The Defense Department is launching an effort to build a map of the defense contracting industry sector-by-sector and tier-by-tier, a top Pentagon official told lawmakers Tuesday. Brett Lambert, deputy assistant secretary for manufacturing and industrial base policy, told a House Armed Services subcommittee that the Pentagon wants to go beyond just understanding its top-tier prime contractors. [...]

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told lawmakers during a classified briefing he expects around half of the $450 billion in cuts to defense spending over the next 10 years to come from weapons programs, according to a report from Reuters. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) told reporters Panetta expressed his concerns over possibly cutting [...]

Office of Federal Procurement Policy Administrator Dan Gordon will step down from the post he’s held since September 2009 to take up a position at the George Washington University Law School, the White House announced Tuesday. Gordon will become associate dean for government contracts law at GWU’s law school. Office of Management and Budget Director [...]

Two public officials were honored Tuesday night for their contributions to the government contracting sector at the Greater Washington Government Contractor Awards, presented by the Fairfax County Chamber of Commerce, the Professional Services Council and Washington Technology. Dan Gordon, administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, and Michelle Foster, deputy director of the Tactical [...]

A recent DARPA tech challenge to put a shredded document back together may make people opt for burning them instead. The DARPA Shredder Challenge requires to reconstruct shredded documents and answer a puzzle embedded in the context of the rebuilt document. The puzzles were unveiled Oct. 27 and participants have until Dec. 4 to reconstruct and decipher [...]

Which federal agency is to move to the cloud next? It looks as though the Interior Department has requested help, due by Nov. 14, in its attempt to take email and collaboration services into the cloud. This cloud would support some 88,000 users across all DOI bureaus and offices, GCN reports. Officials of DOI have [...]

The Department of Homeland Security is working to use Twitter as an intelligence tool and is currently developing guidelines for monitoring social media networks, according to a Politico report. DHS Undersecretary Caryn Wagner recently said the department is currently establishing guidelines to use social networking websites for law enforcement purposes, while keeping in mind current [...]

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently released its final standards for creating more measurements of race, ethnicity, sex, disability status and primary language in order to pinpoint and treat health status disparities. The standards were made effective Monday. The standards were redefined as a result of the Affordable Care Act, and will better identify [...]

The Health Information Technology Policy Committee has said regulations differentiating which data constitutes research and which constitutes operations on the issue of electronic health records will need clarification, FiercegovernmentIT.com reports. In a letter to National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Farzad Mostashari, the committee recalled a notice of proposed rulemaking for secondary uses of EHR [...]

NASA has formed a partnership with economic development agency Space Florida to continue using the Kennedy Space Center’s Orbiter Processing Facility-3 and Processing Control Center, formerly used for the space shuttle program. Space Florida has an agreement to for use of the facility with Boeing and together they will manufacture and test Boeing’s Crew Space Transportation [...]