GSA Administrator Martha Johnson testified before the House Appropriations Subcommittee yesterday to request $675 million for fiscal ’11, an $80 million increase from last year.  Administrator Johnson said that the funding increase was necessary to implement the Obama Administration’s priorities, including improvements to federal contracting via increases to the federal acquisition workforce. Requested outlays in [...]

Last week, we looked at the new definition of “Inherently Governmental” that OFPP plans to adopt on May 31.  The question is: how long will it take DCMA to implement it? The Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) is the agency responsible for management and oversight of government contracts, so it’s most likely the agency that [...]

According to a recent blog post on DoDLive, Admiral Mike Mullen “fully supports” the findings of the Nuclear Posture Review. He writes, “We believe it provides us and our field commanders the opportunity to better shape our nuclear weapons posture, policies, and force structure to meet an ever-changing security environment. We appreciated the opportunity to [...]

In an OMB memo released Tuesday, Federal Chief Performance Officer Jeffrey Zients mandated several improvements to USASpending.gov in accordance with a GAO report released March 12th.  The memo reads, “transparency is a cornerstone of an open government. This Administration is committed to making federal expenditures of taxpayer dollars transparent to the public by providing readily [...]

On the Blog @ Homeland Security, DHS unveiled its Open Government Plan in accordance with the White House’s Open Government Initiative.  The department says its Open Government Plan doesn’t simply “check a box or fulfill a requirement, but that would chart a clear course forward as we mature the department and work with our stakeholders [...]

Writing on the FCC’s broadband blog “blogband.gov,” FCC General Counsel Austin Schlick writes that “important facts are being lost in the discussion” of the U.S. Court of Appeals for DC’s unanimous ruling against the FCC’s sanction of Comcast for denying bandwidth to BitTorrent users in 2007  (Comcast Corp. v. FCC). He writes, “The Comcast/BitTorrent case [...]

A federal appeals court ruled unanimously today that the Federal Communications  Commission (FCC) does not have the authority to require broadband providers to treat all Internet traffic moving through their networks equally. The three-judge panel of the DC Court of Appeals ruling is a major blow to the FCC’s National Broadband plan, and is big [...]

Yesterday, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Director Alejandro Mayorkas announced three initiatives designed to strengthen the efficiency and accuracy of the E-Verify system. These new programs include an agreement with the Department of Justice (DOJ) to streamline legal proceedings for E-Verify misuse and discrimination, a [...]

Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani has a reputation as one of the deadliest Taliban commanders in Afghanistan, and according to Lt. Gen. Michael L. Oates, he is “living up to his reputation.” He’s responsible for at least one assassination attempt against Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President, and the deadly Camp  Chapman Attack on December 30, 2009, the [...]

In successfully uncovering the source of a recent salmonella outbreak, investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used a new tool — the shopper cards that millions of Americans swipe for discounts when they buy groceries. “It was really exciting. It was a break in the investigation for sure,” according to CDC [...]