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DHS network intrusion was twice ruled a false positive before breach confirmed

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:24:00 -0400

Department of Homeland Security personnel twice dismissed signs of cyber intruders inside the agency’s Homeland Security Information Network as harmless activity, allowing hackers to remain undetected inside for weeks and eventually steal credential files, according to an internal incident readout viewed by Nextgov/FCW.

HSIN was breached about two months ago, Nextgov/FCW first reported in late June. The network houses sensitive, unclassified data that’s shared between federal, state, local, industry and overseas partner organizations.

Department investigators have still not determined the affiliation of the hackers, according to two people with knowledge of an ongoing probe into the incident. DHS may send staff to brief Congress on the hack in a classified setting in the coming weeks, added the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to communicate the department’s thinking.

Between May 15 and May 24, the infiltration was detected by analysts inside FEMA, where they observed the hackers had altered files on testing and live servers, used a legitimate web-server program to run malicious code and deleted activity logs that could have exposed their movements, according to the readout. The activity was ruled a false positive.

Between May 25 and June 3, the hackers used similar methods aiming to leave scant trace of their activity, setting off more alerts that were again dismissed as benign. On June 4, they installed hidden backdoors and stole credential data — typically employed to verify users’ identities and grant access to accounts or systems — where personnel then declared a breach was active.

It’s not clear why the intrusion was deemed benign two times over such a wide timeframe, but the incident highlights how a mistaken assessment can give hackers significantly more time to deepen their access into a target’s environment. The hack involved techniques meant to mask activity as normal, which, generally speaking, can make it very difficult for analysts to determine what is legitimate or not, one of the people said.

It’s also unclear what materials, if any, were copied from HSIN systems, though the fact that hackers targeted credential files indicates they sought out access to accounts or systems beyond what they could initially reach.

"The Department of Homeland Security is aware of a recent cyber incident involving a specific, unclassified legacy information sharing environment," a DHS spokesperson wrote in the same statement it provided earlier this month that confirmed the hack. "We immediately took action to isolate the affected systems, mitigate the vulnerability, and launch a comprehensive forensic investigation. There is no indication that classified networks were impacted, and the system remains operational for our partners. As this is an ongoing investigation, we cannot provide further operational details at this time."

Approved users lean on the network to securely access data, exchange requests with partner agencies, coordinate safety and security for planned events, respond to incidents and share information needed to protect their communities, per its website.

HSIN has been used to support ongoing World Cup games and recent America250 events, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., said in a statement after the breach was reported.

“The information in HSIN, while not classified, is highly sensitive, and its exposure risks national security,” he said at the time.

As the United States hosts World Cup matches nationwide, the hack could raise questions about whether the intruders gained access to security plans, interagency communications or emergency response plans for one of the world’s most visible sporting events. It’s also possible that World Cup data was not a target.

Nation-state and criminal hackers routinely target U.S. systems to gather intelligence, steal sensitive information and maintain access to government networks. In February, a suspected China-linked breach of an FBI surveillance system likely exposed the phone numbers of people the bureau was monitoring. Last fall, a widespread breach at FEMA let hackers make off with employee data from both the disaster management office and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to include a statement from DHS.

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Tech Bills of the Week: Leveraging AI for cancer research; Securing chatbots for underage users; and more

Alexandra Kelley and Edward Graham — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:20:00 -0400

This week’s roundup includes several measures that were introduced in the week leading up to the July 4 holiday.

AI to help fight pediatric cancer

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas is looking to leverage AI capabilities to make strides in cancer research in children by introducing the Accelerating Innovation for Kids with Cancer Act on July 9.

The bill seeks to improve federal government coordination to accelerate the use of AI systems and improve diagnoses, treatments, prevention strategies and cures for pediatric cancer.

It specifically tasks the president to work alongside the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Service to appoint a Coordinator of AI Innovation, who would then identify where the federal government can support pediatric cancer research, with a focus on AI.

That coordinator would be responsible for organizing and improving the data infrastructure that supports cancer research to make it ready for AI analyses, as well as improving clinical trial designs to incorporate multimodal data and AI approaches.

Mandatory chatbot safety measures

A bill introduced by Reps. Valerie Foushee, D-N.C., and Greg Casar, D-Texas, adds to the growing body of proposed legislation that asks for developers to add security measures to their generative AI products.

The People-First Chatbot Act, introduced on July 9, seeks to prevent adverse encounters between humans and AI chatbot through instilling strong safeguards. It specifically prohibits tech companies from using data from underage users, —mainly from their chat logs with the product — to further train AI chatbots. It additionally requires companies to disable harmful AI chatbot design features for minors, limits the application of users’ data for targeted ads, gives users the right to access and delete stored chat logs, requires that developers reveal when users are communicating with AI and and mandates that those developers conduct monthly safety assessments, among other provisions.

“The recent tragedies involving AI chatbots emphasize the urgent need for Congress to ensure AI companies and their products are transparent, safe for kids, and most importantly, accountable,” said Foushee in the press release. “The People-First Chatbot Act makes clear that American families deserve control over their personal data, clear disclosure when they are interacting with AI, real protections for children and vulnerable users, and meaningful recourse when AI chatbots cause harm.”

Spotting AI-made content

A bipartisan cohort of House lawmakers introduced a bill July 2 that would set a labeling regime for content created by artificial intelligence software.

Led by Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., Tom Kean Jr., R-N.J., and Sam Liccardo, D-Calif., the Spot the Fakes Act requires the Federal Trade Commission to work alongside the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop a series of technical rules mandating how covered technology companies and AI developers would need to label content generated by an AI tool.

Key to the bill’s mission is to have an AI-generated label be embedded in that content’s metadata.

“Americans deserve to know if what they’re seeing, reading, or hearing was made by a machine,” Gottheimer said in a press release. “This is a commonsense, bipartisan fix — we’re simply requiring that AI content come with a built-in label, so platforms, journalists, and everyday people can tell fact from fabrication.”

New AI application prize challenges

A bill introduced on June 29 seeks to outfit the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020 with prize competition programs to incentivize the development of AI in the U.S. and addresses measurable present-day challenges.

H.R.9506, introduced by Rep. Nick Begich, R-Alaska, amends the landmark National AI Initiative Act of 2020 to include a federal prize challenge. The challenge would focus on developing AI solutions for a myriad of fields, including next-generation algorithm design, chemistry and material science, biotechnology, cybersecurity, energy efficiency, AI safety applications, mechanistic interpretability, quantum computing and more.

The director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy will be tasked with establishing the prize challenge, acting through the National Science and Technology Council and the Interagency Committee. The secretary of Commerce, the secretary of Transportation and the director of the National Science Foundation would be eligible for setting up their own challenge-based acquisitions and other research and development investment initiatives relevant to the bill’s priority technology fields.

Promoting U.S. quantum information sciences and technology

Reps. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y. and Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., introduced legislation on July 2 to expand the definition of quantum technologies covered by the landmark Export-Import Bank Act of 1945’s Program on China and Transformational Exports, which sets key priority sectors where the government has committed to supporting U.S. manufacturers.

Titled as the Advancing American Quantum Leadership Act of 2026, the bill would change the current “quantum computing” covered by the 1945 law into “quantum information science and technology,” broadening its application to quantum innovations beyond the computing space.

“When it comes to emerging technologies like quantum, the United States must lead, not follow,” Lawler said in a statement. “This legislation would allow for the Export-Import Bank’s ability to support the full quantum ecosystem, helping American companies compete globally, expand exports, and maintain our technological edge over adversaries like China.”

Companion legislation was introduced in the Senate by Sens. Andy Kim, D-N.J.; and Mike Rounds, R-S.D.

AI at the border

A new bill introduced on June 30 by Rep. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., would establish a pilot program for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to leverage AI solutions at land entry points along the Arizona border. The technology would specifically include an anomaly detection algorithm.

Following introduction, the bill was referred to the House Committee on Homeland Security.

AI for tax fraud detection

Rep. Vern Buchanan, R-Fla., introduced a bill that seeks to help the federal government catch tax fraud with support from AI.

Introduced on June 29, the AI Tax Integrity Act of 2026 would enact an AI Fraud Detection Pilot Program, implemented by the Treasury Secretary, to examine how AI can catch identity theft; fraudulent claims for tax credits, deductions, or refunds by individuals or business entities; and tax returns improperly prepared by third parties.

The program is intended to last between 18 months and two years. The report documenting its performance would be created 180 days after termination of the pilot, created by the comptroller general and submitted to the Committee on Ways and Means of the House of Representatives and to the Committee on Finance of the Senate.

Markey unveils package of AI accountability measures

Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass. — a vocal proponent of AI guardrails — released an “AI Accountability Agenda” on Friday that includes many of his previously introduced measures designed to mitigate potential harms associated with uses of the emerging capabilities.

The senator’s agenda is built around six priority areas, which include: giving power back to workers; protecting the privacy and safety of children and teens; keeping civil rights safe from AI bias; putting humans first in healthcare; safeguarding against energy and environmental impacts of data centers; and sharing the AI wealth.

Ten bills that Markey previously introduced are outlined in the agenda. These include measures to eliminate algorithmic biases, develop AI privacy safeguards for children — including the Children and Teens' Online Privacy Protection Act — and curtail the use of AI surveillance and automated hiring and firing decisions within U.S. workplaces.

Markey also previously released a discussion draft of a proposal, the Protecting Communities from Data Center Impacts Act, that his office said “would require data centers to receive a certificate from the federal government prior to construction that affirms the data center has met minimum standards for energy, environmental, and economic impacts.” The proposal is included in the agenda.

Although Markey has not yet officially rolled out that measure in the Senate, Rep. Greg Landsman, D-Ohio, introduced the bill in the lower chamber on Friday.

In a statement, Landsman said “our bill makes sure these environmental impacts are studied so communities have the information they need and peace of mind they deserve.”

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Don’t just pick the low-hanging fruit — harvest the whole orchard

Derek Britton — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:54:00 -0400

The private sector isn’t just diving into the deep end of the artificial intelligence pool; it’s swimming with the sharks. The promise of dramatic efficiency improvements, accelerated production schedules and perhaps most important, vastly lowered costs, is fueling AI’s meteoric expansion across every industry. But these businesses are also exchanging AI’s potentially exponential rewards for increased tolerance to risk.

Government agencies don’t have that luxury.

Early last month, the General Services Administration published its Elimination, Optimization and Automation (EOA) Handbook, a guide to help agencies eliminate unnecessary tasks, optimize processes worth keeping and automate repetitive ones. The obvious tool to help achieve these goals is AI, and the instinct is to aim AI at easy targets like low-stakes work where mistakes aren’t as costly or as risky.

That’s not entirely wrong. Automating the easy, mundane tasks that are less risky can save tremendous amounts of time and money, but it also keeps more consequential work stuck. And it’s stuck for good reason because AI can’t be explained or defended to regulators, congressional oversight committees, or already AI-weary taxpayers.

The bottleneck in using AI isn’t missing capabilities or the inability to handle volume, but explainability. When AI makes a decision about a benefit, a claim, a case or a security call, someone will eventually need to defend that decision to an Inspector General, a court, or the public.

That’s something that black-box AI just can’t do. In fact, an April 2026 report from the Brookings Institution found that more than 85% of the government’s high-impact AI deployments in 2025 were missing some of the risk information agencies are required to publish.

The most consequential systems already used in the field today can’t account for how they reached their results. For government agencies, results that can’t be explained are results they can’t use.

The answer isn’t to aim low, but to build AI that can answer for itself no matter where you aim. That requires more than a human in the loop; it means workflows must be transparent and explainable using words we can all understand. Every output should point back to specifics: a rule, a record or a verified source that drove it. A human should have the real authority to review, correct, and overrule. And rules should only update when a change is proven, not silently in the background without human intervention.

When AI can account for itself, you can aim at more consequential, higher-stakes work. Export control, for example, is a decision that carries criminal liability if it's wrong. That’s the kind of work you’d never want to hand off to some black box, but a system that shows its work can now take the first pass. This is precisely the kind of rule-bound work the GSA’s EOA handbook says to automate.

There are cautionary tales all around us about why explainability is critical in high-stakes work. Recently, UnitedHealth allegedly used an algorithm to terminate post-acute care for Medicare Advantage patients. But patients who appealed won more than 90% of their cases. The company’s rationale for continuing to use the algorithm? Only 0.2% of patients actually appealed the terminations. But because, as the lawsuit alleges, the humans in the loop couldn’t understand how the decisions were made, and since they didn’t have authority to overrule the algorithm, it was allowed to continue running.

It’s not all bad news, though. There are plenty of examples of how tackling consequential work has real benefits. Take, for example, how the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) implemented new AI-powered scanning technology with the goal of reducing busy work for TSA agents. If agents have more time to focus on complex issues, they can move people through security lines faster and provide help to travelers who need it most. So, when used well, automation doesn’t replace judgment, it frees up more time for it.

Using AI to automate repetitive, low-stakes tasks isn’t wrong, but it does limit the value AI can provide. AI deployments stuck across government agencies shouldn’t be steered around high-stakes, critical, meaningful work. For example, the GSA’s Federal EOA Playbook identifies how AI can leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Document Understanding (DU) to address challenges associated with unstructured data, which has long been a perennial hurdle in providing efficient service delivery.

What is most needed here is for AI outputs to be made defensible and auditable. If agencies get that part right, the consequential work they’ve been avoiding becomes the work they can finally do.

Derek is Senior Vice President of Government at Seekr. He previously served as the Principal Investigator and Research Scholar at the National Security Agency’s Laboratory for Analytic Sciences. Derek earned his B.S. in Operations Research from the U.S. Air Force Academy and a Master’s degree in Operations Research from Southern Methodist University.

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Trump empties out election commission leadership just months before midterms

David DiMolfetta — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 10:31:00 -0400

President Donald Trump removed the remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Thursday, leaving the independent agency without any sitting commissioners just months before the 2026 midterm elections, according to a White House official.

“The President, and head of the Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted,” the official said in a statement to Nextgov/FCW. “The Slaughter decision gives the President precedence to do so.”

Democratic commissioners Benjamin Hovland and Thomas Hicks were fired, while remaining Republican commissioner Christy McCormick resigned. VoteBeat first reported the dismissals.

The changes leave the commission, which helps oversee federal voting system certification and election administration programs, without the bipartisan leadership responsible for approving some of its most consequential decisions.

The EAC is perhaps best known as a clearinghouse for administering federal election grants and certifying voting systems under the nation’s voluntary voting system guidelines. While those standards are not mandatory, they have become the benchmark many states rely on when purchasing, testing and deploying election technology.

Although the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency serves as the federal government’s lead agency for protecting election infrastructure from cyber threats, the EAC has become an important partner in the broader election security and election education ecosystem. The commission works with CISA, state election officials and voting system manufacturers on issues like system testing, certification, security guidance and information-sharing.

“The Administration from the start has been working across all agencies and local partners to safeguard elections from fraud and abuse, and investing in a strong infrastructure to sustain that mission especially in the midterm elections,” the White House official said.

The removals could raise questions about how the agency will carry out some of its statutory responsibilities as federal officials, states and voting system vendors prepare for this year’s midterm elections.

Career staff can continue many of the agency’s day-to-day operations. Still, the absence of commissioners would complicate actions that require a formal vote or approval, potentially slowing decisions involving voting system standards, certifications and other matters.

The White House official did not offer a specific reason for Trump’s action. But the commission has previously declined to change the national voter registration form to require applicants to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship, a step Trump called for in a sweeping March 2025 executive order on U.S. elections.

A federal judge later blocked that portion of the order, ruling that it exceeded the president’s authority because the Constitution gives Congress and the states primary responsibility over election administration and oversight. The administration has said it plans to appeal.

The dispute underscored the limits of the White House’s authority over an agency Congress created as an independent, bipartisan commission following disputes during the 2000 presidential election. Under rules set by the 2002 Help America Vote Act, the EAC is led by four commissioners, with no more than two members from the same political party.

It’s unclear when the administration plans to nominate replacements or how long the commission could operate without sitting members. Any new commissioners would require Senate confirmation.

The leadership vacuum comes as election officials continue preparing for the 2026 midterms while confronting cyber threats, foreign influence operations and persistent efforts to undermine public confidence in the security of U.S. elections.

The removals are an “extraordinary step that demands an immediate explanation from the administration and raises profound concerns about political interference in the institutions that support our elections,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who serves as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

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What the Telecommunications Act of 1996 teaches the federal government about governing AI

Don Parente — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:38:00 -0400

Thirty years ago, Congress confronted a transformational technology challenge. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 — which spawned MetTel — sought to open telecommunications markets to competition, lower costs and stimulate innovation. Its goals were ambitious and largely bipartisan. Yet the law also provides a cautionary lesson for today's policymakers as they grapple with regulating artificial intelligence.

The challenge facing the federal government is not whether AI should be regulated. The challenge is whether policymakers can create a framework that is unambiguous, encourages innovation, protects national interests and provides market certainty without repeating the costly mistakes that followed telecom reform.

The Telecommunications Act created enormous opportunity. New entrants poured into the market, investors committed hundreds of billions of dollars and entrepreneurs rushed to build the next generation of communications infrastructure. But many of the law's most important provisions lacked specificity. Congress directed incumbent carriers to provide access to competitors yet left key implementation details unresolved.

As a result, regulators, courts and industry participants spent years debating questions that should have been answered from the beginning. What constituted fair access? What technical standards applied? How would disputes be resolved? By the time many of those questions were settled, markets had consolidated, billions of dollars in investment had been lost and much of the competitive landscape Congress intended to create had disappeared.

However, the Act gave birth to a new class of businesses, including MetTel, that heeded the government’s call to open the market to competition using existing telecommunications infrastructure.

For the federal government, the lesson is clear: ambiguity is not neutrality. Ambiguity becomes a policy choice that often shifts decision-making from legislators to regulators, courts and litigants.

Artificial intelligence presents a similar challenge, but at a much larger scale.

Unlike telecommunications in 1996, AI is not centered around a single incumbent monopoly. The technology is evolving rapidly across multiple sectors, including healthcare, defense, transportation, financial services, education and critical infrastructure. The United States currently leads much of the world in AI innovation, but that leadership is not guaranteed.

Federal policymakers face a delicate balancing act. Excessive regulation could slow innovation, discourage investment and weaken America's competitive position against strategic rivals. Insufficient oversight, however, could allow critical market bottlenecks to emerge unchecked, creating barriers to competition, reducing innovation and concentrating power in a handful of organizations.

The federal government's responsibility is to establish clear rules before markets become entrenched.

Several potential choke points are already visible. Access to advanced computing resources, control of frontier AI models, availability of high-quality training data and interoperability between systems may ultimately determine which organizations succeed and which are locked out of the market.

If policymakers wait until these issues are fully consolidated, they may find themselves replaying the telecommunications experience: years of litigation, delayed innovation, stranded investments and costly regulatory intervention after the fact.

The most important lesson from telecom is that precision matters more than breadth.

Rather than creating broad mandates that require years of interpretation, Congress should establish clear definitions, responsibilities and enforcement mechanisms from the outset. Organizations that control critical AI infrastructure should operate under transparent and predictable rules. Standards for interoperability, particularly in sectors such as healthcare, transportation, public safety and financial services, should be defined before proprietary systems become deeply embedded.

Equally important, enforcement agencies must have the resources and authority necessary to act quickly. Regulatory frameworks are only effective if disputes can be resolved at the speed of technological change. Markets move faster than courts, and technology evolves faster than traditional rulemaking processes. If enforcement lags behind innovation cycles, regulation risks becoming irrelevant.

For the federal government, the stakes extend beyond economics. Artificial intelligence increasingly intersects with national security, cyber resilience, public health, workforce development and America's global competitiveness. Regulatory uncertainty can discourage private-sector investment, while poorly designed regulations can inadvertently strengthen foreign competitors.

The objective should not be to control innovation, but to create a stable environment where innovation can flourish while protecting public interests.

The Telecommunications Act demonstrated both the benefits and the limitations of federal policy. It opened markets and created opportunities, but it also left critical questions unanswered, resulting in years of uncertainty and unintended consequences. AI presents an opportunity for policymakers to apply those lessons before similar challenges emerge.

The federal government still has time to shape a competitive, innovative and secure AI ecosystem. Success will depend not on how much regulation is created, but on how clearly it is written and how effectively it is implemented.

History suggests that vague mandates create litigation. Precise rules create markets. As Congress considers the future of AI governance, that may be the most important lesson from the telecommunications reforms of 1996.

As Vice President of MetTel Public Sector, Don Parente is responsible for direct sales and solution architecture for U.S. Federal agencies, states, local and education customers. Don also works with systems integrators to deliver solutions to U.S. government clients.

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Transportation’s tech chief Pavan Pidugu to depart in September

Alexandra Kelley — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:26:00 -0400

The chief digital and information officer of the Department of Transportation is resigning from his position effective Sept. 4, according to an email obtained by Nextgov/FCW.

Pavan Pidugu, who has been the CDIO at the agency since February 2025, sent the email Thursday announcing his departure to his staff and expressing gratitude for his colleagues and their work. He wrote that serving alongside “this incredible team for the past many years has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.”

“When we set out on this journey together, we shared a bold vision to fundamentally transform how technology serves the Department and the American public. Thanks to your hard work, dedication, and true builder mentality, we didn't just meet those expectations—we exceeded them,” the email continued.

Pidugu told Nextgov/FCW in August 2025 that he wanted to turn the Transportation IT shop into a place “where we build technology,” modernizing the agency amid the federal operations overhaul executed by the Department of Government Efficiency during the start of the second Trump administration. Pidugu led the crafting of the department’s “1DOT IT strategy,” which guided Transportation’s modernization agenda.

He said in the Thursday email that, during his tenure, his office achieved “unprecedented milestones” in their tech policy efforts, including conducting a mass, agency-wide transition to Gmail software to achieve about 70% cost savings, creating the internal T-Cloud environment and pursuing long-term plans to migrate legacy IT infrastructure.

The contract between Transportation and Google through software reseller Carahsoft is particularly important, with a value ceiling of $89 million to bring the Google Workspace suite to the agency and build a “modern collaboration environment,” as Pidugu called it in his Thursday email. The department was able to leverage the software at discounted rates negotiated through the General Services Administration’s OneGov program.

“These accomplishments are a direct testament to your talent and your willingness to embrace a product-centric culture,” Pidugu wrote. “By working together, we have broken down historic silos to operate as a truly unified enterprise.”

In his email, Pidugu did not state his reason for resigning or who will take up his position after he leaves.

Over the course of the week, reports of at least three federal CIOs planning to depart their posts in the government have emerged. Federal CIO Greg Barbaccia is set to leave his role by the end of August, and the Department of the Interior CIO Paul “Macca” McInerny also stepped down from his position last week. Department of Housing and Urban Development CIO Eric Sidle has been tapped to take over leading the Interior tech shop.

Pidugu received a Federal 100 award this year for his work at the Transportation Department in 2025.

GovExec Editor-in-Chief Frank Konkel contributed to this report.

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HUD CIO tapped to lead Interior tech shop, people familiar say

Edward Graham and David DiMolfetta — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 11:15:00 -0400

Department of Housing and Urban Development Chief Information Officer and Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer Eric Sidle is expected to soon take up the Department of Interior’s top tech post after the latter agency’s CIO departed, according to two people familiar with the matter.

He is finalizing the paperwork process and could be onboarded in the next one to two weeks, said both people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the selection has not been made public.

Sidle joined HUD in May 2025 after serving in the private sector for a number of years in a variety of tech-specific roles. He previously worked for two years at tech consulting firm Fabrum Advisors as a technology advisor, operating partner and coach.

Prior to that position, Sidle oversaw autonomous driving hardware at NIO, served as chief technology officer at ChargePoint and worked as an engineering manager for special projects at Apple.

Interior’s prior CIO Paul “Macca” McInerny — a former SpaceX engineer that aligned himself with the Department of Government Efficiency’s mission — left the department last week after just over a year in the role, with a top strategy official at the agency, Matt Luby, tapped as interim CIO, Nextgov/FCW reported Monday.

One suspected source of frustration under McInerny involved the department’s effort to consolidate and speed up permitting systems — including systems tied to Bureau of Land Management leasing and energy development — that would likely demand significant overhauls to the agency’s IT stack.

HUD and Interior spokespeople did not return multiple requests for comment.

Sidle has publicly discussed his push to bolster anti-fraud initiatives while at HUD, an effort that aligns with the Trump administration’s broader “war on fraud.”

Speaking at the Government Service Delivery conference in Washington, D.C., last month, Sidle said HUD’s outdated technologies and disparate databases made it difficult to identify companies gaming the agency’s programs, noting that the median age of its systems was 20 years.

“Across different agencies, we’re now talking about how we’re going to be dealing with data sharing, Delta Sharing and all this other stuff,” he said, adding that “even before AI, just the basics of data analytics wasn’t being done — let alone now you have AI, which is going to take off and be able to protect this.”

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Pentagon opens applications for cyber apprenticeship program

Edward Graham — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 17:36:00 -0400

The Department of Defense announced this week that it officially opened the application window for its Cyber Registered Apprenticeship Program, a new initiative to onboard more skilled cybersecurity professionals into its workforce.

DOD’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, which is directing the program, said on Monday that the job posting is now open through July 17 on the government’s USAJobs hiring site. The annual salary for the apprenticeship is listed as $22,584.

Cyber RAP, as the pilot is being called, was first announced in late April by the Pentagon. The 12-month apprenticeship is designed, in large part, to prioritize skills-based hiring over academic experience — part of a broader Trump administration push to place greater emphasis on experience over educational requirements in the federal hiring process.

“This program bypasses traditional academic gatekeeping to value what truly matters: raw aptitude, patriotic drive, and hands-on capability over traditional academic credentials,” DOD Chief Information Officer Kirsten Davies said in a statement. “By unlocking this untapped potential, we are actively forging America's elite cyber workforce of the future from the ground up."

In a recent interview with Nextgov/FCW, Davies said President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “have given us a mandate to really get after skills-based training,” and added that she has also worked to eliminate degree requirements “because if threat actors can be script kiddies and teenagers, then we need to be employing great skills where the skills are and figuring out how to incorporate them.”

The Cyber RAP posting only requires that candidates be over 18 years of age, are U.S. citizens and have the ability to obtain and maintain a government security clearance. The pilot trains apprentices for entry-level DOD positions, including as cyber defense analysts, cyber defense infrastructure support specialists and cyber defense incident responders.

The program includes two developmental tracks with different academic requirements, which the department said are designed “to accommodate different agency missions and standards.”

DOD says “the core Technical Specialist Pathway focuses on rapid, hands-on technical skill acquisition for general [Pentagon] civilian cyber roles and explicitly does not require a college degree,” while “the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) Agency Pathway is tailored for specialized placements within the DMDC and requires candidates to hold an accredited degree to meet that specific agency's qualification standards.”

Speaking at the SAP NOW summit in Washington, D.C., last month, Davies said that the apprenticeship had “already generated more than 70,000 inquiries,” even though it had not yet been officially launched.

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How to find alien technology

Camille Tuutti — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 17:30:00 -0400

You might think this column is about UFOs and the Pentagon's recent declassified files. It's not. We're talking about technosignatures, the evidence of alien technology: a radio or laser signal, artificial chemicals in a distant planet's atmosphere, or a Dyson sphere, a giant structure built around a star to capture its energy.

People mix the two up constantly, and astronomer Dr. Jason Wright sets the record straight. "The two fields have been really distinct, but in people's minds, they're heavily conflated," he says. Wright is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics, an expert in SETI, short for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and he directs the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center.

Here's the first thing he'll tell you: Forget the movies. In the movies, at the first inkling of alien life, the military shows up at the observatory, black SUVs, a general, a phone call to the White House. In real life, the press finds out before the government does, and then the signal everyone got excited about turns out to be a satellite, radio interference, or Earth talking to itself.

I wanted to know how you actually go looking for life in space — and Wright is the person for that. He has focused on technosignatures for the past eight years, but his CV runs 92 pages, most of it astrophysics, a good chunk of it coauthor credits. He tells me that most of the ways to hunt for alien technology date to the 1960s, and they all hinge on one thing: whether a civilization is doing something obvious enough to spot from light years away.

One approach is to image Earth-like planets around other stars and read their surfaces and atmospheres in reflected light, looking for chlorophyll or for methane and ozone, then arguing that only a biosphere can produce them together. That's the route NASA and the European Space Agency are taking to find non-intelligent life.

Or you build a large ground-based array and listen for radio waves. The universe is filled with radio emission from black holes, neutron stars, nebulas and the plasma between stars, Wright says. But transmissions from Earth's technology look different.

"They can only be produced by technology," Wright says. "There's no way you can mistake that for a natural process."

Right now, our radio transmitters are Earth's most obvious sign of life, and that method is likely easier than imaging a planet and detecting life on its surface. Some say radio is old-fashioned and that any advanced species moves to optical signals and laser light. Maybe, but radio still has big advantages and we still use it constantly.

"Starlink is all about radio waves," Wright says, so he doubts aliens would ever abandon it entirely. Either way, programs are scanning for optical signals from other stars, too.

Then there's the hardware. A civilization out to explore or settle the galaxy might build large numbers of probes and send them through interstellar space to other star systems, which means we should check our own solar system for anything orbiting the sun or the Earth. Those are called Bracewell probes, after Ron Bracewell, the Stanford radio astronomer who proposed them first.

Or you look for energy use. Burn through enough of your star's output and someone far away should be able to tell. Freeman Dyson proposed this in 1960 — a species using 10, 20, even 80% of its star's light would be impossible to miss.

The last method goes back to the planet search. While you're looking for chlorophyll or methane on planets around other stars, you might instead find chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere, or elemental silicon on the surface.

"Silicon doesn't appear in nature in its elemental form, but it does appear in solar panels," Wright says. "It very easily and almost trivially captures sunlight and turns it into useful energy." A planet covered in elemental silicon is a planet someone has covered in solar panels, he says.

Which one would turn up first depends on whom you ask. Ask 10 researchers and you'll get 10 answers, because the honest reply depends on guessing what an alien civilization would be ostentatious enough to do.

"These are all super subtle signals," Wright says. "We'll only see them if the scale of technologies is very big, like at least as much as ours, probably hundreds of times what we do."

Let’s say you found something tomorrow. What happens?

It probably doesn’t result in an immediate headline. Instead, people argue over it, evidence accumulates, and the scientific community comes around slowly.

"That process could take decades," Wright says.

Radio is different. Listeners might catch a narrowband signal that's hard to mistake for anything natural.

“The big issue is proving it didn't come from Earth," Wright says. That's what happened with blc1, a signal that seemed to come from Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun. The Guardian broke the leaked story in December 2020, and outlets worldwide ran with the alien angle. Nearly a year later, the team confirmed it was terrestrial interference.

"I know in the movies the military all shows up at the observatory, but that's not what happens," Wright says. "They don't pay any attention."

Today, there are protocols published by the International Academy of Astronautics. The rule is simple: Verify it before you tell everyone, and make sure other groups agree. Clear that bar and there's a process for informing the United Nations and the IAA through the proper channels.

And even then, the likeliest outcome is a worldwide shrug. Wright points to China's FAST telescope, the largest single-dish radio observatory on Earth, which flagged a handful of narrowband signals as possible technosignatures in June 2022. A state science paper ran the story, calling them possible "technological traces of extraterrestrial civilizations," then deleted it.

"What did not happen was that either the Chinese government or the U.S. government got nervous about it," Wright says. The Chinese astronomers went straight to their American collaborators at Berkeley and figured out what it was.

The other misconception is that 60 years of silence is a mystery. People reach for dramatic explanations: it's dangerous out there, there’s a reason the aliens are hiding or gone. Wright thinks that's backward.

"The most important work is actually just this systematic scanning of the sky, and we've done very little of it until very recently," he says.

So no black SUVs and no three-star general at the observatory door. If we ever do find intelligent life in the universe, it probably won't announce itself. It'll turn up how everything in this field does: slowly, and without ceremony.

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OpenAI’s advanced GPT-5.6 models to be publicly released

Alexandra Kelley — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 15:43:00 -0400

OpenAI announced Tuesday evening that its advanced GPT-5.6 series artificial intelligence models will be publicly available later this week.

GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra and Luna models will launch publicly on Thursday, the company said via a post on X. This update follows OpenAI’s announcement in late June that it was working with government partners to assess the safety of these models prior to their release, an approach the company does not believe “should become the long-term default,” per its statement in June.

“We’re expanding preview access globally now,” OpenAI’s post reads.

Delays to the public rollout of OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 series were due to the powerful capabilities of the models. GPT-5.6 Sol is the strongest model of the series, and is tuned for work in biology, chemistry and cybersecurity. It is also accompanied by its stronger variation, Sol Ultra.

Whether any changes were made to the GPT-5.6 models — such as updates to parameters, model weights or other architecture — prior to their release remains unclear. OpenAI did not respond to a request for more information by the time of publication. The GPT-5.6 models are said to feature strong safeguards that can withstand “real-world adversarial pressure,” according to OpenAI.

The GPT-5.6 model’s availability after undergoing government evaluation follows objectives outlined in a recent June AI executive order signed by President Donald Trump that asked for major AI developers to voluntarily submit their leading AI models to government regulators for safety evaluations, largely stemming from Anthropic’s development and release of Mythos, a powerful cybersecurity-focused model that sparked widespread concern over its potential to be used offensively against digital networks if it falls into adversarial hands.

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Seizing the digital advantage at DOD

Edward Graham — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:24:00 -0400

Federal officials are increasingly seeking to adopt new technologies to enhance agency operations. At the Pentagon, the Office of the Chief Information Officer is looking beyond IT transformation to ways it can more effectively get digital capabilities into the hands of warfighters.

Pentagon CIO Kirsten Davies recently spoke with Nextgov/FCW about her digital transformation strategy, efforts to refine the department’s acquisition process and more. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Nextgov/FCW: What are some of your office’s priorities under the current administration?

Kirsten Davies: President Donald Trump and Secretary Pete Hegseth have given us a tremendous opportunity with a mandate for change. What you're seeing out of the Department of War now is enormous enthusiasm and momentum around that.

For example, the secretary has been very clear that we will take acquisition risk today in order to reduce operational risk tomorrow. Operational risk, in this case, means that at the core of everything we do is our work to enable and empower our warfighters. When I came into this role, I really wanted to bring the cause of the warfighter straight into the DNA of the Office of the CIO.

We're shifting gears tremendously away from being just a policy shop. Policy work is extraordinarily important, but operational effectiveness, warfighter readiness and empowerment from a digital perspective are critical. Through the work of the Office of the CIO, what we're able to do is really shift gears and transform how we think about that.

It's not IT for the sake of that “T.” It's developing a technology footprint that enables and empowers our warfighters from the core all the way to the edge.

Nextgov/FCW: How are you going about transforming the Office of the CIO’s operations to meet that mandate for change?

Davies: We have four pillars for the transformation we are undertaking. The first is establishing an enduring digital foundation, so thinking of all the things we do when it comes to network transport and data centers. We are modernizing our data transport ability across this space and transforming the way we think about it from undersea to celestial, so satellites and everything in between. We obviously have a lot of work we're doing to build out the infrastructure for artificial intelligence and modernize the way in which we think about that.

Pillar two is the agile digital capabilities. I say agile very specifically because we are not going to do fast waterfall. We are going to get after agile delivery and agile development, so truly get into industry best practices when it comes to the software development life cycle and when it comes to the totality of the agility we need to get digital capabilities to the warfighters faster, more securely and more resiliently.

The third pillar is cybersecurity of the warfighting ecosystem. What you will be seeing out of my office is a much more holistic and transformative approach to cybersecurity, and that includes operational technology and the internet of things. When it comes to OT, we can’t treat it like IT, and we can’t neglect it as if it doesn't exist. So you're going to see a lot more focus on OT out of my shop as well.

And then pillar four is upskilling, cross-skilling and partnering. We can talk about people all day long, and we can talk about the fact that everyone owns security. We need to embrace that as an ethos for us and work across our defense industrial base and across our allies and our partners internationally as well. And then also work with our interagency partners at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, FBI and the National Security Agency.

Nextgov/FCW: Can you talk more about the work you’re doing on the operational technology front?

Davies: Everything is connected, so the digitization of our industrial base is critical for us. The secretary has talked about reinvigorating our industrial base. From a cybersecurity perspective and from a technology perspective, all these devices are connected. There's more than automation involved. Now it's machine learning and also AI that are being more and more deliberately rolled out and leveraged in industry and in government.

When we talk about the OT aspect of these things, that's everything from building management systems to the critical infrastructure that supports our installations here in America and abroad. It is working with our defense industrial base partners.

All of this is foundational operational technology. We must have appropriate availability, resiliency and security in order to ensure our warfighters have what they need when they need it. And this is underpinned by our technology footprint that goes from the core all the way to the edge.

What we're working through now is setting up an OT council. The notion of this is to have industry expertise, department use cases and defense industrial base partners come to the table and say, “How do we get after this better?”

Nextgov/FCW: How are you outlining your strategic vision in a way that enhances private-sector engagement and drives technology modernization?

Davies: We are transforming from what has been a back-office IT function into a forward-leaning strategic department function that includes, by necessity, very strong collaboration across the building.

I’ve got great partnerships with Emil Michael, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, where the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office is, and with Undersecretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment Mike Duffey’s shop, where he is radically transforming the way in which we approach acquisition and procurement.

You'll see there’s no daylight among us as a leadership team as we move forward with the secretary's vision to enable and empower our warfighters and to ensure the lethality, resilience and readiness of our warfighters from a very specific perspective.

Acquisition at the department has historically been a very long process and was often focused on massive capital investments like ships. We have to shift gears when it comes to technology, when it comes to software, when it comes to cloud, when it comes to infrastructure buildout. Technology changes at a much more rapid cycle than planes and ships and all those things.

What we're working on inside the building and across the leadership is how do we drive not only a more agile approach to developing and delivering capabilities, but how do we drive a more agile approach to acquisition for things that can shift every six months? Infusing that kind of methodology into our thinking is what we're getting after.

Nextgov/FCW: How are you trying to speed up the department’s acquisition and procurement processes?

Davies: We're underway right now on a refinement of our risk management framework. The RMF and the authority to operate are legal frameworks for the ways in which industry partners can work with us. Right now, if we are testing software in one part of the department, that approval, we’ll call it, doesn't necessarily transfer over to another part of the department. And that doesn't make common sense.

We’re not just going to digitize a piece of paper to a PDF; we are actually going to refine the totality of the process itself, including moving to more automation and moving to inheritance of one ATO to another ATO. We want to actually overhaul the whole ATO process in and of itself.

I think that's a very specific example of how we are getting after what the secretary's vision is, which is to reduce barriers to entry. It's to reignite our defense industrial base and really reduce these compliancy and check-the-box exercises to get at meaningful outcomes.

Nextgov/FCW: How is a platform like GenAI.mil helping enhance AI comfortability across the department?

Davies: GenAI.mil is such a brilliant example of the first of many initiatives that are to come out of the department. The adoption and usage rates have been extraordinary. We have 1.3 million users right now, which is amazing. We have over 100,000 agents that have been built by users to support their tasks and their work cycles. In some cases, they have been able to take a two-week task and complete it in two hours.

This is such a beneficial and helpful tool when it comes to day-to-day tasks that our employees and our warfighters can do much more rapidly now. What I love seeing about this is it saves our people for meaningful work. When we can leverage automation, machine learning, supervised machine learning and AI, that frees up time for people to apply their critical thinking, their analytical thinking, their skill sets, their experience and their expertise. From the warfighters to the civilians to the contractors, it frees them up to focus on work that really adds tremendous strategic value to the department, ultimately enabling our warfighters to have greater capabilities at their fingertips.

We recently announced partnerships with eight AI companies to deploy their tools on our classified networks. What you're seeing is this acquisition reform in motion.

The other thing you're seeing is the tremendous leadership from President Trump when he said he wants America to be tops in technology, in AI and in cybersecurity, and you are seeing that worked out at the Department of War. We are implementing that vision.

Nextgov/FCW: How do these efforts fit into DOD’s overall modernization strategy?

Davies: Traditional modernization can be like evolution. It can be an incremental change and take a really, really long time. True transformation goes at speed, and we are working at the speed of warfighters. We need data supremacy for decision dominance.

We have modernized the architecture to be deployed. We are getting after the defense business systems rationalization. In the midst of all that, in parallel, we’re seeing great advancements not only in the core enterprise technology aspects that I oversee, but also the edge use cases that are worked out by our service members and our joint forces and supported by our Office of Research and Engineering and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

You're seeing that change at pace. And one of the things I’ve been really vocal about across the department and especially with our defense industrial base is that their innovation is our warfighter innovation. Their strength is our warfighter strength. Their security is our warfighter security. So we are really getting after these things in a partnership way that is with speed. It is with agility. When we find barriers, we are breaking them down. When we find unnecessary burdensome check-the-box exercises, we're tackling them at pace.

Nextgov/FCW: How are you expanding the department’s future IT and cyber workforce?

Davies: We are working on an extended plan rollout to build on the great work this office has already done. The president and the secretary have given us a mandate to really get after skills-based training, which is what we’re pursuing.

Throughout my entire career, I have been trying to eliminate the requirement for degrees before people can get a job because if threat actors can be script kiddies and teenagers, then we need to be employing great skills where the skills are and figuring out how to incorporate them. You’re going to see a full life cycle approach out of my office, which is also working with Katie Sutton, who is the assistant secretary of war for cyber policy.

We are working on a full life cycle approach to skills-based hiring, cross-skilling and upskilling. We're looking at how we can develop a much more fulsome model for our warfighters who go into veteran status to ensure they are well trained to continue to support the national security mission wherever they go next. You're going to see a lot more of that coming out of my office.

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Some disabled veterans say losing telework accommodations is making it harder for them to keep working at the VA

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 12:02:00 -0400

Many disabled veterans serve in agencies. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2024 about one-fifth of employed veterans with a service-connected disability worked for the federal government.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Veterans Affairs Department is one of the most common agencies where veterans work. It employs more than 105,000 vets, according to federal workforce data from the Office of Personnel Management, which is nearly a quarter of the department’s workforce.

Several disabled veterans who work at the VA told Government Executive, however, that they feel the department is pushing them out of their jobs.

At the start of his second term, President Donald Trump terminated work from home for the civil service, arguing that the workplace flexibility had been abused following the COVID-19 pandemic. But his directive exempted qualifying feds with disabilities — many of whom are eligible for telework through a reasonable accommodation, which agencies are required to provide under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 unless doing so would result in an “undue hardship.” Other examples of reasonable accommodations include interpreters for people who are deaf and accessible work stations.

Multiple VA employees interviewed by Government Executive said that since the department undertook a review of reasonable accommodations in response to Trump’s directive that officials have denied and rescinded telework accommodations, which is impacting many veterans with disabilities.

“There's a joke within the VA that the VA supports disabled veterans, unless you work for the VA,” said Galen Wheless, the president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 1594 in St. Petersburg, Fla.

“I guess they fully expect me to quit or lose the job”

Kevin Price medically retired from the Army after a particularly bad helicopter landing during training that has led to flare-ups of pain in his legs. Oftentimes, he works from bed for half of the day.

“I treat it like a slow computer. Sometimes it takes my body — not all the time — but sometimes it takes my body a little bit longer to wake up,” he said.

Because Price was on a telework reasonable accommodation, he and his young family in 2024 were able to move more than three hours away from his office to live closer to relatives. He received permission from his supervisors for his relocation, with one saying in an email Price shared with Government Executive that the reasonable accommodation allows him “to live anywhere in the state of Florida.”

In February, however, the VA rescinded his reasonable accommodation. While Price appealed — emphasizing his move and that he’s limited to driving no more than 30 minutes because of his disability — department officials responded in an email that an “employee’s commute to and from the worksite is generally considered outside the scope of the position’s essential functions; therefore, the agency is not responsible for providing accommodations related to commuting.”

Cheri Cannon — a partner at Tully Rinckey who specializes in federal employment law — said the VA’s contention regarding accommodations and commuting is “not a lawful justification.”

“The Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act require employers to accommodate known disabilities if a person could otherwise perform their job duties,” she said. “So if you can perform your job duties at home and you need a reasonable accommodation in order to do that, driving is a life function just like walking, talking, reading, hearing and seeing. Driving is a life activity covered under the statute.”

Based on department emails reviewed by Government Executive, the VA offered Price alternative accommodations onsite, including extra breaks, a wellness room and an ergonomic chair. He said that several coworkers received the same suggested accommodations, even though they have different disabilities.

Those emails also show that VA officials said there wasn’t any space in an office closer to Price’s new home.

“So they fully expect me to drive over 150 miles one way, Monday through Friday,” Price said.

Price hasn’t yet had to undertake the approximately six-hour total commute because he started parental leave around his mandated return-to-office date. But he said the rescission of his reasonable accommodation has already taken a toll on his health.

“I had an urgent doctor's appointment because my blood pressure was skyrocketing,” he said. “I was in hypertension. I wasn't sleeping. I was stressed out of my mind.”

And Price’s parental leave ends later this month, so he’s unsure if he’ll be able to stay at the VA.

“I guess they fully expect me to quit or lose the job,” he said.

“It’s extremely draining”

Daniel Solee — a VA employee and Navy veteran with PTSD and a traumatic brain injury — had been working under a telework reasonable accommodation since 2021. It was rescinded, however, in July 2025 in what he believes was retaliation for criticizing his management.

“[My supervisor’s] reasoning was that [Trump’s] order requested all employees return back to the office, which is correct, but it did not say that the Rehabilitation Act is revoked,” he said.

Solee said that he continued to work remotely, but his supervisor eventually revoked his access to systems that he needs for his job and he was terminated in October 2025 for not showing up in person.

With support from his union, he challenged his firing before the Merit Systems Protection Board, which hears federal employees’ appeals. Ultimately, Solee was reinstated as a result of a settlement agreement viewed by Government Executive under which the VA also agreed to participate in a new reasonable accommodation process and provide backpay that Solee said totaled $30,000 before taxes.

After returning to his job in March, the VA offered Solee telework two days per pay period as an alternative reasonable accommodation, according to documentation viewed by Government Executive. But he declined, saying his doctor argues that he requires full-time telework. Now in a standoff, Solee said that he is continuing to work remotely every day, but his supervisor is again limiting his access to systems. And he’s only receiving about half of his normal paycheck due to being deemed AWOL, he said.

“It's extremely draining. It usually increases my TBI with a headache,” he said. “It's constant stuff daily that I go through. I used to have a mental health appointment every three months. Now I have to do it every two weeks because of the stress level.”

He emphasized, however, that he does not want to leave the VA, arguing that the MSPB settlement shows his supervisor is at fault.

“I should leave my job for a person that just cost the VA money? For a person that illegally tried to terminate me? For a person that illegally tried to revoke my reasonable accomodation?” he said.

VA press secretary Quinn Slaven said in a statement to Government Executive that claims the department is violating the Rehabilitation Act are "absurd." He pointed to guidance that states agencies are not required to continue providing previously approved telework accommodations and can review and potentially replace them with “an effective alternative reasonable accommodation.”

“Under President Trump, VA took thousands of employees off remote work and brought them back to the office, where they can work as a team to better serve veterans,” Slaven wrote. “At the same time, VA is ensuring accommodations are granted to employees who need them the most.”

Regarding Price’s and Solee’s experiences, Slaven said the VA cannot provide information about employees unless they sign a “Request for and Authorization to Release Health Information” form. Government Executive relayed this information to both individuals who declined to sign, citing concerns about sharing their health information.

In addition to the alleged professional and medical harms, disabled vets who work at the VA say the return-to-office directive has caused other consequences for them.

One such employee, who preferred to be unnamed due to fears of retaliation, estimates that he is spending an additional $500 per month on transportation and clothing. This individual said that he previously teleworked because it was department policy at the time rather than a need due to a reasonable accommodation.

“This is a moral issue”

Government Executive previously reported on a June 2025 VA memo that outlined a new policy to provide stricter scrutiny of reasonable accommodations as part of an effort to “maximize” in-person work. Similar processes have played out since the start of the second Trump administration at other agencies, including the departments of Treasury, Health and Human Services and Justice as well as the National Science Foundation.

But Douglas Massey, president of AFGE Local 17 for VA’s Central Office in Washington, D.C., said that he received reports of department employees across the country getting their telework reasonable accommodations denied as early as spring 2025.

“This is a moral issue,” he said. “These are veterans. We’re supposed to be serving veterans.”

Wheless, the local president from Florida, said that union officials from other areas have not reported widespread reasonable accommodation recissions. But his local is currently representing nearly 150 impacted individuals.

“These are people with, for example, epilepsy. It's illegal for them to drive, so they can't come into the office. We have stories of a person missing half a lung who is immunocompromised that can't be in an office environment,” he said. “We have folks with PTSD that literally were blown up in wartime that need to be out of an office environment. They’re still valid, capable workers that can still do all the essential functions of their job, but they just shouldn't be doing it in an office environment, per their doctor's orders.”

Another disabled veteran who works at the VA said that she requested a short-term telework reasonable accommodation after a major car accident exacerbated a service-connected mental health disability that temporarily prevented her from driving. While she used to regularly telework in her position, officials denied the request, contending that the department is not responsible for her commute.

“So I talked to my husband, he went to his job and they changed his schedule. They accommodated him for me, so he could drive me to work and pick me up,” she said. “The VA — my VA, my military, my country — basically would not help me, but his work would. That really bothered me.”

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House Homeland committee seeks briefing on DHS network hack

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 17:53:00 -0400

House Homeland Security Committee staff are requesting a briefing from the Department of Homeland Security on the breach of the agency’s Homeland Security Information Network, according to a committee aide with knowledge of the matter.

Staffers are hoping to be briefed on the intrusion — first reported by Nextgov/FCW last week — by Friday, said the aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter is sensitive.

Hackers are believed to have penetrated HSIN sometime between late May and early June, though their affiliation and whether any contents were pilfered from the platform is unclear, a person familiar with the matter previously said.

Approved users lean on the network to securely access data, exchange requests with partner agencies, manage operations, coordinate safety and security for planned events, respond to incidents and share mission-critical information needed to protect their communities, according to its website. HSIN carries unclassified but sensitive information shared among federal, state, local, territorial, tribal, international and private-sector partners.

The intrusion comes as the U.S. oversees security for World Cup games across the country, placing added scrutiny on the systems federal, state and local officials use to coordinate major events. A breach of the platform may raise concerns about whether hackers gained insight into security planning, interagency coordination or response procedures surrounding one of the most visible international events hosted predominately in the United States.

Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., said last week that the network is being used to support the World Cup and America250 events. He added that it played a key role for emergency responders during last year’s mid-air collision between an American Airlines flight and an Army Black Hawk helicopter outside Washington, D.C.

“The information in HSIN, while not classified, is highly sensitive, and its exposure risks national security,” Warner said. “DHS and DOJ must thoroughly investigate who breached HSIN, what the attackers accessed, and ensure all DHS partners are provided with timely information and the tools necessary to mitigate any associated risks from the breach.”

When asked by Nextgov/FCW about the committee briefing request, a department spokesperson sent the same statement it provided last week that confirmed the hack.

The statement said staff “immediately took action to isolate the affected systems, mitigate the vulnerability, and launch a comprehensive forensic investigation,” and added that an investigation is ongoing and more details can’t be provided.

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GSA and National Design Studio collaborate to boost Login.gov experience

Frank Konkel — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:02:00 -0400

Login.gov, the government’s identity-proofing platform housed within the General Services Administration, is collaborating with the National Design Studio to enhance the user experience of millions of Americans who regularly use the shared service.

The collaboration aims to “make it easier for people to access government services, while operating with privacy, transparency, and security at the core of everything we do,” according to an internal email sent to staff Tuesday by Greg Hogan, acting assistant commissioner of Login.gov, and obtained by Nextgov/FCW.

Currently, more than 100 million Americans have accounts through Login.gov to access a variety of government services like Social Security accounts, unemployment insurance, passport services and more across 50 states and agencies.

The National Design Studio was stood up via an August 2025 executive order to improve how Americans experience and interact with government agencies online and in-person. Housed within the Executive Office of the President and headed by Joe Gebbia, the National Design Studio has collaborated with several agencies across government, including on a major effort with the Office of Personnel Management to make federal retirement applications fully electronic.

Per Hogan’s email, “ND Studio has drafted a proposed set of changes that will help modernize and streamline the sign up, sign in, and identity proofing process.” Hogan makes clear that while National Design Studio is providing a service to Login.gov, it “does not oversee or operate” the service, nor is it “building a replacement Login.gov website.”

The National Design Studio instead built a separate “experimental version” of the site to test different design concepts and improvements that it pitched to leadership.

“The ND Studio will have resources available to support us in real-time thinking through these immediate changes and identifying areas where their expertise would be beneficial for the long term,” Hogan said in the email. “I believe our combined skills can greatly benefit the American public.”

“Our team at GSA remains responsible for every change made to the service. Any proposal must go through our normal reviews for engineering, security, accessibility, privacy, compliance, performance, and product before it gets shipped to users. We’ll implement only changes that improve the user experience and meet our standards,” he added.

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Greg Barbaccia to leave federal CIO role at end of August

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 13:56:00 -0400

Federal CIO Greg Barbaccia is leaving government service, capping off an 18-month tenure as the government’s top IT lead where he sought to overhaul how the U.S. agencies acquire and interact with tech services.

Barbaccia will depart Aug. 31, according to a White House official with knowledge of the matter, who requested anonymity to communicate the departure. It’s not clear where Barbaccia is headed next.

The Office of Management and Budget confirmed his departure date.

“Greg has done an excellent job as Federal CIO and Chief AI Officer,” a spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW. “He will certainly be missed when his time here comes to an end.”

The move was first reported by FedScoop.

“Greg Barbaccia has been an incredible partner at GSA. He has fundamentally reshaped our work on the federal government’s technology and the products GSA delivers across the federal workforce on behalf of the American taxpayer,” GSA Administrator Edward Forst said in a statement to Nextgov/FCW. “I’m deeply grateful for his extraordinary service to President Trump and the American people.”

Barbaccia joined OMB in January 2025 after a decade at Palantir and later stints at blockchain intelligence firm Elementus and Theorem, a machine-learning-enabled asset manager. A former Army intelligence sergeant and intelligence community analyst, Barbaccia had not worked in government since 2009 and had not previously served as an agency CIO.

Barbaccia was charged as federal CIO with overseeing governmentwide IT policy, helping shape the federal technology budget and setting the direction for agency modernization efforts. He also served as the federal chief AI officer and became the government’s service delivery lead under the Government Service Delivery Improvement Act.

During his tenure, he pushed agencies to rethink how they buy and manage technology, arguing that the government should default more often to buying commercial tools rather than building systems in-house. He also sought tougher enforcement of FITARA, the 2014 law giving agency CIOs authority over technology investments, and explored ways for OMB to more closely track major IT decisions across agencies.

Barbaccia also made culture a central theme of his tenure, saying his role had become less about “deep diving” into technical architecture and more about changing how the government thinks about technology, compliance and modernization. He pushed the federal CIO office to gather more feedback from agency technology leaders and sent staff into the field for in-person meetings with agencies.

“I came into the job thinking this would be much more of a technical undertaking about deep diving into technical systems and technical architecture,” he told Nextgov/FCW in February. “I’m understanding changing the culture and the way we think about tech and the government is a way more effective means of making change, so that's what I’m focused on — primarily changes across culture, tech and then the compliance regime.”

His departure comes after a turbulent period for the federal technology workforce, including Department of Government Efficiency’s push to downsize government as a whole, broad personnel losses across government — including portions of the federal tech workforce — and a reshuffling of many agency CIO roles. Barbaccia has acknowledged those disruptions but argued that artificial intelligence and a new early-career U.S. Tech Force program could help the government rebuild technical capacity.

Barbaccia also championed a “digital front door” for government services, questioning why taxpayers must repeatedly provide the same information to different agencies. That vision, he said, would require more responsible data sharing and a willingness to make difficult decisions around identity proofing, including the future of Login.gov and the government’s use of commercial identity tools.

During his tenure, the federal government began to confront a new class of advanced AI models that officials and researchers say will forever overhaul how organizations manage defensive and offensive cyber strategies. The models’ advent has raised ongoing questions for agency technology leaders about model-sharing and coordination amid a recent export control debacle that impacted parts of the government.

Nextgov/FCW Managing Editor Edward Graham contributed to this report.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to include a statement from GSA Administrator Edward Forst.

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Anthropic taps Teresa Carlson as public sector lead

Alexandra Kelley — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 05:00:00 -0400

Anthropic is deepening its government presence, with the company announcing Tuesday that it is hiring veteran public sector executive Teresa Carlson as its inaugural global head of public sector.

Carlson boasts a lengthy career working as the go-between for tech companies and the government. Between 2010 and 2022, she worked for Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Splunk in federal sales, public sector relations and business growth, respectively.

Carlson’s most recent role was serving as the founding CEO of the General Catalyst Institute, the public policy arm of venture capital firm General Catalyst, where she worked closely with congressional committees on the government’s adoption of AI.

“Few people are as trusted across government and industry as Teresa, or understand how governments adopt new technology as well. We’re fortunate to have her leading this work for us in the U.S. and worldwide," Kate Earle Jensen, head of Americas at Anthropic, said in a statement.

Carlson is also vice chair of the White House Historical Association, is a National Portrait Gallery Trustee and serves as a board and Executive Committee member at the Atlantic Council.

“After more than two decades helping government leaders navigate new technologies, I joined Anthropic because it prioritized working alongside government early and takes this as seriously as anything it does,” Carlson said in a statement shared with Nextgov/FCW. “AI is changing how we work and how we live, and that change has to happen in collaboration with governments.”

Carlson's selection as Anthropic’s first public sector head comes at a crucial time for the company's relationship with the U.S. government. Anthropic continues to navigate the Pentagon’s April decision to designate the firm a supply chain risk following the company’s refusal to allow the Department of Defense to use its products in operations that involved autonomous weaponry and American surveillance.

The launch of Mythos, Anthropic’s powerful new model designed to detect vulnerabilities across digital networks, has further complicated Anthropic’s relationship with the government. Understanding and harnessing Mythos’s benefits became a matter of national security, prompting the Trump administration to offer select agencies access to test the model.

Mythos’ advanced cyber capabilities, and the risk of those capabilities being leveraged by adversaries, prompted the White House on June 12 to apply export controls to both Mythos 5 and Fable 5 — a restricted version intended for more general use — following reports of a potential jailbreak. While the initial export controls applied to Mythos and Fable were meant to prevent access by foreign nationals, the complicated nature of user verification pushed Anthropic to withdraw model access altogether.

By early July, the export control was revoked, and general access to Fable 5 and select access to Mythos 5 were restored.

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Interior CIO Paul McInerny exits position

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 18:20:00 -0400

The Interior Department’s top technology official left the agency last week after falling out of favor with administration officials, according to a person familiar with the matter, ending a short tenure for a former SpaceX engineer brought in amid the Trump administration’s push to remake federal technology operations.

Paul “Macca” McInerny, who had served as Interior’s chief information officer since May 2025, departed the department Thursday, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their knowledge of the exit. They described the departure as a mutual decision between McInerny and the Trump administration.

Matt Luby, a top strategy official in Interior involved with Department of Government Efficiency efforts over the last year and a longtime friend of former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, is now the agency’s acting CIO, added the person.

Federal News Network first reported that McInerny had stepped down for a new professional opportunity, citing an email to staff from the Office of the CIO. Luby’s appointment as acting CIO has not been previously reported.

McInerny joined Interior after former CIO Darren Ash was placed on administrative leave last year amid disputes over DOGE’s access to a sensitive payroll system. His arrival marked his first federal government job after nearly three decades in the private sector, including work as a lead engineer at SpaceX, helmed by Elon Musk, who helped lead the Trump administration’s DOGE push to shrink the government and overhaul federal operations.

McInerny was not a formal member of the federal DOGE organization, though he was closely aligned with Musk’s broader efficiency-focused circle and came into the job with an efficiency-minded approach to the role, the person said.

But McInerny had no prior experience running a large federal IT organization, and his tenure became strained as Interior continued to face unresolved technology consolidation challenges, the person added.

One suspected source of frustration involved Interior’s effort to consolidate and speed up permitting systems, including systems tied to Bureau of Land Management leasing and energy development, the person said.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has made expanding domestic energy production and speeding federal permitting a central priority, including at the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees oil and gas leasing on public lands. But carrying out that agenda depends in part on Interior’s ability to modernize and consolidate the technology systems used to process permits, leases and related applications, an area that remained a source of frustration during McInerny’s tenure, the person said.

During McInerny’s tenure, Interior instructed bureaus and offices to remove non-English content from department websites, a directive that became one of the more visible digital policy changes associated with the Office of the CIO under his leadership.

McInerny’s tenure also unfolded as Interior aggressively implemented the Trump administration’s broader push to unwind diversity, equity and inclusion programs and reshape public-facing agency materials. In March, the department circulated a memo encouraging employees to report suspected DEI-related activities and reminding staff that refusing to participate in such efforts would be treated as protected whistleblower activity.

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White House to host quantum tech summit with industry Tuesday

Alexandra Kelley — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 17:39:00 -0400

The White House will host a summit with industry on Tuesday dedicated to innovation in quantum information sciences and technologies, featuring remarks from tech policy and agency leadership within the Trump administration, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The White House Summit on Quantum Innovation will begin at 11 a.m. on July 7 in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, per a document obtained by Nextgov/FCW. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios and National Quantum Coordination Office Director Brad Blakestand are slated to deliver a keynote that provides updates on the administration’s quantum agenda and on research and development.

Leaders from relevant government agencies — including Department of Commerce Deputy Secretary Paul Dabbar, Department of Defense Under Secretary for Research Emil Michael, Department of Energy Under Secretary Darío Gil, National Science Foundation Acting Director Brian Stone and U.S. Chief Technology Officer Ethan Klein — are scheduled to discuss how their departments are delivering on commitments to quantum innovation.

Other panelists who will cover industry insights, supply chain and the workforce are listed “TBA” as of late Monday afternoon.

Attendees will primarily represent the U.S. quantum information science and technology industry.

The summit follows President Donald Trump’s two recent executive orders aimed at strengthening the U.S. quantum technology research and development ecosystem and spurring the migration of critical networks to a post-quantum cryptographic standard.

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CISA expects to finalize key cyber reporting rule by September

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 17:13:00 -0400

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency expects to finalize a bedrock cybersecurity incident reporting rule in September, requiring critical infrastructure providers to report major hacks directly to the cyberdefense agency, according to a regulation document published last week.

The Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act requires critical infrastructure entities to report substantial incidents to CISA within 72 hours and ransomware payments within 24 hours.

CIRCIA’s underlying measure in Congress first passed in 2022, though the final rule has been delayed for some time. CISA published the first procedural notice for the rule in April 2024 and missed the statutory October 2025 final-rule deadline. Last month, the agency held additional stakeholder town halls to further discuss the directive after a now-resolved shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security in the spring delayed scheduling of those meetings.

CIRCIA is significant because CISA has historically relied on voluntary cooperation from critical infrastructure operators, and the law would move a major piece of that relationship into a mandatory reporting regime.

The directive grew out of post-SolarWinds and Colonial Pipeline concerns that voluntary reporting left the government blind to major cyber incidents. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine added urgency by raising fears that geopolitical conflict could spill into attacks on U.S. critical infrastructure.

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OPM’s HR systems award clears protest window

Nick Wakeman — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 16:41:00 -0400

The Office of Personnel Management’s plan to consolidate human capital management systems was a hotly-contested contract that Oracle won in June.

Seven companies in total submitted bids, but Oracle has begun work on the 10-year, $395.8 million contract and the protest window has closed. Companies generally have 10 days to file a protest following a debriefing.

Other bidders for the contract included Workday, IBM, SAP and Economic Systems inc.

With no protests, the company is now working with OPM to modernize human resource systems that serve 2 million federal employees.

IBM and Economic Systems filed pre-award protests, objecting to terms in the solicitation. IBM later withdrew its protest and GAO denied Economic Systems protest on June 1, clearing the way for OPM to make its award.

OPM structured the contract as a firm-fixed-price award with a 10-year ordering period. Requirements include core HR and personnel action processing, payroll and benefits integration, audit-ready reporting, and time and attendance tracking.

The system also must comply with security standards such as FISMA and FedRAMP, as well as be interoperable with existing federal IT systems.

OPM wants Oracle to finish the core implementation by the fall. Other phases will follow for agency transitions and then licensing and sustainment.

More than 100 HR systems currently operate across the federal government. Federal HR 2.0 is OPM’s attempt to wrangle all that into a single, integrated platform.

Some of the functions OPM wants include position management, personnel action, records processing, workforce analytics, and employee and manager self-service capabilities.

Much of what OPM uses to manage HR functions runs on PeopleSoft, which Oracle acquired in 2005. Oracle recently extended its support for PeopleSoft through 2037, which includes updates and fixes.

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IBM, Oak Ridge and Cleveland Clinic unveil quantum-powered novel fusion energy research

Alexandra Kelley — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 13:49:00 -0400

IBM, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Cleveland Clinic on Monday unveiled the first known molecular simulation created with the help of quantum computing, an achievement that contributes to goals outlined in the Trump administration's Genesis Mission.

Using IBM’s 156-qubit Heron quantum processor chip and ORNL’s supercomputing infrastructure, scientists developed nine molecular configurations of a liquid salt that has the potential to produce tritium, a necessary fuel for fusion energy production. The simulation contributes to Trump administration goals set out in the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission and represents a new step in the near-term application of quantum information systems.

“We're going to see quantum applications accelerate because of this type of work,” IBM Director of Research Jay Gambetta told Nextgov/FCW.

The molecular models in the research simulate interactions between tritium, a rare isotope of hydrogen that is key in producing fusion energy, and atom clusters in molten salt to support tritium breeding and management. Cultivating a robust supply of tritium and stabilizing it has been a challenge for experts working to deploy fusion energy as a cleaner power source, as the material is extremely rare in nature. Fostering nuclear power is a major goal for the Trump administration’s Genesis Mission.

Tom Beck, the section head of science engagement at ORNL, told Nextgov/FCW the entire effort was aimed at demonstrating the research and development capabilities within the Genesis Mission initiative.

“Essentially, the problem of tritium is … making these reactors stable,” Gambetta said. “With quantum computers you can start to simulate it.”

Beyond quantum, the process also leveraged a hybrid computing system, which draws on components of both classical and quantum computers, to achieve these advanced molecular simulations. While this feat isn’t considered quantum supremacy — where the quantum computing system completely outpaces classical computers — it demonstrates the benefit to merging today’s quantum information technology with artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.

Integral to this research’s success was a data processing technique previously pioneered by researchers at the Cleveland Clinic that resulted in similar molecular modeling. The fragmenting of large volumes of scientific data proved effective in simulating biochemically-relevant protein complexes, a task classical computers struggled to process as the molecules grew in size.

“What's really cool is [researchers] use some AI methods to come up with the fragments from the data that experts at Oak Ridge have, and then [researchers] fed those into a quantum-plus-classical simulation where they used our quantum computer, and then the supercomputers the DOE at Oak Ridge has access to, to iterate on this sort of hybrid algorithm that allowed them to calculate these large fragments accurately,” Gambetta said.

With quantum computing technologies still struggling to scale to a fault-tolerant level, their addition to other powerful computing systems is part of IBM’s focus in spearheading quantum-supported supercomputing as a more feasible application of current quantum information systems to ongoing problems.

“Think of it as taking the latest, best quantum computers, but more importantly injecting them as a subroutine in large HPC clusters to look at problems of interest,” Gambetta said.

Hybrid computing architectures have captured industry interest as a practical and more market-ready solution for the delivery of quantum computing capabilities.

IBM is not the only company betting on the combination of quantum and classical computing solutions. In 2024, Microsoft released Azure Quantum, which uses its own quantum computing technologies as well as those from partners Atom Computing and Quantinuum to offer customers access to quantum computing capabilities via its Azure cloud architecture.

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As DOGE formally sunsets, its public record is still evolving

John Breeden II — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:30:00 -0400

Washington creates plenty of initiatives that seem to drift on indefinitely, but fewer such efforts come with a visible expiration date. The Department of Government Efficiency, better known as DOGE, did. The executive order that created the U.S. DOGE Service Temporary Organization set July 4, 2026 as its end date, making Independence Day not just a symbolic milestone this year, but also the formal sunset for one of the most unusual government entities of the Trump era.

That alone makes DOGE worth a brief closeout look. Whatever people think of the effort politically, temporary government organizations are supposed to have endings, handoffs and records. In DOGE’s case, the order was explicit: the temporary organization would terminate on July 4, 2026. At the same time, the order also says that termination should not be interpreted to imply the termination, attenuation or amendment of any other authority or provision in the order. That means the formal sunset answers one question, but leaves another hanging in the air: what exactly is ending, and what may still remain?

The public-facing DOGE site offers part of the answer, but not all of it. As of this week, the site is still live and active, and still presents ongoing work and spending information with an evolving overall savings claim. On that page, DOGE says it has saved $215 billion, while also acknowledging that the posted receipts represent only a subset of contract, grant and lease cancellations, amounting to roughly 30% of total savings. The page says additional receipts are still being uploaded “in a digestible and transparent manner consistent with applicable rules and regulations.” In other words, even at the sunset point, the public-facing record remains a work in progress.

I spent a little time with the available DOGE public savings records to see what a closeout visitor could actually learn from them. The top-line claim is hard to miss: the site says DOGE has saved $215 billion, or about $1,335.40 per taxpayer. It says those savings come from contract and lease cancellations, grant cancellations, regulatory savings, workforce reductions and other changes.

But once you get past the top-level numbers, the underlying entries showing where the savings are coming from vary quite a bit in detail. Some are specific. For example, one Department of the Air Force contract entry tied to the Aircraft Maintenance Enterprise Solution, or ACES, lists $3.927 billion in savings and describes it as a reduction in the ceiling of a multivendor contract. Some canceled grants are similarly detailed, including a Department of Health and Human Services entry tied to the Texas Department of State Health Services that lists more than $877 million in savings pulled from an Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity grant.

Lease entries can also be quite specific. One listing for the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta includes annual lease costs, total savings and square footage reductions tied to closing a Georgia office, with total savings listed at about $1.2 million. Other entries are more limited. Some USAID items, for example, simply state that details are unavailable for legal reasons. Taken together, the dashboard offers a useful look at what DOGE says it accomplished, but the level of detail still varies significantly from one entry to the next.

Beyond the evolving dashboards, DOGE is also developing an app that allows users to construct personal APIs that can query all of that data directly. The program is still in beta, but I tested it out, and building simple but useful API queries is not very difficult using the available tools. That should allow researchers, reporters and curious users to go beyond the dashboard metrics and inspect all of the available data for themselves. That said, the API is limited to just examining the information that has already been compiled and released by DOGE, which by their own admission is not even halfway complete yet.

So, right now the public can examine the DOGE dashboard, about 30% of their claims, some of the underlying entries and even build an API that opens the data up to more direct inspection. What is harder to see is the final shape of the closeout itself once DOGE sunsets: which responsibilities are being handed off, which authorities continue elsewhere and whether the public record is complete enough to let outside observers make sense of what the temporary organization actually did. The executive order itself strongly suggests some of that work may survive beyond the temporary organization’s formal end.

That uncertainty is not just academic. DOGE’s records have already been the subject of transparency litigation. In March 2025, a federal judge ruled that DOGE was likely covered by the Freedom of Information Act and ordered records released, citing the unusual secrecy around its operations. In May 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily paused lower-court orders that would have required DOGE to turn over records while the litigation continued. Those cases do not settle the political argument around DOGE, but they do underscore something else: closeout is not just about a calendar date. It’s also about whether the public can see enough of the work to understand what is being wrapped up.

That is what makes July 4 more than a symbolic end point. It’s the day the temporary organization was always supposed to sunset. But the bigger question is what kind of historical record DOGE leaves behind. If the dashboard is still evolving, the receipts are still partial and the records are still being contested, then the final measure of DOGE may not be what it claimed in real time, but what the public can ultimately verify after it’s gone.

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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Federal zero trust faces challenges with AI agents

Adam McBride and Jim St. Clair — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:00:00 -0400

Since the establishment of executive order 14028, Federal agencies have spent four years rebuilding their security posture around zero trust to meet the deadlines set in OMB Memorandum M-22-09. By any reasonable measure, this has been one of the most consequential federal cybersecurity efforts in a decade.

It will not survive contact with AI agents.

The problem is not that zero trust principles are wrong. “Never trust, always verify” and least-privilege access remain exactly right. The problem is that zero trust architectures currently deployed across federal agencies was built around a specific assumption: that the entity behind a request is a human user — someone who logs in at human speed, clicks through interfaces in human ways, and holds permissions that change on human timescales. The development of Agentic AI invalidates every one of those assumptions at once.

Agencies’ existing identity stacks rely on protocols and credentials designed for a different problem. PIV cards — the chip-and-PIN credentials carried by millions of federal employees — bind identity to a physical token held by a specific human. SAML — the standard behind most federal single sign-on — assumes that human logs in once in the morning and stays logged in for hours. OAuth — the protocol behind “sign in with Google” and most modern app-level permissions — assumes a person is granting an application limited access to their data on the person’s behalf. None of it was designed for an entity that has no hand to carry a card, authenticates millions of times a day, and changes what it needs every few seconds.

That last point is not hyperbole. In a recent ATARC Identity Management Working Group analysis, Securing the Agentic State, our task group calculated that 1,000 agents operating at machine speed can generate roughly 7.4 million authentication events per day — about 148 times the volume an equivalent human population would produce. No agency’s existing identity stack was sized for that load, and more importantly, none of it carries the audit metadata needed to forensically investigate what an autonomous agent did, on whose behalf, under what authority.

The dangerous default — the one most agencies will drift toward without active leadership intervention — is to onboard agents as service accounts. It is the path of least resistance: existing tooling, familiar review boards, no new policy.

Unfortunately, service account operations and maintenance is already the place where federal zero trust commitments are most often honored in the breach. Static credentials sitting in vaults, broad standing privileges that are not periodically verified, infrequent rotation, minimal attribution of specific actions to specific causes — all of it sits in direct tension with “never trust, always verify.” Agencies have tolerated that gap because the service account population was a known, slow-growing quantity. Agents arrive into that gap in numbers that make the existing O&M model unmanageable. The real choice is not whether agents should be modeled as service accounts. It is whether to take the weakest link in the federal zero trust posture and scale it into potentially the largest non-human identity population the government has ever managed.

Agents need the opposite of what service accounts get: cryptographically verifiable identity that travels with them, narrow permissions scoped to a specific task, and credentials that expire on the order of minutes.

We recommend that three things should change in the next two budget cycles.

First, cryptographic identity should be a baseline requirement for any production agent. Decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials let an agent prove what it is, what it’s authorized to do, and who deployed it, without phoning home to a central registry on every request. The standards are mature; the obstacle is procurement language, not technology. However, we acknowledge cryptographic operations will add latency and compute overhead. Agencies will need guidance on efficient implementations.

Second, delegation chains should be auditable end-to-end. When an agent delegates work to a sub-agent, the handoff should be cryptographically recorded, permissions should narrow at each hop, and revocation should cascade in seconds. Without that, an incident response team facing a compromised agent has no way to bound the blast radius.

Third, the federal zero trust mandate should be formally extended to non-human autonomous identities, with OMB guidance and NIST profiles tailored to agents. The current Federal ICAM framework (and the foundations of runtime governance) treats non-person entities as service accounts and devices — a category never designed to absorb something that sets its own sub-goals.

Importantly, these three steps are doable inside 90 days: designate an executive sponsor for agent identity, stand up at least one low-risk pilot with cryptographic credentials from day one, and direct general counsel to begin work on records management for agent decisions — because agent “memory” will be a FOIA question whether agencies are ready or not.

There is no realistic path where federal agencies opt out of agentic AI. There is a path where they deploy it on identity infrastructure that was retired in concept the day the first general-purpose agent shipped. The cost gets paid in an incident none of us wants to be the postmortem subject of. The alternative is unglamorous: extend the zero trust work already underway, treat agents as their own identity class, and start the policy work before an incident starts it for you.

Jim St. Clair is an Advisor to C3HIE, one of the largest Health Information Exchanges (HIE) in Texas, and the lead author of Securing the Agentic State and leader of the Agentic IAM Task Group within the ATARC Identity Management Working Group. He has more than two decades of experience in federal health IT and identity standards across the federal government and industry.

Adam McBride is the ICAM/IdAM Program Manager for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and co-chair of the ATARC Identity Management Working Group. He has over fifteen years of experience in government and a retired Master Sargeant, US Army.

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Trump says Pulte can declassify ‘whatever’ he wants, sparking fears of exposing intelligence secrets

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:04:00 -0400

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that acting spy chief Bill Pulte can declassify “whatever” records he wants and can declassify “almost everything,” a sweeping green light that has alarmed former intelligence officials, who warn that careless releases could expose sensitive intelligence capabilities and sidestep standard review processes with other spy agencies.

Trump said Wednesday that acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte would only serve in the job for “a month or two months or something,” but has his permission in the interim to release classified records.

“Bill is there just for a fairly short period of time,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. “But while he’s there, I said you can declassify whatever you want.”

Under U.S. law, records declassification is usually handled through a structured review process meant to identify national security risks before materials are released. Trump’s comments appear to give Pulte political backing to move aggressively, but they don’t necessarily address how agencies with involvement in any records would be consulted first.

“My guess is that NSA and CIA are losing their minds at the idea of Pulte declassifying a lot of stuff,” said a former official, who, like others for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid and for fear of retribution.

“If Pulte actually runs the traps and considers damage and balances, he won’t declassify much. If he doesn’t care about blowing up cyber exploits, putting foreign relationships at risk, or getting people killed, he could declassify a lot,” the former official added.

Intelligence records are typically reviewed by the agency that produced them before release, particularly if disclosure could expose that agency’s operations, but that consultation might be skipped entirely under Pulte, a second former official said.

An ODNI spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.

Trump has placed Pulte at the center of a wider declassification push that began under former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who used her role atop ODNI to release records tied to Trump-era grievances over alleged weaponization inside the intelligence community. ODNI’s own public releases under Gabbard included documents the office claimed exposed efforts by intelligence officials to undermine Trump’s 2016 victory and material it said showed a conspiracy used during his 2019 impeachment proceedings.

The declassification push is part of a broader campaign to challenge an intelligence community the president has long accused of working against him. Since the 2016 Russia investigation, Trump and his allies have argued that intelligence and law enforcement shops have used their powers to damage his presidency.

“Trump’s statement alone saying that Pulte has this authority is damaging to national security because any person thinking about volunteering or working with the United States might think twice now, and is more likely to go to the Brits or another service,” a third former official said, adding that if Pulte moves to declassify intelligence involving other agencies, he would be in violation of the law.

The president “just signaled to any person providing intelligence to the United States that their intelligence can be released at Pulte’s whim, thus putting their entire security and safety in jeopardy,” the third former official added.

The White House has assembled a task force collecting thousands of pages of intelligence and law enforcement documents, mostly related to the 2020 election, with plans to declassify some of them in ways that could support Trump’s claims about election irregularities and fraud, NBC News reported Tuesday.

Trump’s declassification plans land against a long-running backdrop of concerns over his administration’s handling of sensitive intelligence. During his first term, officials said he shared highly classified information provided by the Israelis with Russian officials in the Oval Office. Separately, Russian and U.S. news reports later identified Oleg Smolenkov, a former Russian government official living near Washington, as a possible CIA source who had disappeared from Russia in 2017 after allegedly providing information on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s role in the Kremlin’s 2016 election interference efforts.

Trump was later indicted in June 2023 over classified records kept at Mar-a-Lago, including documents prosecutors said involved highly sensitive national defense information, though the case was dismissed and later dropped after he returned to office. Former President Joe Biden also faced a classified documents investigation, but a special counsel declined to charge him on grounds that there was not enough evidence to convict him of “willfully” retaining the sensitive materials.

Pulte’s short tenure has already produced early staffing changes at ODNI that have removed around 50 career and political staff from their roles in the office. The moves follow a broader downsizing campaign started under Gabbard.

The personnel churn included the sidelining of Will Ruger, the deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration. Pulte also brought in a new chief of staff, Christina Norton, who served as Pulte’s chief of staff at the Federal Housing Finance Agency and as the RNC’s election integrity director, helping oversee its 2024 poll-watching operation. Her move into ODNI has sharpened concerns that the office could be drawn further into Trump’s push to revisit election-related claims.

Trump’s comments come after he slowed a Senate push last month to quickly confirm Jay Clayton as permanent intelligence chief, allowing Pulte to take over the office on a temporary basis. Trump said Wednesday that Clayton would get his Senate hearing in two weeks.

Clayton’s nomination has drawn a generally positive response from senators. But Democrats have reacted furiously to Pulte’s elevation, and even some Republicans have expressed concern about installing someone with no prior intelligence community experience as acting DNI. The fight has already affected Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a key spying authority that had appeared headed for reauthorization in early June before Democrats balked in protest of moving forward with Pulte at the head of ODNI.

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How federal cybersecurity teams can adapt to a post-DOGE environment

Brian Snell — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:45:00 -0400

The actions of DOGE may have faded from the news cycle, but for government chief information security officers the cuts that were made last year still feel fresh. Most are facing rising cyber threats with leaner teams and smaller budgets, including increased risks tied to the Iran conflict.

There is a silver lining, however. Many security teams are using this moment to modernize and operate more efficiently. They’re not necessarily trying to do more with less. Instead, they’re prioritizing, automating and simplifying.

What’s more, CISOs are concerned but not panicking. A new Forrester Consulting report found only 38% of public sector cybersecurity decision-makers are confident in their agency’s cybersecurity posture in the wake of headcount reductions. But those same decision-makers are proactively — and successfully — adapting their risk management approach to accommodate the current reality.

Here are the operational shifts they’re adopting to meet the demands of a post-DOGE world.

A renewed focus on high-priority vulnerabilities and critical infrastructure

Agencies simply do not have the resources to try to protect everything equally. According to OPM workforce data published in March, the federal government had experienced a net workforce reduction of more than 278,000 employees since January 2025. As a result, security teams are under pressure to move faster while managing increasingly complex environments with fewer people.

That reality is forcing CISOs to become far more disciplined about how risk is prioritized and managed. Instead of spreading limited resources across every possible vulnerability or compliance requirement, agencies are increasingly concentrating on the systems, networks and data sets most critical to mission continuity and public services. According to the Forrester report, most security teams are focusing on network security, data loss prevention and incident response, all areas where operational disruption or data exposure could have immediate consequences for agency operations and citizen trust.

This represents a broader shift away from attempting to defend every asset equally and toward a more mission-focused security strategy. That means improving visibility into critical infrastructure, reducing response times for high-impact incidents and ensuring analysts are focused on the threats most likely to create operational or reputational damage.

An emphasis on operational simplicity

DOGE was ostensibly about streamlining government operations and creating greater efficiency, though for many agencies that ultimately manifested in workforce reductions. Those staffing cuts have also forced CISOs to confront a challenge that had been building for years: cybersecurity environments had become too complex to manage effectively. Tool sprawl was already creating operational inefficiencies, fragmented visibility and alert fatigue.

With leaner teams now responsible for securing increasingly complex environments, maintaining large collections of disconnected security tools is no longer sustainable. CISOs must respond by consolidating technologies, improving interoperability across platforms and prioritizing integrated environments that provide clearer visibility across networks, endpoints and data.

The goal is not simply to reduce the number of tools, but to eliminate overlapping capabilities and redundant workflows that add complexity without improving security outcomes. Agencies that simplify operations while maximizing existing investments will be better positioned to respond to an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape.

A commitment to AI and automation

Earlier conversations often centered on whether or not to experiment with the newest AI capability or add another tool to the already overflowing stack. Now, agencies must stop and ask if what they’re considering will actually help their smaller teams operate more effectively.

Even as agencies consolidate, many analysts are still forced to jump between disconnected systems and manually piece together information during an incident, creating operational drag when speed matters most. Automation and AI can help reduce that friction by correlating data across security environments, prioritizing high-risk activity and giving analysts faster access to the information they need during an investigation. That allows smaller teams to spend less time managing workflows and more time responding to threats.

A willingness to adapt

In the immediate aftermath of DOGE, there was understandably much concern over how staff cuts would impact government cybersecurity operations. Would the reductions be an open invitation for hackers to target agencies they perceived as vulnerable? Would this finally be the chance those adversaries have been waiting for?

A year later, agencies are still very much targets, but enterprising CISOs have managed to successfully adapt their cybersecurity strategies. They’ve become more focused on critical issues. They’re reducing the number of unnecessary tools clogging up their systems. And they’re creating environments that give smaller teams clearer visibility across the tools that are remaining.

Instead of diluting agencies’ cybersecurity infrastructure, the long-lasting impact of DOGE has been to accelerate a broader shift toward more disciplined, efficient and operationally resilient security strategies.

Brian currently leads a 500-person organization spanning sales, sales operations, channel management, customer success and post-sales engineering across the Broadcom and VMware businesses at Carahsoft, supporting more than $2 billion in annual revenue.

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