Federal retirement claims down, as backlog hit lows for 2026

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<ul><li style="margin-top:20px;">The fewest number of federal employees submitted their retirement papers in August as compared to the rest of 2026. The Office of Personnel Managements says it received only 7,618 retirement claims last month. This is down from more than 10,000 claims OPM received in July. Additionally, OPM's backlog of retirement claims is at the lowest of the year at just over 15,400. The average number of days to process a claim for August also dropped considerably: to 70 days for a digital claim, down from 98 days the month before, and to 79 days for all claims, down from 109 days in July. 
<div style="display:block; font-style: italic;">(<a href="https://www.opm.gov/retirement-center/retirement-statistics/retirement-processing-status.pdf">Federal retirement claims down, as the backlog hit lows for 2026</a> - OPM)</div></li><p></p><li style="margin-top:20px;">For the second time in a matter of weeks, the Justice Department won a major settlement from a federal contractor over allegations of violating the False Claims Act for failing to comply with anti-discrimination rules. Accenture will pay $25 million to resolve allegations that it discriminated against an employee or applicant for employment because of race or sex. Accenture's settlement follows a similar one from Deloitte in late August. Deloitte agreed to pay $21.5 million to resolve comparable allegations.
<div style="display:block; font-style: italic;">(<a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/accenture-agrees-pay-25m-resolve-alleged-employment-discrimination-violations">Accenture to pay $25M to settle False Claims Act hiring allegations</a> - Justice Department)</div></li><p></p><li style="margin-top:20px;">A federal court has ruled that a plan for major staff reductions at the Federal Emergency Management Agency was unlawful. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston found that a plan to cut FEMA’s workforce by up to 50% violated the law. In a late Friday ruling, Illston sided with arguments advanced by labor groups that had sued FEMA over the planned cuts. While FEMA did lay off some staff, the agency ultimately backed away from the steep cuts envisioned in the plan. The court ruling found Department of Homeland Security officials pushed for the FEMA cuts even though the agency’s own supervisors objected. Illston found that violated post-Hurricane Katrina reforms that prohibit DHS from making substantial changes at FEMA.<div style="display:block; font-style: italic;">(<a href="https://federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/2026/09/federal-judge-rules-trump-dhs-plan-for-50-fema-staffing-cuts-was-unlawful/">Federal judge rules Trump DHS plan for 50% FEMA staffing cuts was unlawful</a> - Associated Press)</div></li><p></p><li style="margin-top:20px;">The number of veterans using Department of Veterans Affairs services has skyrocketed in 2026. The agency says more than 250,000 new veterans have enrolled in VA healthcare so far in 2026. It credits several reasons for this increase, including opening 41 new health care clinics since January 2025 and reducing by 70% the backlog of veterans waiting for benefits. Additionally, VA says another reason for this influx of veterans is the reduced average time for processing disability claims, which decreased by 46% since January 2025. Along with opening new facilities, VA also has spent nearly $5 billion this year to modernize, repair and improve health care facilities, which it says is the largest nonrecurring maintenance investment in the department's history. <div style="display:block; font-style: italic;">(<a href="https://news.va.gov/press-room/more-than-250000-new-veterans-enrolled-in-va-healthcare-so-far-in-2026/">VA sees surge in new veterans enrolling in health care services</a> - Federal News Network)</div></li><p></p>

<li style="margin-top:20px;">The Defense Department reinstated more than 500 service members discharged for refusing the COVID vaccine and issued more than $21 million in backpay, according to officials. Anthony Tata, the under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said the department will “continue to reach back out to every veteran whose career was cut short.” Last year, DoD launched a media campaign, sent letters of apology and issued a series of policies to reinstate service members who were booted from the military for refusing the COVID vaccine. Approximately 8,700 service members were forced out of the military for refusing the vaccine in 2021.<div style="display:block; font-style: italic;">(<a href="https://x.com/USW_PR_HONTata/status/2099535391120396478">DoD reinstates over 500 unvaccinated service members, pays over $21 million in backpay</a> - X (formerly Twitter))</div></li><p></p><li style="margin-top:20px;">Republican Sen. Deb Fischer said there is “a lot of work that has to be done” to build broad support in Congress for the Trump administration’s ambitious Golden Dome missile defense system. Fischer said lawmakers still do not have any meaningful information about the system more than a year after President Donald Trump announced the initiative. “There's not a clear understanding of this layered defense that we're looking at when it comes to defending our homeland,” Fischer said. Her comments come after a group of lawmakers sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in June calling on DoD to share its plans for the system before the department “spends one more taxpayer dollar” on the Golden Dome initiative.<div style="display:block; font-style: italic;">(<a href="https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-news/2026/09/golden-dome-needs-congressional-buy-in-but-lawmakers-are-still-in-the-dark-about-what-it-would-entail/">Golden Dome needs congressional buy-in, but lawmakers are still in the dark about what it would entail </a> - Federal News Network)</div></li><p></p><li style="margin-top:20px;">The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency says AI can be used to pull off insider threat attacks. In updated insider threat guidance, CISA says organizations should consider how both trusted insiders and external actors could misuse an internal AI system to compromise security. Risks include data poisoning, AI model tampering and social engineering. CISA is urging organizations to train employees on AI usage, secure their existing AI tools and classify sensitive data. <div style="display:block; font-style: italic;">(<a href="https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2026-09/cisa-insider-threat-mitigation-guide-2026.pdf">CISA insider threat mitigation guide</a> - CISA)</div></li><p></p></ul>
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As the Pentagon rethinks CMMC, cybersecurity isn’t pausing

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<blockquote><p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>Last week, the window for the comments on the CMMC rules from DoD closed, and also DoD issued a class deviation regarding CMMC compliance. Help us sort out the signals there. What should people be reading?</p>
<p><strong>Stephanie Kostro </strong>So a lot has been happening, Terry, on the CMMC front this year. And it started really in earnest a few months ago with, I’ll cite the chief information officer from the Department of War’s memo in July, regarding pausing and suspending CMMC’s requirements. That said, there’s been a lot of chatter about what that meant. So we welcomed the class deviation that came out just a few days ago regarding instructions to contracting officers about what they should be including in contracts. And so it offered us a really good insight into how the building — the Department of War — is approaching CMMC. I’ve been fielding lots of questions from contractors about what should they be doing, what should be looking for. So let me just level set, if I may, what this class deviation is and what it is not. The first question that we get is, “is this the death knell of CMMC,” the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification Program that has been around for a few years and gone through many permutations, right? This is not the death knell of CMMC. In no way, shape, or form does this class deviation say, CMMC is dead. I can insert all sorts of pop culture references to “bring out your dead” or, you know, “I’m not dead yet,” that kind of thing. I would say that this is not an obituary for CMMC. What it does do is reference that July memo from the chief information officer suspending the program, but not suspending cybersecurity requirements. And let me just unpack that for you, Terry, just really quickly. The core cybersecurity requirements remain, and that is — I’m going to dork out with you here — DFARS 252.204-7012, that is the safeguarding requirements. It remains pertinent that contractors have to live up to NIST Special Publication 800-171, Revision 2; that is still the control. It does look at the Supplier Performance Risk System, which is what we call SPRS, and those scoring requirements, those are still the same. And there is still an annual affirmation of compliance with all of these requirements. Those things are still in existence. So I just want to dispel any rumors, myths, etc., out there among contractors that this class deviation guts cybersecurity. It does not.</p>

<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>Stephanie, with those provisions though, what’s the difference between this and the CMMC rules then?</p>
<p><strong>Stephanie Kostro </strong>CMMC really laid out different levels. So, level 1 was the basic level. If you were a CMMC level 1, you did a self-assessment and you could affirm that you are cybersecure to a certain level. Level 2 is still retained that you can do this self-assessment. What it does right now is it gets rid of the outside assessment piece — we call them C3PAOs, so it’s a cybersecurity entity outside of your company that would come in and certify your system or your approach to cybersecurity. And so it does suspend that. It suspends the Phase 2 transition, where you would start going towards this level 2 by an outside assessor. Level 3 also exists; it’s the toughest CMMC level. That is also still suspended. So it retains the self-assessments, it retains baseline compliance with NIST 800-171-Rev. 2, which I mentioned earlier. And it does require contracting officers to update active solicitations to reflect all these changes. So this is — I think it was more than 80 pages of a class deviation, they showed the line-in, line-out. It should be very, very clear what is still required and what is no longer required right now. Meanwhile, Terry, we are still waiting for the department to share the results of its review that the CIO asked for two months ago. Right about now is when the review should be ending, and hopefully the department and the officials will come and tell industry what the results of that review are and what industry will be required to do going forward.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>Stephanie Kostro is president of the Professional Services Council. Stephanie, on that last point, during this 60-day window, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to lots of contractors and I would say they fall into two buckets. One is, “I’m so proud I was an early adopter of CMMC Level 2 and got my certification. That’s my competitive advantage.” And the other group of contractors says, “I’m not ever doing that unless I absolutely, positively have to.” So when you think about all of the uncertainty around this, what should contractors be thinking about which bucket is best?</p>
<p><strong>Stephanie Kostro </strong>I have had the same experience, Terry, where we’ve got these two schools of thought. And I would say that if you have undertaken an outside review, an outside assessment of your approach to cybersecurity, that was money well spent because there are still going to be cybersecurity requirements going forward. And let’s be honest, sunk costs are sunk. You’ve already paid the outside assessment. You’ve got the piece of paper, virtual or not, that you can wave in front of people. And I think that was a good investment. That said, if requirements do change going forward, I don’t blame companies for going, hey, you know, I haven’t started my assessment, I’m way back in the queue waiting for my assessment, I’m going to hit pause until I find out what the actual requirements are. So I think that’s a good way forward as well. What we’re watching for, Terry, are a few things. I mentioned earlier that I would love to talk to department officials, have them talk to industry about this review that’s been going on for the last two months and where they’re going. I would love a little bit of insight into that Magic 8 Ball there. I would also say we’re looking for another memo from the Department of War CIO, right? Everything in this class deviation that just came out was predicated, or cited as its authority, the July memo from the CIO. I would hope that the CIO would come out with a new memo once all of this officially says, you know, here’s where we’re going with this. So that’s what we’re watching for as well. I would love to have conversations with department officials on where they’re heading once they figure it out themselves.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>Well, Stephanie, let’s shift from cybersecurity to border security. That’s been a topic for PSC over the last year, and coming back onto the top of your agenda, what’s happening now that’s bringing it back to the forefront for you?</p>
<p><strong>Stephanie Kostro </strong>Border security has been a hot topic, not just for Professional Services Council member companies, which represent, as you know, Terry, some 400 companies that do government services and technology solutions for every single agency within the federal government. A huge federal customer over the last few years, to be honest, has been the Department of Homeland Security and specifically Customs and Border Protection. Our vice president for civilian agencies, Krista Sweet, has worked tirelessly with DHS and CBP in particular to organize a border tour out to the southwest border. We are bringing a dozen or so companies with PSC staff to San Diego and Los Angeles, Long Beach. Now, you may be wondering, what kind of boondoggle is this? You’re going in September? The answer is simple. We had scheduled this border tour to go to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, to also go to some land border crossings near San Diego — so the Office of Field Operations in San Ysidro and Otay Mesa, the ports of entry and the border patrol along the U.S.-Mexico land border near San Diego. We organized this trip a year ago, but then there was a shutdown, the longest ever in U.S. federal government history. And then DHS remained shut down earlier this year. So even though CBP had money because of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and Reconciliation 2.0, we were still facing a shutdown. So we are finally having this trip. It’s going to be Sept. 30 and Oct. 1. They’re going to hit all of these great ports of entry to see what’s going on. They’re going to get operational briefings, facility tours, tech demonstrations, and they’re going to have direct conversations with frontline officers and agents. I’m so excited for this trip, and I’m thrilled that it’s finally happening.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>What does an on-the-ground experience change for these contractors beyond the normal business-to-government conversations?</p>

<p><strong>Stephanie Kostro </strong>You know, I think we live so often in our D.C. bubble, Terry … we’re here talking to headquarters staff who operate in these big, beautiful buildings here in Arlington or at St. Elizabeth’s or in downtown D.C. And we don’t actually talk to folks who, from a domestic border perspective, have boots on the ground. You know, I come from a Department of Defense-slash-War background, so I’m used to talking about boots on the ground in overseas environments, right? But literally at these ports of entry, they are the first line of defense when it comes to making sure that the borders are protected. And this is a nonpartisan issue, or a bipartisan issue. Democrats and Republicans alike all have often talked about the border. Contractors talking to folks who have skin in the game, who are actually walking the border, who are checking in all of the cargo that comes on ships from overseas, or even just that come into our territorial waters — it’s important for contractors to understand that these are the customers they’re serving. It’s not the folks sitting here in the National Capital Region. It’s those folks out on the operational field. So I think as we get companies out there talking to folks, it’s going to bring home why it is that they do what they do and how can they do it better.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>And do you see a change in understanding from the government frontline folks when they actually talk to the contractors as well?</p>
<p><strong>Stephanie Kostro </strong>One hundred percent. Because, you know, they look at it and go, oh, you guys are in D.C. and you always talk to the head shed or you talk to headquarters folks; you never come and talk to us about what we need. And this changes their perspective as well. What’s fortunate is when you get an industry association like PSC organizing this trip, the lawyers are also happy because we’re not just bringing one company to talk to a field office. We’re bringing a dozen companies. So you don’t get that conflict of interest either. I think at the end of the day, we would love to do this more often. You know, PSC has long had a series on the Hill, called PSC on the Hill, where we do demonstrations for congressional staff and members. This is a PSC in the Field, and I love this series of events, and I hope to have more of them going forward.</p></blockquote>
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Republican Rep. Massie moves to impeach Defense Secretary Hegseth over Iran war

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<h1>Republican Rep. Massie moves to impeach Defense Secretary Hegseth over Iran war</h1>
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                Rep. Thomas Massie, R-KY, moved to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday over the Iran war.
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<p>Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky moved Tuesday to impeach Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth over the war in Iran.</p> <p>Congressman Massie, a long-time critic of the Trump administration, read the articles of impeachment aloud from the House floor just after the chamber convened at noon. Massie alleges that Hegseth has waged the Iran war illegally, among other "high crimes and misdemeanors."</p> <p>Massie alleges that Hegseth initiated the conflict unlawfully, defied Congress' order to <a href="https://www.npr.org/2026/03/11/nx-s1-5744981/pentagon-iran-missile-school-hegseth" target="_blank">withdraw from the conflict and incurred unnecessary civilian casualties.</a></p> <p>Massie has repeatedly clashed with members of his own party in recent years and is <a href="https://www.npr.org/2026/05/19/nx-s1-5827183/massie-gallrein-kentucky-race-results-trump" target="_blank">ending his time in office after losing his primary </a>to an opponent backed by President Trump. Massie's clashes with Trump extend beyond the war with Iran. Working alongside Democrat Ro Khanna of California, Massie led the successful effort to compel the Trump administration to release files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.</p> 
<p>Republicans in theory have enough votes to defeat the proposal, though it could be a complicated vote for their members in competitive elections districts. <br/>The war, which is incredibly unpopular among the American public, has contributed to rising costs in the United States.</p> <p>The administration maintains the conflict was necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, though experts maintain the country <a href="https://www.npr.org/2026/03/20/nx-s1-5753788/expert-discusses-irans-nuclear-capabilities-before-and-after-the-us-israeli-attacks" target="_blank">was not close</a> to developing one before the conflict began six months ago.</p> <p>"Secretary Hegseth has been a transformative leader for the Department of War," Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson wrote in a statement to NPR. "The entire Department is unified behind the Secretary's vision and will continue working to put our warfighters and America first."</p> <p>The House will have to act on Massie's proposal by Thursday, a quick turnaround. The body is set to leave Washington this week for an extended recess that will end after the midterm elections in November.</p>
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Space Force sees new Space Academy as civilian talent pipeline

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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Air Force Academy in Colorado will continue to be a key training ground for budding Space Force officers even as NASA launches a new Space Academy, the space service’s top officer said Tuesday.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But the Space Academy could become a formal pipeline that prepares a reliable stream of civilian workers for the Space Force, which heavily relies on their deep technical expertise across each of the service’s complex missions.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“We need a lot of technical civilians in the Space Force,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. Doug Schiess told reporters at the Air and Space Forces Association’s annual fall conference outside Washington. “Anybody that’s space-minded and is going to have that [Space Academy] background, that can then get a job in the Space Force as a civilian, that’s great.”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Space Force is scrambling to rebuild its civilian workforce after losing nearly 14% of those employees to early retirements and layoffs in the Trump administration’s purge. Civilians make up about one-third of the Pentagon’s smallest service, more than in any other branch of the military.</span></p>

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The service is asking Congress to fund around 7,200 civilian jobs in 2027, a 40% bump over 2026, to staff a burgeoning slate of missions from communications relay to missile warning to offensive cyber operations.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Space Academy could help fuel that growth. In an executive order last month, President Donald Trump announced the U.S. would pursue a “professional corps of civically grounded leaders” for the next era in American space exploration. The proposed academy would train specialists ranging from astronauts and satellite operators to engineers and scientists, in exchange for an agreement to join the military or civil service for a certain number of years.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Military space officials have argued that creating a separate service academy for the Space Force, established in 2019, would be unnecessarily duplicative. Schiess indicated the space branch will help shape NASA’s plan and can benefit from its work, but won’t be leading the effort.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">He likened the idea to the Merchant Marine Academy, which educates civilians as well as military officers. Those graduates typically go on to staff a supplemental force of cargo ships and can support the Navy in wartime, but can head to other services as well.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Each of the Defense Department’s more typical service academies also produce a handful of second lieutenants each year who go on to work for another branch of the military. The Space Academy could offer a similar path for troops looking to join the Space Force, Schiess said.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">He suggested each of the military services could host a Reserve Officer Training Corps unit at the new academy. The Space Force aims to bring in about </span><a href="https://www.starcom.spaceforce.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4600820/starcom-highlights-plan-to-deliver-space-force-growth/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">300 guardians through ROTC</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> alone next year.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“If there is an avenue from that academy to then get to a commissioning source … then we see that as goodness,” Schiess said. “But we graduate 100 guardians from the United States Air Force Academy every year, and we will continue to do that.”</span></p>

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A presidential commission on the Space Academy will spend 120 days hashing out the details needed to create the new school. That panel is chaired by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and includes Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink and several other federal executives. It held its first meeting Sept. 9.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Space Force’s training command will also offer input to the commission, Schiess said.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Space Training and Readiness Command boss Maj. Gen. Jim Smith declined to comment Monday on how the Space Force could partner with the new academy, saying the commission needs to issue its recommendations before the Space Force figures out how to implement them.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Our national security, our way of life relies on capabilities and activities in the space domain,” Smith told reporters at the conference. “The more we increase that education and train people on issues and items relative to the space domain, that’ll be a huge win.”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">NASA is now calling on states to </span><a href="https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/274445df4c224846adf7de19c11c4c6a/view"><span style="font-weight: 400;">bid to host the academy’s permanent campus</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> starting in 2031.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">That location must offer the “institutional capacity, infrastructure, partnerships, security and room for growth” needed to create a world-class school that can endure well into the future, the agency said in a Sept. 10 solicitation.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The campus should inspire excellence, strengthen America’s aerospace workforce and visibly </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">express the nation’s determination to remain the world’s preeminent spacefaring power,” NASA said.</span></p>
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Cyber AB’s Matthew Travis on CMMC reform

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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Defense Department’s pause of new Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification third-party assessment requirements was a bit of a jolt to the defense industrial base — the final rule for the program was released last year and after years of uncertainty the program had finally started to gain momentum. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">There are multiple factors driving the decision — DoD Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies said the current iteration of the program “imposes significant and often prohibitive burdens on the DIB, particularly the small and non-traditional businesses.” </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">There are also concerns about what the program does not address. Davies said CMMC does not incorporate requirements for operational technology and relies on point-in-time assessments rather than near-real-time monitoring that is needed given today’s cyber threat landscape.</span></p>

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“[CMMC] is very narrowly tailored. It exists to safeguard control and classified information, but there are other cybersecurity equities that I think the department is concerned about, and there are certainly cost drivers that the Small Business Administration would like to see revisited. I do think they have got some dials that they can turn as well as maybe some new ways to think about third-party verification of cybersecurity compliance,” Matthew Travis, the chief executive officer at the Cyber AB, told Federal News Network.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Davies established a CMMC reform task force to review the program and develop recommendations on a framework that “prioritizes speed to capability, lowers barriers for small, medium and non-traditional businesses and replaces prohibitive, third-party compliance models with scalable, realistic security measures” and asked industry to provide feedback on the future of the program.  </span></p>
<h2>Recommendations for reform</h2>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Cyber AB responded to the Defense Department’s request for information, outlining what Travis described as low-hanging fruit — something that could potentially be implemented without having to go back through rulemaking. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">One proposal involves changing how CMMC third-party assessment organizations conduct assessments.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The way the rule was written initially for CMMC mandated certain things that the CMMC third-party assessment organizations (C3PAOs) must do and how they must do it…It is a static look at one point in time, and so the problem that if you are a defense contractor and you get certified Level 2, and a year later you want to modernize your network, you want to add improvements, you want to innovate and make your network more efficient or more secure — you have got to go back to a C3PAO and get another assessment and pay for another assessment,” Travis said.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“There’s no continuous monitoring. There’s no way for a C3PO to do just a delta assessment. I think we could look at that as maybe introducing continuous monitoring. FedRAMP has it. I think CMMC should look at that as well,” he added.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Cyber AB also wants the department to reconsider the size of CMMC assessment teams.</span></p>

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Current rules require three CMMC certified assessors on every assessment team. Travis said some smaller companies don’t need three assessors, especially when they are well organized and rely on knowledgeable </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">managed service providers (</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">MSPs) or </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">managed security service provider</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">s (MSSPs). Allowing some assessments to be conducted by two people could reduce the cost of an assessment that gets passed on to defense contractors.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In addition, assessors must complete mandatory training and undergo a rigorous background investigation. Travis said investigation delays have created a backlog that is limiting the number of assessors entering the labor pool.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The more supply we have, the cost is going to come down. Looking at how we can make it more efficient to do background checks for those assessors which are needed,” Travis said.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The relationship between CMMC and </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">FedRAM</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">P is another area Travis said needs clarification.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The FedRAMP relationship with CMMC is very fraught with confusion right now, and I think getting that clarity because a lot of the defense firms don’t necessarily know how to meet the requirements of the [National Institute of Standards and Technology] standard,” Travis said. “There’s a lot of confusion on how FedRAMP integrates in the CMMC, and I would love to see the task force address that.”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In the meantime, the CMMC program continues to operate — Travis said the current environment is reminiscent of where the program stood in early 2025, when the program was established but mandatory contract requirements were yet to be implemented.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Travis said the department will need a transition plan once the task force completes its work.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">There needs to be a transition plan that continues the momentum of the program and also preserves the value of existing Level 2 certifications, whatever we might call it or whatever might look like, whether it’s reciprocity or standards acceptance.</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">I would hate to see an environment where companies who did the right thing, who followed the guidance of the department, got certified at Level 2, and now realize that may not be worth what I thought it was worth,” </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Travis said.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“I think it’s very critical that the department preserve what has been accomplished, and so that those companies don’t have to go back to the starting line and do something different,” he added.</span></p>

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nearly 2,000 companies have already received Level 2 certification and the number continues to grow, Travis said.</span></p>
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Artificial intelligence may help the Navy’s financial managers untangle decades of systems

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<p><em>Interview transcript</em></p>
<blockquote><p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>You are working financial management systems for the Navy. Within that, everybody seems to have an AI pilot these days. Where is AI intersecting with what you’re doing?</p>
<p><strong>Greg Koval </strong>So we’re employing some basic tenants of AI and I think really we’re still just scratching the surface. So we are looking at automating the mundane tasks in a lot of ways. But really we’re kind of at that automation phase and a lot the tools and methods that are available to the private sector per se aren’t really available to us yet on the government side. There’s a whole process that needs to go through. So, we’re using what we can at this point. But I think there’s a lot more that can be done to really get it out there and get it to the masses.</p>

<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>When you talk about mundane tasks in financial management, be a little bit more specific with me. Is that basic accounting or cutting checks? What are you talking about?</p>
<p><strong>Greg Koval </strong>Really basic accounting. So at this point, because of the way that our system environment is and a complexity, we have a lot of systems in play. A lot of system from various periods of time that don’t have the same data structure. So we might have the same error coming in from the same system repeatedly. That’s a good test case there for AI and a good use case for AI. Basically, Take this transaction from point A to point B. We don’t need a human in the loop to certify it because it’s essentially correcting a mistake and a mistake that doesn’t require additional funding or bring funding back or impact somebody in a way that wouldn’t be helpful. So, you know, those are the initial use cases and I’ve been challenging industry for the last 18 to 24 months really to show me a technology where you can go into my general ledger and make a correction for me based on aI going through a process thinking like a human and being able to say this transaction is wrong. It’s wrong for this reason. I’m going to fix it. So we’re not really there yet with that level of technology, but I’d love to get there.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>What are some of the challenges about taking an industry standard financial management tool, an AI tool, for example, and trying to deploy it in a defense financial management environment?</p>
<p><strong>Greg Koval </strong>So there’s a lot of additional security protocols, obviously, that the software has to go through, the vendor has to through. And like I mentioned early on, I think what’s available to the private sector, there’s curve there where it’s not available to us because in some cases, the vendor might not see the same market because of all the investment they need to make to make it meet our security and governance requirements. So again, I think people and companies are starting to see that opportunity. We’re seeing a lot of those tools available to us. But again, there’s time. You have to go IL2, impact level two, impact level four, impact level five. That all takes investment in a lot of cases by the particular software vendor. And again, it’s a business decision on their side. Do they wanna support it or don’t they?</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>That’s a really interesting challenge then, because as you’re trying to integrate and maybe simplify decades of variety of formats in your financial management system, you’re not going to be able to find a new tool that’s going to deploy seamlessly across all of that. How do you make the decision about where to prioritize?</p>
<p><strong>Greg Koval </strong>So there are the tools available out there today that are helping us. So for example, we’re big users of war data platform. There’s some other software products out there that we’re using that really kind of help us see ourselves in a better way and pull that data together and allow us to really connect the dots between those legacy systems and those legacy environments, but I think we have a long way to go and frankly, a lot of the decisions that we made over the last 10, 20, 30 years really put us in the position where we are now. And as we’re upgrading and modernizing our enterprise resource planning system, we’re looking to really bring a lot of those functions and legacy systems perform into that system back in house. So we really have that cradle to grave view of our transactions from start to finish. And that’s really going to be key for us moving forward. Not just to improve auditability and accounting, but really to improve operations. Because every time something goes unmatched, every time, something shows up on a loading dock that’s not expected, that might be needed for the mission, that has an impact to the war fighter. And I think we need to really close that gap from factory floor to warehouse to ship to support our sailors and our Marines in the mission.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>It feels like we’ve been deploying enterprise resource management systems in DoD for at least 30 years, probably as far back as I can think. As we’re thinking about continuing the consolidation under enterprise resource management, how are you adjusting so that the deployment is keeping pace with the new technology?</p>

<p><strong>Greg Koval </strong>So that’s really one of the things that we’ve looked at very hard. And for example, the Department of the Navy is finally in one ERP really too. So the Marine Corps has DAI, the Navy has Navy ERP. It took us 25 years to get into two systems. We went from nine, 10, 11, depending on how you count them, down to two. That just happened this year with the fleets when we brought them online at the start of ’26. So The first key lesson learned is we can’t take 25 years to upgrade technology because the technology we upgraded to is now obsolete and end of life in 2030. So now as we move to the next system, really the upgraded system, the new software that’s available to us, we really need to look at efficiency, standardization, standard architecture. And again, bringing a lot of that inside the box. They’re conscious decisions we’ve made inside the Department of War and the Department of Navy to keep legacy systems connected. We need to shut down those legacy systems and really move forward in one ERP. We need use ERPs like an ERP, that’s what industry does, that’s not what government does.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>Going to rip the Band-Aid off on that conversion.</p>
<p><strong>Greg Koval </strong>Exactly.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>Part of the ERP deployment challenge is technology, but the other part of it is data because all of those legacy systems have their own data repositories. As you’re consolidating from a dozen to two, what did you find was the biggest challenge in normalizing the data that makes the system operate?</p>
<p><strong>Greg Koval </strong>So it’s really, it’s figuring out what we need from a data perspective. I think from, to a large degree, we are data hoarders, and we have so much data that we don’t know what to do with it. And in a lot of cases, even if we knew what to do with that, you don’t always have the same data picture in each of those legacy systems. So the data looks different, feels different, is different. And when you try to make a connection of data for the same business event between a legacy system and our ERP, in a lot of cases, you can’t do it because you’re almost speaking two different languages, two different data structures. So the biggest lesson learned is having that common data structure, common data picture, and using the data that we need and only the data we need. Because there’s a lot great ideas out there about, hey, this community needs this data, that community needs that data. It was really kind of a bright, shiny object out there and people end up not really using it. But then we’re stuck with it. And we’ve gone through this in some forums where we’re sitting there looking at data elements and whether we need them or not. And some people can’t even justify why they’re there and why we use it, other than that’s what we always did, so keep doing it. And that thinking needs to change.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>Do you find that a big culture jump to get people disconnected from that data security blanket?</p>
<p><strong>Greg Koval </strong>Yes, it’s huge because everybody works in their own silo. Everybody wants to protect what they have in their current process instead of taking a step back and saying, how do I fit into the bigger picture? And we see this all the time. You know, if you take budget systems, acquisition systems, log IT systems, they should be working together seamlessly. Today, data falls off the cliff, somebody picks it up, they start all over. Take it to the next cliff, drop it, somebody picks it up, starts all over again. We can’t continue to do this. And while a lot of the, you know, kind of automation and AI tools have been helpful in connecting those dots and building bridges there, it’s still expensive, because instead of having a person be the bridge, Now you’re paying for technology to be the bridge, but you’re still paying for something and that money’s not going back to war fighting. And that’s really where we need to have our focus.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>Well, between war fighting and you’re sitting right in the middle of one of DoD’s priority projects, which is auditability, defense has yet to get a clean audit, although the Marine Corps has done so, so has part of the Navy, one of the values of a clean audit is a common data picture of the enterprise. How are you seeing this play out in the work that you’re doing in Navy financial management systems?</p>
<p><strong>Greg Koval </strong>So today we’re actually pushing for a working capital fund unmodified opinion for fiscal year ’26. So, you know, here we are in September, we’re 11 months in, in the prep that we did last year to really position us. You know, we move forward, we made a lot of adjustments in FY ’25 at the end of the year. So when we rolled in our opening balance, it was pretty good. That’s been under audit along with all the current year activity. And we’re on track to get an opinion. The game’s not over. We’ve got to finish strong. We’ve gotta finish hard. There’s a lot of complexities there trying to get a first clean-audit opinion. And I remember that working on the Marine Corps and leading the Marine Corp’s effort three years ago. So it’s never over till it’s over, but we’re track and doing everything humanly possible with our partners. And what’s also interesting about this, and similar to the Marine corps experience, We had a big dependency on Army, who holds a lot of ammunition for the Marine Corps. For the Navy working capital fund, we have a big dependence on DLA. And we’ve been working closely with them. We’ve also been working closely with our industry partners who also hold a significant amount of inventory. So they’ve been great in supporting us and it’s really kind of making sure that we finish strong and win the audit game and give the department and Navy another one.</p>

<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>Working capital fund is probably the most complicated part of defense financial management. Are there lessons that you’ve learned in preparing for the audit that you can transfer to the other services as they will eventually have to go through this?</p>
<p><strong>Greg Koval </strong>Yes, the biggest thing we learned is to use the technology available to you and focus on data and analytics by Sanifar’s internal controls and material weaknesses.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>That’s really interesting that and a little surprising.</p>
<p><strong>Greg Koval </strong>In some ways, yes, but in some ways no, because you have to clean up your books if you’re going to pass an audit. And the analytics that we ran identified transactions that were open since 2007, 2010, 2015. They’re all invalid. And we knew that because once we ran the analytics on the customer side, the people we were selling to, their appropriations expired a decade ago. So why do we keep this on the books? And I think that’s where there is a culture change because people said, well, I need a key supporting document to take it off the books. And we flipped the script on them and we said, you need a key supporting document to keep it on the books, you don’t have one. The data is telling the story, let’s get rid of it. So multiply that by thousands. And that was part of the big cleanup we did. And again, you can’t have a human do this. It was really leveraging technology, running it through the general ledger, identifying things with certain criteria that didn’t look right, and then chasing them down to say, all right, is this valid or not? And in most cases, it wasn’t.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>So you were talking about having to convince the people in this system that that was the right approach?</p>
<p><strong>Greg Koval </strong>Yes.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>As you’re moving down the audit ability path Are there other lessons that have been challenging for the workforce?</p>
<p><strong>Greg Koval </strong>There have been, I think it’s the sheer magnitude of it, and the sheer level of effort it takes, because, and it doesn’t, it’s not just the FM community, the biggest burden of all really falls on the supply community for the working capital fund, because if you look at the Navy’s balance sheet, we’ve got almost $70 billion in inventory. Our FM workforce doesn’t touch that $70 billion except to place a value on it to put it on the financial statements. It’s everything that’s stowed, received, managed in warehouses at Navy installations, DLA locations, vendor locations, on ships. That inventory was subject to audit. So when you kind of look at the scope and sphere and complexity of all this, it’s a workforce issue, and it’s a workforce challenge for people that are not anything associated with FM. So you’re actually getting down to, how well does your warehouse floor perform to help pass this audit? And we saw that with the Marine Corps, too, and just getting down those operating units and having them understand that somebody is going to come out and count stuff. It sounds mundane, but it’s not the culture. We’re not a fortune 50 company that gets audited every year that expects an inventory to happen. So once you get through that initial change management, though, I think it rolls a lot smoother and it’s better to just, you know, for those who aren’t there yet from an audit opinion perspective, it’s just pulling off the bandaid and moving forward.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>Have you found any tension between trying to optimize your financial management systems to pass an audit and optimizing your financial management systems for mission support?</p>
<p><strong>Greg Koval </strong>No, because I think we’re really doing different sides of the same thing. So accountability is key to war fighting. Accountability is key to supporting the mission and supporting mission outcomes. And accountability means keeping your shelves up to date when you expend something going into the system and showing it’s expended because then it has to go into the supply chain to order a replacement. I’m so there’s a lot of that. Also on the financial side, what we’ve done is really try to take the burden of some things like valuation out of the hands of the operator. So one of the other key efficiencies and really outcomes that we had with the working capital fund audit was we centralized how we did valuation of that $70 billion of inventory to the point where we’re not even really relying on the field activities. We’re telling the field the activities you need to keep your shelves accurate. You need to document and record timely your expenditures. But when it comes to valuation, we’ve got it at the headquarters level. We are able to use Jupiter, which is our enclave of the war data platform to do valuation for them and really take it out of their hands. And then it’s helpful to us too, because now we own it, we manage it, we see it. And the operators have their role, which is timely and accurate recording of expenditures and their stock and keeping that in a good spot. And on the financial side, we own the evaluation piece. So it ended up working out really well. Instead of in the past, I think there is a lot of everybody has to do everything all of the time and we never got there. So once we’re able to change that paradigm, it ended working out really, really well because again the outcome is the same. We want to have a clean, efficient experience for the war fighter and for the operator, and an audit shouldn’t get in the way of that.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>All right, so as you continue to march down the auditability path, and you’re deploying more automation in your financial management tools, are you beginning to see a shift in the role that your financial-management workforce is playing? Are they moving more into decision support, data analytics, leadership guidance, as opposed to just, yep, I’ve got my debits and credits balanced?</p>
<p><strong>Greg Koval </strong>I think we’re getting there. And again, there’s a target rich environment that we have, again, due to the way that we’re currently set up with all of our legacy systems and processes. And there is so much to automate that you’re basically working through each customer. What do you need to improve your workforce’s experience? So, you know, again, with the number of civilians and uniform folks we have across the entire department of the Navy, we’re never going to get to everyone, but we’re trying to do the best we can with what we have from a resource perspective. And again, you know, we are on a track where basically, on average, we save about 250,000 labor hours per year in the FM workforce alone. Cumulatively, we’re around 2.4, 2.5 million hours saved since we got started. So it’s effective, but we could probably continue to scale it and move out. It all costs money though.</p></blockquote>
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How sharper tech focus is transforming DoD’s business dynamic

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<p><em>Interview transcript</em></p>
<blockquote><p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>You’ve spent a lot of your career navigating the space between government and industry and investors. As you look at where we are now, what are some of the biggest changes you’d point to in how the Defense Department accesses emerging technology?</p>
<p><strong>Mike Dodd </strong> I think a couple of themes here. One, just in the identification of what our actual critical technology, named critical technology areas are. We’ve recently gone from 14 down to six. And that’s by design, right? Where the department is really trying to have a thesis of where are we peer-to-peer with our adversaries? Where are we near-peer? Because if everything’s critical, nothing is, so coming down from 14 to 6. And also ensuring that we can do business at the speed of business, relevance and scale — so just within my office, bringing in teams, embedding teams from In-Q-Tel and the Office of Strategic Capital. So we bring institutional finance to the equation as well, recognizing often one of the most significant challenges for nontraditionals is the ability to have access to capital and scale. So I think a very narrow focus on what’s critical, our pathways to business, the contracting mechanisms by which we can do business, and access to capital is our kind of go-fast mechanism.</p>

<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>Let’s take each one of those in turn. Let’s start with the critical technology areas going from 14 to 6. How did you make that decision and how has it changed how you engage with the market?</p>
<p><strong>Mike Dodd </strong> I think as I kind of touched on, when we went from 14 to six, it was really looking at our adversaries and their capabilities and their technology capabilities. Our construct is to deter major conflict by having a disparity of technological capability, so recognizing where we were peer-to-peer or near-peer in some of those domains. And our quantum battlefield information dominance, our scaled directed energy and our contested logistics are three of the six that fall within my office in critical technologies. So it was determining what we needed to focus on, what actually is critical, and then kind of in parallel of that, recognizing that microelectronics, semiconductors, chips are foundational in everything that we have, and they don’t necessarily be named as a critical technology area, because they’re foundational in everything that we do. So they become an enduring effort within my office as well. So really determining what’s critical and then placing our bets and our funding profiles along those named CTs and the go-fast mechanisms within my office.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>And you mentioned, I’ll use air quotes here, placing your bets, but that really, I assume, means aligning funding. And you’re looking at a lot of different sources of funds and types of funds. What did you find most challenging there?</p>
<p><strong>Mike Dodd </strong>I think on the front end was just changing. I think the culture shift within the department and within the Pentagon has been significant. And I don’t know we’re at a complete 180 yet, but it’s getting there. And you know, a lot of large prime contractors were expecting the department to pay and fund all the R&amp;D, and that’s no longer our model. Our expectation is for primes and our mid-tier companies to invest their own IRAD dollars into those capabilities that are interesting and/or compelling to the department. The culture shift on actually doing business at the speed of business — statutorily, we’ve had that for decades, and recognizing we can do things in several days or weeks and putting performers onto contract. So the performers that we’re trying to attract into the DIB or DIB performers we’re to scale, for them to get across that proverbial “valley of death,” they have to understand where the funding mechanisms are as the contractual pathways, where their prospective teaming opportunities are and how will we actually help those companies scale? And the fourth tenet is that they have access to capital and structured finance that will actually allow them to scale to the level that the department is looking for.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>And that brings in the Office of Strategic Capital, which has been sort of a backwater for a long time, but now clearly is not. How are they getting in the middle of all of this to facilitate the relationships that you need?</p>
<p><strong>Mike Dodd </strong>Well, I think a couple of neat ways, one certainly of which it took them time simply to just get formed and get statutory authorities and funding that they can actually deploy to these problem sets, right? So we’re catching them at a great kind of crossroad, and sincerely nobody better to establish and accelerate these than Deputy Secretary Feinberg with his background coming from private equity and just fully understanding, one, the need within the department and two, how do we access it and create those structured finance opportunities for our nontraditional performers. So again, we’ve embedded a direct representative from the Office of Strategic Capital who looks at all my nontraditional performers — and our large primes as well — to ensure that where we can provide structured finance to those performers, where the department is making those large bets, those performers can scale. So I think OSC — and early on, they also were exceptionally focused on some of the top problem statements for the department as far as rare earth and critical mineral opportunities. So the front end of their deal flow was fairly heavy on critical minerals and rare earths and recognizing we need to reshore a lot of those efforts. And then as I also mentioned, I’ve got microelectronics and semiconductors in my book. They’re going to be, and are as we look at some of the deal flow and funding opportunities, absolutely critical in the reshoring or near-shoring of the semiconductors and chips needed for all of our systems.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>As you’re talking about structured finance and deal flows, one of your other focus areas really has been to open more front doors to these nontraditional companies, folks who don’t have a long relationship with the defense industrial base. How are you doing that and how are they finding out where to knock?</p>

<p><strong>Mike Dodd </strong>I love that question. I’m smiling. One of the best ways we do that is things like this. We come to these types of events where we look for and find technologists where they are, and ensure that we get a chance to meet and vet technology capabilities and iterate with them in real time. I think you joked on the way in here, I roll pretty deep, and that’s by design. We’ve got some of our senior officials and our technologists along with us. So we can meet some of these performers and iterate with them in real time and get a sense of how interesting or compelling they may be and how do we get them into the Pentagon or meeting some of our technical teams so we can determine how interesting or compelling they really are. Now in parallel with that, worth mentioning, we have another effort underway and within one of my offices, a soon-to-be-released kind of front door portal. And what that will do is go across the department. And there’s certainly a number of front door websites, portals — this will aggregate all those into kind of one effort. And on the infrastructure side of that, we’ll be able to kind of scrape all of those abstracts, white papers, capabilities briefs, even marketing material, websites and start to heat-map capability to our problem sets. So we can bubble those technologists up, that they get a senior official or technologist review and then we can get them in and actually vet their capability or technology. And then how bankable are they as well? We’ll do that all kind of in one construct.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>That is fascinating and finding these companies and getting them to the front door is only step one. The Federal Acquisition Regulation Overhaul is really supposed to help change how agencies think about acquisition. When you think about it from the technology transfer space, what are you really hoping that the FAR Overhaul does for you?</p>
<p><strong>Mike Dodd </strong>I think two significant things. One, recognizing where we need to utilize FAR-based acquisition, we can and we should. And those are a lot more of our kind of commodity items or our commercial off-the-shelf type items and our huge systems, right? Manufacturing ships is an example. The air is pretty thin in who can do that, and at scale. We primarily use non-FAR-based acquisition methods to access nontraditional performers. And we do that in a couple of different ways. One, I have a consortium manager that manages a consortia of thousands of nontraditional performers. So what the CM does for me as the government is they take on the fiscal and contractual fiduciary responsibilities. And to the performer, it really is like a commercial contract, right? So my contract is with the CM. They manage the fiscal fiduciary responsibilities to the performers and make that as simple as they can. And those become like eight- or 10-page type contracts for us to get on like a commercial-esque type of contract for our nontraditionals. So it’s utilizing the FAR certainly where we need and then, candidly, avoiding it like heck where we just don’t need it. And I have much faster statutory tools in my toolbox to get performers onto contract as quickly as possible. And that can be literally same day stuff if we want to get a performer on contract.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>All right. So we’ve got them to the door. We’ve got them through the door, we’ve got them on some kind of contract vehicle. But you used a term earlier that has been around for a long time, the valley of death. So you get them on contract, they’ve got promising technology. What differentiates those who get across that valley from those who don’t?</p>
<p><strong>Mike Dodd </strong>Really, it’s performance. And that’s, I think, one of the biggest things that we bring to the table within CT is ensuring performers that if we deem them compelling, that we not just put them on contract, but there is a funding profile that gets them not just across, but actually into a scaling mode. And we talk about that value of death. And that, for some companies, is weeks or months; for some companies, it’s months and years. But it’s iterative with the performers themselves for us to recognize their financial health, and there’s ways across that, not just in awards to performers. Again, I mentioned structured finance. Sometimes it’s a blend. We know what the market basket is. We know who the performers are that are in that technology domain. We know when the on and off ramps in the contractual opportunities are. So sometimes we need to bring structured finance and/or investment, private equity and venture capital, into the mix as well. So once we understand just the dynamic and what that landscape is for that performer, it’s ensuring that we bring that mix of prospective awards that are all performance-based. Everything that we do within critical technologies is outcomes-based. We deliver capability in 24 months or less. If you don’t fit in my construct, that’s a science project. And you mentioned you were chatting with Honorable Jewell earlier. And if he’s still here, a big shout out to Joe. Then we ask you to go collaborate with our science and technology folks. We are delivering capability within 24 months or less.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>All right. Then I want to bring it back to the folks who actually have to do that work. Your acquisition workforce, your R&amp;D technology experts — this culture change to speed, to structured capital is very, very different. What have you found necessary to move the workforce to this new model?</p>
<p><strong>Mike Dodd </strong>That early on, I think, took a significant effort. Candidly, I think the culture within the building right now understands that we are moving at the speed of business. And we are very active in looking for roadblocks, whether it’s policy, contractual, a person in an office who is slow-rolling us, and we try to bring radical transparency to everything that we’re doing. And meritocracy, so that performers can have a clear process and pathway to the different contractual funding opportunities and problem-solving within the department. So I think early on it was a fairly dramatic cultural shift in the building, but we have such momentum under way right now. I think the building understands this is how we operate. And you know, hey listen, we’re in a shooting match in a couple parts of the world. So I think also that level of intensity and realism that we must do things at the speed of business and deploy these capabilities to our warfighters is just understood.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>And how are you structuring this for the long term? I mean, this really has been an intense focus over the last 18 months, but what have you had to redesign institutionally to ensure that this is the new way going forward?</p>
<p><strong>Mike Dodd </strong>Well, the culture is certainly a big part of that. And I think we’ve achieved kind of those cultural milestones now, or we’re well on the way. Two, it’s stripping out sometimes some of these policies and clauses that are decades and decades old. And many of these are just not even applicable anymore. Once they’re factored in or impact one of our acquisition processes, they slow us down by weeks or months. So, it takes a very concerted kind of audit of, again, just not FAR-based but non-FAR-based acquisitions, tweaking those statutes. And Congress has been tremendous at working with us at massaging some of the statutes that allow us to do business at the speed of business, and just simply recognizing we need to attack those bureaucracies and any go-slow grenades that come our way so that we can move at the speed by which we need to.</p>

<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>And as you look forward, what are the biggest things you’d like to solve to actually even improve speed and get this capacity to service members faster?</p>
<p><strong>Mike Dodd </strong>In each one of our CTs, we have a senior official, and then I’ve got portfolio directors that manage kind of the remainder of the portfolio. And as I mentioned, measured outcomes. So all of our senior officials at any given time typically have five or more sprints that are under way. Those have start dates, end dates and funding profiles associated with those. So it’s by ensuring that we have measured outcomes and when we begin a sprint, I get commitment from the services, the resource sponsors and the program acquisition executives to commit to transition at the onset of our sprints. One of the things we recognized very early on was a very low percent of capabilities that actually transitioned to the department or up into the services. Fairly easy fix: You just invert the model where we stop prototyping hundreds and thousands of things and trying to push them up into the service or sell them into the services. Now we work with the services and gain their problem statements and inputs, so when we design a sprint, we’re getting their commitment at transition. Not everything transitions, certainly, but our probability of transition is dramatically higher because we’ve got the services and the resource sponsors who actually have the money on board with what we’re designing. And if we hit those performance milestones and we get that thing from TRL six, seven, eight, nine, where the services say, you have achieved what you said you were going to achieve for the service and therefore we do want to transition and apply our funding to it as well. And then in parallel with that, candidly within my office by statute, we write the technology roadmaps for the Department of War. So I have significant influence on what the services procure and or try to procure. And if they wander too far from that statutorily, we have the authorities to kind of bring them back within the technology roadmaps to ensure that they’re procuring the technologies that we have determined are, again, those most critical ones.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>As you’re going through this critical technology development process, for ones that look like they’re going to be successful, where the services really want to move them, how do you lay in the plan to get them to scale at production?</p>
<p><strong>Mike Dodd </strong>Candidly, that becomes less complex because we have buy-in from the PAEs and the resource sponsors and the services themselves, our service liaisons and our embeds. So they know the wedge and where we apply our funding is to really get them into the POM, or the program objective memorandum, and the funding cycle. And if we need to bridge them in the off years between the POMs, that’s where our funding kind of comes in. So it’s very iterative but very collaborative with the services, how we apply our funding so that ultimately it gets them and the services to POM for that capability. So we’re just, we’re doing it just, you know, exceptionally collaboratively kind of across our teams.</p></blockquote>
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Some of DoD’s toughest tech challenges aren’t technical at all

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<p><em>Interview transcript</em></p>
<blockquote><p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>You have just completed what has got to have been a whirlwind adventure, 30 R&amp;D sites in 90 days to complete a comprehensive assessment. As you look back on that now and you’ve written the assessment, what most surprised you in that whole visit?</p>
<p><strong>Joseph Jewell </strong>That’s right, we were charged based on a memo from Secretary Hegseth on January 9th with executing a review of the defense research enterprise. We didn’t actually quite get in under the 90 days, it was more like 120, but we produced I think a very good result, visited 30 of approximately 90 independent research components within the intramural labs as well as UARCs and FFRDCs, and the findings were striking. I think there’s a very differing level of challenges that each lab site faces. A lot of it depends upon geography. Just to single out a few — at China Lake in California, for example, it’s quite a remote location, and so they had some difficulty recruiting, especially young people, because of the lack of a hospital nearby that had maternity capability, right, which has since been rectified. But there was a period of a couple of years where it was very difficult for them to recruit young families for that reason. On the other hand, the infrastructure at China Lake is excellent because they had an earthquake several years ago and therefore the government was more or less required to rebuild all their buildings. So it was kind of funny as we visited other sites, a number of the lab directors at other locations said, maybe not so much tongue-in-cheek, you know, “could you send us an earthquake too so that we can get shiny new lab facilities?”</p>

<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>Well, one of the big findings in the report is around infrastructure and how differentiated it is and how maybe antiquated it in some places. Talk to me about how you approach the infrastructure assessment and what you’re recommending.</p>
<p><strong>Joseph Jewell </strong>Most of the defense research enterprise’s infrastructure was built up during the Cold War, of course, so the post-World War II period saw a great flourishing of defense research and development, which continued through until approximately the ’90s. And then with the Peace Dividend, we drew back, essentially. So a lot of the facilities that we have, even though we have really capable talent, great scientists and engineers — I’m a little biased, I worked for five years at the Air Force Research Laboratory myself — but that’s actually a good microcosm of what we saw there. I worked with a new wind tunnel facility with cutting-edge electronics and, you know, brilliant people working on it in a building that was literally crumbling, right, where you couldn’t get the bathrooms to work right and the roof leaked and they could only air condition the part that actually had the electronics in it and all of these little hindrances to doing cutting-edge scientific work.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>How much of an issue is it when you’re trying to recruit the best scientists for defense programs when you have infrastructure that maybe is not competitive with what they might find at a university or a private-sector lab?</p>
<p><strong>Joseph Jewell </strong>Well, I guess the first thing, having been a professor for seven years, I can tell you universities are not immune to these kinds of infrastructure challenges either. I think the advantage that we have in the federal government research enterprise is dedication to the mission. And the mission is very compelling, particularly for a young person who’s working, say, in a field like aerospace engineering that’s very defense-adjacent. Some of the biggest, meatiest, most interesting problems are found in the federal government and working for defense. So I think we have that as an advantage. We have to make sure that we have the hiring capabilities to bring on these new engineers and scientists, and to retain them. The other thing I’d highlight that we identified as an impediment in many cases is the security clearance process, which can just take forever. My first top secret clearance took 529 days, I believe. I marked it off on a calendar, which really should not have been the case. At the time, I was a researcher didn’t need it for my career yet. There was a project waiting. But if you need someone on a project tomorrow, you can’t wait a year and a half.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>Right. The report does address the security clearance piece, but it also talks about other sort of workforce management constraints. If you could wave a magic wand and fix the lab personnel system, where would you start there?</p>
<p><strong>Joseph Jewell </strong>I think we need greater flexibility to pay people what they could get, at least some reasonable fraction of what they can get, in the private market. I think that’s important, especially with all the new defense tech startups, which are very successful. I mean, in aerospace alone, we have SpaceX, you have Anduril, you have Rocket Lab — you have all of these really compelling companies that are taking, in many cases, the basic research that was federally funded and then applying it to really compelling problems. I mean, I think that’s a great, compelling case, and we’re happy when people go to work at those places, certainly. But we do need our own federal workforce as well. And even with the compelling nature of the mission, we have to be able to pay them on a flexible scale. So there actually is something called the Lab Demo System, which is within, but more flexible than, the GS system. So it can go all the way up to GS-15, but it’s not as rigidly tied to years of experience. It’s more tied to performance, particularly after someone’s hired. So that was something that we saw actually reflected back as a universal positive. The laboratory said without that flexibility, they could not maintain the staffing levels that they have.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>One of the things you just mentioned there was the attractiveness of the private sector competition, and DoD really used to be the innovation engine for a long time. And now we’re seeing a lot of emerging tech come from the private sector. As you did this assessment, how did that shape your mission assessment of what the defense’s R&amp;E enterprise should look like?</p>

<p><strong>Joseph Jewell </strong>So, the new system of venture capital and startup companies is very good at targeting very large quantities of money and other resources, talent, against specifically selected problems. What it’s actually not good at, not designed to do, is to seed that basic research that is then later developed and applied. So there was a time in our country’s history where private enterprise invested in what we would call blue sky basic research. Think of the Bell Labs, of course, that AT&amp;T used to run and which produced Nobel Prize winners who were innovating in areas that didn’t have even immediate obvious applicability to telecoms, although some of them did pay off, of course, years or decades later. That kind of research in our present system is largely funded by the federal government, half of it’s government labs, not just DoW, but also the Department of Energy and of course in our university ecosystem, which we’re seeking to leverage more. So I think we have to recognize that basic research needs to continue to be a federal priority if we’re going to keep feeding in the innovations that later can produce the SpaceXes of the world.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>One of the findings in the report is that the ecosystem has become much more siloed over time. Talk to me about what that looks like and what the impact then is on those silos and how it produces, or doesn’t produce, the kind of research that we need.</p>
<p><strong>Joseph Jewell </strong>I’ll give one example, I guess, which is, particularly in these cross-cutting military technologies that have applicability across the services and across domains, we really need to avoid especially service-based silos. And so I’ll pick a little bit on my own field of technical work, which is hypersonics, and which, of course, for a long time, NASA, the Navy, the Air Force, and now even the Army, of course, have deep equities in that, are in many cases fielding systems in that. I mean, of course, NASA has arguably fielded hypersonic systems for decades. And yet, particularly at the level of the most highly classified programs, which we can’t talk about here of course, the information interchange doesn’t necessarily take place. So one of the first things that I did upon taking office I think 260 days ago — Wikipedia keeps track so I don’t have to —</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>And you spent 90 of them on the road.</p>
<p><strong>Joseph Jewell </strong>Oh, I wasn’t on the road for all 90 of those. I went on several of those trips, but they were typically week-long swings, geographically oriented, where they’d visit a different lab every day, sometimes two in one day. It was really a grueling trip. So we split up the load on that, thankfully. But one of the first things I did upon taking office was convene a meeting of the people who work in the Army, Navy and Air Force. So, you know, DoW proper as well as DARPA and SCO, the Strategic Capabilities Office, and NASA all together to kind of lay it on the table at an appropriate level and say, here’s what we’re working on in hypersonics, how can we coordinate, how can we leverage what we are doing? Because there’s an awful lot of investment taking place, particularly at the program level. Basic research is kind of its own thing, but particularly at program level there’s a lot taking place, and I wanted to figure out what connections we could build in these normally siloed environments. One of the things that in this administration Under Secretary Michael has done is he has slimmed down the number of critical technology areas from 14 now to six, of which scaled hypersonics is one. And each of those six critical technology areas has a cognizant senior official who’s a technical expert in that area and is not necessarily charged with administering all of it. So the senior official for hypersonics, Dr. James Weber, who I’ve known for years going back to our AFRL days. It does not run all of federal hypersonics, but he’s expected to remain familiar with everything that is happening within the DoW and the federal government more broadly in hypersonics. And he has a convening and coordinating function to make sure that it all is a coherent picture that works towards common goals. We have similar efforts in, for example, biomanufacturing and biotechnology. Dr. Gary Vora, who reports to our office, is our senior official for bio, and so he has a similar function there. So I think these CTAs that we are prioritizing definitely do have this function that’s intended to, in a way, un-silo things.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>The report does talk a lot about transparency, and it also really focuses on trying to track outcomes. Now, DoD, the Defense Department is very good at tracking inputs, like most of the government, but not so good at tracking outcomes. So when you think about that requirement in the research, science and technology space, and the desire for transparency to cross those silos, what tools or processes are you looking at that would facilitate a better perspective?</p>
<p><strong>Joseph Jewell </strong>It’s easy to track a dollar spent and much more difficult to track an idea generated. But one metric upon which we’re trying to get better there that we do track is patents generated. So there is a wide variety of patents generated at DoW labs, at UARCs, at federally funded research development centers that the government either owns or has use rights for. And Under Secretary Michael noticed or was told that the entire Pentagon earns about $20 million per year off their patent licensing, which is just a drop in the bucket, right? We have tens of thousands of patents. Of course, some are aging out every year, but then new ones are being added every year. And so what that $20 million is indicative of — not that we need to earn more money from that, because that’s not the point here — but that we really need to get those technologies out. And so one thing that we have been tracking and trying to do better is to essentially gather the patents into categories, and then we have started something that we call the Defense Patent Holiday, which is for specific categories of patents. We launched this in January, and then, we had an update to it, actually, in July. And so, we started with categories like advanced materials, microelectronics. We’re going to, in this coming January, launch a biotechnology/biomanufacturing set of patents. We curated several hundred patents in each of these categories, where they weren’t selected just for scientific interest, but that our assessment was if a commercial product existed based on this technology, the DoW would potentially be a customer for that technology. And then we pushed them, on a non-exclusive basis, essentially into the public domain if a company is willing to sign out the patent, sign a license. They have two years of fee-free, royalty-free use of that patent to try to make a business case and build a business upon it. Because the idea is we’re not trying to make money off these patents; we just want to see the technology get out there. And that’s actually been very successful. We’ve coordinated that with the SBIR-STTR process, which is administered through my office. We’re going to announce sometime, I believe within the next month, the winners from, we got 184 applications for SBIRs and STTRs across several technology areas based on patents that were made available for use in the Defense Patent Holiday. And we’re likely going to pick somewhere in the range of maybe 25 SBIR-STTRs to seed-fund some of these. So not only are we making the technology free, the IP free, but we’re going to provide some seed funds to see if we can get viable businesses out of these.</p>
<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>And what sort of response have you had from that? Because there’s always been a lot of concern about how long it takes to move from bench science to applied technology.</p>
<p><strong>Joseph Jewell </strong>Right, and so the response has been great on that. I think one of the, for patents in particular, a lot of the time is essentially administrative. So we have tried to cut the licensing period, or the time it takes to get a patent fully signed out, to 90 days. Sometimes it can take years, which is unfortunate. And so we’re expecting fairly fast results there.</p>

<p><strong>Terry Gerton </strong>Well, speaking of speed, basic science is not something you can rush. You need time and it takes time. But this report has 14 findings and recommendations. If you were going to pick a handful to try to address the speed of the R&amp;E enterprise, where would you start and what do you think would be most impactful?</p>
<p><strong>Joseph Jewell </strong>I think the most impactful ones are those around personnel. We need to get our defense research enterprise back up to full strength. We have very good people working there. I think that the federal workforce in S&amp;T, at least insofar as it works in the labs, is doing a great job. We have very strong people who have worked there, in many cases, for decades and find the mission very compelling. But recent deferred retirement plans, for example, resulted in a decrease in the workforce. And so in some areas, we have to build back up, getting the services to use the hiring authorities that they do have in science and technology. There are some special flexible hiring authorities to allow them to fill those positions, so encouraging them to actually do that is very important. The second thing I would highlight is that we are suggesting, or it’s, of course, for Congress to decide, but we’re suggesting that laboratory military construction, MILCON, be ring-fenced so that investments that within the service competition might never rise to the top. New building for your wind tunnel to replace the one that’s crumbling, for example, is maybe not going to win out over new barracks. But those investments have to be made or else the facilities and the technologies that we’ve invested in over the past decades will literally crumble and we’ll lose that competitive advantage.</p></blockquote>
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Golden Dome needs congressional buy-in, but lawmakers are still in the dark about what it would entail

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<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) said Monday there is “a lot of work that has to be done” to build broad support in Congress for the Trump administration’s ambitious Golden Dome missile defense system, in part because lawmakers still do not have any </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">meaningful information about the system more than a year after President Donald Trump announced the initiative. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">To be able to, I think, first of all, get the information that we need is extremely important, but also to have a better understanding of just what Golden Dome involves,” </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Fischer said</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">at the Air and Space Forces Association’s Air, Space &amp; Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Md.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Fischer’s comments come after a group of </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">lawmakers sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in June saying that DoD needs to share its plans for the system before the department “spends one more taxpayer dollar” on the Golden Dome initiative.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“There is no reasonable justification for keeping the mission and number of interceptors for Golden Dome secret … It is one thing to withhold design details or performance specifications of certain systems, but it is quite another to withhold the entire system architecture that you expect Congress to approve and fund. Congress and the American public have a right to know what they are paying for,” the lawmakers </span><a href="https://beyer.house.gov/uploadedfiles/letter_to_secretary_hegseth_on_the_golden_dome_program.pdf" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">wrote</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span></p>

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A recent </span><a href="https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62422" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">analysis</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office </span><a href="https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-news/2026/05/cbo-estimates-golden-dome-could-cost-1-2-trillion-over-20-years/" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">estimated</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that the Golden Dome architecture consistent with President Trump’s executive order would cost roughly $1.2 trillion over the next two decades, far exceeding the White House’s initial $175 billion estimate. The Defense Department has since said that outside cost estimates are incorrect because they are not estimating what DoD is building.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Fischer echoed the sentiment, saying that </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">CBO scores “can be really unrealistic due to the fact that there is not a clear understanding of this layered defense that we’re looking at when it comes to defending our homeland.”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The CBO’s national security division </span><a href="https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2026/08/golden-dome-cost-estimate-draws-pentagon-pushback/" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">defended</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> its estimate of the Golden Dome, saying that it used current technologies, such as Patriot missile batteries and Aegis Ashore to estimate the cost of the network of systems outlined in Trump’s January 2025 executive order.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Fischer said the program will need the buy-in not only from Congress, but from the public as well.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“That goes back to having them understand the threats, understand the needs, and understand the resources that are being committed to address all of those needs</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">,” Fischer said.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“We need to make sure that they are followed, and there is that strong buy-in, not </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">just from Congress, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">not just from any administration, but from the people of this country. And I think they will be there. They are there when they know what’s at stake,” she added.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But the program of this massive scale, with such serious national security implications, has been shrouded in secrecy, and there has been no public debate </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">about its cost, the viability issues facing it or the strategic risks of pursuing and deploying it.</span></p>

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Meanwhile, Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, Golden Dome’s program manager, said the Defense Department is on track to deliver </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">a Golden Dome operational capability by the summer of 2028.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">The first thing we did right out of the gate was put industry consortium on contract to get after command and control, because that really is the secret sauce of any kind of national missile defense capability you want to put out there. That has been on contract. We have already tested it twice. It was effective on both sets of tests</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">We know, based on those tests, that we are on the right path with command and control,” </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Guetlein said. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“We know, based on those tests, that the munitions that we are planning to bring to the fight, the sensors are going to be effective against the threats that … the president identified in the executive order,” he added.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Guetlein said about 95% of the $22.5 billion that Congress provided for the program last year has been obligated.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">We have gotten all of that money on contract. We have space-based interceptors on contract. We have command and control on contract. We have radars on contract. We have some munitions on contract. We’re already digging dirt. We stood up our first operational site already, and have been digging dirt across the homeland, building the construction of our sites,” </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Guetlein said. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“We have the evidence that says we are making the progress that we told Congress and told the president that we would make,” he added.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The administration is seeking an average of about $15 billion annually over the next five years for the system. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">DoD recently announced that the system would cost </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">$185</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> billion.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Some experts </span><a href="https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-news/2026/03/as-golden-domes-price-tag-rises-some-say-new-estimate-is-no-more-credible/" rel="noopener" target="_blank"><span style="font-weight: 400;">said</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> the Pentagon is either “not being honest about the likely costs of this system or it is planning to build a system so limited in its architecture that it will not have even a theoretical hope of achieving its stated goal.” </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p>

<p><b>If you would like to contact this reporter about recent changes in the federal government, please email anastasia.obis@federalnewsnetwork.com or reach out on Signal at (301) 830-2747.</b></p>
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House Republicans demand fair compensation for more federal law enforcement

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<ul><li style="margin-top:20px;">House Republicans are calling for fair compensation and benefits for more federal law enforcement personnel. A letter addressed to the Office of Personnel Management points out discrepancies in how some law enforcement officers are classified for retirement purposes. The GOP lawmakers are calling on OPM to review the benefits specifically for police officers at the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, as well as DoD's Force Protection Agency and personnel at the Federal Protective Service. <div style="display:block; font-style: italic;">(<a href="https://rsc-pfluger.house.gov/media/press-releases/house-republicans-seek-fair-compensation-all-federal-law-enforcement-officers">House Republicans letter on fair compensation for federal law enforcement officers</a> - Rep. August Pfluger (R-Texas))</div></li><p></p><li style="margin-top:20px;">The Small Business Administration is promoting specific types of companies for entry into the 8(a) program. Prospective participants from defense-critical industries will receive a boost if they want to join the SBA's 8(a) program. SBA is promising to fast-track applications for companies providing products and services across 10 NAICS codes for capabilities like small arms ammunition and shipbuilding and repair. This focus is a part of the Trump administration's efforts to strengthen domestic supply chains, expand production capacity and ensure that the military has a resilient industrial base. SBA recently enacted reforms to the business development and government contracting program, emphasizing merit-based considerations and eliminating "race-based admissions framework." <div style="display:block; font-style: italic;">(<a href="https://legacy.sba.gov/article/2026/09/10/sba-issues-guidance-prioritize-defense-critical-firms-new-8a-program-rules-take-effect">SBA to prioritize defense-critical small firms in 8(a) program</a> - Small Business Administration)</div></li><p></p><li style="margin-top:20px;">NASA took the first step to create the new Space Academy called for in President Donald Trump's August executive order. In a new request for information, the space agency is asking governors to submit ideas that describe how their state could support the new academy, including proposed locations, site readiness, estimated costs and partnership approaches. States have until Oct. 26 to respond to the RFI. The Trump administration set an aggressive deadline to break ground on the new location by 2027, educate the first 300 students in a temporary location by 2028 and fully open the academy by 2031.<div style="display:block; font-style: italic;">(<a href="https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-answers-presidents-call-to-establish-united-states-space-academy/">NASA opens process to choose space academy location </a> - NASA)</div></li><p></p>

<li style="margin-top:20px;">The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is looking for a new chief information officer. CISA posted the CIO opening to USAJobs last week. The agency is taking applications through Sept. 23. CISA’s last permanent CIO, Bob Costello, stepped down to join the private sector earlier this year. The cyber agency has gone on a hiring spree this past summer, with roughly 250 prospective hires waiting in the wings as of this month. <div style="display:block; font-style: italic;">(<a href="https://www.usajobs.gov/job/883714800">CISA accepting CIO job applications</a> - USAJobs)</div></li><p></p><li style="margin-top:20px;">Federal job applicants should no longer have to answer a question about which executive orders are most meaningful to them. The Trump administration has been given seven days to comply with a federal judge's orders to stop using a so-called “loyalty question” on government job applications. The motion comes nearly a year after federal unions sued the administration over the added essay question. The lawsuit contends that the question aims to assess applicants’ “loyalty” to the Trump administration, violating the First Amendment.  <div style="display:block; font-style: italic;">(<a href="https://democracyforward.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/86-2026-09-11-Judge-George-A.-OToole-Jr-ORDER-entered.-OPINION-AND.pdf">Stay motion in “loyalty question lawsuit”</a> - AFGE et al v. Kupor)</div></li><p></p><li style="margin-top:20px;">House Intelligence Committee leaders want to strengthen the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. A bipartisan intelligence committee report recommends giving the director of national intelligence full budget authority over the intelligence community. The goal would be to strengthen the DNI role in line with the original vision of the 9/11 Commission. The DNI was created to serve as the president’s principal intelligence advisor and oversee other intelligence agencies. However, the ODNI’s effectiveness has been under scrutiny and the Trump administration has targeted the office for controversial workforce cuts. <div style="display:block; font-style: italic;">(<a href="https://federalnewsnetwork.com/intelligence-community/2026/09/odnis-role-future-still-up-for-debate-25-years-after-9-11/">ODNI’s role, future still up for debate 25 years after 9/11</a> - Federal News Network)</div></li><p></p><li style="margin-top:20px;">The Air Force’s training command has rolled out a new strategy aimed at transforming its infrastructure into a “cohesive, AI-driven learning ecosystem.” The command plans to shut down outdated IT systems and move airmen to cloud-based learning platforms. It also seeks to use AI-enabled, personalized learning to reduce the time by 20% to train airmen in technical specialties. The strategy also calls for implementing intelligent scheduling tools to improve flight training. Teams across the command are now developing 90-day implementation plans. <div style="display:block; font-style: italic;">(<a href="https://www.aetc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4593315/first-command-unveils-tech-blueprint-through-2026-it-data-and-ai-strategic-guid/">Air Force Training Command rolls out IT, data and AI guidance</a> - Air Education and Training Command )</div></li><p></p><li style="margin-top:20px;">The Defense Department is expanding its program providing no-fee patent licenses to accelerate the delivery of innovative technologies from government laboratories. Launched in January, the so-called Defense Patent Holiday initially focused on advanced materials, batteries and unmanned systems. The Pentagon has since selected about 460 patents using an AI-enabled process, targeting technologies that could have both commercial and military applications. The department added another tranche of patents focused on microelectronics in July. It is now preparing to release its next batch of patents focused on biotechnology and biomanufacturing in January. <div style="display:block; font-style: italic;">(<a href="https://www.ndiatechexpo.org/">DoD expands its Patent Holiday initiative</a> - National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies for Defense conference )</div></li><p></p></ul>


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Decides which products and services federal agencies must buy from nonprofit agencies that employ people who are blind or have significant disabilities: it maintains the Procurement List published in the Federal Register and sets the fair market price for everything on it. Orders are distributed through two designated central nonprofit agencies.

AbilityOne Commission

Chairperson of the AbilityOne Commission

The Administration for Children and Families is an operating division of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. It administers federal programs that promote the economic and social well-being of children, youth, families, and communities, including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Head Start, child care, child support enforcement, foster care and adoption assistance, refugee resettlement, and services for Native Americans. It was established in 1991 through a reorganization of the Department.

Administration for Children and Families

Alex J. Adams

The Administration for Community Living is an operating division of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. It administers programs that help older adults and people with disabilities live independently and participate in their communities, coordinating aging and disability services authorized largely by the Older Americans Act. It was created in 2012 by consolidating the Administration on Aging with offices serving people with disabilities.

Administration for Community Living

Administrator of the Administration for Community Living

Runs the aging services network created by the Older Americans Act: it funds state and area agencies on aging, which pay for congregate and home-delivered meals, in-home services and caregiver support. It also houses the long-term care ombudsman program and elder-rights protection work.

Administration on Aging

Mary Lazare

Sets policy and oversight for the federal child welfare and youth programs run by its two bureaus: the Children's Bureau, which administers foster care, adoption and child abuse prevention funding to states and tribes, and the Family and Youth Services Bureau, which funds runaway and homeless youth services and adolescent pregnancy prevention.

Administration on Children, Youth and Families

Cody Inman

The Administrative Conference of the United States is an independent federal agency that studies the administrative procedures of federal agencies and develops recommendations to improve the fairness, efficiency, and transparency of regulatory, benefit, and other government programs. Its members are drawn from federal agencies, academia, and private practice. It was established by the Administrative Conference Act of 1964 and operates under 5 U.S.C. 591 and following.

Administrative Conference of the United States

Presides over the Administrative Conference of the United States and is its chief executive, hiring and supervising the staff, preparing the Conference's budget estimates and serving as its official spokesman to the other branches. Appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate for a five-year term (5 U.S.C. 593(b), 595(c)).

Chairman of Administrative Conference of the United States

The Administrative Office of the United States Courts is the central administrative and support agency for the federal judiciary. It provides budget, human resources, technology, statistical, program, and management support to the United States courts and serves as the staff for the Judicial Conference of the United States. It was established by the Act of August 7, 1939, and operates under Chapter 41 of Title 28 of the United States Code, headed by a Director appointed by the Chief Justice of the United States.

Administrative Office of the United States Courts

Robert J. Conrad Jr.

Issues the government-wide procurement policies that bind executive agencies and oversees how agencies buy and the federal acquisition workforce. Appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.

Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy

Kevin Rhodes

Has authority over and responsibility for all NNSA programs, including the weapons laboratories, production plants and nonproliferation work. The office is held by the Under Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Security, appointed by the President with Senate confirmation.

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Brandon Williams

Administrator of General Services, the institutional head of General Services Administration. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949 (40 U.S.C. 301); directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of General Services

Edward C. Forst

Administrator of the Administration for Community Living, the institutional head of Administration for Community Living. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under Department of Health and Human Services reorganization (2012); programs under the Older Americans Act of 1965; directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Directs the agency's national research programs and its network of laboratories and research centers, and decides which lines of in-house science USDA pursues. Selected within the Department rather than appointed by the President, reporting through the Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics.

Administrator of the Agricultural Research Service

Joon Park

Administrator of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, the institutional head of Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau. Appointed under Homeland Security Act of 2002 (Public Law 107-296), 116 Stat. 2135; directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau

Mary G. Ryan

Directs BPA's power marketing, transmission operations and rate-setting, and makes the arrangements for the sale and disposition of the federal power the agency sells to Northwest utilities. Appointed by, and responsible to, the Secretary of Energy.

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John L. Hairston

Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the institutional head of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under Social Security Act, Titles XVIII and XIX (42 U.S.C. 1395, 1396); directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

Mehmet Oz

Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the institutional head of Drug Enforcement Administration. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1973; directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration

Terrance C. Cole

Directs the government's central energy data and forecasting program and, by statute, publishes its statistical and forecasting reports without any other official's approval. Appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, from people specially qualified to manage an energy information system.

Administrator of the Energy Information Administration

Tristan Abbey

Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the institutional head of Environmental Protection Agency. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1970; directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency

Lee M. Zeldin

Runs the agency's commodity, farm loan, disaster and conservation programs and its state and county office network. Appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture; the post is not Senate-confirmed.

Administrator of the Farm Service Agency

William Beam

Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, the institutional head of Federal Aviation Administration. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under Federal Aviation Act of 1958 (72 Stat. 731); directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration

Bryan Bedford

Runs FEMA and is the principal advisor to the President, the Homeland Security Council and the Secretary of Homeland Security on emergency management. Appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, from candidates with demonstrated emergency management ability and at least five years of executive leadership experience.

Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency

Cameron Hamilton

Administrator of the Federal Highway Administration, the institutional head of Federal Highway Administration. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under Department of Transportation Act (49 U.S.C. 104); directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of the Federal Highway Administration

Sean McMaster

Administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the institutional head of Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under Motor Carrier Safety Improvement Act of 1999 (113 Stat. 1748; 49 U.S.C. 113); directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration

Derek D. Barrs

Administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration, the institutional head of Federal Railroad Administration. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under Department of Transportation Act of 1966 (49 U.S.C. 103); directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration

David Fink

Administrator of the Federal Transit Administration, the institutional head of Federal Transit Administration. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1968 (5 U.S.C. app.; 49 U.S.C. ch. 53); directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of the Federal Transit Administration

Exercises the Secretary's authority under the Federal Meat Inspection Act, Poultry Products Inspection Act, Egg Products Inspection Act and Humane Slaughter Act, and directs the inspection workforce. Appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture and reporting through the Under Secretary for Food Safety.

Administrator of the Food Safety and Inspection Service

Justin Ransom

Runs the Foreign Agricultural Service and, by statute, also oversees the General Sales Manager and the Agricultural Attache Service, making the Administrator USDA's senior official on agricultural trade. The post is filled by the Secretary of Agriculture and is not Senate-confirmed.

Administrator of the Foreign Agricultural Service

Daniel Whitley

Administrator of the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation, the institutional head of Great Lakes Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation. Appointed by the President under Saint Lawrence Seaway Act of May 13, 1954 (33 U.S.C. 981-990); directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation

J. M. (Mike) McCoshen

Administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration, the institutional head of Health Resources and Services Administration. Appointed under Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 201 et seq.); directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of the Health Resources and Services Administration

Thomas J. Engels

Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the institutional head of National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 (Public Law 85-568); directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Jared Isaacman

Awards and administers the office's grants and judges whether states comply with the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act's core protections. The Administrator is appointed by the President from among people with experience in juvenile justice programs.

Administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

Eileen M. Garry

Administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the institutional head of Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under Norman Y. Mineta Research and Special Programs Improvement Act of 2004 (49 U.S.C. 108); directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration

Paul J. Roberti

Directs the federal crop insurance program and also serves as Manager of the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation. Appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture; no Senate confirmation required.

Administrator of the Risk Management Agency

Patricia Swanson

Directs the agency's rural business loan, loan guarantee and grant programs under the Under Secretary for Rural Development. Appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture; no Senate confirmation required.

Administrator of the Rural Business-Cooperative Service

J.R. Claeys

Directs the agency's rural housing and community facilities loan, guarantee and grant programs under the Under Secretary for Rural Development. Appointed by the Secretary of Agriculture; no Senate confirmation required.

Administrator of the Rural Housing Service

George Kelly

Directs the agency's electric, telecommunications and water and waste lending programs. Appointed by the President; no Senate confirmation required.

Administrator of the Rural Utilities Service

Karl Elmshaeuser

Administrator of the Small Business Administration, the institutional head of Small Business Administration. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under Small Business Act of 1953 (15 U.S.C. 631 et seq.); directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of the Small Business Administration

Kelly Loeffler

Runs the power marketing administration: negotiates its wholesale sales contracts, sets rates that repay the federal investment in the dams, and directs generation scheduling with the Corps. Appointed by the Secretary of Energy.

Administrator of the Southeastern Power Administration

Virgil G. Hobbs III

Runs the power marketing administration: negotiates its wholesale contracts, sets rates that repay the federal investment in the dams, and oversees its transmission system. Appointed by the Secretary of Energy.

Administrator of the Southwestern Power Administration

Mike Wech

Directs federal security screening at airports and security regulation across all transportation modes, and receives and distributes transportation security intelligence. Appointed by the President with Senate confirmation for a five-year term; the statute requires experience in transportation or security.

Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration

David P. Cummins

Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division, the institutional head of Wage and Hour Division. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (29 U.S.C. 204); directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division

Andrew Rogers

Runs WAPA's power marketing, rate setting and transmission operations, exercising on the Secretary's behalf the power marketing functions transferred from the Bureau of Reclamation. Appointed by the Secretary of Energy.

Administrator of the Western Area Power Administration

Tracey A. LeBeau

Funds high-risk energy research that industry will not finance on its own, awarding cost-shared projects to companies, universities and national laboratories and cutting them off when technical milestones are missed. Its targets are set by statute: energy imports, emissions, efficiency, nuclear waste, and the resilience of energy infrastructure.

Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy

Conner Prochaska

Runs the Section 106 process, under which a federal agency must consider how a project it funds, permits or carries out would affect historic properties and consult states and tribes before proceeding. It writes the regulations for that review, joins the hardest cases itself, and advises the President and Congress.

Advisory Council on Historic Preservation

Chairman of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is an operating division of the United States Department of Health and Human Services within the Public Health Service. It produces evidence and funds research to make health care safer, higher in quality, more accessible, and more affordable, and works to ensure that the evidence is understood and used. It was established in 1999 under the Healthcare Research and Quality Act, succeeding the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, and is codified at 42 U.S.C. 299.

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

Roger D. Klein

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry is a public health agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, administered through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It evaluates and works to reduce human exposure to hazardous substances from waste sites, spills, and other releases, conducts public health assessments, and studies the health effects of toxic exposures. It was authorized by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980.

Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry

Aaron Bernstein

Runs the Department of Agriculture's own laboratories: its scientists work on crop and livestock production, plant and animal disease, food safety, human nutrition and natural resource management. Results are published for public use rather than sold, and much of the work is done with land-grant universities.

Agricultural Research Service

Flies the aircraft and crews the vessels that Customs and Border Protection uses to detect, track and interdict smuggling and other unlawful cross-border activity. It is CBP's air and sea arm: the Border Patrol covers the land between ports of entry and the Office of Field Operations staffs the ports.

Air and Marine Operations

Jonathan P. Miller

Reviews court-martial convictions from the Air Force and Space Force, sitting in panels of at least three appellate military judges. It can affirm, modify or set aside findings and sentences, may hold a sentence inappropriately severe, and its decisions can be taken on to the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.

Air Force Court of Criminal Appeals

Provides graduate and professional education to Air Force and Space Force members and Department of the Air Force civilians: its graduate school awards master's and doctoral degrees in engineering, science and management, and its continuing-education schools train civil engineers, logisticians and strategic-force specialists.

Air Force Institute of Technology

James C. Bowers

The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau is a bureau of the United States Department of the Treasury. It collects federal excise taxes on alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and ammunition and regulates the production, labeling, advertising, and importation of alcohol and tobacco products. It was established on January 24, 2003, under the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which split the former Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and retained the tax and trade functions in the Treasury.

Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau

Serves as the principal cyberspace policy official within State Department senior management and as the Secretary's adviser on cyber and digital issues, leading the Department's cyber diplomacy. Appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate, with the rank and status of ambassador.

Ambassador at Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy

Adam Cassady

Designs, builds and maintains the permanent American military cemeteries and memorials outside the United States - the graves, chapels, monuments and grounds where American war dead are buried or commemorated. It also controls the erection of other United States war memorials and monuments on foreign soil.

American Battle Monuments Commission

Chairman of the American Battle Monuments Commission

The American Printing House for the Blind is a private nonprofit corporation that holds a federal charter and serves as the official national source of educational materials for students who are legally blind and enrolled in programs below the college level. It produces and distributes braille and large-print textbooks, educational aids, and assistive technology, funded through an annual federal appropriation administered by the Department of Education. It was chartered by Congress in 1879.

American Printing House for the Blind

Craig Meador

The President of the American Printing House for the Blind leads the Louisville nonprofit that manufactures and furnishes braille, large-print and tactile materials for the instruction of blind students, distributed to schools each year under a federal per-pupil quota (20 U.S.C. 101, 102). Its Board of Trustees selects the president.

President

Funds economic development in the Appalachian counties of thirteen states, approving grants for broadband and water infrastructure, workforce training and business development, mostly delivered through local development districts. It is run jointly by the governors of the member states and a federal co-chair.

Appalachian Regional Commission

Gayle Conelly Manchin

The Architect of the Capitol is a legislative branch agency responsible for the maintenance, operation, development, and preservation of the United States Capitol, the congressional office buildings, the Library of Congress buildings, the Supreme Court building, the United States Botanic Garden, and the grounds of the Capitol campus. The title refers to both the agency and the official who heads it. Permanent statutory authority for the office dates to the Act of August 15, 1876.

Architect of the Capitol

Thomas E. Austin

The Architect of the Capitol has the care and superintendence of the Capitol and maintains the buildings and grounds of the Capitol campus (2 U.S.C. 1812). A commission of congressional leaders and appropriations and administration committee members appoints the Architect to a renewable 10-year term and can remove the holder at any time (2 U.S.C. 1801a).

Archivist of the United States, the institutional head of National Archives and Records Administration. Appointed by the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, under National Archives and Records Administration Act of 1984 (Public Law 98-497); directs the agency's staff, budget, and statutory functions.

Archivist of the United States

Bradford Pentony Wilson

Arctic Research Commission

Chairman of the Arctic Research Commission

Operates the two homes for retired and former enlisted members of the armed forces, Armed Forces Retirement Home-Washington and Armed Forces Retirement Home-Gulfport, providing residences, meals and graduated levels of health and long-term care. Eligibility is statutory, turning on length of service or wartime service.

Armed Forces Retirement Home

Stephen T. Rippe

Hears and decides contractors' appeals from the final decisions of Department of Defense and NASA contracting officers - disputes over payment, delay, termination and contract interpretation. Its full-time judges must have at least five years of experience in public contract law and are selected the way administrative law judges are.

Armed Services Board of Contract Appeals

Reviews court-martial convictions from the Army, sitting in panels of at least three appellate military judges. It can affirm, modify or set aside findings and sentences, may hold a sentence inappropriately severe, and its decisions can be taken on to the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.

Army Court of Criminal Appeals

Heads the National Security Division and is the Justice Department's primary liaison to the Director of National Intelligence. One of the Senate-confirmed Assistant Attorneys General, designated for the role by the President (28 U.S.C. 507A).