. The staffing rate for information systems specialists has remained below target levels for half a decade but the gap has widened since 2023. CBP officials pointed to low pay, a lengthy background investigation process, a limited local applicant pool, high cost of living and minimal career advancement opportunities as drivers of attrition and the inability to fill open positions. GAO conducted the audit over a nearly two-year period, starting in April 2024 and concluding this month. In examining CBP’s northern border facilities, the watchdog found that CBP did not have a strategy to address the critical staffing gap. The Department of Health and Human Services made several changes to its IT leadership recently, including the addition of a new acting deputy chief information officer and acting deputy chief AI officer. A webpage listing leadership within the Office of the Chief Information Officer currently has David Hong as acting deputy CIO and Arman Sharma as acting deputy chief AI officer. Meanwhile, Kevin Duvall, who was previously deputy CIO and acting deputy CAIO, is no longer on the page. The apparent change-up comes amid reports of a personnel shake-up at the health agency. On Friday, CNN reported that two top aides to Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were departing and new senior counselors would be installed. Those changes were related to preparations for midterm elections, per CNN. It is not clear if the IT leadership changes were for similar reasons. While there is no public indication of when Hong and Sharma began serving as acting deputies, the changes appear to have been made recently. 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. Customs and Border Protection personnel — not American service members — shot down an object with a military laser earlier this week near El Paso, Texas, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation. Troops with Joint Task Force – Southern Border were not authorized to shoot down drones in the area. The task force — which works hand-in-hand with federal law enforcement and serves as the primary military entity for the U.S.-Mexico border mission — trained CBP personnel on the equipment who used it during the incursion. A source familiar told DefenseScoop that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved the transfer of a military counter-drone system to CBP. Sources did not identify the specific laser system that was used. U.S. Border Patrol falls under CBP. The operation reportedly caused interagency turmoil between the Pentagon and Federal Aviation Administration, prompting the latter to issue a 10-day flight restriction that lasted only hours into Wednesday. The Internal Revenue Service moved forward this week with plans to involuntarily move employees with no direct tax experience to perform customer service and analysis duties for this year’s filing season. According to email notices obtained by FedScoop, multiple IRS employees from the agency’s IT and human capital office were informed Monday that they were assigned to a 120-day involuntary detail to the agency’s Taxpayer Services division, as either a customer service representative or a tax examiner. The detail, effective Feb. 22, could be extended beyond the four-month period, per the notice. Joseph Ziegler, the agency’s chief of internal consulting, stated in the notice that neither position will require direct engagement with taxpayers or answering phones, adding that the tax filing season is the “most important time” of the year for the agency. It is unclear how many employees were affected by the temporary reorganization, but it follows a series of shakeups and losses for 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.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s top official rejected claims from lawmakers Tuesday that the Department of Homeland Security component is building a database for protesters. The alleged detractor database has been referenced in several reports by think tanks, letters to DHS officials from lawmakers and in interviews with border czar Tom Homan. During Tuesday’s House Homeland Security Committee hearing, Rep. Lou Correa, D-Calif., cited a well-circulated clip of an ICE agent in Portland, Maine, telling a person videotaping that she would be added to a “nice little database.” “I can’t speak for that individual,” said Todd Lyons, who serves as acting director of ICE. “But I can assure you that there is no database that’s tracking United States citizens.” Despite Lyons’ pushback on the database claims, skepticism is persistent as stakeholders point to reports to the contrary. FedScoop reached out to DHS for clarification. Tricia McLaughlin, the agency’s assistant security for public affairs, reaffirmed that there is no database of domestic terrorists run by DHS. “We do of course monitor and investigate and refer all threats, assaults and obstruction of our officers to the appropriate law enforcement,” McLaughlin said in an email. “Obstructing and assaulting law enforcement is a felony and a federal crime.” A recent attempt at a destructive cyberattack on Poland’s power grid has prompted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to publish a warning for U.S. critical infrastructure owners and operators. Tuesday’s alert follows a Jan. 30 report from Poland’s Computer Emergency Response Team concluded the December attack overlapped significantly with infrastructure used by a Russian government-linked hacking group, and that it targeted 30 wind and photovoltaic farms, among others. CISA said its warning was meant to “amplify” that Polish report. In particular, CISA said the attack highlighted the threats to operational technology and industrial control systems, most commonly used in the energy and manufacturing sectors. And CISA’s alert continues a recent agency focus on securing edge devices like routers or firewalls, after a binding operational directive last week to federal agencies to strip unsupported products from their systems. “The malicious cyber activity highlights the need for critical infrastructure entities with vulnerable edge devices to act now to strengthen their cybersecurity posture against cyber threat activities targeting OT and ICS,” the alert reads. CISA urged owners and operators to review the Polish report, as well as security guidance from other U.S. 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.

Many Americans by now have received their W-2s or other important tax documents, which can only mean one thing: it’s officially tax filing season. You might be ready to submit your documents, but is the IRS itself ready? That’s a big question mark looming over the 2026 filing season after the tax agency unleashed seismic cuts to its workforce last year and has pumped the breaks on many of its efforts to modernize. Matt Bracken, editor in chief of FedScoop, has kept close watch of the IRS under the second Trump administration, chronicling the cuts made in 2025 and measuring the possible impact that could have on processing times and backlogs during this filing season. Matt joins the podcast to discuss the outlook for 2026 tax filing, how AI comes into play and much more about the tax agency’s ongoing efforts to modernize. The Defense Department announced Monday that it will incorporate OpenAI’s ChatGPT into the military’s generative AI platform that’s already being used by more than a million personnel. ChatGPT has been wildly popular in the commercial sector since it was widely released in 2022. Now the Pentagon plans to add the tech to its GenAI.mil system, which DOD leadership — including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — have been pushing hard for the department’s employees to use since it was launched in December. The Army, Navy, Air Force, Space Force and Marine Corps have already adopted the system as their preferred generative AI platform. The Department of Energy is launching a Genesis Mission Consortium as its latest move to deepen the public-private partnerships fueling the AI platform. The initiative, announced Monday, will facilitate structured partnerships as well as working groups, which will focus on ensuring model validation and reliability, addressing data governance and compliance standards, enabling federated data sharing and accelerating research throughput via reduced operational bottlenecks. The consortium will act as a “collaborative hub” and a “single, coordinated access point” for members and resources, according to 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.

The Department of Homeland Security’s watchdog office has launched an audit of the agency’s privacy practices amid allegations that DHS and its components have used facial recognition tools and other technologies to collect data broadly and violate civil liberties.

The Office of Personnel Management finalized a new classification Thursday for career federal workers in policy-related roles that will effectively make them easier to terminate. The new “Schedule Policy/Career” creates an administrative category for nonpolitical “career” federal employees who work in roles that are defined as influencing policy. Workers added to that classification will be converted to “at-will” employees and will no longer be eligible for adverse action procedures or the ability to appeal terminations. Roughly 50,000 employees will be subject to the change, per an estimate in the final rule. Despite the administration’s assertion that the new schedule is for “accountability” and will not be subject to political loyalty tests, federal employee advocates have long argued the policy is a thinly veiled attempt to strip career employees of safeguards in an effort to replace them with workers who are politically aligned with the president. The announcement from OPM on Thursday stated that the final rule explicitly does not allow discrimination based on politics, prohibits use of the new schedule to reshape the workforce or conduct mass layoffs, and would protect whistleblowers. OPM also stated that it would take on a role to review agency actions to ensure they are compliant. A Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency order published Thursday directs federal agencies to stop using “edge devices” like firewalls and routers that their manufacturers no longer support. It’s a stab at tackling one of the most persistent and difficult-to-manage avenues of attack for hackers, a vector that has factored into some of the most consequential and most common types of exploits in recent years. New edge-device vulnerabilities surface frequently. Under the binding operational directive CISA released Thursday, federal civilian executive branch (FCEB) agencies must inventory edge devices in their systems that vendors no longer support within three months, and replace those on a dedicated list with supported devices within one year. To aid agencies in following the directive, CISA is producing a list of end-of-service edge devices. CISA developed the directive in conjunction with the Office of Management and Budget, and puts a bit more muscle behind a decade-old OMB circular on agencies phasing out unsupported technologies. Despite being called “binding operational directives,” CISA has no authority to mandate that agencies carry out the orders — although agencies have demonstrated they usually seek to follow them, and there are ways that CISA can work to ensure compliance. The private sector pays attention to CISA’s directives even though they don’t apply to companies. 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.