A group of business and industry organizations is asking Congress to bolster federal agencies’ access to “competitive sourcing,” according to a Federal Computer Week report. The Business Coalition for Fair Competition, which encompasses 31 organizations, sent a letter to the House Appropriations Committee, urging it to pass spending bills that are “free of damaging language [...]
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen said the House Armed Services Committee today he endorses President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan troop withdrawal plan, even though he initially wanted a less accelerated timetable. In a primetime address last night, Obama announced that 33,000 U.S. troops, about the same number of troops committed there [...]
Following the unanimous vote in the Senate yesterday to approve CIA Director Leon Panetta as the next defense secretary, the Pentagon is preparing for the top transition as Robert Gates retires at the end of the month. DoD has launched a transition team headed by Marcel Lettre, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for legislative [...]
Legacy n. (leg-uh-see) — anything handed down from the past, as from an ancestor or predecessor The surprising news last week that Vivek Kundra, the nation’s first federal chief information officer, would step down at the end of the summer for a Harvard fellowship now has federal IT watchers mulling the tech pioneer’s legacy. [...]
The House Oversight Committee has unanimously approved a bill that would streamline information about federal spending — including contracts, loans, grants and agencies’ internal spending. Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) introduced last week the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, which would provide a single, electronic platform to track federal spending to be based on [...]
As top defense-industry officials gather for the biennial exposition of top military and aerospace weaponry and technology that is the Paris Air Show, they may come home with a more optimistic message than the doom and gloom of budget cutting and deficits. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, both industry and government [...]
The proliferation of smartphones and technological innovations such as cloud computing could point to a new era for geospatial intelligence, according to a recent Defense Systems report. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is sounding out the new tech tools to more easily put high-value geospatial imagery into the hands of warfighters. “We’re entering a new phase [...]
Defense authorizations approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee last week would impose a spending freeze for the department’s service contracts, amounting to a total of $1.1 billion in cuts. But Government Executive reports it might not translate across-the-board hiring or pay freezes. Instead, different programs will feel different impacts, Gov Exec reports, citing industry [...]
After being introduced in the House last week, a streamlined approach to collect information on federal spending and post it online is now getting a debut in the Senate. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) introduced legislation Friday, which mirrors a bill introduced earlier in the week by Darrell Issa‘s (R-Calif.), creating a single, online storing-house for [...]
For the Health and Human Services Department’s digital-health-records czar, Farzad Mostashari, innovation is the name of the game. Mostashari, who was elevated to the top health IT position in the spring, spoke with GovernmentHealthIT.com as part of the Government Health IT Conference last week. “Electronic health records are creating more and more electronic information and [...]