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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Secret Service experiences mobile device security blunders
Yesterday00:05:55Summary readyThe Secret Service has serious gaps in its mobile device management and security practices, leading to heightened risks for the nation’s leaders, other protectees and its employees, according to an inspector general report published Thursday. Those security and management gaps included a culture of using personal devices even in protective operations, a lack of security software on government-issued devices and the approval of apps containing vulnerabilities, among others. Much of the blame, per the report, lies with the Department of Homeland Security unit’s Office of the CIO, which is responsible for establishing security standards and ensuring compliance with policies. Employees pointed to issues with their government-issued devices as the reason for the lapse in protocol, citing technical limitations and diminished reliability. Government-issued devices, for example, would “frequently” disconnect from the virtual private network and couldn’t download “essential” apps to conduct investigations and communicate with local law enforcement. Records revealed employees were claiming reimbursement for use of personal devices after traveling internationally, illustrating the practice was “routine” and “expected,” per the watchdog. President Donald Trump’s new supplemental spending request includes $67.1 billion to support the Defense Department, featuring funds to advance new capabilities and offset the cost of operations in the Middle East. The Office of Management and Budget sent the spending package to Congress on Wednesday, requesting a total of $87.6 billion. While the lion’s share of the funds would cover the mounting costs of Operation Epic Fury, the White House is also seeking money for other issues — such as aid to American farmers and responses to the Ebola outbreak in Central Africa. In a letter sent to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., OMB Director Russell Vought urged lawmakers to approve the additional funding as a way to reimburse the Pentagon for the war in Iran. The biggest ticket item in the supplemental is a $21 billion request for munitions, which would likely support the Pentagon in replenishing weapons that have been spent during Operation Epic Fury. 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 Department of Education’s IT shop lost more than half of its employees to Trump’s reduction in force last year
6d ago00:05:49Summary readyThe Education Department’s Office of the Chief Information Officer lost more than half of its staff in early 2025 during the Trump administration’s reduction-in-force campaign, leaving some suboffices completely empty, the agency’s Office of the Inspector General found in a report issued Monday. The OIG used Microsoft Office and Teams to track down who was subject to the RIF during the first nearly ten weeks of President Donald Trump’s second term, finding it gutted 40% or 1,579 of the agency’s workers in total. The OIG said it was presented with a scope limitation for the review due to the department not providing all requested information or giving unfettered access to Department staff, which limited its ability to fully address the review objective. Specifically in the CIO’s office, the OIG counted 44 remaining employees of the 92 employed in January 2025 — a 52% reduction. About 8% of all separated employees in the agency were in IT management, it found, and about $6 million in OCIO contracts were terminated as part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s massive agency reorganization campaign in early 2025. Suboffices within the OCIO that are statutorily required to oversee all departmental operational enterprise IT infrastructures and software, develop IT investment performance measures and conduct security reviews mandated by the Federal Information Security Modernization Act have no remaining employees, the report said. NASA issued a long-awaited list of awardees for the latest iteration of a multibillion-dollar cross-government IT acquisition vehicle, moving the large-scale contract forward. In a brief notice on Monday, the agency said it would start processing the awards for the sixth generation of its Solutions for Enterprise‑wide Procurement contract, known as SEWP VI. It also disclosed more than 2,100 awardees across three categories: IT solutions, enterprise-wide IT services, and mission-based IT services. Among the hundreds of awardees, the list includes IBM, Leidos, KPMG, Carahsoft Technology Corp., Peraton, REI Systems, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), CACI, Cherokee Nation Government Solutions, Amivero and Guidehouse. All of the awards are indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity, with a 10-year ordering period and a maximum ordering value of $20 billion. The contract period begins Nov. 1 and will run through October 2036. 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.
SummaryFollowing new quantum EOs, Energy launches Quantum Genesis initiative
1w ago00:06:54Summary readyThe Department of Energy is kickstarting a quantum computing effort tied to the Genesis Mission following a pair of quantum-focused executive orders signed by President Donald Trump on Monday. The newly launched Quantum Genesis initiative aims to develop and deploy a more resilient quantum computing capability by 2028. Darío Gil, under secretary for science and Genesis Mission lead, told FedScoop that the new initiative serves as a foundation for the charges Trump issued in his directives for “challenging America’s quantum information science community and industry to build the world’s first fault-tolerant quantum computing capability that will transform scientific discovery, strengthen national security, and power the next era of American innovation.” To reach that goal, DOE has three main priorities: set up a competition to accelerate quantum system development, conduct targeted research to advance high-impact, scientific quantum use cases, and build a supercomputing facility for engineers to access the new capabilities. The facility, along with DOE’s existing high-performance computing systems and the Genesis Mission’s in-progress American Science and Security Platform, will form a unified high-performance computing, AI and quantum computing ecosystem. The Pentagon’s workforce shrank by roughly 10.7% during the height of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency implementation efforts, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office. That decrease represents 82,940 employees — from a baseline 778,188 civilian employees at the Defense Department in December 2024 near the end of the Biden administration, down to 695,248 in January 2026. Outlining governmentwide workforce contractions across 2025 that were sparked by multiple presidential directives, GAO’s report offers a fresh, data-driven look at DOGE’s downsizing impacts inside the Pentagon. It indicates that, while DOD remains America’s largest employer of federal civilian personnel, the department’s workforce is now substantially smaller in volume than it was in prior years. Dawn Locke, director with GAO’s Strategic Issues team and lead on the review, told DefenseScoop: “A key takeaway for DOD is the role the Deferred Resignation Program played in the agency’s efforts to reduce the size of its civilian workforce.” 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.
SummaryTrump issues post-quantum executive orders to speed up migration
1w ago00:05:43Summary readyPresident Donald Trump signed two executive orders Monday to accelerate the federal government’s transition to post-quantum encryption and reprioritize government financing to support the domestic quantum computing industry. The orders, which CyberScoop first reported on last year, direct the government to throw its weight behind the quantum computing industry. They are part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to put its stamp on the development of another key emerging technology. Ahead of the signing, sources previewed details of those orders to CyberScoop. Per one of those sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss pending administration actions, a “whole of government approach is used to empower research and development into quantum computing, as well as quantum sensing [and other resources].” They described the Trump administration’s attitude for propping up industry as “don’t let us miss out on prioritizing the feeders for the research or the development of quantum.” The second order requires federal civilian networks to adopt quantum-resistant encryption faster than the current 2035 deadline. The new encryption algorithms, vetted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, will protect against future quantum computer attacks. Agencies that miss the new deadline must report to the Office of Management and Budget explaining why. Four proposed rules to begin formally overhauling 20 sections of the Federal Acquisition Regulation were published in the Federal Register on Tuesday. While the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council has been rewriting and deviating from the FAR for over a year now as part of what it’s calling “the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul”, the unpublished proposed rules are a step toward codification of these changes. Over a combined total of more than 1,000 pages of proposed rules, the overhaul would establish regular regulatory reviews and sunsets, as well as move the bid protest system to the agencies involved in disputes instead of the Government Accountability Office. The FAR update comes in response to an April 2025 executive order mandating the procurement policy be pared down to the essentials and presented in plain language, void of any “undue barriers” and “unnecessary regulations.” The FAR has not been significantly updated in 40 years. 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 VA hosts IT industry day, telling contractors to bring their ‘A’ games for the age of AI
1w ago00:06:06Summary readyThe Department of Veterans Affairs hosted an IT industry day last week with a specific takeaway from the agency’s deputy CIO: incumbency itself is not enough. Zack Schwartz, principal deputy assistant secretary in the VA’s Office of Information and Technology, said he’s made it clear that tech contractors need to bring their “A-game when it comes to supporting the veteran,” and the VA is open for business with whoever can do it best. “Incumbency is not a guarantee, incumbency is not an advantage,” Schwartz said in an interview with FedScoop. “We will not settle just because you’ve supported the VA in the past.” Schwartz said last Wednesday’s private IT Advanced Planning Brief to Industry was a breakthrough between the agency and industry, as he made it clear that the “massive organization” is “moving extremely fast” to modernize and integrate AI with governance. LOGZONE, an Alabama-based logistics services provider, has agreed to pay more than $507,000 to resolve allegations that it misrepresented its compliance with Pentagon cybersecurity requirements while doing work with the Navy. According to a settlement agreement published last Thursday, the Justice Department alleged that LOGZONE failed to fully implement required security controls under NIST Special Publication 800-171 despite its contract mandating compliance. While not an explicit violation of the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program, the suit highlights the Defense Department’s increasing scrutiny of the defense industry not implementing required cybersecurity measures for sensitive information. The settlement stems from two contracts awarded by the Navy between 2021 and 2022 for logistics, inventory management and facility support services for the Naval Oceanographic Command located at Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. According to the settlement agreement, LOGZONE received more than $682,000 under the contracts through March 2025. 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.
SummaryTrump’s FEMA nominee is planning an IT overhaul
2w ago00:05:07Summary readyThe Federal Emergency Management Agency might undergo a major change to its IT operations if President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security unit is confirmed. Cameron Hamilton, Trump’s pick to lead FEMA, told Senate lawmakers during a Wednesday hearing some of the tools and technology that FEMA uses are a bit antiquated and that if he’s confirmed, he’s planning to do a significant IT overhaul of the entire agency for better accountability. Hamilton would be the first permanent leader of FEMA in Trump’s second term. The agency has gone through four different acting administrators, including Hamilton, whose stint lasted from January-May 2025. The instability at its helm is representative of the turmoil throughout FEMA, which has seen its net workforce contract by nearly 4,000 since 2025. More than half of those departures occurred in the first four months of 2026, according to OPM’s Federal Workforce Data website’s latest update in April. FEMA was especially impacted by the historically long DHS shutdown earlier this year, with its operations scaled back to the bare minimum. The Environmental Protection Agency has run artificial intelligence pilots on “everything,” but its chief information officer only wants subject matter experts to be using the technology at a high level. CIO Carter Farmer said last week that while the agency has piloted AI to review public comments and analyze large scientific datasets, he still wants experts to review outputs. Farmed explained: “Something we tell our staff quite regularly is if you’re not an expert in the subject matter you’re using AI for, you probably shouldn’t be using AI because it can be very convincingly wrong. If you’re not an expert at that, validating those outputs is very hard.” Another reason why using AI can require more experience: “Prompt engineering is a real skill,” Farmer said, and proper use is rarely plug-and-play. He added that: “Having to learn how AI works — and how the back end of it actually works — is very helpful in how to think about how you should be using this tool.” But the agency’s daily use of AI is less high-stakes. Farmer said the EPA’s biggest focus currently is using AI for “low-level” or “low-risk functions” like email drafting and creating presentations. 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.
SummaryAWS wins $2.6B DHS-wide Cumulus cloud project
2w ago00:05:41Summary readyThe Department of Homeland Security is taking the next step toward reaching its cloud aspirations by officially bringing the first vendor onboard its Cumulus project, according to contract documents published last Friday. The agency awarded nearly $2.6 billion to Amazon Web Services via a single-award indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract for its cloud offerings, including Infrastructure as a Service, training and marketplace solutions. Cumulus was first introduced in January as part of procurement forecasting documents that outlined DHS’s plan to increase the efficiency, flexibility and effectiveness of its cloud purchases in the hopes of unlocking “significant discounts.” At the time, DHS anticipated potential contracts would surpass $100 million, which is the ceiling for estimates on the Acquisition Planning Forecast System platform. The Cumulus project marks the first time cloud service providers have been tapped at an agencywide level, rather than by individual components. DHS plans to bring on other notable cloud providers. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is expected to join next quarter, as is Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. The award amounts for those contracts have not yet been disclosed. More than 2 in 5 IRS IT employees have either been separated from the agency or involuntarily reassigned to other positions during the second Trump administration, according to a watchdog report released last week. In its third workforce snapshot since President Donald Trump began his second term, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that the IRS lost 30% of its workforce (31,273 staffers) from January 2025 through January 2026, though it also added 2,000-some positions for a net decrease of 28%. Those departures were a mix of voluntary separations, deferred resignations or other incentive-induced exits. Among the tax agency’s IT staff, 42% are gone, including 29% (2,497 individuals) who departed via separation or workforce reduction efforts. The remaining 13% (1,143 employees) were reassigned to the chief operating officer’s staff, per the report. “According to the IRS, restructuring the IT department allowed them to simplify and align technical work with the agency’s mission and core functions,” TIGTA reported. “IRS officials stated that the reassignment was not performance-related but was done to support Chief Operating Officer responsibilities.” Those non-IT responsibilities included the oversight of integrated support functions, implementing economy-of-scale efficiencies and facilitating better business practices, tax agency officials told the watchdog. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
SummaryUnder Tech Force, OPM wants to send some feds for tours of duty in industry
2w ago00:06:12Summary readyThe Trump administration is already trying to bring talent from industry into the government via its U.S. Tech Force program, but the next step could be putting federal workers on exchanges to companies, according to remarks from an Office of Personnel Management official Thursday. During a panel at a federal technology-focused conference, Kevin Hennecken, senior advisor to the director at OPM and leader of the Trump administration’s Tech Force hiring effort, mentioned the agency’s interest in such a program as a way of helping train federal workers. Something OPM has been focused on is “creating more pathways for people to sort of experiment going to the private sector for periods of time and coming back,” Hennecken said. “I think that can also be quite helpful, just to expose them to some different ways of getting things done.” Such efforts would add another layer to the Trump administration’s current Tech Force program, which is focused on filling the government’s hiring needs with early career workers. Those workers, who have just started onboarding, will serve two-year stints before it’s up to them whether to stay in government or go to industry. A small number of management-level professionals will also temporarily join the federal workforce from the private sector as part of the program. A National Institutes of Health contracting arm responsible for a series of large-scale IT contracting vehicles is ending all of its cross-government contracts and ceasing all functions by the end of 2028, according to a notice from the agency. All of the governmentwide acquisition vehicles (GWACs) under the NIH Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC) will expire Oct. 29, which is also the last day to award new orders, the Tuesday announcement stated. That includes the office’s ongoing iterations of its Chief Information Officer-Solutions and Partners contracts. The functions will be moved to the General Services Administration. The announcement comes after the Trump administration’s push to consolidate procurement led to a decision earlier this year to cancel NITAAC’s long-running and embattled next iteration of its governmentwide IT vehicle, known as CIO-SP4. That contract would have been worth roughly $50 billion, but faced numerous legal challenges and was delayed time and time again before it was ultimately scrapped. 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.
SummaryOracle wins OPM’s massive governmentwide HR modernization contract
3w ago00:05:06Summary readyThe Office of Personnel Management on Wednesday awarded its anticipated contract to modernize and consolidate federal human resources functions to Oracle, capping a process that’s been over a year in the making. The nearly $400 million award puts Oracle in charge of a process to bring over 100 HR systems under one single platform that the agency is calling its Core Human Capital Management system. OPM says it believes the project will make significant reductions in the overall cost of HR platforms to taxpayers. “Historically, federal agencies have relied on fragmented, aging HR systems that are costly to maintain and difficult to scale,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said in a written statement included in a press release. He called the award “a foundational investment in the future of federal workforce management.” A final award comes over a year after an early effort to award such a contract failed to move forward. In May 2025, the Office of Personnel Management awarded a sole-source contract to Workday to facilitate the Trump administration’s HR modernization efforts, arguing it was the only vendor that could do the job. But OPM abruptly canceled that award, and later launched open competition for such a contract. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Wednesday ordered federal agencies to prioritize vulnerabilities based on four criteria, as part of a push to “patch smarter, not harder.” Federal agencies should emphasize patches for vulnerabilities that affect a publicly exposed asset, allow an attacker to fully automate exploitation, give attackers the ability to take over control of a system or relate to evidence of active, real-world exploitation, CISA declared. CISA acting director Nick Andersen previewed the binding operational directive (BOD) Tuesday, framing it as a rethinking of vulnerability management more broadly. Andersen said in a statement: “This Directive provides clear definitions, timelines and criteria that enhances transparency, predictability and agencies’ resource planning to execute more effective vulnerability remediation." BOD 26-04 sets forth timelines for how quickly agencies must fix a vulnerability based on how many of the four criteria it meets. If it meets all four, for example, agencies need to fix it within three days and carry out a “forensic triage” to assess whether their systems were compromised. 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.
SummaryCBP is installing new AI-powered surveillance towers at the southern border
3w ago00:06:12Summary readyU.S. Customs and Border Protection is moving forward on AI-powered autonomous surveillance towers that are expected to be deployed across the southern border, signing a $71 million task order with GDIT last week. The award is the latest in a massive indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract, worth up to $1.8 billion, that kicked off three years ago and is aimed at modernizing and expanding CBP’s surveillance tower system. GDIT is a key player in CBP’s modernization plans as the prime contractor on a remote video surveillance program, the developer of a CBP database with quantum sensors and a fundamental part of a number of other projects including the smart border wall. Michael Wagner, VP of biometrics, border and transportation security at GDIT, told FedScoop that the company started working on this next-generation autonomous tower about three years ago and has gone through several iterations of solutioning and testing and validating out in the field. The American military deployed an autonomous Corsair maritime drone built by Saronic to find and recover two soldiers who were stranded near the Strait of Hormuz on Monday after their Army AH-64 Apache helicopter crashed during a patrol operation, U.S. Central Command spokesperson Capt. Tim Hawkins told DefenseScoop. The confirmation of this unique rescue mission comes as military tensions are surging in the Middle East amid the United States-Iran conflict. It marks the U.S. military’s first publicized use of an autonomous surface vessel to locate and retrieve downed aircrew in real-world warfare, following years of experimentation with different types of sea drones. Hawkins said the drone used in the operation was a U.S. Navy Corsair unmanned surface vessel operated by U.S. 5th Fleet’s Task Force 59. In that rescue operation, he told DefenseScoop, the maritime drone picked the two pilots up “and transported them to another location on the water where they were then hoisted up to a helicopter for further transport.” 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