Members of Congress have reached a consensus to allot $425M for the Election Assistance Commission’s implementation efforts across states, FCW reported Monday. The funds would help states update election infrastructure, systems and other assets such as security.

The agreement allows states to use the funds for updates that would improve the management of federal elections. These purchases would include updates in election security and technology.

Lawrence Norden, deputy director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s election reform program, said states must consider the importance of security in using the funds, amid cyber threats that surround elections.

The funding approval follows the Senate’s allotment of $250 million earlier this year for election security.

Lt. Gen. Eric Smith, deputy commandant for combat development and integration at the U.S. Marine Corps, said the naval integration between the Navy and the Marines is shaping how program managers decide on procurements, including the acquisition of an unmanned aerial system called the Marine Air-Ground Task Force UAS Expeditionary, USNI News reported Monday.

“We have to do this together. …  We’re talking about, while the Navy is working the Future Vertical Lift and that is kind of foremost in their priority group right now, is we start moving toward MUX – what it is, what it’s not, what it has to do – and mostly it’s [electronic warfare],” Smith said. “One of the requirements is, it has to fit on a hangar on a destroyer, so before we make big decisions, we have to confer with the Navy to make sure we don’t go down a dead end where the Navy says, look, two years ago you took this right turn, I can’t go with you anymore, if only you had asked.”

MUX is a large Group 5 UAS meant to help the Marine Corps close a gap in its sea-based aviation capability. The drone would have tiltrotors and helicopters for lift and as well as the F-35B Joint Strike Fighter jet for data collection and strike missions.

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has partnered with the building equipment industry to study alternative refrigerants and methods to increase energy efficiency of heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems.

ORNL said Thursday it will work with Taylor Commercial Foodservice, Emerson Climate Technologies, Enginuity Power Systems, Baltimore Aircoil Company and the National Automatic Merchandising Association through separate collaborative research-and-development agreements.

The projects will include the development of climate-friendly refrigerants for food processing, assessment of potential hazards and the advancement of a heat exchanger technology.

“These collaborations are just the beginning of what we anticipate being a record number of industry partnerships over the next year to develop breakthroughs for energy-efficient buildings and a more secure, resilient power grid,” said Moe Khaleel, associate laboratory director for energy and environmental sciences at ORNL.

A Battelle and University of Tennessee joint venture operates the lab for DOE.

The department’s building technologies office aims to cut average energy consumption rates in all buildings nationwide by 30 percent in 2030, ORNL noted.

The U.S. Census Bureau awarded prize money worth $20K to each of the five selected teams that presented data projects meant to optimize the population count in 2020, Federal News Network reported Monday.

One of the selected projects as part of the Census Opportunity Project came from a team from business management consultancy firm MotivF, which showed efforts to improve trust in the 2020 census among hard-to-count communities.

Census Accelerate is another program that gathered community partners, influencers, copywriters and designers to come up with posters, memes and other materials to spread information about the 2020 count.

“The community partners really need content. A lot of them tell us that while they’re doing a lot of really important boots-on-the-ground efforts, they don’t have much capacity to get creative or to develop digital content,” said Mara Abrams, director of the Census Open Innovation Labs.

Maj. Gen. Thomas Murphy, director of Protecting Critical Technology Task Force at the Department of Defense, told Breaking Defense in an interview published Monday about the task force’s efforts to come up with policies to implement security controls meant to protect technologies.

“It’s not my decision to say, ‘you can’t do business,’” Murphy said. “We’re trying to make policy changes. We’re trying to elevate the importance of security in the requirements and acquisitions processes. That’s what this is about.”

“Depending on the criticality of that output, whatever it is you’re buying, I don’t want to go so fast that we sacrifice security,” he said.

Murphy also talked about plans to implement new rules, such as vetting researchers getting DoD funding for “problematic foreign connections” and evaluating companies bidding for Pentagon contracts for security.