Commerce Secretary Gary Locke announced this week new board members for the department’s Innovation Advisory Board. The new advisory group, established by the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, will help guide policy on job creation and global competitiveness, the department said. The COMPETE act, signed by President Barack Obama in January, also boosted funding [...]

TechStat accountability sessions have been hailed in federal IT circles as a way to cut back on wasteful spending. The face-to-face meetings, which bring together all levels of stakeholders to make decisions on overbudget and behind-schedule projects rely on data captured by the IT Dashboard. But that particular tool is getting a more skeptical assessment. [...]

In the wake of Amazon’s high-profile cloud outage — and doomsayers predicting catastrophe for federal cloud-computing efforts — a number of agency chief information and technology officers sat down to discuss cloud concerns. At a May 4 TechAmerica federal technology symposium, agency IT officials said security remains at the top of their list of concerns. [...]

The Defense Department’s acquisition czar Ashton Carter released guidance last week on an internal management tool that aims to better estimate the costs of major weapons programs. In the memo, obtained by Federal News Radio, Carter explains the “will-cost” vs. “should-cost” distinction — which was first laid out as an internal management tool in September [...]

The alternate engine for the Joint Strike Fighter — hailed by proponents as an example of life-cycle competition and assailed by critics as pork-barrel spending — may be down. But don’t count it out just yet. The House and the Senate unceremoniously pulled funding for the extra engine in February and the Defense Department officially [...]

Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra’s plan to shutter some 800 data centers over the next three years — 137 of them by the end of this year, alone — was proof positive that the administration’s tough talk on consolidating wasteful federal IT spending was coming to fruition. The administration’s rhetoric overall has emphasized cutting [...]

Along with public elation and relief, the killing of Osama bin Laden by an elite squad of Navy SEALs bolstered by years of painstaking geospatial and human intelligence offered an antidote to a pessimistic portrait of U.S. intelligence gathering. The news was greeted as proof that information-sharing between intelligence and military forces is no longer [...]

Defense spending is on steroids, while funding for diplomacy and statecraft is on life support, Undersecretary of Defense for policy Michele Flournoy said last week at a Johns Hopkins University seminar. In a speech that also focused on the rise of global Asian power and its effect on U.S. national security, Flournoy called for a [...]

In a letter to CIA employees posted on the agency’s website yesterday, Director Panetta, who is soon to depart for the top job at the Defense Department, hailed the work of the U.S. intelligence community in the operation undertaken by U.S Special Forces and undergirded by intelligence operators to take out Osama bin Laden. “Today, [...]

As part of efforts to shutter the U.S. Joint Forces Command, the Defense Department announced it is reassigning several “critical’ JFCOM organizations and functions to other branches and commands, according to a DoD press release. Those JFCOM functions and organizations deemed critical have been reassigned to other combatant commands, services and the Joint Staff. For [...]