The Daily Scoop Podcast

Today… on The Daily Scoop Podcast… from The Scoop News Group. OPM’s tech-friendly director steps down And, inside the debate on banning ransomware payments

Today we have a special interview recorded from the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, which last week was home of Google Cloud Next 2024. While there, I had the tremendous opportunity to speak at length with Karen Dahut, Google Public Sector CEO. During our conversation, we covered a lot of ground, taking in all of the announcements from Next, reflecting on the upcoming two-year birthday of Google Public Sector and what’s been accomplished in that time, how generative AI is permeating the public sector, and what’s ahead. This is one of many interviews captured at Google Next, so make sure to tune into the others released throughout this week.

Google's Leigh Palmer on the need for transparency in public sector AI by The Daily Scoop Podcast

The Daily Scoop Podcast is available on all the podcast platforms. If you’ve already rated the podcast on your platform of choice… thanks! High ratings and good reviews of the show… help more people find it. The Daily Scoop Podcast is a production of the Scoop News Group in Washington D-C. Adam Butler and Carlin Fisher help put this show together… and the entire Scoop News Group team contributes. We’ll be back tomorrow with more top headlines. Until then, I’m your host Billy Mitchell. Thanks for listening.

Discussing the evolution and future of FedRAMP, GSA's Eric Mill shares insights on the program's changes. Explore the transition to a more tech-focused strategy, embracing data-driven approaches. Navigating the search for a new director and the importance of stakeholder engagement in shaping the program's future.

Kiersten Todt has worked on just about every hot-button cybersecurity issue you can imagine. Currently the CEO of Liberty Group Ventures, her most recent role in government was as the chief of staff at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. As a Senate staffer, she drafted key parts of the legislation that created the Department of Homeland Security, and during the Obama years, she was the executive director of the Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity. She sits down with CyberScoop’s Elias Groll for a wide-ranging conversation about the evolving cybersecurity policy landscape.

Since 2016, the Department of Defense and other national security agencies have partnered with the Hacking 4 Defense program allowing students at universities across the U.S. and the globe to address critical problems facing the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community. Launched as a pilot out of Stanford, the program has expanded to more than 63 universities and enlisted more than 3,000 students for the course. And more recently, participating universities have partnered with our allies and universities in the U.K. and Australia to work on common problems. This week, the latest Hacking 4 Defense cohort is beginning, and it’s the largest ever, with 37 universities teaching 39 H4 courses, supporting 120 student teams with over 500 students between the U.S. and U.K. Joining the podcast to discuss the evolution of Hacking 4 Defense and what to expect from the latest cohort is Pete Newell, co-founder and CEO of BMNT, the defense innovation firm that runs the Hacking 4 Defense program.

The FedScoop news team is growing … sort of. We recently promoted our editorial fellow Caroline Nihill to a permanent member of the reporting team. You’ve likely seen Caroline’s work since joining the team last summer, covering developments in AI, shift in the Technology Modernization Fund and opening FedScoop’s aperture wider on Capitol Hill. But now that she’s a full-time member of the team, we wanted to invite her on so DailyScoop listeners and readers of FedScoop.com could get to know her better. Caroline Joins the podcast to discuss how she came to be a reporter with FedScoop, what she’s most passionate about covering at the intersection of the federal government and technology, and what you can come to expect from her coverage going forward.

Bill Eggers, Executive director of Deloitte’s Center for Government Insights, discusses Deloitte's latest report on the top trends transforming government in 2024. The podcast explores radical transformation in government operations, the importance of data, cloud, automation, AI, and digital twins in reshaping government services, and the focus on outcomes rather than just technology. It also covers key trends like data-fueled government, digital transformation, and human-centered experiences for enhancing user experience and efficiency in government services.

The Air Force Research Lab last March established its Digital Capabilities Directorate to speed up its modernization pursuits and enable its scientists and engineers to explore and more efficiently collaborate via a growing suite of emerging technologies. The directorate fuses together former AFRL’s elements, like its Research Collaboration and Computing Directorate, as well as the lab’s former Business Process Reengineering Division and others. It also has roots that trace back to a temporary digital “war room” that was stood up to help drive innovation. Alexis Bonnell is Air Force Research Lab CIO and director of the Digital Capabilities Directorate, appointed to those roles last July. She joins the podcast to discuss her journey to the role, her priorities nearly a year in and how things are shifting as AI becomes an increasingly important part of AFRL’s enterprise IT.