With news this week that a top administration procurement official will answer questions about a draft executive order requiring government contractors to disclose political donations, the rhetoric surrounding the move has ratcheted up. Chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Small Business Committee, led by Rep. Sam [...]

Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Darrell Issa has dropped plans to subpoena Office of Management and Budget officials, Politico reports, after the White House announced Office of Federal Procurement Policy Administrator Dan Gordon would testify before the committee in hearings dealing with government contractors’ political donations. A few weeks ago, speculation [...]

The General Services Administration Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies has announced a new addition to one of the agency’s top technology and policy shops. GSA wooed Kathy Conrad, formerly a senior vice president for Jefferson Consulting, a federal business development firm, to the office’s new principal deputy associate administrator, according to a Federal [...]

Even as the Army is preparing to move as much as 1.6 million email users to a cloud-based system, the House Armed Services Committee is withholding all but 2 percent of the project’s budget for next year until a “business case” can be made for the cloud switch, Nextgov reports. The House Emerging Threats and [...]

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee has issued several recommendations to the 2012 Defense Authorization Bill, as the legislation enters what is known as “markup.” In his draft, Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) aimed to lay out specific rules of engagement for military operations  in cyberspace — including conducting secret military cyber activities outside [...]

Industry observers recognize that bid protests — the official act of challenging a contract award — are on the rise. According to an article in Federal Times, the Government Accountability Office reported that 2010 was the third year in a row where bid protests increased by more than 15 percent. So what’s behind the uptick? [...]

The General Services Administration has put out a new request for quotation for a number of email-as-a-service cloud-computing services, according to a Federal News Radio report. The $2.5 billion five-year blanket purchase agreement contract — for e-mail, office automation and electronic-records management — is part of GSA’s bid to get federal agencies adopting cloud services [...]

The Wall Street Journal, citing an unnamed administration source, reported the Obama administration has settled on three possible candidates to be the next commerce secretary. According to The Journal, one of the hopefuls currently serves in the administration, while the other two come from the business world. That has the Journal speculating that Locke’s replacement [...]

The chief information officer of the Department of Veterans Affairs wants to make it easier for veterans and their doctors to use iPads, particularly for healthcare applications. “I’ve told my folks I don’t want to say ‘no’ to those devices anymore,” CIO Roger Baker said at a TechAmerica conference this week. “I want to know [...]

The Defense Department isn’t only in the business of buying massive, multimillion-dollar weapons programs anymore. Increasingly, Pentagon dollars, like those of many other federal agencies, are being spent on commercial off-the-shelf solutions. But DoD is still saddled with an acquisition system geared more toward missiles than state-of-the-art IT equipment. The department says that could all [...]