The Department of Health and Human Services announced yesterday the availability of up to $1 million in grants per state to help states and other stakeholders begin health insurance exchanges. The grants were mandated by the Affordable Care Act and were given in hopes to strengthen the healthcare marketplace.
According to HHS, health insurance exchanges, starting [...]

Department of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced he has asked the FBI to help Pentagon authorities investigate the leak of the classified documents published by WikiLeaks.
During a Pentagon briefing yesterday, Gates and Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, condemned WikiLeaks’ release of 90,000 classified battlefiend reports. [...]

As OMB Director Peter Orszag steps down today, it has been announced Jeffrey Zients will assume his post until the new director is confirmed.
Zients is currently OMB’s deputy director for management and the first federal chief performance officer. His post will be taken over by Rob Nabors, who is returning to OMB from his current [...]

Following a Government Accountability Office investigation that uncovered weaknesses in the State Department’s ability to detect fraudulent passport application, legislators introduced the Passport Identity Verification Act yesterday during a Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security hearing.
Subcommittee Chairman Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) introduced the legislation [...]

Federal agencies are becoming more transparent by releasing more documents, making more information available online, and reducing backlogs of pending FOIA requests, according to a report by the Department of Justice’s Office of Information Policy
This spring marked the first time agencies submitted to the Department of Justice Chief FOIA Officer Reports [...]

The Independent Panel’s Assessment of the Quadrennial Defense Review submitted a report yesterday that outlined recommendations for several changes in the Department of Defense’s future strategies and priorities.
Former Defense Secretary William J. Perry and former National Security Advisor Stephen J. Hadley handed the report over to House Armed Services Committee after the panel found that [...]

Director of Federal Bureau of Investigation Robert S. Mueller appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee at the “Oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation” hearing yesterday to highlight some of the agency’s accomplishments in responding to threats to the United States within the past year.
In his testimony, Mueller cited numerous national cases in terrorism, threats [...]

The Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday launched a new, easy-to-use Consumer Help Center that will provide consumers with the latest information from the commission.
The new website will allow consumers to learn about different issues in telecommunications, make it easy for consumers to find out what’s going on at the FCC, get tips for making the [...]

In testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security yesterday, FBI’s Assistant Director Gordon M. Snow spoke about how threats in cyberspace–from social-engineering scams to data mining–are pervasive dangers threatening national security and Americans in their everyday lives.
Snow highlighted how modern-day con artists operate on the Internet, moving their scams to [...]

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued today its final regulations of the rules for the Pre-Existing Conditions Insurance Plan, a temporary plan designed to cover uninsured Americans with pre-existing conditions until 2014.
The regulation describes the options for determining who has a pre-existing condition, how to verify citizenship, how an individual can appeal [...]