Suzette Kent, federal chief information officer and a 2020 Wash100 Award recipient, said her office plans to work with Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and other lawmakers in Congress to address information technology modernization-related challenges facing federal agencies, Federal News Network reported Monday.

Hassan, ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs’ federal spending oversight and emergency management subcommittee, sent letters to 10 federal agencies in early June to respond by Aug. 3 to six questions related to their IT modernization efforts.

Kent shared her insights on agencies’ application rationalization plans and noted that her office plans to work with those agencies on their responses to the lawmaker’s letter.

“What the letters and the budget discussions will help us do is draw a more direct parallel between the business objective of the agency and how we fund those, and what the right vehicles are,” she said. “Particularly, the things that require multi-year commitment because some of the questions to the agencies focus on systems that were older or more comprehensive and those things don’t happen in a single year. That will let us have some healthy dialogue there as well as let agencies share their perspective around how they have prioritized what their modernization looks like, and that’s a dialogue that is very important agency by agency.”

Kent said Hassan’s letter provides the Office of Management and Budget another opportunity to talk about how to sustain transformation efforts of agencies.

“There are things that we continue the dialogue around, like supporting agency requests for working capital funds, or when the budgets come in with specific modernization goals around projects or shared services, and understanding that these are not one and done projects. There needs to be an ongoing commitment to make real change,” she added.

A section in the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act requiring government contractors to remove Chinese-made technologies from their networks is now slated to take effect in August 2020 and the Department of Defense (DoD) is considering delaying by a year full compliance with that provision, FedScoop reported Monday.

“DoD fully supports the intent of Section 889, but the Department is hearing that, in light of the COVID impacts and disruptions to the industrial base including small businesses, there may be reasons to extend by one year the implementation of the rule,” Lt. Col. Mike Andrews, a spokesman for DoD, told the publication. “While necessary to accomplish, the requirements of 889 will require significant investment and may benefit from use of a risk based approach to achieve effective implementation.”

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has yet to issue guidance for contractors to comply with the NDAA provision.

The Department of Commerce (DOC) has issued a new rule that seeks to encourage U.S. companies to increase their participation in the development of international standards for new technologies in the telecommunications sector.

“The United States will not cede leadership in global innovation. This action recognizes the importance of harnessing American ingenuity to advance and protect our economic and national security,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement published Monday.

“The Department is committed to protecting U.S. national security and foreign policy interests by encouraging U.S. industry to fully engage and advocate for U.S. technologies to become international standards,” Ross added. TechCrunch reported the new rule will allow U.S. companies to work with Huawei on establishing standards for 5G technology.

The new policy will apply "in legitimate standards development contexts only, and not for commercial purposes” and “is meant to ensure Huawei’s placement on the Entity List in May 2019 does not prevent American companies from contributing to important standards-developing activities despite Huawei’s pervasive participation in standards-development organizations.” The department’s bureau of industry and security put Huawei and its affiliates to the Entity List last year due to national security risks.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched an effort to better protect warfighters from infectious microbes that are resistant to antibiotics. DARPA said Friday that its Harnessing Enzymatic Activity for Lifesaving Remedies or HEALR program seeks to design and deliver medical countermeasures to treat microbial infections that stem from multi-drug resistant organisms.

HEALR will leverage cellular science to further understand how to address and neutralize MDR microbes. The agency plans to post a broad agency announcement soon on the beta.SAM.gov website.

“HEALR presents the opportunity to identify drugs that are safer, more effective and better address drug resistance and bacterial infections than existing therapeutic modalities,” said Seth Cohen, who manages the HEALR program.

Rajeev Dolas, acting director of the office of organizational policy and governance at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), said employees are using attended bots on their laptops as part of USPTO’s robotic process automation effort, Federal News Network reported Friday.

He said during a panel discussion at an Advanced Technology Academic Research Center virtual conference the agency plans to integrate “intelligence behind automation” and put the bots running on staff’s devices to a “centralized” platform.

“Eventually, we want to take them off of the users’ computers, and take them and put them in a centralized area where we can properly govern the execution of these bots,” Dolas said. “We want to make sure that there’s appropriate logging and authentication mechanisms put in place, as well as governance for ensuring that the bots are not running amok and doing things they should not be doing."

The U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) plans to deploy an analytics-based “operator” that will bring sensors, communications and internet of things (IoT) capabilities to the tactical edge, C4ISRnet reported Saturday.

James Smith, acquisition executive at USSOCOM, said at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference last month that the Hyper Enabled Operator technology is meant to analyze, synthesize and communicate information in the battlespace in near-real time.

USSOCOM is seeking commercial-off-the-shelf technologies to support the Hyper Enabled Operator, which also covers elements such as compute kits, software-defined architecture, human-machine interfaces and beyond-line-of-sight communications.

“What we’re trying to do is not necessarily increase physical performance, but it is in that cognitive domain,” said Col. Ryan Barnes, who leads the command’s Joint Acquisitions Task Force for the new program. 

“We’re looking to put the [IoT] and data analytics on an operator at the edge so he can make more informed decisions faster. And we are looking to do that in the classic partner nations for internal defense, unconventional warfare scenarios."

USSOCOM is also looking to partner with industry for its related “Automate the Analyst” effort under the SOFWERX innovation arm this month, according to Smith.