The Department of Commerce has unveiled several initiatives to further develop the U.S. government’s analytical capacity to understand and address supply chain risks.
The department said Tuesday one of the efforts announced at the Supply Chain Summit is the launch of a diagnostic tool, called SCALE, designed to help assess supply chain risks across the U.S. economy using a set of indicators.
The International Trade Administration’s Industry and Analysis business unit plans to kick off a competition to develop new data or analysis that could be used to broaden the indicators of risks in the SCALE tool and hold two industry supply chain tabletop exercises in 2025.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo will bring together industry stakeholders in the fall to discuss risks related to the supply chains for artificial intelligence data centers and inform recommendations to help mitigate the identified risks.
During the summit, the department also announced strategic partnerships with seven industry associations and academic institutions to promote supply chain resilience and innovation.
The new partners are the National Small Business Association, Council for Supply Chain Management Professionals, Association for Supply Chain Management, Institute for Supply Management, Industries Studies Association, Carnegie Mellon University and Georgetown University.
The Office of Personnel Management has appointed Taka Ariga, a Senior Executive Service member and technologist, as chief data officer.
In a LinkedIn post announcing his appointment, Ariga said he will oversee the work of OPM’s Human Capital Data Management and Modernization Directorate.
He said he will help bring together data governance, artificial intelligence and data science to support OPM’s role in providing human capital services for more than 2 million federal employees.
Prior to OPM, Ariga spent five years at the Government Accountability Office, where he served as the first chief data scientist and director of the Innovation Lab. As head of the Innovation Lab, he was responsible for driving the adoption of AI, blockchains and other emerging technologies.
In mid-August, OPM and the Office of Management and Budget issued a joint memorandum to provide federal agencies with guidance to address government workforce challenges.
According to OPM, the memo identified key steps to strengthen workforce-related data analytics and design and build an improved applicant and hiring manager experience with tools and training.
Space Systems Command has announced the completion of the ground critical design review for its Next-Generation Overhead Infrared Polar, or OPIR NGP program, and the system critical integration review for its complementary Future Operationally Resilient Ground Evolution, or FORGE program.
The tests, conducted from Aug. 26 to 29, demonstrated the ground system integration required for the delivery of advanced missile warning capability for global security, SSC said Tuesday.
The command described the concluded tests as major program milestones demonstrating that the NGP’s space and ground system design not only meets technical requirements but also indicates acceptable risk level and conformance with budget allocation and project timetable.
The NGP will replace the highly elliptical orbit-based Space-Based Infrared Systems, or SBIRS program. It will cover the North Pole region for surveillance on the wide-ranging missiles that U.S. adversaries test and deploy in the area.
The new tests follow the April completion of OPIR NGP’s space vehicle critical design review. The program is on track to demonstrate initial launch capability by December 2025 with Raytheon’s recent delivery to Lockheed Martin of the first of two NGP satellite payloads for deployment to geosynchronous Earth orbit.
The DOE said Monday that the investment aims to support innovations that will work to demonstrate the utility of quantum computing in addressing the agency’s scientific research efforts. Of particular interest are advances in software, control systems and algorithms.
Out of the $65 million, $14 million will be sourced from fiscal year 2024 funds. Outyear funding will be contingent on congressional appropriations.
Commenting on the investment, DOE Associate Director of Science for Advanced Scientific Computing Research Ceren Susut said, “With these awards we are equipping scientists with computational tools that will open new frontiers of scientific discovery.”
“Quantum computers may ultimately revolutionize many fields by solving problems that are currently out of reach,” Susut added.
The Federal Communications Commission will begin accepting applications from entities interested in becoming a cybersecurity labeling administrator—or CLA—and lead administrator under the FCC’s Cybersecurity Labeling for Internet of Things program.
The application period will open on Sept. 11 and close on Oct. 1, the FCC said Tuesday.
CLAs will be authorized to certify the use of the FCC IoT label, which includes the U.S. Cyber Trust Mark, by manufacturers whose products are found to comply with the FCC’s IoT cybersecurity labeling program rules.
Entities selected as lead administrators will act as liaisons between the commission and CLAs; conduct stakeholder outreach to identify, develop and recommend technical standards and testing procedures for at least one class of IoT products; and develop and execute a plan for a consumer education campaign.
According to the agency, the FCC IoT label will help consumers make informed purchasing decisions, identify trustworthy products and encourage manufacturers to prioritize higher cybersecurity standards.
“We live in a world where more and more devices in your home require an internet connection,” said FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel. “But these smart devices that make our lives easier and more convenient must also be protected from bringing malware and other kinds of malicious activity into your home.”
Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley this week urged lawmakers to adopt a budget anomaly requested by the Biden administration to increase funding for the Social Security Administration in any stopgap deal to avert a government shutdown on Oct 1, warning that flat funding could endanger recent improvements to customer service.
The request from the Office of Management and Budget, part of a laundry list of proposed provisions to include as part of a continuing resolution to ensure continuity of operations in the absence of full-year appropriations legislation, would effectively fund Social Security Administration operations at an annual rate of $15.4 billion—as Biden requested in his fiscal 2025 budget—for the duration of the CR.
Thus far, neither chamber in Congress has shown a willingness to meet the administration’s request. The Republican-controlled House has advanced legislation that cuts Social Security administrative funding by nearly $500 million from current levels, while a bipartisan Senate spending bill proposes a $500 million increase, which if enacted would put the agency’s funding level at $14.7 billion.
In a letter to House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., O’Malley warned of dire consequences if SSA is flat-funded past September, as proposed in the House GOP’s six-month continuing resolution. House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday cancelled a planned vote on the measure, after dissent within his caucus threatened to derail its passage.
“If enacted, a six-month CR without any additional funding for the Social Security Administration would be devastating,” O’Malley wrote. “We would be forced to implement a hiring freeze with minimal exceptions. We would lose over 2,000 staff in the first half of the year alone and reach a new 50-year staffing low by the end of December. We would need to significantly reduce overtime to historically low levels, decreasing processing capacity for our most critical workloads.”
And in testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, O’Malley laid out how both the House and Senate funding proposals for SSA would fall short of the agency’s needs. Under the House plan, employees would be furloughed by 20 days, while the agency would see its headcount fall by 3,400 staff, not including the 1,500 decrease in staff at state Disability Determination Services offices. And funding for the agency’s IT infrastructure would be “barely” enough to “keep the lights on.”
Conversely, the Senate proposal would see the SSA workforce shrink by 1,000 workers and DDS staffing would decrease by 500 employees. But it preserves $50 million in IT modernization investments and would allow the agency to maintain its current overtime posture, which management deploys strategically during peak service periods.
“We’ve seen 10 years of steady declines in customer service to the American people, and the fundamental reason for this precipitous decline isn’t the pandemic, and it’s not telework,” O’Malley said. “It’s this: SSA today is struggling to serve more customers than ever, with staffing that Congress has reduced to a 50-year low . . . I do not believe for a moment that this was the intention of Congress, but the cold result is that customer service, for which Americans have already paid for by working their whole lives, has been reduced to crisis levels.”
Senate Budget Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fl., asked why O’Malley has not reduced telework for field office employees to meet customer demand for in-person service. Although the commissioner in February mandated that regional and national headquarters staff work in-person at least three out of five days per week, field office workers already were on that schedule.
“I regularly hear from Iowans who struggle to get in contact with SSA, but despite increased staffing needs, the Social Security Administration continues to allow flexible telework for employees such as field office workers,” Grassley said. “A field office manager told me in June that only five of their employees came into the office five days per week. What steps are you taking as commissioner to ensure more employees do show up to the office?”
O’Malley noted that his agency is in “the middle of the pack” when it comes to federal sector telework, and stressed that field office employees have more responsibilities than simply taking appointments from the public, many of which are better suited to telework.
“We are not only an entity that receives customers when they walk in or answers their calls when they call on the 800 number,” he said. “The same people in those field offices also process the insurance claims, and that means they need time away from the windows and the conversations to actually make real and effectuate the things for which people are applying, whether that be a waiver on [benefits] overpayments, or to apply for retirement or Medicare. Time is required to process and put those things through.”
O’Malley said that the House spending plan in particular would cause the agency to regress on many of its customer service crises, particularly the agency’s recent overpayment—and recoupment of those overpayments—scandal and reducing wait times for initial disability determinations.
“We’re actually making some good progress: we’ve cut in half the wait times on the 800 number—that would be undermined,” he said. “We’ve reduced the backlog at the [administrative law judge] level [of disability determination appeals] at a lower rate than we’ve seen in modern memory. We talked about overpayments. But at the DDS level, and nothing underscores it more than this, our chief actuary estimates that more people die today awaiting their initial disability determination than ever before in the history of the program . . . The House mark would be devastating.”
Michael Sulmeyer, the inaugural assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy, aims to advance Department of Defense cyber programs and focus on internal cyber scaling, Federal News Network reported Wednesday.
The U.S. Senate appointed Sulmeyer to the role in August after the office was established in March as authorized by the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. After over a month in the role, Sulmeyer said that the DOD should focus more on its rate of return rather than just the Pentagon’s cyber capabilities.
“It’s one thing to count the number of operations or to count the number of hunt-forwards,” Sulmeyer said.
Hunt-forward operations are cyber missions conducted by U.S. Cyber Command’s Cyber National Mission Force officers worldwide.
“There is power in quantity, but increasingly, how we talk about our return on the nation’s investment, not just DoD, but the cyber community, more broadly, private and public sector, I think, is an area I’m looking to try to work on,” Sulmeyer added.
Sulmeyer also works alongside the department’s chief information officer to sanction U.S. Cyber Command’s operations budget.
“They’re going to work on operating the network and the cyber security type of work,” Sulmeyer stated. “I’m supposed to focus on understanding the cyber operations part of Cyber Command’s budget and then DoD-wide.”
Prior to this position, Sulmeyer served as the principal cyber adviser for the U.S. Army, where he advised military leaders on all matters of cyber, such as readiness and capabilities.
The U.S. Department of Education named the first six organizations to participate in the phased rollout of the 2025-26 form to apply for federal financial aid Wednesday, and opened up the interest form for high schools, school districts and other entities to get involved in its next three testing periods.
In August, the department said it would take a staggered approach to launching the application period for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid — better known as FAFSA — in an effort to address any problems prior to the updated form opening up to everyone by Dec. 1.
The phased rollout will make the application fully available two months later than usual.
The first testing period beginning Oct. 1 will include six community-based organizations. The department on Wednesday said it selected Alabama Possible; Bridge 2 Life, in Florida; College AIM, in Georgia; Education is Freedom, in Texas; the Scholarship Foundation of Santa Barbara, in California; and the Scholarship Fund of Alexandria, in Virginia; to participate.
The six organizations will provide access to the new form to hundreds of participants in the first testing period. The form will gradually open up to tens of thousands of students in the subsequent testing stages.
“Each of these orgs have committed to recruit 100-plus students and contributors, which will allow us to test the FAFSA system end-to-end from the submissions process, to processing, to ingestion of the (Institutional Student Information Records) by colleges and possibly even state agencies,” FAFSA executive adviser Jeremy Singer said on a call with reporters Wednesday.
Singer said each of the community-based organizations will host an in-person FAFSA event over the first few days of October.
“We will send some of our team members to these sites to observe and learn from our experienced partners, seeing how students and families are interacting with the application, what’s working for them, what’s challenging, what’s clear, what’s less clear,” said Singer, who heads FAFSA strategy within the department’s Office of Federal Student Aid.
Next phases
Singer said the second testing period would launch in mid-October, with the third debuting in early November and the fourth period beginning in mid-November.
Community-based organizations, high schools, school districts and institutions of higher education have from Wednesday until Sept. 20 to submit an interest form to be part of the next three testing periods.
The department said it plans to notify those selected to participate in the second testing period by Sept. 24 and inform those chosen to take part in the third and fourth testing periods shortly afterward.
The department has also worked to close the gap in FAFSA submissions compared to the prior cycle. In March, the department said it received roughly 40% fewer FAFSA applications than the same time last year.
But as of this week, the gap had fallen to approximately 2.3%, the department said.
The department also said that as of early September, roughly 500,000 more FAFSA applicants are eligible for Pell Grants compared to the same time in 2023.
The updates to the rollout of the 2025-26 form come as the department has worked to resolve the 2024-25 form’s multiple glitches and errors, which advocates voiced concerns over. The application got a makeover following the December 2020 passage of the FAFSA Simplification Act.
West Virginia Watch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. West Virginia Watch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Leann Ray for questions: info@westvirginiawatch.com. Follow West Virginia Watch on Facebook and X.
The OSC said Tuesday it is inviting commercial space situational awareness companies to submit proposals for a new commercial pathfinder to support the Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS, project.
The Improved O/O Ephemeris Pathfinder project is intended to evaluate the accuracy and efficiency of a satellite’s ephemeris, or its position and velocity at certain times, using data provided by satellite owners and operators. The project’s main objective is to establish the standard for ephemerides and determine the methods of achieving these benchmarks.
OSC made three orders in the Global Data Marketplace for the project. These are:
Generate ephemerides for satellites in low Earth orbit
Generate ephemerides for satellites in geostationary Earth orbit
Two companies to monitor data quality from the above two orders
Interested vendors may submit their proposals for the TraCSS pathfinder project until Sept. 16 at 12:00 noon EDT.
The IRS’ workforce in 2022 was more diverse than the federal workforce as a whole as well as the national civilian labor force in terms of representation of women and individuals from historically disadvantaged racial or ethnic groups.
However a Government Accountability Office report published on Monday found disparities in diverse representation at more senior levels and argued current IRS plans to address the gaps have significant shortcomings.
GAO reported that IRS’ workforce — which consists of approximately 90,000 employees, and is expected to grow because of an infusion of funds from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act — generally became more diverse between fiscal years 2013 and 2022. But that progress didn’t persist across ranks.
“In general, the more senior the level, the lower the representation of women, employees from historically disadvantaged racial or ethnic groups and persons with disabilities in each of the 10 fiscal years we reviewed,” investigators wrote.
For example, 71.9% of IRS employees in grades [general schedule]-10 and below were women in fiscal 2022 compared to 45.6% of individuals at the executive level.
Other noteworthy findings include:
The decreasing representation at senior levels for Black or African American and Hispanic or Latino employees was largely tied to fewer women of those backgrounds serving in those roles. In contrast, the increasing representation at senior levels of white employees was driven largely by there being more white men in those positions.
Women, employees from historically disadvantaged racial or ethnic groups and individuals with disabilities were generally less likely to be promoted across multiple GS grades.
IRS employees who are women earned 17% less than men and workers from historically disadvantaged racial or ethnic groups earned 6% less than their white counterparts.
Investigators wrote that salary disparities existed even after controlling for GS grade level and occupation.
Over the review period, IRS did identify certain causes for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility setbacks. Between fiscal years 2017 and 2022, for instance, the agency noted that there was low participation by Hispanic or Latino, Asian and Black or African American employees in an executive readiness development program.
GAO criticized IRS’ plans to resolve those setbacks, in particular that they are spread out among three different strategies.
“With multiple plans articulating differing DEIA goals, IRS’s DEIA efforts are neither clear nor transparent, hindering decision-makers’ ability to set priorities, allocate resources and restructure efforts, as needed, to ensure effective DEIA advancement,” investigators wrote.
They also found the agency conducted limited stakeholder consultation and that staffing issues in IRS’ Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion contributed to the issue.
GAO made eight recommendations, including that IRS create a unified DEIA strategic plan and set performance measures for goals in the strategy. IRS agreed with each of the recommendations.
Congressional Republicans in June introduced legislation that would bar federal funds from being used toward DEI efforts.
