Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Jr. said he would “smartly” cut back intelligence service contracts over the next two to three years, according to a report in Federal Times. “What I’d look to do is profit from what happened to us in the 1990s,” he said at the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Symposium in [...]

Earlier this year, six cosmonauts began a 500-day isolation test to see whether humans can endure the rigors of a trip to Mars and back. Last week, NASA announced it is planning something much longer-term: a 100-year Starship that would take a crew to Mars… and leave them there. NASA is partnering with DARPA and [...]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released numbers showing federal pay in 2010 lagged behind private sector pay by 24 percent. The gap has widened by two points since 2009, according to The Federal Times. The statistics were presented at a meeting of the Federal Salary Council, which will make recommendations to President Barack Obama [...]

The congressional midterm elections resulted in historic gains by Republicans, as well as an historic anomaly — marking the first time in 80 years a minority party retook control of the House of Representatives but not the Senate. The election has repercussions across the board: the Obama administration is reading the tea leaves of last [...]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have taken the lead in implementing health IT practices, as part of efforts to more fully incorporate Gov 2.0 principles at the nation’s flagship public-health agency, according to a report on Federal News Radio. CDC Chief Information Officer Jim Seligman said of the agency’s more than $430 million [...]

There were glimmers of what’s to come on the IT front from federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra at the Excellence in Government conference on Nov. 1, according to FederalNewsRadio. In the wake of across-the-board federal IT reform and restructuring, Kundra also hinted at a new focus for IT expansion efforts: a “next-generation” Social Security [...]

In the wake of revelations that the federal government had mistakenly or improperly paid almost $1 billion to deceased people over 10 years, Director Deputy of the Office of Management and Budget Jeffrey Zients took to the blogosphere to detail new methods to curb improper payments. “Whether the budget is in surplus or in deficit, [...]

Cyber attacks against the Defense Department declined in 2010, according to a report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and reported on by Wired’s Danger Room blog. In the first half of 2010, there were some 30,000 malicious cyber incidents against the Pentagon. In 2009, there were about 71,000 such incidents. And, if [...]

In an editorial for The Federal Times taken from remarks Martha Johnson made in an Oct. 7 speech at the Telework Exchange, the General Services Administration administrator advises her audience – and her readers – to begin to think about work differently. “Work is what you do, not where you are,” she writes. Johnson is [...]

An official in the Transportation Department’s Office of Inspector General says DOT websites launched to provide the public with information about Recovery Act funding and projects are vulnerable to cyber attacks. DOT officials launched an audit from December 2009 to July 2010 to examine if DOT’s recovery websites, which track and disseminate the $48 billion [...]