Podcast
The Daily Scoop Podcast
Hosted by The Daily Scoop Podcast · EN
A podcast covering the latest news & trends facing top government leaders on topics such as technology, management & workforce. Hosted by Billy Mitchell on FedScoop and released Monday-Friday.
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The federal CIO says OMB plans to make IT contract data collection public
2d ago00:05:19Summary readyThe Office of Management and Budget plans to make public at least some of the technology contract data it’s collecting from agencies, per the government’s top IT official. Under a March memo, certain chief information officers are required to update OMB each month on contracts they or their subordinates have approved. That same memo also mandates data collection about pricing and agency use of services from vendors themselves. The memo received some positive reception as a possible method to better inform procurement decisions, but a common critique was that it provided no assurances the information would ever be transparently published. Despite citing data standards consistent with the OPEN Government Data Act — a law that requires agencies to publish non-sensitive information in machine-readable and open formats by default — the memo did not state whether the information would be publicly disseminated. When asked by FedScoop recently whether public sharing is part of the plan for that information, Greg Barbaccia said: “Absolutely. This is the citizens’ data.” The format that might take is less clear, however. Barbaccia said it “remains to be seen what amount we could share responsibly” and he would “have to take that back and think about that a bit.” The White House is keeping an eye on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s progress on a plan to deploy wearable identification technology for its agents, according to ICE Assistant Director Matthew Elliston. The Department of Homeland Security’s fiscal 2027 budget proposal, set by the White House, allocates $7.5 million for the agency’s Science and Technology unit to develop critical technologies that strengthen the component’s ability to execute its mission. If passed, a portion of those funds would go to delivering operational prototypes of smart glasses that will “equip agents with real-time access to information and biometric identification capabilities in the field,” per the budget justification. “We have been toying with the idea of wearable facial matching” technology, Elliston said during AFCEA Bethesda’s LEAPS Summit Thursday in Washington, D.C. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
SummaryLawmakers sound the alarm on ICE ‘ghost flights’
4d ago00:05:52Summary readyA group of 32 congressional Democrats is calling for the Federal Aviation Administration to help hold Immigration and Customs Enforcement accountable following reports that the Department of Homeland Security unit is withholding aviation data. While deportation flights significantly increased last year, data about the air operations is difficult to find, according to the House members’ letter to FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford. The representatives are asking for a detailed report about ICE’s use of the Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed (LADD) program and whether the FAA is aware of additional data-suppression methods contributing to the decreased transparency. The program “was established to enable private aircraft owners and operators of non-commercial flights to filter their flight data from public display websites,” the coalition said in the letter sent Monday. “ICE’s use of this program to obscure routine government operations and suppress information about deportation flights is out of the scope of this program, and therefore inappropriate and dangerous.” The price tag for the Golden Dome for America could reach $1.2 trillion to develop, deploy and operate over 20 years, according to a new report published Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office. The updated cost estimate is based on a “notional” missile defense architecture that broadly includes capabilities outlined in President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order calling for Golden Dome’s development. CBO’s projections are significantly larger than the $185 billion already budgeted for the project — with space-based interceptors (SBIs) accounting for over half of the office’s estimate. “Of the $1.2 trillion amount, acquisition costs for the notional [national missile defense] system would total just over $1 trillion,” the report stated. “The most expensive component is the space-based interceptor layer, which accounts for about 70 percent of acquisition costs and 60 percent of total costs.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
SummaryThe future of AI in the federal workforce
5d ago00:20:35Summary readyIf you ask Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor how he thinks about the role of AI in his agency’s mission, he’ll tell you he sees two different prevailing perspectives: one with a “big OPM” mission and another for “little OPM.” At least that’s how he described it to me recently at UiPath’s Fusion conference in Washington, DC. During our interview, Kupor shared about juxtaposition, emerging AI use cases that OPM is driving forward, and much more. The Department of Homeland Security intends to continue its work with Cellebrite, a provider of digital forensics hardware and software tools, according to forecast documents released last week. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as the department’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, plan to award a five-year, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract with a $100 million ceiling to the vendor later this year. Cellebrite’s products enable the agency to access data from cellphones, tablets and — more recently — unmanned aerial vehicles. The Israeli firm’s data extraction capabilities are “the most widely utilized and deployed computer forensic tool” within HSI, per the document. Cellebrite has been deployed across DHS, including its reported use within the Secret Service to break into the phone of the man who shot President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., in 2024. DOGE’s playbook for using artificial intelligence to eliminate regulations was on full display at the Department of Housing and Urban Development last summer with the introduction of an AI tool built for the “extermination” of federal housing rules. Documents obtained by Democracy Forward via Freedom of Information Act requests reveal a PowerPoint presentation delivered at HUD on SweetREX, a tool named for DOGE associate Christopher Sweet, according to Wired reporting last August. The new documents, shared with FedScoop, laid out a multistep process in which all HUD regulations would be analyzed by the AI. The tool would then provide recommendations to “keep, delete, or partial delete” each rule, per the presentation. Attorneys would review the suggestions and agency staffers would make the final decision. HUD regulations cover everything from the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sex in mortgage assistance to providing legal aid for foreclosure-related issues. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
SummaryAt long last, a new deputy federal CIO
6d ago00:04:16Summary readyFederal CIO Greg Barbaccia has tapped the Department of Education’s chief information officer as the government’s new No. 2 IT official. Thomas Flagg will take over as deputy federal CIO after spending more than 11 years at the Department of Labor and leading Education’s IT shop since October 2024. In an email sent Thursday to agency CIOs and shared with FedScoop, Barbaccia said there was “an overwhelming amount of interest” in the deputy role “from an exceptionally strong field of candidates.” Flagg stood out due to the “depth and seriousness of his experience across multiple technology leadership roles,” Barbaccia wrote, pointing to his time at the Department of Education and DOL. The hiring of Flagg gives the White House its first permanent deputy CIO since September 2025, when Drew Myklegard left the public sector to become Carahsoft’s executive director of government programs. Since then, the acting deputy federal CIO position has been held by Jay Teitelbaum, an Office of Management and Budget, U.S. Digital Service and Department of Homeland Security alum. The Trump administration is redirecting a cybersecurity scholarship program that requires recipients to work in government service toward artificial intelligence, leaving some current program scholars dismayed and bewildered. In an email to participating school program coordinators obtained by CyberScoop, the Office of Personnel Management and National Science Foundation said the CyberCorps Scholarship For Service program would now be known as CyberAI SFS. The email reads: “The SFS students we enroll today will not be employable when they graduate in 2-3 years without significant AI background. Any SFS student in this new program must be proficient in using AI in cybersecurity or providing security and resilience for AI systems. Therefore, new students in the legacy CyberCorps program must learn to acquire AI expertise to augment their cybersecurity expertise.” It also explains that “new SFS scholars will not be accepted to the Legacy CyberCorps(C) program without a description on how they will develop competencies at the intersection of cybersecurity and AI.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
SummaryOPM applies AI to modernize federal job descriptions
1w ago00:04:21Summary readyThe Office of Personnel Management is applying artificial intelligence to modernize the writing of position descriptions in the hiring process. OPM Director Scott Kupor touted the agency’s new USA Class tool during an interview at the UiPath Fusion conference, presented by FedScoop, as a way to streamline notoriously slow and complex federal hiring. The federal government “has a lot of jobs,” the director said, with more than 600 classifications and a workforce north of 2 million civilian federal employees. “So the ‘n factorial’ is pretty significant.” Kupor said OPM sought to leverage AI’s strength in digesting large volumes of information — in this case, thousands of existing job descriptions — to train a model, and then prompted it to create new position descriptions aligned with OPM’s classification standards. Federal hiring managers then review the outputs to ensure accuracy, further strengthening the model. The Pentagon plans to require service members to complete cybersecurity training once every three years, DefenseScoop has learned, a move that will scrap an annual mandate and is set to upend the Army’s recent shift to a five-year requirement. In a Sep. 30 memo, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the military to “restore mission focus” by reducing, consolidating or eliminating a slew of mandatory courses, such as cybersecurity training, that he said were distracting from the military’s core job of fighting wars. Hegseth did not specify by how much the services should “relax the mandatory frequency” of cybersecurity training, and by February, the Army issued its own directive that required soldiers to take the course once every five years instead of annually, DefenseScoop reported. But more than a month after the service’s directive, the Pentagon is moving to require troops to conduct cybersecurity training once every three years, according to a recent memo reviewed by the publication and a senior defense official, which would effectively overrule the Army’s move. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
SummaryCISA warns of ‘weeks to months’ of critical infrastructure isolation amid conflicts
2w ago00:04:39Summary readyThe Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is urging critical infrastructure owners and operators to plan for delivering essential services under emergency conditions – potentially for months at a time. The federal government’s top cybersecurity agency warned that state-sponsored hackers, particularly two Chinese groups known as Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon, continue to threaten critical sectors like electricity, water, and internet. The agency is now working with the private sector to protect operational technology – the systems that control the heavy machinery and equipment that powers most critical infrastructure – from attacks that enter through business IT systems or third-party vendor products. The initiative — known as CI Fortify – will include CISA conducting targeted technical assessments of critical infrastructure entities and aims to create plans that “allow for safe operations for weeks to months while isolated” from IT networks and third-party tools. Leonel Garciga left his role as the Army’s chief information officer last week, the service announced Tuesday. His departure from the job had been anticipated. Garciga, a Navy veteran who has served in the federal government across intelligence, information technology and engineering sectors for nearly three decades, was selected as the Army’s CIO in July 2023. He stepped down as CIO on May 1 during a ceremony that highlighted his “many accomplishments advancing the Army’s digital transformation, cybersecurity, and data strategies,” according to a social media post from his former office. As the Army’s CIO, Garciga was responsible for ushering the service through a tumultuous time in the digital domain amid heightened cybersecurity risks, AI advancement, and the military’s push to access and streamline its own vast data repositories. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
SummaryDOD expands its classified AI work with 8 companies
2w ago00:05:12Summary readyEight U.S. technology companies have signed formal agreements to deploy their frontier AI capabilities on the Defense Department’s classified networks “for lawful operational use,” according to a Pentagon press release published Friday. DOD’s new deals with SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle follow a major contract dispute between the department and Anthropic that culminated earlier this year over potential ethical constraints that accompany the use of AI in warfare and for national surveillance. “Integrating secure frontier AI capabilities into the Department’s Impact Level 6 (IL6) and Impact Level 7 (IL7) network environments will streamline data synthesis, elevate situational understanding, and augment warfighter decision-making in complex operational environments,” officials wrote in Friday’s press release. A bipartisan congressional push to codify a National Science Foundation-based artificial intelligence research enabler continued this week with the reintroduction in the Senate of the CREATE AI Act. The bill from Sens. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., Todd Young, R-Ind., Mike Rounds, R-S.D., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., would establish the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) that would give AI researchers, educators and students more access to tools, data and other information to help develop new systems. Heinrich, founder and co-chair of the Senate AI Caucus, said in a press release that the NAIRR would go a long way toward “democratizing access to AI,” ensuring that American workers are prepared for the future and primed to lead “rapid advancements” with the emerging technology that boost the U.S. economy. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
SummaryThe White House wants to revamp federal contracting practices by making cost-reimbursement structures the exception, not the rule, per an executive order signed Thursday. President Donald Trump’s order calls on the federal government to view fixed-price c
2w ago00:05:07Summary readyThe White House wants to revamp federal contracting practices by making cost-reimbursement structures the exception, not the rule, per an executive order signed Thursday. President Donald Trump’s order calls on the federal government to view fixed-price contracts with performance-based considerations as “the default and preferred method of procurement.” Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins told lawmakers Thursday that the VA’s beleaguered electronic health record modernization efforts have turned a corner with the successful rollout of the system this month at four Michigan facilities. Collins said the April 11 deployment of the EHR at hospitals in Detroit, Ann Arbor, Battle Creek and Saginaw “has been phenomenal, even by industry standard.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
SummaryDOGE duo ducked security rules during Treasury stint, GAO finds
2w ago00:04:59Summary readyTwo DOGE associates dispatched to the Treasury Department in the early days of the second Trump administration flouted various IT security rules while the agency itself fell short on implementing proper cyber controls, a new watchdog report found. The Government Accountability Office examined access that a pair of DOGE staffers had to Bureau of the Fiscal Service payment systems from Jan. 20-April 11, 2025. The Office of Management and Budget’s public tally of governmentwide AI use again grew in 2025 — this time amid the Trump administration’s push to use the technology in the name of efficiency. Per OMB’s recent publication on GitHub, the U.S. government reported about 3,600 AI use cases across agencies, a nearly 70% increase in disclosed applications of the technology from the previous reporting year. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
SummaryHouse passes two bills to modernize IRS operations
3w ago00:04:01Summary readyLess than two weeks after the IRS wrapped what its CEO called the “most successful filing season” in history, the House passed a pair of bills aimed at giving the tax agency better tech for its next go-round. The lower chamber cleared the BARCODE Efficiency Act and the Taxpayer Experience Improvement Act this week, teeing up the modernization-focused pieces of legislation for the Senate. The Department of Labor aims to unveil its AI workforce hub in “the coming months,” an agency official told FedScoop Tuesday. The concept of a Labor-managed AI workforce hub was first introduced in President Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan last July. The portal will feature recurring analyses and actionable insights meant to inform workforce and education policy, per the plan. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
Summary