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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Trump issues a new AI national security memo
Yesterday00:04:33Summary readyPresident Donald Trump on Friday signed out a new artificial intelligence national security memorandum that the White House says establishes “a new framework to put the most advanced, secure, and reliable AI systems into the hands of America’s warfighters and intelligence professionals while ensuring their responsible use.” The memo rescinds the Biden administration’s National Security Memorandum-25 from October 2024 that similarly set governance for the use and safety of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in national security and intelligence systems. The new guidance sets policies driving four key actions around AI in the national security space. The Department of the Air Force has tapped Ashley Devoto — a veteran and cybersecurity expert — as its new chief information officer, the department announced Thursday. Devoto enters the role after the department has been without a permanent CIO for over a year following the departure of Venice Goodwine in March 2025. With a decades-long career in cybersecurity fields, Devoto will now oversee the Air and Space Forces’ modernization and sustainment efforts for information technology and more. As CIO, she will lead the department’s enterprise information technology, data and artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and defense business systems portfolios and steward approximately $17 billion in technology investments that enable the missions of more than 800,000 Airmen, Guardians, civilians, and contractors worldwide. 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 CIA wants to turbocharge commercial tech buying with a new acquisition framework
6d ago00:26:33Summary readyEarlier this year, the CIA issued a new acquisition framework that it hopes will “turbocharge” collaboration with industry by proritizing the adoption of commercial products. Along with the framework, the agency released new processes for centralized vendor vetting and streamlined IT authorization. In her first interview as the CIA’s chief procurement officer, Effie Frangogiannis joins the Daily Scoop to break down the new framework, how interested industry partners can get involved and what’s coming next. The Trump administration issued a revised executive order Tuesday focused on artificial intelligence, offering a significantly pared-back vision for the federal government’s role vetting AI systems compared with a draft version that was spiked weeks ago. The order keeps in place the administration’s largely voluntary framework for companies to engage with the federal government around testing new models before release, but appears to considerably weaken or loosen provisions that had been opposed by industry. Under the order, AI companies would voluntarily provide the federal government access to frontier models before release, but now it will be for “up to” 30 days instead of the 90-day timeline included in previous drafts. It also explicitly states that nothing in the program will be construed as mandatory or part of a federal licensing or permitting regime, and gives AI companies significant influence to help define what models would and would not be covered under for testing. Under the order, all federal testing and access to the models would be subject to “confidentiality, cybersecurity, insider-risk, and intellectual-property protection, use, and nondisclosure requirements.” The Pentagon’s next iteration of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract would establish a cloud marketplace for military users while expanding support for artificial intelligence, edge computing and cross-domain operations, according to a draft solicitation. On May 20, the Defense Information Systems Agency published a draft performance of work statement for the upcoming JWCC Unified Cloud Marketplace (UCM) contract on Sam.gov. Previously known as JWCC Next, the program is intended to create a single marketplace through which Defense Department organizations can access authorized cloud services from a broad range of vendors. Under the proposed structure, the UCM would be organized into three tiers. The first would consist of hyperscale cloud service providers delivering core infrastructure and platform services. A second tier would encompass “Everything-as-a-Service” (XaaS) offerings — including software-, platform- and infrastructure-as-a-service capabilities. A third tier would be dedicated to commercial innovators and small businesses offering cloud-based technologies that meet the department’s security requirements. 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.
SummaryA federal AI consortium reemerges with a new name, scope and call for members
1w ago00:06:29Summary readyThe National Institute of Standards and Technology’s AI Safety Consortium will now be called the NIST Artificial Intelligence Consortium, the agency said Friday, continuing a shift in approach to the technology under President Donald Trump. According to NIST’s announcement, the renamed group will retain some of its previous work but will change its scope. The group is also seeking new member organizations to carry out its aims. Craig Burkhardt, deputy NIST director, said in a statement included in the release. “To encourage more extraordinary AI technological innovations, NIST is seeking to expand its AI measurement efforts by harnessing the broader community’s interests and capabilities.” The decision comes about a year after the Trump administration changed the name of NIST’s AI Safety Institute, pivoting away from “safety.” That organization, which was originally established under the Biden administration, is now called the Center for AI Standards and Innovation. It’s also the first news about the consortium in some time. The consortium was established in 2024 alongside the AI Safety Institute as a venue for input from companies, universities, and other organizations on measurement standards for AI safety. NIST is in the headlines once more this week, but not for reasons it’s going to be excited about. Department of Commerce inspector general report released Thursday found that the National Institute of Standards and Technology has mismanaged a critical cybersecurity vulnerability database through poor planning, inefficient operations, duplicate federal programs, and failure to communicate with users. The National Vulnerability Database, maintained by NIST since 2005, collects information about computer security flaws and adds details like severity ratings and affected products. This information helps cybersecurity professionals across government and the private sector decide which security problems to fix first. In February 2024, the database’s enrichment contract lapsed, creating a backlog of unprocessed security flaws that has only grown worse. The report identified the lack of strategic planning as a core problem. NIST leaders admitted they had no long-term plan for clearing the backlog, even as it grew from about 13,000 unprocessed security flaws in June 2024 to over 27,000 by the end of 2025. NIST publicly promised in May 2024 that it would clear the backlog by September 2024, setting a goal of processing 6,200 security flaws per month, but the agency had never processed more than 5,000 per month in the past. 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 looks to move beyond ‘fragmented’ CJADC2 deployments with $2B budget request
2w ago00:05:46Summary readyTucked into the Pentagon’s budget materials for fiscal 2027 is a request for more than $2 billion to purchase command-and-control technology licenses and engineering support for the U.S. combatant commands, Joint Staff and National Guard Bureau. That total includes more than $1.5 billion to expand defense users’ access to Palantir’s Maven Smart System in support of the Defense Department’s “Joint Force AI-Enabled Headquarters initiative” and $60 million for the “Virtual Joint Operations Center (VJOC) initiative.” Little has been disclosed publicly about those two efforts to date, and a Pentagon spokesperson declined to share more information about them with DefenseScoop this week. However, the budget documents indicate that the department is looking to swiftly consolidate “software-centric C2 onto a single pane of glass” over the next fiscal year. The DOD’s foundational concept for Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2), which broadly involves breaking down long-standing boundaries between the military services to enable a unified network where all sensors and shooters can seamlessly connect, started to take clear shape in the early 2020s. A House subcommittee will hold an open hearing next week on how frontier artificial intelligence models are shaping the cybersecurity landscape, for good and for ill. The June 4 hearing will be the second the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection has held that was focused at least in part on the subject, following a similar hearing held in December. But unlike at that joint subcommittee hearing, where members also examined other emerging technologies, AI takes center stage next week. It caps a series of closed-door meetings of the Homeland panel where members and staff have been evaluating the intersection of AI and cyber. 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.
SummaryTech Force touts 200 hires
2w ago00:06:04Summary readyWorkers hired under the Trump administration’s Tech Force program are gradually making their way into the government. About 200 people have been hired so far, and onboarding began over the past couple of weeks, Tech Force Director Kevin Hennecken told an audience gathered in a meeting room within the U.S. Capitol Visitor’s Center on Wednesday. He estimated about 10 people have been onboarded and expects that to be over 100 next month. The goal, he said, is to have about 300 to 500 workers by the end of summer. “Going from hiring to onboarding in the government can take a little bit of time,” Hennecken said. “We’re moving as fast as we can.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement is spending more than five times what it did last year on a single vendor’s identity verification technology, according to procurement documents published this month. ICE’s contract with BI2 Technologies from Sept. 24, 2025 to Sept. 23, 2026 totaled $4.6 million, while the new award, set to run from June 1, 2026 to May 31, 2027, surpasses the $25 million mark. The Massachusetts-based, venture capital-backed vendor will supply ICE agents with an additional batch of 1,570 iris-scanning devices. The handheld devices are wireless and connect to BI2 Technologies’ Inmate Identification and Recognition System, which provides access to 5 million-plus booking records, including arrest and incarceration data from 47 states. 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.
SummaryOMB update federal cyber logging tactics
2w ago00:07:29Summary readyFederal agencies will shift to a priority and risk-based method of logging cybersecurity events under a Friday memo from the Office of Management and Budget aimed at cutting “red tape” and costs. The memo from OMB Director Russell Vought rescinds and replaces a previous directive from the Biden administration issued after the 2020 SolarWinds breach that affected both the public and private sectors. While the previous policy “improved foundational capabilities across agencies,” OMB said the amount of data agencies were required to retain was costly and operationally difficult. In its place, the Trump directive outlines “a risk-based, prioritized logging approach” to logging. OMB’s policy comes amid concern about the use of artificial intelligence and automation to fuel cyberattacks. That technology can speed up the process of gaining access to a system and help covertly maintain that access for a long time. It’s also increasingly being used by threat actors, the memo said. Anthropic’s Mythos large language model is the talk of federal tech and cyber practitioners across the Beltway, and for good reason. According to the company, its month-old Project Glasswing initiative, which allows select researchers to get their hands on the Mythos model, has uncovered more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity software vulnerabilities across systemically important code, a finding that Anthropic says has shifted the central problem in cybersecurity from discovering flaws to verifying and patching them. The findings, drawn from partner reports and independent evaluations, mark one of the first large-scale accountings of what a frontier AI model can do when pointed at widely used code, and of the bottlenecks that emerge once it does. Several partners reported that their rates of bug discovery had increased more than tenfold. 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 wants nearly $30 billion for a new AI Arsenal
2w ago00:06:28Summary readyThe Defense Department is requesting close to $30 billion in fiscal 2027 to purchase and enable next-generation AI supercomputers and modernize the military’s computing infrastructure to power them. According to recently published budget documents, the Pentagon aims to build out its portfolio of highly secure data centers, and ultimately centralize and scale supercomputing assets across the joint force through its new “AI Arsenal initiative.” The fiscal 2027 proposal comes with a $29.5 billion spending plan. This proposed funding increase is up for consideration as DOD is hustling to integrate commercial AI models into battle management and warfare operations, threat detection and analyses, supply chain logistics and more. A Pentagon official told DefenseScoop: “The department’s AI Arsenal initiative is an investment in foundational, government-owned AI infrastructure to maximize federal buying power and build the strategic advantage we need.” The House Small Business Committee continued its push last week to make the agency it oversees embrace artificial intelligence in its work, advancing a new AI-focused bill aimed at more transparency around those efforts. In a Wednesday markup, the committee unanimously approved the SBA Artificial Intelligence Utilization Act (H.R. 8881) from Reps. Brad Finstad, R-Minn., and George Latimer, D-N.Y. The legislation would require the Small Business Administration to provide a yearly report to Congress on its use of AI and machine learning, detailing the benefits, risks and related issues. Additional oversight on SBA’s AI program from the committee comes in the wake of a Government Accountability Office report this month that called attention to years of SBA failures to comply with federal requirements on AI use case inventories. In March, the agency publicly posted its inventory — two months past the Office of Management and Budget deadline, but for the first time in SBA history nevertheless. 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 looming AI security executive order gets pushed back
3w ago00:05:26Summary readyPresident Donald Trump said he would postpone the release of an executive order that would set up a 90-day testing and vetting regime for frontier AI models, hours before the White House was set to publicly announce the signing. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office Thursday, Trump said he opted to delay the order “because I didn’t like certain aspects of it” and expressed concerns that it could harm U.S. AI industry competition with countries like China. According to multiple sources, a draft version of the order circulating in the last 24 hours would have set up a voluntary testing regime between the U.S. federal government and frontier AI companies that would allow the government to study new models for 90 days before they’re publicly released. In addition to the government, the draft order would also facilitate access to the models for cybersecurity testers in critical infrastructure sectors, like finance and healthcare.
SummarySnowflake scores the latest federal OneGov deal for AI, data cloud products
3w ago00:05:42Summary readyArtificial intelligence and cloud-based data products through Snowflake will now be available to all federal agencies, the General Services Administration announced Thursday. The GSA has struck a OneGov deal with the cloud-based data warehousing and analytics company in order to “empower federal workers to break down data silos, enhance mission effectiveness, and accelerate their IT modernization initiatives,” it said in a press release. Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said in a statement: “Federal agencies are seeking efficiency in cost, enterprise scaled performance, intuitive design driven tools for the workforce and simplicity in contracting — we are the only multi-cloud data platform that can meet this charge on day one.” Just over a year old, OneGov is a government contracting framework allowing for cross-agency use of commercial products at a discounted price. For Snowflake users across the federal government, this means 20% off compute services, which could go up to 50% as usage increases, as well as nearly a 27% discount on storage, the release said. The Small Business Administration’s information security program is largely ineffective after falling below the federal baseline for controls in nine of 10 domains, according to a new watchdog report. Under Office of Management and Budget guidance on ratings for security effective controls, the SBA “has defined policies but it has not consistently implemented them,” the agency’s Office of Inspector General wrote, relaying findings from an independent auditor’s review of SBA’s fiscal 2025 performance under the Federal Information Security Modernization Act.The SBA surpassed OMB’s baseline for incident response, earning an “optimized” rating under federal FISMA guidelines. But the OIG said that six domains — cybersecurity supply chain risk management, risk and asset management, configuration management, identity and access management, contingency planning, and information security continuous monitoring — were considered “defined” (a rating of 2 on the 5-level maturity model scale). Another three domains — cybersecurity governance, data protection and privacy, and security training — were slightly better, per the watchdog, with ratings of “consistently implemented” (3 out of 5).
SummaryCISA credentials get leaked on GitHub
3w ago00:05:37Summary readyCongressional Democrats want answers from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency https://cyberscoop.com/cisa-credential-leak-congress-demands-answers/ on GitHub in an incident that the security researcher who discovered it called one of the worst leaks he’s ever seen. Other security professionals also voiced concern Tuesday about the leak and the potential for abuse by any malicious parties who got a hold of the information. Security firm GitGuardian said it discovered a public GitHub repository last week that exposed credentials for privileged AWS GovCloud accounts and internal CISA systems dating back to November. The repository, apparently maintained by a contractor, was named “Private-CISA.” Krebs on Security first reported the incident. A GitGuardian researcher said his main fear upon verifying the leak was real “is that a state actor will get the data and might be able to do bad stuff.” State-based attackers who obtained the credentials “might be able to gain persistence,” the researcher said, calling it worse than an attacker destroying a database or having an intruder gain access to a government system. The Office of Personnel Management would get a better handle on the federal biotechnology workforce under a pair of bills from a bipartisan House duo. Introduced Wednesday, the Federal Biotechnology Workforce Assessment Act directs OPM to coordinate with agency heads on defining the federal biotech workforce, in addition to assessing current and future needs for those “bio-literate” federal employees. The bill from Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Rich McCormick, R-Ga., shared first with FedScoop, is aimed at ensuring the federal government workforce keeps the country a step ahead of China in the biotech space. Priority No. 1 for OPM’s assessment is identifying the total number of biotech positions required at federal agencies. The legislation is focused specifically on the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Interior, State, and Treasury, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the offices of the Director of National Intelligence and the U.S. Trade Representative.
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