Monthly Archives: September 2024

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Information Innovation Office is requesting proposals to develop new innovative technologies for deploying resilient hidden networks with privacy and performance guarantees.

The effort aims to combine software-defined networking approaches with emerging technology models to test if the hidden communication systems, or HCS, will perform to expectations in the real world, DARPA said Thursday.

The project will be executed under the agency’s Provably Weird Network Deployment and Detection program

The submissions should investigate groundbreaking advances in science, devices and systems, DARPA added, noting that the proposed solutions must improve from the current manual HCS development process and ensure that the deployed network will remain hidden.

The government anticipates multiple individual awards for the project, in which participants will prototype their proposals for six months and the selected organizations will advance to the procurement stage that will run for two years.

Interested parties are advised that DARPA will accept abstracts until Oct. 1, questions through Oct. 17 and proposals no later than Nov. 5.

The Health Resources and Services Administration within the Department of Health and Human Services has selected multiple vendors to modernize the organ transplant system, moving away from the previous single-award contract.

The awardees are Arbor Research Collaborative for Health, General Dynamic Information Technology, Maximus Federal, Deloitte and Guidehouse Digital, the HHS said Thursday.

The transformation of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, or OPTN — the first in 40 years — comes amid criticisms regarding lack of transparency, potential for conflicts of interest, IT reliability issues and other structural challenges.

Work under the contracts includes improving patient safety, increasing transparency and public engagement in OPTN policy development, and strengthening patient-centered communications.

According to the agency, the modernization effort will enhance the system’s efficiency for over 100,000 people on the organ transplant waitlist.

“With the life of more than 100,000 Americans at stake, no organ donated for transplantation should go to waste,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, a past Wash100 Award recipient.

“The Biden-Harris Administration has reformed OPTN to require accountability in the operation of organ procurement that our transplant patients and their families demand,” he added.

Join the Potomac Officers Club’s 2024 Healthcare Summit to explore the transformative trends and innovations shaping the future of the healthcare sector. Register here.

Under former President Donald Trump’s administration, one of the most restructured and diminished federal agencies was the Department of State — over 10 percent of its workforce was let go with no replacement. But even in the Biden administration, the internationally-focused department was dealt a five percent loss in its fiscal year 2024 budget from 2023 and officials are bracing themselves for a possibly similar blow in 2025.

Are you a member of the government contracting community who has investment in international relations and deals abroad? Then you’ll want to attend the Potomac Officers Club’s first-ever GovCon International Summit on Oct. 10. Held at the Hilton Alexandria Mark Center in Virginia, it will be a central meeting place for contractors whose sights are set not just on U.S. shores but beyond — which, in this day and age, really should be everyone. Check out the full lineup and save your spot today!

“The department will have to make tradeoffs. The dollars are simply unable to stretch as far as we need to meet the moment. And budget cycles do not always align with global realities and crises,” said Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Richard Verma.

In a plea to the Senate earlier this year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a past Wash100 Award recipient, highlighted how the department has made significant achievements over the last couple of years despite its shrunken workforce and spending power. These include considerably condensed timelines for passport delivery after application, which had ballooned during the pandemic. A reported 48 percent of Americans now have passports, as compared to just 20 percent in 2006.

President Biden is requesting $64.4 billion for State for 2025 (in 2024 it got $64.2 billion).

Lawmakers in Congress have until Sept. 30 to pass the appropriations or institute a stopgap spending bill — otherwise a partial shutdown will occur. These actions will crucially determine what the State Department might look like next year — though we’ll have to wait until after Election Day on Nov. 5 to really know how the department might operate and function.

Get involved in the international space. Register to attend the Potomac Officers Club’s GovCon International Summit!

Space technology company Umbra has recently launched a new business line aiming to deliver high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites. Through the mechanisms of how the company is structured, it’s been able to bring down the cost of those satellites. To explain more about how they do that, Jason Mallare, vice president of Umbra, joined the Space Hour.

Interview transcript: 

Jason Mallare Umbra was founded in 2015. We created the business primarily focused on democratizing access to to space-based remote sensing, focusing primarily on synthetic aperture, radar imaging, SAR imaging. The black and white, sometimes colorized, but primarily black and white imagery where we use irradiated RF emissions and then detect it much like a traditional radar does. But we take all those pulses over time as the satellite orbits and create a integrated picture scene of the ground that sees through whether it can operate at night through clouds, etc. And the basic premise was if you build highly affordable, highly capable systems, you’ll kind of break through the logjam in the market. And the term we use is unit economics. So if the unit economics of the of the satellites, the launch was already solved for us by companies like Rocket Lab and Space X, And so it really came down to the individual cost of the satellites. And if you get them low enough, then you could sell each individual product, whether it be an individual image or a subscription or a time, you know, reservation on the satellite, whatever it may be. And you could drop that price to the point where it starts to unlock the use cases and unlock the accessibility of it by verticals, environmental, oil and gas, defense, etc. So we did that and we launched our first satellite in 2021 and commercialized about a year later, 2022. Today we’ve launched ten total satellites, operating a constellation of six satellites today, as the satellites have gone through their various phases of their lifecycle. And they’re, you know, effectively or I guess technically microsats. By weight, they’re about 100 kilograms, but they deploy a very large, high compaction ratio. So, small in stow, but large when deployed. Antenna to about four meters, about 12 feet across. So very capable, very affordable, low cost systems. And, you know, we came through on the promise of the most affordable remote sensing systems. What we’re finding is that even with highly affordable systems and highly affordable data, that the market is still very, very dominated by defense and intel needs. The predominance of the buying power, the predominance of the focus, the predominance of the technology continues to focus and be pooled in that vertical effectively across the globe. And further, what we found is that when you really look at budgets and you look at kind of how the D&I, defense and intel across the globe is made up, the U.S. leads that by factors, by large factors in terms of numbers of systems and primarily dollars spent. And so, you know, we launched the commercial business. We are doing business with the U.S. government. We’re doing business with some other friendly nations selling some cuts, affectionately call it sling in pixels, you know, provide our data as a service to these to these countries. But we started to perceive a bit of a ceiling bill, a bit of a cap of of how we’d really be able to take that affordable and resilient technology and deploy it if we were only providing the services. And so Mission Solutions is our kind of response to that. And we said, well, if for policy reasons or security reasons or resilience reasons or ConOps concerns, you’re not able or not interested in procuring the pixels, we can make our technology available to you both domestically and abroad to provide, you know, take that technology very, very affordable, highly performant, very flexible, very resilient and integrated into your arsenal, whether it be a domestic U.S. or U.S.’s allies. And so that’s that’s what we’re focused on now.

Eric White I cover, obviously, a lot of space tech companies like yourself. And I have to say that this was the first time I saw a major selling point being the affordability of a small sat or a SAR satellite. Number one, what is it about cutting costs on the production of these satellites? How do you go about that? And was it just newer techniques or new kinds of technology? And second off, was this in response to a need that you heard from potential customers or ongoing customers about how, hey, you know, we’d really like to do more with this, but it’s just these things are so darn expensive?

Jason Mallare Yeah, I think on the first two things, one is vertical integration. So controlling all of the costs. Bring in as much as you can in-house so that you’re not beholden to other businesses. You know, their business model, their profit margins, their market demand, their volume, their scene, etc. And then also you can really cut out all the things you don’t need. Don’t buy a box that can do seven things when you only need it to do one thing, kind of thing. And so that’s been a big part of it, especially for us. That’s really been the payload. We’ve really focused to start on vertically integrate on the payload, which we’ve effectively done. And then we’re expanding that to the bus, the rest of the platform. And I think the second thing is the commercial model, the freedom that you have, as is what we call a commercial entity, meaning private equity, private wealth, private funds deployed in a way that effectively that we, you know, we see as best and cutting out anything that we feel like is codification of old lessons learned, old mistakes that are no longer relevant. And often what you see in these larger, I’ll call them acquisitions or procurements, when large governments or large companies, there’s a sense of risk aversion. And the way that they handle that risk aversion is by all means, look at all the mistakes we made over the last 50 years and let’s make sure that we address, you know, 80 to 100% of those risks when many of them may be irrelevant to what you’re doing and or the risk is actually so low that you spend way more money than the risk merited in the first place. And so when you when you can take a commercial approach to it and you say, well, here’s what we’re going to focus on, we’re going to move quickly, we’re going to launch fast, we’re going to launch, we’re going to fail if we need to, learn from that failure and then relaunch again. That’s way you get a lot of that cost out. And then on the second part, I think I guess also two responses in terms of like the why affordability and what what drove us to that hypothesis. And I think one, you know, looking at just the what we perceived to be the logjam in the in the industry and saying this technology is not beyond us as the U.S., us in kind of commercial industry, technology, industry, you don’t need the world’s largest governments to deploy this technology, given the ubiquity of componentry, both, you know, commercial off the shelf, maybe automotive, things like that. But then also the even ubiquity of space-specific hardware and the affordability, etc. And so the realization that it doesn’t have to be that expensive and perhaps it being so expensive is perhaps why the adoption has been slow. You’ve got companies that have formed, they’re doing analytics for these verticals, but they’re really not using SAR or remote sensing as much as maybe we think they could and is that it’s not affordable. You know, we’ve got a hypothesis that the data going into a value add service needs to be 10% or less of that service. And so you think about, well, what is the cost of that service that is applied to that vertical? And what does that total market? Okay, now depreciate it quite a bit. Do you rate it down to just that 10%, let’s say? And that kind of was one perspective. The other perspective, which is I guess a little ironic or circular, but it is in fact what’s driven some of our decision making is following carefully what a lot of the countries, the U.S. being the lead, but other countries are doing in terms of art being proliferation and seeing how they’re driving their architectures and what in actuality that expansion of their count of systems and therefore their capacity is. And when you look at that and you say, okay, China’s got 300 semis harbored up there, Japan’s planning some number of systems. The U.S. has some number of systems. And you you do your analysis on, okay, how many systems do they have? What is the capacity of those systems? How many images can they produce per day? What do we think they’re spending on that? And then you do that, you do that analysis, say oh, well, then amortize it out to a price per image or kind of a depreciated price to the taxpayer or to whomever of X, well, that’s pretty darn low. And that number, when we did that math was quite a bit below the commercial market was bearing from the providers of the day, you know, back when we were starting the business. So we said, okay, so there’s a problem there. If we’re really going to do this commercially, it truly does need to fulfill the promise of being affordable. And if these larger and, you know, equities, governments, large businesses, whatever are figured out how to do it at that price point, well then that sets the price point. And we need to work hard to get to that point and below.

Eric White How important, as the increase in space traffic comes when it comes to LEO satellites, you talk about these satellites being able to do more with taking up less real estate and less numbers, being able to cover a lot bigger of an area. Is that sort of the trend in what we’re going to see from your company and the industry as a whole? Are people going to demand more from these satellites and also that price just keep on getting lower? Can it go any lower?

Jason Mallare It definitely can go lower. I do think that as it becomes a mature market, I do think that it will start to become more of a market of margins. And so we’ll have to be very, very careful about protection and affordability. Companies like Max SAR have set up a precedent that yes, it has to be affordable but not at the cost of performance. And so, you know, they set their models with their world class world views, just for example, and they said, listen, relatively few are highly capable systems is in fact a very, very economical approach to things. And so that anchors you on one side. Certainly you get to the point where you can only have so much coverage. You can only see limb to limb, if you can even. And these satellites are all things considered. The earth is 6,000 or 12,000 kilometers across, and you’re even 1,000 kilometers above it. If you think about that, relatively, you’re still right at the effectively the surface of the earth. And so your ability to see big swaths of the earth is always new, pretty limited. And then there’s, you know, the tyranny of power, loss over space. And as you go farther away, the more the photons get weaker, the electron waves get weaker, systems get bigger and bigger and bigger. And so that kind of defeats itself. And so as you look at that balance, you try to balance that across all those different parts of the of the trade optimally performing systems that are still, you know, low on the affordability or high in the affordability column, but not so many systems that it becomes unmanageable and to your point, creates a mess in LEO. I believe, and what you’ll see from Umbra is, yes, it’s going to be more than one or two systems, but it’s not going to be thousands. I think as sort of the technology, the trades evolve around that, I do think it’s possible we’ll see a manageable number of at least speaking from an ISR perspective, a manageable number of ISR systems. That with appropriate space based traffic management, with appropriate norms and kind of thoughtful approaches to how we put them in space, how we control them, how we are prepared to de-orbit them, how we cooperate with each other, no accidental collisions, things like that. I think it can be, I think it can work out just fine. But I think that kind of gravity to ever decreasing prices and affordability is going to be is going to be something we’re all going to wrestle with for time. You know, I’ll go back to the realization or understanding that a lot of the demand is D&I, defense and intel across the globe and taking just the U.S., which is what we studied the most and looking at fairly flat budgets and a lot of inflation and which are effectively mean shrinking budgets. And —And so from that perspective, that piece of story of how we’re going to have to continue to innovate more performance, lower cost.

Eric White And I just wanted to get an update on the current status of these new SAR satellites. Where do they stand and what do you all have coming down the pipeline?

Jason Mallare Well, we just launched satellites nine and ten for, you know, we refer to them as nine and ten, into our constellation. They went up on the most recent transporter launch, which is a Space X rideshare platform. So us and hundreds of our closest friends and competamates go up into a effectively a sun sync orbit, a polar orbit, and we have first flight and we actually are operating those those systems for our customers already. And so they join the constellation. The team worked tirelessly over the weekend and a couple of weekends ago. And they are raring to go. And right now, how we build out the constellation, we call it on demand. When we first started, you know, we really had a vision where you factor a license and still license for a very, very large constellation, you know, many dozens of spacecraft, as we’ve sort of looked at what the demand is and all the things I sort of said previously about the consolidation of the demand, etc., we’ll probably end up in the two to four spacecraft per year build rate and that’s what we’ll deploy. We’re currently machined or outfitted to to operate around 12 systems per year. We’ll be announcing later this year and into next year the expansion of that capacity. And so we will be able to to increase that that capacity quite substantially in terms of number of systems we can build per year for customers as well as number of system that we can deploy into our own commercial constellation based on demand effectively. In addition, will be unveiling our next generation platforms in the in the months to come. That will really be kind of our workhorse for our mission solutions, which will be, you know, larger systems, more capability, resilient, more, more resilience. More affordability. More flexibility, and that will be both the space and ground parts of the architecture. And yeah, and we’ll be announcing additional partnerships that we have across the globe. And to include here at home with with a lot of U.S. government customers as well as our partners in the U.S.

Eric White That’s Jason Mallare, vice president of the space technology company Umbra.

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Shane McCall Yeah, SBA put out a clarification to make it clear that this new HUBzone rule is not commenting on how SBA is going to evaluate Mentor Protégé Joint Ventures. But SBA did say it’s considering eliminating the exception to affiliation for mentors and proteges or multiple award contracts. So they are still considering that, but it will be the subject of a future rule with full notice and comment rule making.

Tom Temin All right. So you always have to stay nimble and on the waltzing here across the dance floor of contracting. And let’s get to HUBzone. I mean, I called it a rewrite in a clarifications clothing. Am I right about that?

Shane McCall Yeah, it’s a very long set of proposed rules. In some cases, it is clarifying, but in some cases it’s making pretty substantial changes to the rules. So I think you’re exactly right on that.

Tom Temin And what tops the list in your mind?

Shane McCall In my mind, one big change if it goes through is that HUBzone companies would have to be eligible, meaning they meet the principal office requirement, be in a HUBzone and meaning the 35% employees residing in a HUBzone. They would have to meet those requirements at the date of offer, which is a very big change from the current rule, which says that a HUBzone business has to be eligible as of its most recent recertification. So if you submit a proposal, say in September, your most recent certification day was six months ago. You don’t actually have to be eligible to meet those principal office and 35% requirements as of today or whenever you submit your proposal, it looks back to your most recent certification. This proposed rule would say no. Each time you submit an offer on a hub zone set aside contract, you would have to be eligible as of the date of offer. So it would require a lot more kind of maintenance and check and compliance throughout the year. It’s assuming that a company bid more than once a year on a lump sum contract.

Tom Temin Right. So your office can’t be that Winnebago that you move back to the fancy suburbs once you’re no longer in the HUBzone. And then there’s a related rule about the 40 hours of week that constitute a workweek, has to be not all in one week of the month. That constitutes a month of normal work for people of 40 hours or something.

Shane McCall Yeah. I had that one down as a pretty big proposed change as well. The overall change would be that HUBzone employees to count as an employee under that rule would have to work 80 hours per month. The rule, as it currently stands, is only 40 hours per month. So that’s only ten hours per week. And that is allowed as kind of the base minimum, even though in practice the HUBzone office had more scrutiny for employees that were only working at minimal time. But now they would raise that floor from 40 hours per month to 80 hours per month, which still isn’t really full time as we typically think of it, like 40 hours a week.

Tom Temin And there is another change in the so-called attempt to maintain rule. What’s that all about, and what’s changing?

Shane McCall Yeah. Well, so the attempt to maintain rule was the basic idea that for a HUBzone business, at the time of the kind of the key date it has to have 35% of its employees residing in a HUBzone. And so I mentioned earlier that key date under these rules would be changing from your annual certification date to the date of offer. And so the attempt to maintain said, well, what about after you win a HUBzone contract? How does that change the rules? And part of that attempt to maintain was, you have to keep trying to hire employees that are from HUBzones through job fairs and online postings and things like that. But it also had a floor. So as you can tell with HUBzone a lot of it’s about floors and minimums. And one of those minimums was in order to show you’re attempting to maintain, you had to have at least 20% of your workforce be residing in a HUBzone during the time when you’re performing a HUBzone contract. So it went from 35 down to 20. And SBA is now saying, well, wait, I think we went too low with this 20% floor. So what they’re proposing is in the first year of your HUBzone contract, you can meet the 20%. After the first year, you bump back up to having to meet the minimum of 35%. So it would give you that 20% kind of floor, but only for one year. It be time limited instead of for the length of the contract, which is quite a bit stricter.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with attorney Shane McCall. He’s a partner at Koprince McCall Pottroff. Well, the bigger question here is SBA within its legal statutory allowance in changing rules this much, especially in the post Chevron deference era.

Shane McCall That’s an interesting one. The HUBzone statute is like some statutes. It’s fairly vague. So I think it, I don’t want to say conclusively, but it would allow a lot of wiggle room for the SBA to set up rules for administration of this program. It’s one of those rules where it kind of says, a couple paragraphs and leaves SBA to fill in the gaps. So it may be one where there’s not a lot of statutory language that a judge could hang its hat on to kind of challenge. Now, of course, people could certainly try.

Tom Temin Well, who would have standing to challenge at this point?

Shane McCall Well, yeah, I don’t think there’d be standing to challenge at this point. You’d have to go through the notice and comment rulemaking and then have the rule actually negatively affect someone. I will say one thing that we’ve talked about a little bit over the years is SBA in their past revisions, and this is just paint with a broad brush. They tried to make the HUBzone rules and the HUBzone program a little bit more flexible in the changes from a couple of years ago. 2019 was one of the years when they had a very large change to the program. This rule seems to be swinging the pendulum back the other way towards being more strict.

Shane McCall One thing that we’ve noted that may be something someone could challenge, although it’s not really in this role per say, is this legacy employee concept, which said that even if an employee was not living in a HUBzone, but they were living in a HUBzone and at the time of certification, they could still be counted as a Hubzone employee even if they moved out of that zone as long as they maintained employment at that company. And this proposed rule does put a limit on that as well. And some folks have said, well, wait, the statute seems to say living in a HUBzone is part of the requirement. So you can’t have a rule that says even if you don’t live in a HUBzone, then you still count as living in a HUBzone. It’s a bit of a stretch there. So this rule limits that legacy employee concept. It says a company can only have one legacy employee. So for a small company that could be fine, for a larger company where it could definitely impact how they count the numbers on their HUBzone.

Tom Temin Well, getting back to the big picture, is the SBA then concerned, in your view, that there’s a lot of abuse of this. And do these changes make sense or do they make it harder to have the whole program if you’re trying to be a HUBzone contractor?

Shane McCall Yeah, I think they will make it harder to be a HUBzone contractor now. It may be better actually, though, because I think HUBzone in enforcing and applying its existing rules, has become pretty strict on things like definition of an employee. Even, but that wasn’t really in the rule. So for instance, in this proposed rule, it’s going to say SBA can seek all sorts of information about the actual work an employee does, which it seems kind of like and almost an invasion of privacy, if you will. But it’s not because you’re in a regulated program, you’re a federal contractor. But what SBA can do is they can ask for job descriptions, resumes, timesheets, work products, any documentation they want about the actual work that employees are doing. So that’s going to go into the proposed rule. But SBA had already been asking for that. They just been doing it under kind of an internal policy guidance that was put on their website. So in some ways it’s like the rules catching up to the strictness the HUBzone program already had. And that’s a good thing. Because then at least contractors know going in, they’re going to be really strict on this. They’re not going to be as flexible as they used to be. And then everyone kind of knows what they’re going to get going in. So in that sense, it could be somewhat of a positive because it’s really going to show companies if they want to do this, they have to be very, very serious about their compliance going in, and that will be reflected in the rules rather than just after the fact, as they say, well, this is how we interpret this rule. And then you say, well, it’s not actually listed in the regulation. They say, well, it’s our internal policy guidance. Yeah. So it’s better from that sense of having everyone be on the same playing field.

Tom Temin So this is a mixed bag, you might say.

Shane McCall Yep. I think it’s a mixed bag because it’s going to make things more clear. It’s going about how strict the SBA is. But on the other hand, it could mean some companies have a much harder time complying with some of these rules.

The National Security Agency has issued a cybersecurity advisory, or CSA, on China-linked threat actors who hacked into internet-connected devices to create a botnet and execute malicious online activity.

The CSA was published in coordination with the FBI, the U.S. Cyber Command’s Cyber National Mission Force and international allies, NSA said Wednesday.

The cyber alert outlined the threats posed by the hackers and their botnet, a network of compromised nodes used for illicit cyber operations.

“The advisory provides new and timely insight into the botnet infrastructure, the countries where compromised devices are located, and mitigations for securing devices and eliminating this threat,” NSA Cybersecurity Director Dave Luber said in a statement.

According to the advisory, the botnet has more than 260,000 compromised devices in North America, Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia as of June.

The hacked devices include small home and office routers, firewalls, network-attached storage and Internet of Things gadgets.

From these devices, the threat actors build a botnet to hide their online activity, launch distributed denial of service attacks or breach U.S. networks.

To ensure they are protected, the CSA authors called on device vendors, owners and operators to immediately update and secure their equipment.

The advisory also encouraged national security systems, defense agencies and defense industrial base networks to mitigate the cyberthreats by regularly applying patches, disabling unused services and ports, and replacing default passwords with strong passwords.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health within the Department of Health and Human Services has announced the performer teams that will build an integrated data toolbox designed to consolidate biomedical research data from various health disciplines and make data more accessible to advance health innovation.

ARPA-H said Wednesday the Biomedical Data Fabric Toolbox seeks to democratize access to data and facilitate the development of open-source tools that could address technical hurdles to data integration and use as part of efforts to improve health outcomes of patients.

“We launched this program to enable advancements in medical research that will improve health outcomes for Americans. The BDF Toolbox products will allow doctors to have easier access to a vast breadth of data so that they can make the best-informed decisions possible, with their patients,” said ARPA-H Director Renee Wegrzyn.

According to ARPA-H, algorithms and newly discoverable data that will emerge from the BDF Toolbox effort will be available on GitHub and other platforms and web applications.

“ARPA-H’s BDF program leverages research from decades of NIH’s investment in data science and will develop tools that rapidly scale use and integration of data so that health care givers can apply it to patient care plans,” added Wegrzyn.

The selected performer teams will initially focus on data related to cancer and rare diseases.

Some of the teams are led by Stanford University, Harvard Medical School, MIT, New York University, ICF, Charles River Analytics, DNA HIVE and Insilicom.

Click here to view the full list of performer teams.

Register here for the Potomac Officers Club’s 2024 Healthcare Summit on Dec. 11. Join this key event to explore the transformative trends and innovations shaping the future of the U.S. health care sector.