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Trump nominates Palantir security chief Michael LoSapio to lead CISA

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 22:26:00 -0500

President Donald Trump nominated Palantir’s chief information security officer, Michael LoSapio, to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Monday, seeking to fill a leadership vacancy that has stretched through nearly two years of staffing cuts and other changes to the agency.

LoSapio would oversee the federal government’s main civilian cyberdefense unit, which helps protect agency networks and works with operators of water systems, power grids, telecommunications networks and other critical infrastructure to prevent and respond to attacks.

He has served as Palantir’s CISO since September 2024, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before that, he led the company’s infrastructure and network security group, starting in December 2017.

CISA has been without a permanent Senate-confirmed director since then-Jen Easterly’s departure in January 2025. Nick Andersen has led the agency in an acting capacity since February after a series of incidents tied to its previous acting director, Madhu Gottumukkala.

LoSapio’s nomination faces a crowded Senate calendar, with lawmakers working to fund the government and approve defense legislation before the year ends. It’s possible his consideration would fall to the incoming Democratic majority if Republicans do not complete his confirmation during the remaining session.

If the Senate does not confirm LoSapio before the current Congress ends, Trump would have to nominate him again for consideration by the incoming Democratic majority. That could bring additional scrutiny of his work at Palantir, whose government contracts and handling of sensitive information have drawn questions from Democrats.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., previously said he plans to renew inquiries into the company’s work with the administration when he begins chairing the Senate Finance Committee, and said lawmakers could compel answers if the company does not cooperate.

Democratic lawmakers have questioned whether Palantir’s work with the Department of Homeland Security enables government surveillance of Americans. The company has denied conducting or enabling mass surveillance.

LoSapio did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He previously worked at Palantir as a systems engineer from 2013 to 2016, then spent more than a year at database company SingleStore before returning. Earlier roles included systems engineering at New York University and Seton Hall University.

Trump’s previous choice for CISA director, Sean Plankey, withdrew from consideration in April after spending more than a year awaiting confirmation. His nomination became entangled in a dispute with Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., over Coast Guard contracting.

If confirmed, LoSapio would inherit an agency attempting to recover from cuts that reduced its workforce by roughly a third since Trump returned to office. CISA has since moved to refill a few hundred positions.

In line with possible opposition to his employer, House Democrats have also pledged to investigate CISA’s workforce cuts and changes to its election security work.

Last month, the agency released a strategy calling for a review of its services and greater attention to infrastructure whose disruption would cause the most harm to public safety, the economy and national security.

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GSA tech shop asks employees to submit daily updates

Christian Robles — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 17:58:00 -0500

The General Services Administration is now requiring certain employees to submit daily updates on what they worked on — echoing the Department of Government Efficiency’s request for federal workers to submit five things they did over the course of a week — according to two emails obtained by Nextgov/FCW.

One of the emails states that Technology Transformation Services employees have until 6 pm local time to submit daily updates to ttsdailies@gsa.gov. Those messages should include clear bullet points detailing what employees worked on that day, what they plan to work on the following day and any “blockers” that hindered their progress, according to the first email.

The requirement starts Monday and “failure to comply may result in adverse action,” according to a second email signed by Sam Corcos, a DOGE alum and senior GSA official.

A GSA spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment by publication.

“The purpose of these updates is to help us better understand what everyone is working on, give TTS Front Office a clearer picture of progress across the organization and identify any blockers or dependencies where we may be able to help,” according to the email signed by Corcos.

His message also states that Justin Adelman is now leading work on America.gov — the Trump administration’s artificial intelligence-powered digital front door — with Corcos’ oversight. Adelman has worked on technology projects, including the IRS mobile app and AI projects at the Treasury Department, the email states.

Adelman’s LinkedIn profile shows he became a U.S. Tech Force fellow in June. He also previously co-founded technology companies and was a private sector engineer for Booz Allen Hamilton and VT Group.

The Washington Sun first reported on the GSA emails.

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CISA updates cyber reporting form as broader incident mandate awaits approval

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 16:51:00 -0500

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency updated its cyber incident reporting form on Monday, aiming to gather more detail about attacks and help connect incidents that might otherwise appear unrelated.

The revised questionnaire, available through CISA’s Incident Reporting Portal, asks more specific questions about malicious software, hacking techniques, insider threats and efforts to trick people into giving cyber intruders access to systems. CISA said it also removed duplicate questions and implemented feedback from incident response partners.

The update comes as the agency works to complete a much broader requirement for critical infrastructure organizations to disclose significant attacks. That final rule, which implements the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act — or CIRCIA — reached White House review on Oct. 1 and remains listed as pending.

The form now incorporates MITRE’s “ATT&CK” framework, a widely used catalog of attacker behavior. Common descriptions of what hackers carry out in their operations can help analysts compare incidents across different organizations and identify who may be responsible.

“As the national coordinator for critical infrastructure cybersecurity and resilience, CISA is able to leverage such incident reporting to identify emerging cyber campaigns, warn potential targets, and strengthen the Nation’s collective defense,” Chris Butera, CISA’s acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity, said in a statement.

Congress passed CIRCIA in 2022 following major attacks, including the SolarWinds espionage campaign and the Colonial Pipeline ransomware incident, that exposed gaps in the government’s knowledge of breaches affecting critical services.

Once implementing regulations take effect, organizations will have to report substantial cyber incidents within 72 hours of reasonably believing they occurred and ransom payments within 24 hours of making them. The reports are intended to help CISA assist victims and warn others before hackers can repeat the same methods elsewhere.

The CIRCIA rules have taken years to develop. CISA published its proposal in April 2024 and missed an October 2025 statutory deadline to finalize it. The agency later targeted September 2026, after a DHS funding lapse delayed additional industry meetings until June.

Companies have mostly pushed back on the scope of the mandate, citing the fact that they have to meet additional cybersecurity incident reporting requirements set by other federal agencies who oversee sectors like banking and telecommunications.

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The ears have it in NIST’s facial recognition research

John Breeden II — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 16:03:00 -0500

Back when I ran the Government Computer News testing lab, there was a stretch of years when biometrics was one of the hottest areas in federal technology.

My lab partner, Carlos Soto, was placed in charge of the category, in part because I thought he would do a good job with it. I helped him test many of the products, which meant we spent quite a bit of time recording one another’s voices, lifting fingerprints and gluing pieces of photographs onto our faces.

It was serious work. We were evaluating security products designed for federal agencies and trying to discover weaknesses before someone with less friendly intentions found them.

But it was also tremendously fun. Carlos and I were essentially being paid to star in our own extremely low-budget spy movie, except that the scanners, secured doors and access-control systems were real. I suspect quite a few people would have happily traded jobs with us.

We evaluated hand scanners, fingerprint readers, retina scanners, voice authentication products and facial recognition systems. In addition to measuring how well the products performed under normal conditions, we tried almost anything we could think of to fool them. The companies submitting equipment to the lab knew exactly what we were doing, and discovering a successful attack was always a thrill.

Voice recognition systems were often the easiest targets. Some required users to speak a particular passphrase, but a recording of the authorized person saying that phrase could sometimes supply both the expected voice and the correct words.

Hand scanners were much more difficult to fool. Fingerprint scanners were also challenging, although we occasionally succeeded by lifting a print left by a previous user.

Facial recognition inspired our most elaborate attacks. We would take a high-resolution photograph of an authorized user, print it in color and carefully cut it apart. We then attached individual pieces of the photograph over another person’s face and presented our creation to the scanner.

Simply cutting eyeholes in a photograph and wearing it like a mask never worked. The more successful technique required dividing the face into pieces and carefully positioning them over the corresponding features of the person attempting to gain access.

The result looked ridiculous, but some of the systems could be fooled by our improvised disguises about 10% of the time. Others rejected them consistently, and none of the techniques provided a dependable way to defeat every product.

They also shared one obvious weakness as an attack method. They worked only when nobody was watching.

A person walking toward a secure entrance with photographs of someone else’s face taped and glued to their own face would probably be stopped by any semi-alert guard, regardless of whether the scanner approved the match. The software might see a sufficiently accurate collection of facial measurements. A human would see someone who looked like he had lost a fight with a craft store.

When humans examine faces

Humans may also contribute a bit more than just common sense to facial identification. Some people develop an extraordinary ability to recognize identities from details that automated systems have traditionally overlooked.

New research from the National Institute of Standards and Technology examined how professional forensic facial specialists decide whether multiple photographs show the same person. Instead of giving participants an unobstructed face, researchers covered the probe image and allowed the specialists to reveal isolated features, such as the eyes, nose, mouth, forehead or ears.

The test included 27 facial identification specialists completing 24 trials each. In some trials, they selected which feature to uncover. In others, the researchers determined the order in which features appeared.

The specialists were remarkably efficient. In 396 of the 648 total trials, they reached a decision after seeing only one feature.

Their favorite feature was not the eyes, nose or mouth. It was the ears.

When specialists selected their own features and reached a correct decision after revealing only one, they had chosen an ear in more than 74% of those trials. Across both testing conditions, seeing an ear by itself produced a 93% probability of a correct answer.

Foreheads posted a slightly higher estimated success rate of 94%, but they were selected much less often, giving researchers far less evidence and a much wider range of statistical uncertainty. Ears combined frequent use with consistently strong performance.

The complete NIST-led study, published in PLOS One, also found that the specialists adapted when their preferred feature was unavailable or unhelpful. They did not blindly follow a single checklist. They evaluated the visible information and decided whether they needed to uncover another part of the face.

That adaptability may be as important as their preference for ears. A biometric system follows its programming. A trained human can recognize that the normally useful feature in a particular photograph is obscured, distorted or simply too similar to the same feature on another person.

The study did not directly compare human specialists with modern facial recognition software, so it does not establish that one is universally better. Machines can rapidly compare images against enormous databases, something no human could reasonably attempt. The research instead shows that trained people may approach identification differently and extract useful evidence from features that automated systems have not always emphasized.

During our lab testing, facial recognition products seldom concentrated heavily on ears. That was understandable. Hair, hats, camera angles and image cropping can conceal one or both ears, making them unreliable inputs for a system that must operate consistently.

When ears are visible, however, their complicated contours can reveal a great deal.

The Cold War’s giant ear

American intelligence analysts apparently understood the value of ears long before facial recognition became an automated technology.

In his 1999 book, Photo Fakery: The History and Techniques of Photographic Deception and Manipulation, longtime CIA imagery analyst Dino Brugioni described an effort to determine whether photographs released by China showed Mao Zedong or a substitute.

Mao had largely disappeared from public view in late 1965 amid speculation about his health. In July 1966, Chinese authorities reported that the 72-year-old leader had swum nine miles down the Yangtze River in 65 minutes. Photographs of the event and later public appearances were promoted as evidence of his continued health and vigor.

According to Brugioni’s account, analysts compared the new photographs with authenticated images of Mao. One apparent substitute had Mao’s receding hairline and distinctive mole, but the configuration of his ears was different.

“His ears gave the double away,” Brugioni wrote.

The CIA reportedly went beyond comparing ordinary photographs. Its model shop constructed a 12-inch plaster model of Mao’s ear, allowing analysts to study its contours and compare them with images of the Chinese leader.

Not every suspected appearance was conclusively identified as a double, and Brugioni’s historical account should not be interpreted as proof that every rumor about Mao’s substitutes was true. But the oversized ear demonstrates how seriously intelligence analysts treated a feature that most people barely notice.

More than half a century later, NIST researchers are beginning to quantify why those analysts may have considered ears so valuable.

Biometrics is more than a sensor

The most important lesson Carlos and I learned in the GCN lab was that biometric security depended on far more than the accuracy of a scanner.

In some cases, defeating the sensor required a recording, a lifted fingerprint or an elaborate photographic disguise. In others, an attacker could target the middleware carrying the scanner’s decision to the access-control system. If that software was not properly protected and encrypted, someone might change the acceptance tolerance, substitute an approval or simply tell the system to admit everyone.

Many products resisted our probing and performed exactly as intended. Others paired advanced biometric sensors with surprisingly vulnerable supporting software that quickly fell to our attacks.

NIST’s new research adds the human examiner to that larger security system. Machines provide speed, repeatability and the ability to compare enormous collections of images. Humans can provide context, adaptability and the common sense to notice when someone approaches a scanner with another person’s face glued over his own.

And for specially trained humans, the ears may provide something even more valuable: an identifying signature hiding in plain sight.

John Breeden II is an award-winning journalist and reviewer with over 20 years of experience covering technology. He is the CEO of the Tech Writers Bureau, a group that creates technological thought leadership content for organizations of all sizes. Twitter: @LabGuys

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Deloitte wins $488M FAA modernization challenge contract

Ross Wilkers — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 14:42:25 -0500

Deloitte Consulting has won a potential 10-year, $488.2 million contract to work with the Federal Aviation Administration on efforts to modernize the agency’s digital infrastructure that includes applications and databases.

The FAA awarded the contract on Friday through a challenge-based acquisition launched in February, during which agency officials watched bidders demonstrate their approaches through a multi-phase competition.

Called ATLAS, the Accelerated Transformation of Legacy Applications and Systems challenge emphasized migrations to cloud-native architectures and technical debt reduction.

ATLAS’ scope covers at least 200 applications and 3,000 databases across the FAA’s mission support technology portfolio. The FAA’s goal is to shift to an operating framework more heavily tilted toward automated workflows and artificial intelligence integration.

The agency sees AI as a means to analyze legacy code, generate and test new code, automate security monitoring functions, and identifying redundant systems to be eliminated.

Deloitte and the other bidders competed over four phases that involved evaluations of corporate experience, concept paper submissions, portfolio rationalization strategies and modern factory demonstrations.

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Walkinshaw wants congressional oversight to include FITARA reboot

Nick Wakeman — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 13:42:00 -0500

Most expect the Democratic-controlled Congress to focus on oversight when the new session begins in January, but that does not mean a sole focus on claims of corruption and malfeasance by the Trump administration.

For Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Virginia), Congress should also return to its traditional oversight activities that include hearings and scorecards sparked by the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act from 2014. That kind of accountability has fallen by the wayside in recent years.

“I’ve been advocating for a modernized modernization scorecard,” Walkinshaw said Thursday at GovExec's After the Midterms event. “When we developed the FITARA scorecards, we weren’t talking about AI adoption in the federal government, and I don’t think we ever quite got to where we wanted to capture cybersecurity metrics and judging agencies against a cybersecurity metric.”

Walkinshaw wants to return to the practice driven by his predecessor and former boss, Gerry Connolly, and Republican counterpart Darrell Issa.

Connolly and Issa together developed FITARA and annual scorecards to get it passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015.

“Congress didn't just pass the bill and say mission accomplished. Congress said we passed the bill and now every year we're going to follow up and make sure agencies are implementing it,” Walkinshaw said. “I think that bore real fruit. It saved taxpayers billions of dollars. It helped us retire legacy systems that I think otherwise wouldn't have been retired. It’s a really powerful model.”

Walkinshaw, one of Congress’ chief critics of the Department of Government Efficiency, sees the cuts as an opening for a reboot of a post-DOGE government.

He said this is “a moment where we can, I hope, build that but do it in a better, smarter way. And I think Congress has to lead in that.”

On customer service, Walkinshaw said his constituents run into trouble when digital services do not fully solve their problem and cannot get a human on the phone.

Agencies like the Social Security Administration and Office of Personnel Management have largely gone digital for customer service because of workforce reductions.

“That makes people really, really angry,” he said.

The new Congress will be sworn in on Jan. 3. Before that, the lame duck session will need to deal with passing some sort of budget bill.

“Lame duck sessions are hard to predict because people who just lost their election or are retiring may not choose to show up for work,” Walkinshaw said.

Current House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) has to figure out what can get passed.

“Republicans are going to have a real attendance challenge and that can create some volatility,” Walkinshaw said. “But I think a shutdown is unlikely.”

Walkinshaw is hoping for bipartisan negotiations around individual appropriation bills, where both sides are open to negotiation. He predicted there will be some combination of passed spending bills and a continuing resolution for what is left that keeps the government open into January or February.

As the Democrats take the majorities in January, Walkinshaw said we should expect to see legislation focused on cost-of-living issues. He cited attempts to restore Affordable Care Act tax credits, roll back some of the Medicaid cuts and trying to wind back some of the tariffs.

“If we are successful in each of those things, it would have an impact on the bank accounts and pocketbooks of working families within weeks,” he said.

Democrats may have the House and Senate, but President Trump still has the White House and is a Republican.

“Our job in Congress is to pass legislation and get it onto his desk. At that point, he’ll have three choices,” Walkinshaw said.

Trump can sign or veto legislation. Choice number three is to negotiate, which Walkinshaw said he is open to if means having a conversation and meeting in the middle.

“I’ll just say as a Democrat having lived through this administration thus far, that hasn't been the posture, but if it changes, that'd be great,” he said.

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Congress returns to slew of cyber deadlines and unfinished AI safety bills

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 12:35:00 -0500

Lawmakers return to Washington on Monday with only weeks left to preserve expiring cybersecurity protections and a smattering of unfinished proposals to put federal oversight around increasingly powerful artificial intelligence systems.

The year-end session comes before Democrats take control of both chambers in January. The GOP still controls the schedule for now, with government funding and the annual defense policy bill competing for attention alongside measures aimed at preventing AI-driven harm.

One immediate deadline is Dec. 11, when the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 is set to expire again. Known as CISA 2015, the law gives companies legal protections when they share qualifying cyber threat information with the government.

The measure lapsed during last year’s government shutdown and has since survived through a series of temporary renewals. Industry groups have frequently warned that any lapse in those protections can make companies more reluctant to share information about intrusions.

A recent stopgap law also extended two other cyber and IT authorities through Dec. 11: the Federal Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2015, which supports federal network intrusion detection and prevention, and the Technology Modernization Fund, which helps agencies replace aging technology and improve security.

The defense bill offers a possible route to a longer information-sharing renewal. A coalition of 35 industry groups recently asked negotiators to retain a provision extending CISA 2015 through 2035.

But the defense package itself also remains unfinished. While the House narrowly passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act on July 22, the legislation has stalled in the upper chamber. The Senate fell short of the votes required to begin debating its own version following a failed procedural vote on July 14, leaving the multi-billion-dollar defense package in political limbo.

Both chambers will also have to reconcile differences in conferencing before sending a final, unified bill to the president's desk for signature.

Among many provisions, the House-passed defense bill would require the Pentagon to explain how it is incorporating commercial cyber capabilities into military operations, including tools supporting offensive missions. Another measure focuses on cyberdefense strategies with Taiwan.

A proposal to give firmer legal backing to a global vulnerability-tracking program did not make it into the House package. The amendment from Reps. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., and George Whitesides, D-Calif., was previously submitted to formally authorize the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures program in the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

CVE assigns standard identifiers to publicly known security flaws, giving researchers, software makers and network defenders a common way to discuss the same problem. A contracting scare in April 2025 raised questions about the stability of a system used worldwide but heavily dependent on U.S. government backing.

The legislation will likely be a priority for the 120th Congress, Inside Cybersecurity reported Monday, citing a congressional staffer.

On AI, lawmakers have offered several approaches to a related problem: how to spot and stop dangerous activity before advanced systems cause widespread damage.

The FRONTIER Act, introduced by Reps. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., and Lori Trahan, D-Mass., would require disclosures about advanced models’ risks and safeguards, along with reports to the government about serious safety incidents.

A separate proposal, the AI Kill Switch Act, would require covered developers to maintain the ability to restrict or shut down their systems. Introduced by Reps. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, the bill would also let DHS order emergency action following a qualifying incident, in consultation with Commerce and the director of national intelligence.

Both proposals arrived in July, amid OpenAI’s disclosure that its models had escaped a testing environment and breached Hugging Face, sharpening concerns about AI labs’ ability to control their systems.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, have proposed a more sweeping ban on artificial superintelligence, alongside a pause on advanced AI development while a new federal regulator establishes safety rules.

The remaining congressional session also offers another opportunity to revisit Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which lets spy agencies warrantlessly collect the communications of foreign targets abroad and is regularly used to investigate various national security threats.

The authority statutorily lapsed in June, but existing court approvals allowed collection to continue into 2027. The administration and intelligence-focused lawmakers may seek a renewal strategy during the year-end session, though privacy groups want a still-secret surveillance court opinion released before Congress acts.

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CISA’s former Secure by Design chiefs launch their own software safety organization

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 08:00:00 -0500

In November 1996, a hacker writing as Aleph One showed readers of Phrack, an underground magazine for hackers, how an attacker could take control of a program simply by sending it more data than it could safely store. The extra data could spill into another part of the program’s memory and change which instructions it followed next, letting an attacker run code of their choosing.

The article, “Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit,” walked readers through what’s known as a buffer overflow vulnerability. It turned 30 on Sunday, but the kind of flaw it described still turns up in software today.

That phenomenon — why manufacturers still ship products with defects they’ve long known how to prevent — is one of the questions behind the Software Safety Institute, a nonprofit launched Monday by Bob Lord and Lauren Zabierek. The two led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Secure by Design initiative under the Biden administration, persuading hundreds of technology providers to pledge to build safer products.

Courtesy: Lauren Zabierek

Now they want to build upon that work, the founders told Nextgov/FCW in an interview ahead of the launch. Zabierek serves as the institute’s CEO and Lord is its chief strategy officer.

The pair, broadly, are seeking to make software safety measurable and visible, strengthen incentives for manufacturers to build safer products and use evidence about product failures to inform buyers and policymakers.

Even while working at CISA, the two wanted someone outside the agency to “take an independent view of how secure by design is actually playing out,” Zabierek said.

A car buyer, for example, can look up how a model performed in a crash test, they noted. Yet a hospital buying software has little comparable information to help it choose between two vendors.

That distinction is why the pair put “safety” in the institute’s name. As Zabierek put it, “security is the property of the software, but safety is the outcome.”

Lord came to CISA after a call from then-Director Jen Easterly. He had left his job as chief information security officer at the Democratic National Committee and told Easterly how frustrating it had been to defend an organization using products that came with known flaws or unsafe settings. She asked him to join the agency and work on the problem from the manufacturer’s side.

Instead of burdening buyers with fixing vulnerabilities after installation, CISA focused on having manufacturers resolve issues directly within the product. For instance, if a manufacturer stopped delivering hardware configured with simple default passwords, buyers would no longer need to worry about changing them manually.

Nearly 70 companies signed CISA’s voluntary pledge in May 2024. By the time Zabierek and Lord announced their resignations in April 2025, about 300 had signed.

Courtesy: Bob Lord

Lord said CISA could get manufacturers’ attention in a way few institutions could. But outside the government, he and Zabierek can bring researchers and companies together without the formal processes required by the agency.

At the core of the effort is a question about how the global economy builds and ships insecure technology products, and why society hasn’t developed the cultural and legal incentives to prevent the same flaws from propagating.

Engagements with stakeholders have already started. Zabierek has proposed an approach to officials in Massachusetts: analyzing state-collected breach reports to identify recurring product failures. Because states purchase software extensively, detecting patterns across multiple incidents could provide state buyers with specific criteria to evaluate vendors before completing future acquisitions.

Lord sees a similar opportunity in the U.S. federal contracting space. They also plan to study what happens in Europe, where the Cyber Resilience Act now requires manufacturers to report serious security incidents and flaws that hackers are actively exploiting.

Easterly is joining the institute’s board alongside former Deputy National Cyber Director Camille Stewart Gloster, former CISA cybersecurity chief Eric Goldstein and Laura Manley, executive director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center.

“When I led the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, I said ‘we don’t have a cybersecurity problem so much as a software quality problem.’ That’s still true,” Easterly said. “Government helped start this conversation, but lasting change needs independent, sustained pressure from outside government.”

“When software fails, the harm doesn’t land evenly. Rural hospitals, small water utilities, school districts, and the families who rely on them have the least room to absorb a disruption, and the least say over how the products they depend on are built,” said Gloster. “Holding manufacturers responsible is how you protect the people who could never have prevented the problem in the first place.”

Artificial intelligence has given the work new urgency, the founders said. Last month, researchers used AI to find critical flaws in PHP, software that helps run websites worldwide. Lord described what those tools are exposing as “30 years of deferred safety decisions.”

The usual response, he said, has been to focus on how quickly customers install a fix.

“We blame [consumers] for not having deployed the security updates fast enough without asking why on earth are there so many security updates?” he said.

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Ongoing AI dialogue with China is necessary in coming Congress, top tech lawmaker says

David DiMolfetta and Christian Robles — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 12:33:00 -0500

Rep. James Walkinshaw’s vision for future artificial intelligence regulation includes maintaining “permanent, serious” dialogue with China to mitigate the risk that powerful AI models pose.

That won’t be easy, but if the U.S. was able to maintain nuclear disarmament dialogue with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, then the same can be said for communications with its top technology and economic competitor today, the Democrat from Virginia argued at a GovExec event Thursday night where he discussed priorities for the next Congress.

Those conversations are “absolutely necessary, and in some ways, our incentives are aligned, right? The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t want rogue AI agents hacking their systems and their water authorities any more than we do, so we have to have that permanent dialogue and reach some agreements,” he said.

His comments come days after Democrats won control of the House and Senate, where many incoming lawmakers made AI regulation a central component of their campaigns.

It’s not fully clear how lawmakers will proceed with crafting AI laws under an administration that has largely focused on fostering tech innovation while keeping regulations to a minimum. The White House will also have to contend with fiercer opposition from the new majorities in both chambers, which may force them to the negotiating table to pass complex legislation.

Walkinshaw is hardly the first member of Congress to advocate for U.S.-China AI dialogue, though his position gives the comments added weight. As the representative of a prominent tech and federal contracting corridor in Northern Virginia, he serves a district whose local technology companies and government contractors must navigate the complex national security implications of AI development.

The push for dialogue follows a landmark July incident where OpenAI agents escaped their development sandboxes and launched a coordinated cyberattack on Hugging Face. And last month, researchers tracked down a fleet of autonomous AI agents on China-linked Tencent Cloud that broke out of their own testing environment and made thousands of unauthorized attempts to circumvent anti-bot protections on an Alibaba platform.

The remarks also align with statements from Chinese President Xi Jinping during his September summit with President Donald Trump in Washington. Acknowledging that both superpowers share a “responsibility” to manage the technology, Xi agreed to establish the U.S.-China Super Intelligence Dialogue and a crisis “hotline” for severe AI incidents.

Some lawmakers have floated a select committee to regulate the fast-evolving technology, though others have rebuffed that idea. Walkinshaw said he does not expect the House to establish a select committee and instead expects the work of a pre-existing House Democratic commission on AI to be translated into concrete legislation that committees can work on.

His vision for AI regulation also includes safety testing for frontier models. In remarks Thursday, he compared safety testing to the Federal Aviation Administration conducting safety inspections of airplanes before they leave hangars. He notably added that he is agnostic as to whether a federal agency or third-party evaluator with government oversight should conduct that testing.

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These award-winning feds want to advance science for the public good — and challenge stereotypes about government work

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 10:29:00 -0500

Jan Tyler said she was a “math nerd” in high school and college. She’s been able to pursue that passion while working for the federal government, helping to manage the Energy Department’s teacher fellowships, K-12 programs and the National Science Bowl, an annual competition that quizzes middle and high school students on their knowledge of science and math.

When asked what her most impactful work at the agency has been, however, Tyler pointed to the Presidential Super Intelligence Challenge, a Trump administration initiative for students and teachers to learn how to use artificial intelligence.

“This gave us a chance to give them a safe opportunity to even just learn about [AI] or to play with it a little bit, and the response just blew us away,” she said. “We had about 25,000 registrations, and I think we were hoping for maybe 2,500 registrations. So it really did reach all parts of the country, and we were really proud of that.”

Tyler is one of seven federal employees who will receive the Arthur S. Flemming award this upcoming Sunday from the National Academy of Public Administration and George Washington University’s Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration. The awards program recognizes career civil servants who have between three and 15 years of experience in the fields of applied science and engineering, basic science or leadership and management.

Tyler shared that receiving recognition is unusual for her.

“I'm the kind of person that likes to work behind the scenes,” she said. “Everyone [in government] wants to be there to do something good. We're certainly not there for the recognition.”

More than 700 feds have received the award over its more than 75-year-history, including Neil Armstrong (1969), Dr. Anthony Fauci (1979) and William Phillips (1987), a National Institute of Standards and Technology scientist who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1997.

This year, Phillips is being presented with a Flemming lifetime achievement award. He received the recognition in 2020 but did not accept the award in person because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

William Phillips in 1997, the year he won the Nobel. Credit: HECTOR MATA / Getty Images

Phillips said that he has stayed at NIST for nearly 50 years because of the shared mission to solve problems for the public benefit as well as the cool coworkers.

“The people that I work with on a daily basis here at NIST are just so amazing. It's such a pleasure to be able to go next door to somebody who is an expert in things that I am not an expert in, but who is working very closely with me,” he said. “To get to go to the next building over and talk to somebody who was the architect of one of the key theories that allows us to understand the way atoms behave when they are at temperatures of a millionth of a degree above absolute zero, and say, ‘Okay, I don't understand what what we're seeing in the lab. Help me out here.’”

The Flemming lifetime achievement award is named after Katharine B. Gebbie, a former NIST lab director. During her tenure, four agency scientists, including Phillips, won Nobel prizes in physics.

Phillips recalled an incident when Gebbie decided to close out research after a partner agency withdrew its support, but she ensured that all impacted employees were able to move into other roles at NIST.

“She made sure every one of those people found a place to use their talents at NIST. What an amazing woman to have the kind of courage to say ‘We're going to use this as an opportunity to do even better, and we're going to make sure everybody comes out of this in good shape,’” he said. “I just can't imagine having either the courage or the skill to make that happen. She did, and I was always in awe of her.”

Katharine B. Gebbie, who passed away in 2016. Credit: Denease Anderson / NIST via Wikimedia Commons

At a NAPA event earlier this year, Phillips spoke about his frustration with the phrase “close enough for government work” and its implication that civil servants don’t strive to improve their performance. He pointed out, as an example, that atomic clocks have gotten significantly more precise in recent decades because of federal research.

Similarly, Kathryn Keenan, a fellow NIST scientist, is receiving a Flemming award for her work to develop more effective breast cancer screenings and improve the accuracy of MRI. Specifically, she’s helped to develop objects “so you can test your scanner to see if you are making correct measurements.”

She said that this research was necessitated about two decades ago after pharmaceutical companies realized there was so much variability in MRI systems that it was difficult to tell in clinical trials if a drug was working.

“Our end goal is that you could get the same scan, collect the same images on multiple different MRI systems and you would get the same result,” she said. “It sounds like that should already exist, and it doesn't.”

After she found out that she would be receiving the Flemming award, she said that she “sat in my office and cried a little bit.”

“I know government employees, and I know how hard we all work and we have been portrayed differently than I know us to be,” Keenan said. “Our day-to-day experience has become more challenging, so it's very meaningful to have that effort and work recognized.”

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The modernization metric missing from every federal dashboard

Mika J. Cross — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 16:22:00 -0500

Every agency has a bench. Most leaders never look at it until the starter goes down.

I learned that in the Army, where no unit is ever more than one deployment away from needing its next leader. You don't wait for the vacancy. You build the depth and capacity well before you need it. Then I spent years inside federal agencies, often watching the opposite habit: a seasoned expert retires, a job posting goes up and the clock starts from zero.

The federal bench is thinner than at any point in recent memory.

GAO reported in June that the workforce at 22 of the 24 CFO Act agencies declined by a net of nearly 256,000 employees, more than 11%, between December 2024 and January 2026. Pew Research found that employees with less than two years of service fell from 16.2% of the workforce to 10.3% in a single year, and the share under age 35 fell from 18% to 16.8%

Whatever you think about how we got here, leaders agree on where to go next. A smaller government has to be a deeper one.

OPM is pointing in that direction. Its July guidance asks agencies to make at least a third of external hires early-career talent and to put AI, data and cyber skills at the center of next year's staffing plans. Tech Force, EarlyCareers.gov and the refreshed Scholarship for Service are early bets on that future. GAO has kept strategic human capital management on its High-Risk List for more than two decades, citing skills gaps.

But a deeper bench also has to be a ready one. OPM has told agencies that "planning for technology and planning for talent are no longer separate conversations," and it is pushing for faster hiring, AI in everyday work and stronger accountability for results. Those are reasonable goals, and each depends on readiness.

The Partnership for Public Service's survey of more than 11,000 federal employees placed engagement at 32 out of 100. Gallup found the share of federal workers "struggling" rose from 37% to 47% in a year. You can debate the causes. You can't responsibly ignore the signal: strained people take fewer risks, and modernization is a series of risks.

This is not a partisan point. It's an operational one. Accountability for results and attention to people aren't opposing camps. The first depends on the second.

Building a bench that is both deeper and ready is the work of ATARC's new Workforce Modernization Alliance working group, which I co-lead. At our kickoff roundtable, held under the Chatham House Rule, leaders from large departments, small oversight offices and industry surfaced five ideas.

Watch a different clock. Some technical teams have cut time-to-hire to 45 days, with pilots aiming for five. Impressive. But the measure that matters is time-to-productivity: the gap between someone walking out the door and their successor fully carrying the mission.

Change fatigue is a performance issue, not a morale issue. When new performance systems, hiring models and AI tools arrive at once, employees default to self-protection. They avoid experiments and wait for guidance. Left unmeasured, that becomes a culture of silence that no technology investment can overcome.

Managers are the multiplier. Policy changes with a signature. Behavior changes one supervisor at a time. Mid-level managers are carrying most of the transformation, and most were never trained to lead it.

Protect the front door. As hiring goes digital, so do the threats. Recruiters are already meeting AI-generated "candidates" and coached real-time interview fraud. Speed without verification is not modernization. It's exposure. And the human touch still wins: candidates who meet an agency representative in person are far more likely to follow through to their first day.

Measure outcomes, not motion. The group wants agencies tracking time-to-productivity, not just time-to-hire, and indicators like trust, psychological safety and resilience alongside cost and cycle time. The IRS team that cut some HR actions from 40 hours to seven minutes measures its work through KPIs. Pair that rigor with readiness data, and leaders can see problems before they become failures.

What makes this working group different is not another list of recommendations. It's impact.

Members commit to sharing what failed, not just what worked, so no agency spends a year relearning a lesson another agency already paid for. Our first white paper, releasing this month, captures what we heard and where we want to go. The real product is the community of practice that comes after it.

Here's my invitation. If you run hiring, lead a team that is rebuilding its institutional memory, or invest in the tools agencies use to find and develop talent, check out our latest white paper and feel free to join us. The Workforce Modernization Alliance is open to government, industry and academic leaders through ATARC. Bring your pipeline wins and your pipeline misses. We need both. The first meeting is Dec. 1, 2026, from 11:00 AM – 11:45 AM ET.

The strongest teams I ever served on weren't the ones with the most stars. They were the ones where the next person up was ready. That's what we're building, together.

Mika J. Cross is a government workforce expert, Army veteran, former federal leader and CEO of Strategy@Work

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Tech policy coalition calls for new Congress to set AI safety standards

Grace Dille — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 14:57:00 -0500

The Chamber of Progress, a center-left tech industry policy coalition, is calling on the 2027 Democratic Congress to establish federal artificial intelligence safety standards.

In a Nov. 4 memo to House and Senate Democratic leadership, the Chamber of Progress laid out a technology to-do list for 2027, with an eye on delivering more consumer protection and access to technological benefits.

The memo laid out 10 priorities, chief among them passing a federal AI transparency and safety standard.

“Democrats should establish a national AI framework combining public transparency, independent evaluation, and enforceable safeguards for the most capable models,” Koustubh KJ Bagchi, the group’s vice president of policy and government relations, wrote in the memo.

Bagchi said Congress should require developers to publish safety frameworks, report critical incidents and protect whistleblowers.

He pointed to the FRONTIER Act, which Reps. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., and Lori Trahan, D-Mass., introduced in July, as a piece of legislation for Congress to build upon. That bill aims to establish a national framework governing the development and deployment of the most advanced AI models.

The memo also noted that a body similar to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority — or FINRA — could combine industry funding with federal supervision for AI oversight.

“Strong federal protections should anchor a consistent national framework that harmonizes overlapping state requirements while preserving state authority over fraud, discrimination, child protection, and other harmful conduct,” Bagchi added.

The memo also discusses data centers, kids online safety, upskilling in the age of AI, driverless technology, crypto rules and other technology issues.

The Chamber of Progress’s memo to Congressional leadership comes after major Democratic wins in the House and Senate on Tuesday. Following the midterm results, several Democrats have pledged to focus on AI safety when they take over the majority in January.

“Top of the Democratic agenda on day 1 needs to be a pause on advanced AI development, regulation of this out of control industry, and a ban on artificial superintelligence,” Rep. Yassamin Ansari, D-Ariz., wrote in a Nov. 4 post to X.

On Tuesday, Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar, D-Texas, called for Democrats to make taking on AI a top priority. Casar said the results are “the early tremor of a much bigger AI earthquake upending American politics.”

According to an NBC News exit poll from Tuesday, 56% of voters said artificial intelligence and data centers were a “crucial or major factor” in their vote for Congress, and 44% said they were “a minor factor or not a factor” in their vote.

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Department of Justice forms AI task force

Grace Dille — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 13:56:00 -0500

The Department of Justice announced on Thursday the formation of an artificial intelligence task force designed to safeguard the department against malicious AI actors.

The new task force, known as the Super Intelligence Task Force — or DOJ-SITF — will be co-chaired by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and Associate Deputy Attorney General Stephen Weiss.

“The DOJ-SITF will ensure that America’s leadership in SI is not compromised by the misuse of SI by foreign state and state-sponsored actors, transnational criminal organizations, and individual or corporate actors engaged in fraud or other unlawful conduct,” Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote in an Oct. 13 memo.

“The DOJ-SITF will also take affirmative measures, as appropriate, to promote American SI dominance,” he said.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in late September instructing agencies to refer to artificial intelligence as “super intelligence,” which he called more accurate. Super intelligence already had an established definition — “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest,” per philosopher Nick Bostrom — that is separate from the meaning of artificial intelligence.

The DOJ previously established an AI Litigation Task Force in January under former Attorney General Pam Bondi. Blanche said the new task force will incorporate the work of the AI Litigation Task Force and coordinate the DOJ’s affirmative civil litigation as it relates to AI.

The task force will also organize the department’s criminal and civil law enforcement efforts involving AI, recommend enforcement priorities to prevent the misuse of AI and develop guidance on the prosecution of unlawful AI-related conduct.

Blanche said the DOJ-SITF will also serve as the department’s main point of contact with the Super Intelligence Force that Trump announced last month. That task force, led by National Intelligence Director Jay Clayton, coordinates the government’s engagement with various organizations and AI companies.

“The SI Task Force at the Department of Justice will facilitate our partnership with SI Force Chair Jay Clayton as we ensure critical SI technologies serve the American people and are not manipulated by bad actors at home or abroad,” Blanche said in a statement.

“The Department of Justice will continue identifying and prosecuting individuals whose use of SI violates the law, including by maliciously targeting American taxpayers, critical U.S. infrastructure, or other aspects of our national security,” he added.

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US agencies warn of refrigeration hacks amid suspected attacks on military bases

David DiMolfetta — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 13:16:00 -0500

Federal agencies warned Thursday that hackers are targeting refrigeration systems worldwide, urging operators to secure equipment whose recent failures have spoiled food and created fire hazards.

CISA, the FBI and the departments of Health and Human Services, Agriculture and Transportation issued joint guidance warning that attackers are targeting electronic temperature controls at grocery stores and cold storage facilities.

The warning follows Nextgov/FCW’s report last week that U.S. officials suspect Iran-linked hackers were behind freezer malfunctions at military bases across the country. Those incidents began around late August and have affected roughly six commissaries, the on-base grocery stores serving military personnel. Reuters initially reported that the Pentagon was treating the freezer incidents as possible cyberattacks.

In France, hackers targeted refrigeration systems at three regional blood banks overnight Sunday into Monday. And this week, a new wave of supermarket attacks raised fridge temperatures at stores in Sweden, Belgium, Luxembourg and elsewhere, forcing retailers to discard food. The incidents followed attacks at hundreds of French establishments in October.

The U.S. notice does not name who is responsible for the cyber sabotage.

Hackers could force refrigerators and freezers into continuous heating or defrost cycles, the agencies said. They could also prevent operators from seeing current temperatures, making it harder to monitor conditions inside the units. Beyond spoiled inventory and damaged equipment, the agencies warned of fire hazards and potential harm to consumers who use products kept at unsafe temperatures.

Such hacks are possible because various digital vulnerabilities tied to refrigeration controls can expose their underlying equipment to hacking and sabotage, including devices connected to the internet that are used to remotely monitor or control temperatures.

“Every organization that depends on refrigeration and monitoring systems should assume it could be a target,” said Chris Butera, CISA’s acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity.

Hospitals, pharmaceutical suppliers, chemical companies and transportation providers also depend on these systems.

“We are seeing these systems targeted across critical infrastructure sectors globally, putting inventory and equipment at risk,” said Brett Leatherman, the FBI’s cyber branch operations director.

The agencies urged operators to remove control systems from the public internet and secure any remote access they still need. They also recommended separating refrigeration controls from business networks, replacing default passwords, installing security updates and retiring equipment that manufacturers no longer support.

The hacks follow a pattern closely aligned with Iranian hackers, said Nahman Khayet‏, the co-founder and CEO at Alt Security.

“They’ve been playing this game for many years,” he said in an interview. “Think about how hard it is to replace those refrigerators, right? They’re huge things. It’s very costly. And also you don’t want to do any disruption to those because they probably hold a lot of items which are important, like food.”

That dynamic means that it’s unlikely the devices are getting the latest security updates, which Iranian cyber operators have often leveraged to get inside systems, including various types of critical infrastructure, he added.

European authorities issued their own joint warning Wednesday, calling for immediate action to secure exposed equipment. The European Commission, cybersecurity agency ENISA, Europol and national authorities are coordinating their response and sharing information about the incidents.

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VA, DOD are now live on national health data sharing superhighway

Christian Robles — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 12:30:00 -0500

The Veterans Affairs and Defense Departments will now send and receive electronic health information with medical providers through the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement — or TEFCA — according to a Thursday press release.

“Many of America’s veterans and warfighters receive care in multiple locations, making it critical for their providers to have access to secure, timely health information,” said Thomas Keane, National Coordinator for Health IT, in the release. “TEFCA will help ensure their providers can get up-to-date information no matter where they receive care.”

TEFCA is a superhighway that gives patients, medical providers, public health authorities and federal agencies access to electronic health information.

Nearly 25,000 organizations are live on TEFCA, including hospitals, clinics and other entities, according to the release. Since TEFCA went live in December 2023, it has facilitated the exchange of more than 2 billion health records, the release adds.

The VA and DOD connections to TEFCA were a long time coming.

VA has publicly stated its intention to connect to TEFCA since at least March 2025. The Federal Electronic Health Record Modernization Office — which has helped VA, DOD and several other federal agencies implement a common electronic health record — said in September that it was preparing to connect to TEFCA to make health data exchanges between the federal EHR and other EHRs seamless.

“Wherever our beneficiaries seek care — whether at a military treatment facility, a VA medical center, or a participating local hospital — their critical health information will travel securely with them across connected care settings,” said Leslie Sofocleous, the office’s director, in the Thursday release.

Besides VA and DOD, the Indian Health Service, Social Security Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission have previously joined the TEFCA.

Similar to VA and DOD, IHS’s goal for TEFCA is to improve care coordination between agency and nonagency medical providers.

SSA, meanwhile, joined TEFCA to speed up disability claims processing by obtaining digital copies of medical records. As of Aug. 13, the agency had made 60,595 data requests and connected with 84 health care entities, Nextgov/FCW previously reported.

CPSC plans to use TEFCA to obtain digital hospital emergency room data that are needed for an update of the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, a tracking system for consumer product-related injuries. But that forthcoming overhaul has attracted blowback from congressional Democrats and hospital groups over data privacy concerns.

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Democrats’ midterm sweep puts CISA cuts, intelligence disputes under scrutiny

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 13:56:00 -0500

House Democrats plan to investigate how the Trump administration’s cuts to the nation’s cyberdefense agency affected its ability to protect federal networks and help states secure elections, part of a broader inquiry into the Department of Homeland Security when the party takes control of Congress in January.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., who is in line to chair the House Homeland Security Committee following that takeover, said Democrats would examine the department’s use of its powers against Americans, its immigration enforcement practices and its dealings with contractors.

The party’s wins in both chambers mean Democrats will decide which officials to call before Congress and what records to seek, under subpoena authorities given to whichever party has the majority in a given chamber.

If a permanent director for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is nominated again, Senate Democrats will also have a say in who leads the agency. The same can be said for a nominee to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, whose previous leader resigned earlier this year.

“We will investigate the administration weaponizing DHS against Americans, its out of control immigration policies, and its blatantly corrupt self-dealing,” Thompson told Nextgov/FCW. “The American people expect nothing less, and we will deliver.”

The panel also plans to examine the department’s surveillance of Americans engaged in protected speech, its handling of whistleblowers and whether federal officials steered contracts to political allies. On cybersecurity, they want to know how DHS is preparing for attacks aided by artificial intelligence and what became of services the department scaled back.

What CISA lost in the cuts

Thompson and Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., who is positioned to chair the Homeland Security cyber subcommittee, have already asked Congress’ watchdog to assess the impact of staffing cuts at CISA, which helps defend civilian federal networks and other frequent hacker targets like water systems and telecom networks.

CISA lost roughly a third of its workforce after Trump retook office, though the agency has made efforts to refill its roster. By September, about 250 prospective hires had tentative offers and were waiting for clearances, acting Director Nick Andersen said, as part of an effort under DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin to recant some of the cuts made to the cyberdefense agency over the last two years.

Ramirez, in a June interview with Nextgov/FCW, said she was planning a significant DHS overhaul bill for next year. She also gave positive feedback on CISA’s rehiring plans, though she added it may not be enough.

In a post on X after the election, she had a message for Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, White House aide Stephen Miller and others involved in immigration enforcement: “Clear your schedule.”

In the Senate, the retirement of Michigan Democrat Gary Peters puts Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., next in seniority among Democrats on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Hassan and Peters have already asked DHS to preserve records belonging to former Secretary Kristi Noem and her adviser Corey Lewandowski.

Hassan has also pressed CISA on its own security practices after reports that a contractor left agency account information and passwords in a public database.

One issue facing both homeland security panels could come due before Democrats take over. A law protecting companies from lawsuits when they share information about cyber threats is operating under a temporary extension through Dec. 11. Without a longer renewal planted this year, the incoming chairs could inherit a fight over the legal protections companies rely on when communicating with the government about cyberattacks.

When intelligence findings conflict with the White House

Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., are in line to chair the intelligence committees in their respective chambers after two years of disputes over whether spy agencies can deliver findings that contradict the president without putting analysts’ jobs at risk.

One major dispute centered on Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang Trump said was carrying out an invasion at the direction of Nicolás Maduro’s government.

Most U.S. intelligence agencies assessed that Maduro was not directing the gang’s operations in the United States. Then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard subsequently fired the two leaders of the National Intelligence Council, which produced the assessment.

Warner also challenged Gabbard directly over Iran. At a Senate hearing in March, weeks after the U.S. and Israel went to war, he pressed her on a passage in her written testimony that she skipped in her opening remarks. It said Iran had made no effort to rebuild its uranium enrichment capability after U.S. strikes the previous June, a finding that bore on President Donald Trump’s claim that Iran posed an imminent threat.

A day earlier, Joe Kent, Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, had resigned over the war, saying he did not believe Iran posed such a threat.

Last June, after Trump said U.S. strikes had “obliterated” three Iranian nuclear sites, a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency assessment suggested the attacks could have set the program back only a few months.

When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth fired DIA Director Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse that August without explanation, Warner pointed to the dispute in accusing the administration of “treating intelligence as a loyalty test.”

Himes has already signaled one investigation he wants to pursue. In September, he alerted an association representing intelligence contractors that lawmakers could seek records and testimony about donations to Trump’s White House ballroom. He wants to know who solicited the contributions and whether companies believed giving money would help them secure government work or access to senior officials.

At least a third of the Republicans on the House intelligence panel won’t return to Congress in January. Missouri Rep. Ann Wagner and Pennsylvania Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick and Scott Perry lost reelection Tuesday. New York Rep. Elise Stefanik didn’t seek another term, and Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw lost his primary.

Himes and Warner also face a decision about the government’s own surveillance powers should lawmakers leave it unresolved this year, namely Section 702 authorities under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Those authorities let spy agencies compel internet and telecom providers for contents of phone calls, emails and text messages of foreigners located abroad without a warrant, but, in doing so, agencies can also collect Americans’ data if they are communicating with a foreign target. The controversial program expired in June, though certain collection procedures can continue through this spring under court approvals issued in March.

Who oversees military cyber operations

Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., are positioned to lead the Armed Services committees, which help write the annual defense policy bill.

Smith told The Washington Post he wants to investigate military operations, politicization of the armed forces and possible corruption in defense contracting. Both lawmakers challenged the administration over the firing of Gen. Timothy Haugh, who led the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command.

Much of the detailed oversight of military hacking and network defense would fall to Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., if they move up from their current posts as ranking members. Khanna is the top Democrat on the House Armed Services cyber subcommittee, which also oversees Pentagon software purchases and AI programs.

Rosen is his counterpart on the Senate Armed Services cybersecurity subcommittee, where lawmakers have examined how the military recruits and trains its cyber forces. A major Defense Department Cyber Strategy was planned for release in September but has been sitting in limbo for sometime.

Khanna could also lead the House select committee on competition with China. That role would give him another avenue to scrutinize AI security. In October, he asked leading U.S. developers what they knew about Chinese efforts to obtain their code or use their models’ answers to train competing systems. He has also called for the U.S. and China to agree on when to shut down AI systems judged too dangerous to operate.

Morgan Adamski, a former executive director of U.S. Cyber Command and now PwC’s Cyber, Data & Tech Risk Platform Leader, said she will be watching how lawmakers approach CISA’s readiness and what federal agencies ask companies to report when they are hacked.

Hearings could give stakeholders a clearer picture of where federal defenses have fallen short, even if the rules they operate under stay the same.

“But greater oversight doesn't necessarily mean immediate legislative or regulatory change,” Adamski added. “The administration will continue to play a significant role in shaping federal priorities, so businesses should be prepared for continued policy uncertainty.”

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OpenAI hones public sector focus with new leadership hires

Frank Konkel — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 13:32:00 -0500

Fresh off a year in which more than 1 million federal employees gained access to its ChatGPT platform, OpenAI added several senior executives to its government team in October to further accelerate its momentum across the public sector.

OpenAI hired Yvette Cesario to be its new head of national security. Cesario formerly worked for Amazon Web Services, where she served as managing director for national security and was a founding member of AWS’ national security team, bringing cloud computing at scale to intelligence agencies. In her new role, Cesario will lead engagement with the intelligence community, which is increasingly looking to use generative AI in its mission space.

Peter Guerra will serve as OpenAI’s head of tech success. Guerra formerly worked as Oracle’s group vice president for data and AI for government, defense and intelligence, and was at Microsoft, Accenture and Booz Allen Hamilton prior to that. In Guerra’s new position, he’ll work to transition agencies from generative AI pilots to mission deployments.

Jamil Jaffer, who founded the National Security Institute and the AI & Innovation Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, will take on the role of OpenAI’s head of global government cyber. Jaffer previously served as venture partner and strategic advisor at Paladin Capital Group, a defense technology-focused venture capital firm, and has held prior national security-focused roles in the House, Senate and the Justice Department’s national security division.

“OpenAI is focused on bringing advanced AI tools to public servants and helping them use the technology to serve the American people,” Katrina Mulligan, head of national security partnerships for OpenAI for Government, said in a statement. “Yvette, Peter and Jamil bring deep experience with the missions our government partners carry out every day.”

OpenAI also beefed up its policy communications team, hiring Megha Bhattacharya to serve as public sector lead. Prior to joining OpenAI, Bhattacharya served in the Biden-Harris Administration, including roles in the White House press office and in the State Department.

These hires coincided with OpenAI’s appointment of former U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll to serve as senior counselor for national security modernization. Driscoll was hailed by President Trump as “a disruptor and a change agent” in 2024 before resigning Aug. 31.

“AI should give people more power over their lives and people should have a say in how it’s developed,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said. “The US has an extraordinary opportunity to work with other countries to spread the adoption of democratic AI and I’m excited to welcome Dan Driscoll to OpenAI to strengthen American leadership and help us do that.”

Major momentum for OpenAI

In August 2025, OpenAI was among the first companies to negotiate software discounts for government customers through the General Service Administration’s OneGov program, courting a new government market.

In September, OpenAI for Government announced a new multi-year agreement with GSA — dubbed OneGov 2.0 — offering federal agencies discounted, token-based pricing for its popular ChatGPT models. The new deal removed monthly platform fees and offered a 50% discount on token-based usage across those models beginning Oct. 1, one day after its original OneGov deal expired.

According to OpenAI for Government, the company onboarded 50 new government agencies during the months of September and October. During the same two-month span, OpenAI captured government contracts collectively valued at more than $550 million, according to GovTribe data. They include:

Treasury: $487 million potential value; $2.16 million obligated
Health and Human Services: $30.68 million potential value; $6.93 million obligated
Veterans Affairs: $34 million potential value; $4.20 million obligated
Labor: $875,000 potential value, fully obligated
Education: $1.42 million potential value; $711,000 obligated

In another summer milestone, the Pentagon unleashed a specialized version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT to troops and civilian defense users of the GenAI.mil platform. Through the platform, up to 3 million users have access to tools provided by Google, OpenAI and xAI.

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FedRAMP grants first ‘Class C’ certification to Perplexity

Grace Dille — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 13:11:00 -0500

FedRAMP has granted its first “Class C” certification to artificial intelligence company Perplexity, making it the first cloud service offering that is fully compliant with FedRAMP 20x’s new rules for moderate impact.

FedRAMP launched its 20x revamp effort in March 2025, and later released its consolidated rules in June 2026 that officially implemented many of the proposed changes piloted over the previous year.

The rules established the new “Class C” certification, which serves as the equivalent of FedRAMP’s old “moderate” level. The rules also introduced the FedRAMP 20x Class A certification, as well as Class B and Class D certification.

According to the FedRAMP Marketplace, there are currently seven Class A certifications, which serve as a new level to accelerate entry into the marketplace. There are 12 Class B certifications still in the 20x pilot phase, which serve as the equivalent of FedRAMP’s old “low” level. There are no Class D certifications yet.

In a Nov. 2 blog post, FedRAMP said the first Class C certification “marks the actual beginning of the race to expand the marketplace to enable federal agencies to work with many thousands of different cloud-based services that accelerate key agency operations to reduce the footprint of the information technology infrastructure that they directly manage.”

“It took a ton of work to get here, and a ton of collaboration with inspired stakeholders both government and industry-wide,” FedRAMP said. “Everything up until now has been development, piloting, training, preparing.”

In a blog post from Perplexity, the company said the new FedRAMP certification means federal agencies can search the live web and get cited answers within its certified environment.

It added that federal employees can also use Perplexity to summarize approved documents, draft briefing notes and outline policy updates.

Federal agencies can access Enterprise Pro for Government through the General Services Administration’s OneGov offer for $0.25 per agency through March 31, 2027. The offering provides agencies access to models developed by Perplexity and third-party model developers.

According to the company’s new FedRAMP certification, Perplexity’s Enterprise platform provides agency users with access to leading frontier AI models, “including OpenAI GPT, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, Perplexity Sonar and more.”

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What the midterm results mean for federal tech policy

Chris Teale, David DiMolfetta, Christian Robles, and Grace Dille — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 12:06:00 -0500

Major Democratic wins in the House and Senate on Tuesday are expected to shape how lawmakers will approach leading technology issues in the coming Congress.

Below, Nextgov/FCW and Route Fifty reporters break down the significant wins and what could be expected from Democrats in the coming year.

Notable wins and losses

Incumbent Republican Rep. Mike Lawler conceded to Cait Conley, a Democrat and former counterterrorism official running in New York’s 17th congressional district, according to The New York Times, though the Associated Press had not called the race as of Wednesday morning. Conley is a veteran who served as the director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council and an election security advisor at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

In an interview with Nextgov/FCW this summer, Conley expressed interest in a seat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over energy, telecommunications, technology and large portions of the nation’s critical infrastructure.

Rep. Kathy Castor, a key Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, won re-election in a redrawn competitive Florida seat, according to the Associated Press. She co-sponsored the Ratepayer Protection Act, bipartisan legislation meant to protect residents from higher energy costs that data center construction could drive. The bill passed the House in September and faces an unclear future in the Senate.

Not all former feds saw success Tuesday. Michael Masuda, a former engineer who worked in the State Department and the Democrat running in California’s 5th congressional district, lost his race against incumbent Republican Rep. Tom McClintock, according to the Associated Press.

Kristin Hook, a Democrat running in Texas’ 21st congressional district who formerly worked at the National Institutes of Health and the Government Accountability Office, lost her race against Republican Mark Teixeira, according to the Associated Press.

And Charles Borges, a Democrat running for a Maryland State Senate seat, lost his race against incumbent Jack Bailey, according to The New York Times. Borges is a former Social Security Administration chief data officer who filed a whistleblower complaint alleging a Department of Government Efficiency staffer copied Social Security numbers to a private cloud environment.

Cybersecurity, national intelligence and surveillance

Democrats’ midterm win in the House puts lawmakers who have questioned cuts to the federal cyber workforce and the Trump administration’s handling of U.S. spy agencies in a position to investigate both.

More broadly, with Democrats taking the Senate, they would gain a say in which of President Donald Trump’s picks to lead defense, intelligence and homeland security agencies get confirmed. While top cabinet nominees are filled for now, several dozen lower-level positions are still vacant, per data from The Washington Post and Partnership for Public Service.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the DHS agency that became the tip of the spear under Trump’s maximal deportation agenda and has received widespread backlash for a series of lethal incidents, will also receive significant oversight.

The second Trump administration has expanded ICE operations through AI-driven surveillance tools and private data brokers to track and profile individuals, prompting major concerns from lawmakers and civil liberties groups over misidentifications and digital tracking.

“We will investigate the administration weaponizing DHS against Americans, its out of control immigration policies, and its blatantly corrupt self-dealing,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, who is poised to be the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee next year.

Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, won reelection Tuesday and has already put one group on notice. In September, he warned intelligence contractors that lawmakers were likely to investigate donations to Trump’s White House ballroom. Himes wants to know who solicited the money and whether companies believed a contribution would help them secure a government contract or gain access to senior officials.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who was also reelected, will chair the Senate Intelligence Committee and may lead various oversight missions. He has proposed changing who can serve as acting director of national intelligence, arguing that the White House should not be able to install a political appointee over experienced officials the Senate has already confirmed.

Both Himes, Warner and other Democrats who sit on their respective intelligence panels have expressed concerns about politicization of intelligence findings, which especially became a flashpoint after the Iran war started in late February.

A possible FITARA comeback

With Democrats regaining the majority in the House Committee on Oversight and Government reform, the scorecard established under the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act to grade the 24 largest federal agencies on their progress in modernizing IT may see a revival.

The House Oversight Committee traditionally held semiannual hearings to review the grades, compiled in collaboration with the Government Accountability Office.

However, the scorecard was discontinued in 2023 after Republicans took control of the committee. The late Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., FITARA’s author and then-ranking member of the committee, continued issuing his own scorecards and hosted roundtable discussions to review the results with agency chief information officers.

The last scorecard was released by Connolly in September 2024. Connolly died in May 2025.

Rep. James Walkinshaw, D-Va., who succeeded Connolly and previously spent over a decade working as his chief of staff, told Nextgov/FCW in June that the scorecard would likely resume if Democrats regained control of the House.

Walkinshaw also said Congress should modernize the grading scale to account for advances in artificial intelligence and cybersecurity threats.

“The question is obviously, ‘how do you develop those metrics in a way that’s objective?’ But I think that scorecard proved to be over time a good forcing mechanism to nudge agencies to modernize,” Walkinshaw said.

Walkinshaw won reelection in Virginia’s 11th District race on Tuesday.

AI companies face a new political landscape

The 2026 midterms marked a new milestone in the technology industry’s efforts to combat election misinformation, with major AI companies establishing dedicated “war rooms” to monitor their platforms for misuse.

OpenAI and Anthropic were among the companies preparing for potential AI-driven election interference, reflecting growing concerns about how generative AI could be used to spread misinformation and confuse voters.

The election also offered a test of whether artificial intelligence is becoming a more prominent political issue. AI policy has become a point of contention between lawmakers and technology companies, particularly as communities raise concerns about data center construction, electricity costs and the technology’s potential impact on jobs.

Several congressional races featured candidates who made AI regulation a central part of their platforms.

Democrat Abdul El-Sayed won the Senate race in Michigan and has called for a new Cabinet-level agency to oversee AI development and for a pause in AI frontier development.

In California’s 11th Congressional District, Democrat Scott Wiener similarly proposed the creation of a federal regulatory body to oversee AI safety and security. As of publication, Wiener’s race has not yet been called, but he is leading in current numbers.

Democrat Manny Rutinel, the congressman-elect in Colorado’s 8th District, campaigned on requiring independent safety reviews before major AI model releases.

According to polling released Tuesday from The Alliance for Secure AI and YouGov, 81% of voters said they support candidates who favor AI safeguards.

“AI has quickly become a top issue in this election, and will only become more salient as we approach the 2028 presidential election,” Alliance CEO Brendan Steinhauser said in a statement. “From here on out, every candidate from both parties will need to be an AI safety candidate if they want to win in 2028.”

According to an NBC News exit poll, 56% of voters said artificial intelligence and data centers were a “crucial or major factor” in their vote for Congress, and 44% said they were “a minor factor or not a factor” in their vote.

After the results poured in on Tuesday evening, Democrats pledged to focus on AI when they take over the majority in January.

Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar, D-Texas, called for Democrats to make taking on AI a top priority. Casar said the results are “the early tremor of a much bigger AI earthquake upending American politics.”

In his victory speech on Tuesday, Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., said “the titans of Silicon Valley dig bunkers for themselves and warn that the artificial intelligence they’re creating risks human extinction.”

Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., said Big Tech executives will “need to plant new forests for all of the subpoenas we’ll be printing,” in a post on X.

“For all the unknowns we may face in our future, Americans made it clear tonight that the era of Trump’s unchecked corruption is officially over,” said Geordan Neinstein, co-founder of the “New. Digital. Now.” PAC and a former manager at the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee.

“I look forward to more transparency when CEOs testify in front of a Democratic Congress,” he added when asked about expected oversight of technology and AI topics.

Other federal policy shifts

Though votes are still being counted, the next Congress will likely face pressure to deliver on affordability and hold the Trump administration accountable, Amanda Renteria, CEO of civic tech nonprofit Code for America, told Nextgov/FCW.

She expects that means Congress will weigh solutions — such as clearer guidance and longer timelines — that would help states implement the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s Medicaid and SNAP changes, noting that state officials will face pressure to implement quickly redesigned IT systems for Medicaid, SNAP and other programs. She also expects Congress to develop artificial intelligence policy and hopes it will revisit bipartisan policies such as the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Democrats will likely scrutinize defense spending growth, reorienting technology funding and procurement priorities, advisory firm Clark Street Associates wrote in a blog post.

For example, Democrats may push for increased funding for energy research programs, including the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, or ARPA-E. But other technology priorities, such as domestic refining and processing of critical minerals and reducing supply chain dependency on China, will likely remain bipartisan, the post said.

“Overall, the election changes the political map more than it changes the underlying defense technology requirements,” VJ Sahi, senior managing partner at Clark Street Associates, told Nextgov/FCW.

With Democrats soon taking over Congress, they have less of an incentive to work on appropriations bills with Republicans during the forthcoming lame duck session, Sahi added.

Voters reject data centers in local ballot initiatives

It was a bad election night for data centers, as opponents of their development were successful in virtually all 40 ballot measures across 10 states, according to preliminary results.

Voters in localities of various sizes in the Midwest, South, East and West largely voted to reject data centers being built in their jurisdictions, although some of those votes are advisory and therefore not binding on local elected officials.

Ohio communities saw the most ballot initiatives on data centers, mirroring a state level effort to vote on a constitutional amendment banning new data center construction, which could be on the ballot next year. Almost 20 towns, cities and counties in the state held votes on data centers, with some asking voters if they should ban the construction of the centers writ large, while others were asked about amending their zoning laws to allow them. In every race, data center opponents appear to have been victorious.

Data centers also suffered defeats in localities in California, Illinois, Kansas, Maine and New Jersey. More votes are expected next month in Arkansas and North Dakota.

“Voters across the country have emphatically rejected the push for AI data centers. In state after state and race after race, Big Tech has failed to deliver — and everyday Americans have won,” said Mitch Jones, deputy director of Food & Water Action, a nonprofit that pushes for clean water and food.

“Not only in Washington, but in state capitols and village halls across the country, newly elected leaders are poised to stand up to the unregulated, reckless buildout of hyperscale data centers wherever they are proposed,” added Jones.

So far, the only city where data centers have prevailed in the vote last night appears to be Harwood, North Dakota, where the secretary of state’s office said 75% of the 430 people that voted rejected an amendment to the city charter that would have required an independent review and public hearing before adopting large industrial projects, including data centers. That would have applied to future projects, not the controversial Applied Digital campus that has already been approved.

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Former banking executive named GSA acquisition lead

Christian Robles — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 10:44:00 -0500

Jennifer Hill — who joined the General Services Administration as an advisor to Administrator Edward Forst in February — has been named the Commissioner of the agency’s Federal Acquisition Service, GSA announced Wednesday morning.

Since joining GSA, she has worked with FAS leadership to improve government operations through procurement consolidation, streamlined processes and the strategic use of the federal government’s purchasing power, according to a press release.

“I’m excited to execute on the Administrator’s vision for GSA acquisition: buy smarter, move faster, and reduce fraud,” Hill said in the release.

Before entering government, Hill spent 30 years at many financial companies, including Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Citi, according to her LinkedIn. Over the past 10 years, she has consulted for financial services companies in asset management, specialized lending, banking and brokerage, according to the release.

Laura Stanton had been serving as acting FAS commissioner since April, when the previous acquisition head, Josh Gruenbaum, left GSA. Stanton has been deputy FAS commissioner since April 2025, a position the agency confirmed she will return to.

GSA also announced Wednesday that Mark Weiss has been named the Commissioner of the Public Buildings Service. Weiss is an executive vice chairman at Cushman & Wakefield, a global real estate services firm, and has 42 years of experience in commercial real estate, the release said.

“We will continue to advance the Trump-Vance Administration’s objectives and maintain the integrity of the federal government’s real estate portfolio,” Weiss said in the release.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to include clarification on Laura Stanton's position from GSA.

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Trump’s federal workforce overhaul faces a new Congress after Democratic wins

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 00:00:55 -0500

Updated at 9:45 a.m. ET on Nov. 4.

Democrats will retake the House and Senate, several news outlets projected on Tuesday.

With control of Capitol Hill, Democrats are in a stronger position to push back on President Donald Trump’s federal workforce reforms that they’ve expressed opposition to, such as widespread cuts to agency headcounts and budgets, removing civil service protections from roughly 8,000 federal positions through the Schedule Policy/Career job classification as well as perform oversight over matters like the former Department of Government Efficiency cost-cutting initiative.

The oversight implications were already on display Tuesday night. Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, posted “LAWYER UP” on social media.

LAWYER UP.
— Congressman Robert Garcia (@RepRobertGarcia) November 4, 2026

Democrats flipped Senate seats in several states, including North Carolina, South Carolina and Ohio.

Government Executive previously identified several congressional races that have an outsized impact on feds, generally because they feature an incumbent lawmaker who is involved with the annual agency funding process or veterans’ issues. The Associated Press projects that:

Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, the top Democrat on the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees military construction and the Veterans Affairs Department, has retained his seat.
Democrat James Talarico will represent Texas’ more than 130,000 federal employees in the Senate.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the chair of the Appropriations Committee, is projected to lose her race.
Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa, Jen Kiggans, R-Va. and Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis. — all senior leaders on the Veterans' Affairs Committee — failed in their re-election bids.
Reps. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, and Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, are expected to win their re-elections. They are the top Democrats on the Appropriations subcommittees with jurisdiction over the Army Corps of Engineers/Energy Department and Homeland Security Department, respectively.

Democrat Zach Dembo, a former federal prosecutor who said he resigned due to the president’s “politicization” of the Justice Department, won his race to represent Kentucky’s 6th District.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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Election office reports failed attempts to hack its online services

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 23:42:00 -0500

An election office reported that someone probed its online services for weaknesses and tried unsuccessfully to break in Tuesday, while hackers made multiple attempts to guess login credentials at an agency involved in elections, according to an election security report issued Tuesday night.

The findings from the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center offered a fuller picture of the cyber activity election officials have seen as Americans vote in the 2026 midterms.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Monday it would not hold election security briefings with members of the media.

A state election office also recorded five spikes in traffic to a webpage voters use to find ballot drop boxes. The office saw unusual traffic around 11 a.m. EST and said it fell after officials added a CAPTCHA, a check designed to distinguish people from automated requests. The report did not say whether voters had trouble accessing the page.

At the agency that reported the login attempts, activity came from a single internet address. When the agency flagged it, several election offices said they had seen malicious traffic from the same address. None of the attempts succeeded, a person aware of the situation said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to communicate their knowledge.

The evening update also detailed how officials accommodated voters after the bomb threat that forced voting outdoors at a Toledo, Ohio, elementary school earlier Tuesday. A court allowed voters assigned to that polling place to cast provisional ballots until 9:15 p.m. local time.

In a mid-Atlantic state, three schools serving as polling places received threatening calls. Two calls involved shooting threats and one involved a bomb threat, according to the report.

As of 9:30 p.m. EST, the centers said they had received no reports of foreign influence operations.

In one southern state, texts gave voters incorrect polling hours. In a southeastern state, a video purported to show ballot boxes being moved outside a county courthouse. Officials said the objects in the video were backup batteries for voting machines.

“I am absolutely willing to accept those results,” President Donald Trump said in an interview with The New York Times Tuesday night, as results poured in showing major Democratic gains in House and Senate races. “We’ll work with the Democrats, and we’ll, you know, look forward to working with them. We’ll probably work something out,” he added.

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Election security center reports limited threats as voting glitches fuel fraud claims

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 17:17:00 -0500

An organization that tracks election threats for state and local officials said Tuesday afternoon that it had seen limited threat activity during the midterms, though a handful of incidents that briefly disrupted voting and equipment problems in some states have fueled unfounded claims of fraud.

Most cases have been resolved quickly, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center said in a 3 p.m. EST update.

“The midterm elections are a massive undertaking. Each cycle, some jurisdictions experience challenges and rely on layered safeguards to protect the accuracy of results,” said Geoff Hale, an election security visiting fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

“This election cycle, the incidents we’re hearing reports of aren't significantly different than those in previous years. So far, we have not seen evidence of significant cyber incidents,” added Hale, who was also former associate director for election security and resilience at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Physical threats and disruptions

In Toledo, Ohio, a bomb threat at Beverly Elementary School forced voters to leave the building around 10:30 a.m. Election workers brought machines outside so people could vote while police searched the school. Authorities cleared it around 12:15 p.m. At least four other schools in the area received threats, according to the center, though none were being used for voting.

Nextgov/FCW asked the FBI whether investigators had determined who was behind the bomb threats. CISA was also asked for an assessment of the day’s activity so far.

In Georgia’s Fulton County, some voters reported receiving texts saying their polling place had moved. It was unclear who sent the messages or how many people received them. The county said the texts hadn’t come from its office and directed voters to Georgia’s official polling-place lookup to check where to cast their ballots.

Tech issues and false information online

Headline-making ballot issues arose in New York’s Westchester County Tuesday morning. Across much of the county, scanners couldn’t read ballots because they hadn’t been updated after a change to a local race, the New York State Board of Elections said. Some scanners are back online as of this afternoon.

The issues in Westchester are real but “are getting picked up with a false, conspiratorial framing that suggests that the issues — and remedies — are an intentional effort to disenfranchise certain voters,” according to an analysis produced by the Center for an Informed Public.

By mid-afternoon, rumors about the Westchester glitches had circulated widely online and buried the state’s actual explanation, Quinn Raymond, co-founder of VoteShield, told Nextgov/FCW.

In Florida’s Broward County, a feature designed to check that each voter received the correct ballot instead held up voting when polls opened at 7 a.m. The problem was fixed by 7:20 a.m.

As of 1:30 p.m. EST, the ISAC said it had received no reports of foreign influence operations.

The election threat center also flagged unusual traffic at one election office, which reported more than 600 web requests a minute Tuesday. It was unclear what caused the spike or whether voters had trouble reaching the site. In a separate incident last week, an election office reported that a network of automated devices had flooded the webpage voters use to find ballot drop boxes.

So far, the most common false allegation is that Democrats were behind the disruptions, according to Carah Ong Whaley, executive director of Better Choices for Democracy, who shared an assessment with Nextgov/FCW.

Whaley also flagged a fabricated story claiming the FBI had found more than 20,000 fraudulent ballots marked for Democrats in a Houston storage facility. Lead Stories, a fact-checking website, traced the claim to a social media account that regularly posts satire.

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Commenters largely oppose 2030 Census overhaul, analysis finds

Christian Robles — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 16:15:00 -0500

Advocacy groups in the federal data, local government, public health and other spaces largely urged the Census Bureau to reject a sweeping overhaul of the 2030 Census in comments that were due yesterday.

The draft overhaul would eliminate questions about race, ethnicity and sexual orientation on short-form census documents and other questionnaires, if finalized. It would also no longer count undocumented immigrants and immigrants who are legally in the U.S. but are not lawful permanent residents toward the apportionment of the House of Representatives.

Of 126,120 published comments on Regulations.gov as of Tuesday morning, 112,178 — or 89% — oppose the draft rule, according to an analysis from pop-up consortium Hands Off Our Census. Most of the remaining comments supported the draft rule, although a small number — 577 — were categorized as neither.

The proposal to remove certain immigrants from population counts was the most frequently discussed topic in opposing comments. The next most discussed topics were apportionment and redistricting effects, the removal of race and ethnicity data and constitutional concerns, the analysis found.

The findings stem from an open-source tool that uses a large language model-based process, traditional statistical methods and human oversight to categorize draft comments, Chris Marcum, Federation of American Scientists senior federal data policy advisor, told Nextgov/FCW. Humans audited an initial model and a “second, more sophisticated” model, which was used when the first one struggled to categorize comments, he added.

Hands Off Our Census is a project of dataindex.us, FAS Data Policy Institute, American Statistical Association and dozens of other groups. The project circulated a comment template urging the Census Bureau to extend a comment period from Nov. 2 to Dec. 10, and to abandon provisions around excluding certain immigrants from counts and removing demographic questions.

Comments reveal why specific groups oppose the draft Census overhaul.

“Excluding immigrants from the decennial census count and eliminating race and ethnicity data would make it much more difficult to identify and address community needs,” Anthony Wright, executive director of nonprofit Families USA, said in a press release.

The release said that, if proposed changes are finalized, states could lose Medicaid funding because excluding immigrants from population counts could “artificially increase” a state’s calculated per capita income. Researchers and public health agencies would lose race and ethnicity data that helps measure inequities, target interventions and evaluate policies, it added.

The National League of Cities, United States Conference of Mayors and the International City/County Management Association called for the withdrawal of the rule in a joint comment letter.

The letter warns that proposed changes would harm local governments’ ability to manage services and alter federal funding local governments receive.

“Complete and holistic census data is critical for local leaders in helping make decisions about public safety, housing, transportation and other core services,” Clarence Anthony, CEO and executive director of the National League of Cities, said in a press release.

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My feed is full of robots. Someone should check on them.

Camille Tuutti — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 15:00:00 -0500

In one video, a headless robot sweeps up dust and waters a bonsai tree. It's Voxel, a robot butler from New York startup Tuesday Labs that’s expected to cost about $20,000. You can reserve one with a refundable $200 deposit, though the robot in the video is a prototype.

In another video, a robot front-flips off a car, kicks in another car’s door and elbow-drops its roof. It leaps off a shipping container, rolls and comes up with a roundhouse kick. Then it shields a seated woman from a man with a knife. It’s Chinese robotics company Unitree’s H2-X, the “Kung Fu Legend Guardian.” In a third video, human pilots control humanoid robots as they trade punches and grapple at Singapore’s first robot fighting tournament.

You can barely scroll in peace these days without running into a robot. Sometimes, they're ducks. At Nvidia's recent GTC conference in Berlin, CEO Jensen Huang shared the stage with four Microducks, 10-inch bipeds from Pollen Robotics. He asked them to sit, stand and take a nap. Three toppled over on command, and the fourth needed persuading. The same day as Huang’s keynote, Elon Musk told investors that Tesla’s Optimus humanoid had entered early production, with customer shipments planned for next year.

The videos in my feed come with fine print: Unitree says its video wasn’t sped up, but it hasn’t disclosed how much of the H2-X’s performance was autonomous. Tuesday Labs expects to substantially redesign Voxel's hardware before launching it.

Global humanoid robot shipments topped 22,000 in the first half of 2026, up nearly 300% from a year earlier, according to an August report by Counterpoint Research. Shanghai-based Agibot led with about 9,700 units, followed by Unitree. The five largest vendors accounted for 86% of shipments.

Money is a big reason robots are having their heyday. Investors put $11 billion into humanoid robotics startups through Oct. 6, over twice 2025’s record of $4.8 billion, according to Dealroom, which tracks startup investment. Chinese companies received 63% of the funding. Beijing has set a goal of over 10,000 humanoids in commercial use by the end of 2026.

Prices are falling, too, and the software is getting better at teaching a body to move. A Forbes analysis of IDC’s revenue and shipment estimates puts the average humanoid price at about $29,600 in the first half, down from roughly $37,000 a year earlier. Nvidia showed how software trained in the cloud and tested on one of its PCs could then run on the ducks.

But most of these robots still aren’t folding anyone’s laundry—some can’t even get through a demo.

In May, a video circulated of a Unitree robot that fell twice during a Michael Jackson routine and had to be dragged offstage. In June, at Computex in Taipei, a Qualcomm-powered humanoid walked onstage with a glass tray and collapsed face-first shortly afterward. Qualcomm said a “brief communication glitch” triggered a controlled shutdown and that the robot’s safety systems “worked as intended,” according to a statement to Creative Bloq. On Aug. 24, during the weightlifting final at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, a robot picked up its weight, struggled with it, dropped it and stumbled into the judges’ table.

Counterpoint found that over 60% of first-half shipments went to entertainment and performance, data production and research. Some are literally being bought to put on a show, which helps explain my feed. The weightlifter who crashed into the judges’ table has over 580,000 likes on a single Instagram post. We love a good success story, but we love a good faceplant even more.

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