The General Services Administration (GSA) will waive certain requirements for vendors under the Multiple Award Schedule (MAs) program to expand the availability of products and services in support of the U.S. government’s COVID-19 pandemic response efforts.

GSA issued a letter stating that it will not require contractors to meet three specific MAS requirements: a minimum of two years of corporate experience, submission of annual financial statements for the previous two years, and one relevant project experience per special item number, the agency said Thursday.

“This is a great opportunity for companies, including start-up companies,” said Jeff Koses, senior procurement officer at GSA’s office of acquisition policy. “The letter applies to both companies not yet doing business with GSA, as well as existing MAS contractors who are able to provide products and services that directly support COVID-19 efforts.” 

The temporary waiver is “effective immediately and will remain in effect until rescinded,” the letter reads.

Check out GovConWire's Innovation and Modernization in Federal Acquisitions Forum coming up on Thursday, April 15th. Visit GovConWire Events to learn more and register for Thursday's event. 

While the federal acquisition systems continue to evolve to meet the demands of the market, challenges still remain. Join GovConWire’s Modernizing Federal Acquisition Forum to hear notable industry and federal leaders discuss the new modernization priorities, innovative solutions and future plans for acquisition.  

The Department of Justice's (DOJ) Security Operations Center (JSOC) has passed an assessment conducted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

DHS said Thursday that its Cybersecurity Service Provider delivered the assessment with staff from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The assessment screened the Justice SOC across multiple assessment areas, such as threat response, malware security, vulnerability management and threat intelligence analytics.

JSOC exceeded standards in 35 of 40 assessment areas, and is now certified as a CSP Center of Excellence. The assessment also marks DHS CSP's first evaluation of a non-DHS federal component.

“The success of the DHS CSP program and the partnership between DHS and DOJ has shown that despite very different missions and compositions, DHS and other federal agencies can collaborate from a mature and common framework to effectively enhance our national cybersecurity posture,” said Kenneth Bible, the chief information security officer at DHS.

JSOC offers security operations services to help agencies respond to cyber incidents, gather threat intelligence and monitor networks.

The Department of Defense (DoD) has entered into an agreement with six allied counterparts to conduct research into the environmental conditions of the Earth’s polar regions, C4ISRnet reported Sunday. 

The DOD will work with the governments of New Zealand, Canada, Finland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden to study the Arctic and the regions south of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans as part of the International Cooperative Engagement Program for Polar Research (ICE-PPR) program.

ICE-PPR comes as part of the U.S. Navy’s efforts to survey the Arctic landscape to potentially gain an advantage over Russia and China.

The memorandum of understanding, signed in November, tasks the group to conduct environmental observations and modeling as part of initial research activities. The group will also facilitate exchanges and study underwater phenomena as well as human factors as part of ICE-PPR.

“ICE-PPR is unique from NATO working groups and other activities in that the goal is for project work, not just information exchanges,” noted John Woods, deputy director of the Office of Naval Research Global's International Engagement Office.

The agreement will expire in 25 years.

The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) wants to make every non-secret government document digitally available via the govinfo website and the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications. GPO said it will gather these documents from the National Collection of U.S. Government Public Information.

“GPO’s pledge to make every U.S. Government document publicly accessibly is another way GPO is keeping America informed and is an important pillar supporting our democracy,” said Hugh Nathanial Halpern, director of GPO.

The office said it will identify, gather, digitize, authenticate and catalog these publications for public access. The govinfo website is a digital repository compliant with the International Organization for Standardization.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) plans to use the Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) contract for storage, edge computing and other areas and Jack Gumtow, chief information officer of DIA, said storage-as-a-service is one of the capabilities he intends to focus on once C2E becomes ready, Federal News Network reported Friday.

“If a program needs, for example, 100 gigs worth of data, but in reality they only use 10, and we’ve allocated 100, I’ve got 90 gigs that are just spinning and is never used. So we’re buying that much storage when I only need a percentage of that storage. I think storage-as-a-service will help change some of that,” Gumtow said.

DIA also plans to use the follow-on to the Commercial Cloud Services contract to bring cloud to the edge and one of those efforts is the modernization of a classified environment for the intelligence community called the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System.

“We’re going to completely modernize that with three levels of effort. The first LoE is a technical refresh because it’s dated and a lot of the equipment is at the end of life. The second one is enhancing security. The third one is the modernization piece,” he said of JWICS modernization.

In November, the CIA awarded the C2E contract to Amazon Web Services, IBM, Microsoft, Google and Oracle.

Gumtow was one of the panelists during the Potomac Officers Club’s 2nd Annual CIO Forum. If you missed the virtual event, you can still access the On-Demand footage by visiting the Potomac Officers Club Event Archive.

Maj. Gen. Sean Gainey, director of the U.S. Army’s Joint Counter-Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems Office (JCO), said the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office and the U.S. Air Force will host a demonstration of counter-sUAS platforms in April at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.

JCO will downselect a low-collateral effects interceptor that could be purchased by all services through a contract, National Defense reported Monday. JCO plans to pick an initial capability by fiscal year 2022 for procurement and deployment.

“Ultimately, our goal is to align existing and future counter-UAS solutions to best address warfighter needs while applying more resources effectively,” Gainey said. “We don’t see the counter-UAS problem set as one enduring solution, we see it as a range of capabilities integrated into a common … [command-and-control system] that gives you the ability to address threats across the range of threats out there, and have the ability to keep up with the pace of” evolving challenges.

He added that his office is testing directed energy capabilities against unmanned platforms.

“We have high-energy lasers that have proven successful in the contingency environment,” Gainey noted. “We’re building off of that capability to where you will see high-energy lasers integrated into our architecture — some of them are integrated now — and it is a matter of scaling it up to the ultimate scale that we want.”

In January, the Department of Defense (DoD) unveiled a strategy to establish a framework for addressing and countering small UAS. Ready the Force, Defend the Force and Build the Team are the DoD Counter-sUAS Strategy’s three lines of effort.