Lisa Porter, deputy undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, has said that the Department of Defense is aiming to implement a “zero-trust architecture” to fortify network security. DoD said Tuesday that zero-trust environments use microsegmentation to divide networks into individual zones that require special access.

Porter told attendees at a Center for Strategic and International Studies event in Washington, D.C. that DoD users should act as though networks have already been compromised by external and internal threats.

“I think we’ve been lulling ourselves into a false sense of security by thinking we can build perfectly secure enclaves,” she said. “There is no such thing as a secure system. So we have to deal with that reality whether we are doing cyber, whether we are doing supply chain, whether we are doing 5G.”

According to Porter, the Pentagon is “really trying to advocate” for the zero-trust concept and intends to work on research and engineering efforts related to the subject.

The Senate Appropriations’ commerce, justice and science subcommittee passed a spending bill that would authorize $22.75 billion in fiscal year 2020 funds for NASA, SpaceNews reported Tuesday.

The proposed measure reflects a $1.25 billion increase from the space agency’s FY 2019 funding and allocates $2.6 billion in funds for the Space Launch System, $1.4 billion for the Orion spacecraft and $1.1B for the space technology program.

The bill would earmark $6.9 billion for the agency’s science programs, including $445.7 million for the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope and $161 million for the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud and Ocean Ecosystem spacecraft. The Senate Appropriations Committee is set to decide on the measure on Thursday, Sept. 26.

A bipartisan group of House lawmakers on Tuesday introduced legislation that seeks to protect the U.S. telecommunication supply chain from foreign interference.

The Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act would prohibit any organization from using federal funds to procure communications products or services that  might pose a national security threat to domestic networks,  the House Energy and Commerce Committee said Tuesday.

The bill also calls for the Federal Communications Commission to create a reimbursement program meant to help smaller communications firms remove and replace banned equipment or services from networks.

Reps. Frank Pallone, D-N.J.; Doris Matsui, D-Calif.; Greg Walden, R-Ore.; and Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., are the bill’s sponsors.

“Our telecommunications companies rely heavily on equipment manufactured and provided by foreign companies that, in some cases, as with companies such as Huawei and its affiliates, can pose a significant threat to America’s commercial and security interests,” the four lawmakers said in a joint statement.

The panel’s communications and technology subcommittee is scheduled Friday to discuss the bill at a meeting about supply chain security and spectrum matters.

A U.S. Digital Service tool works to help contracting officers and specialists determine an organization’s readiness level in undergoing acquisitions as part of their digital transformation efforts, FCW reported Tuesday.

Florence Kasule, a digital services procurement expert at USDS, said the Digital Service Maturity Determination platform is designed to assess a workplace’s focus on end users, culture of delivery and transparency and seeks to help contracting professionals better understand the team they will work with. 

“Does that team track and measure feedback openly and honestly, are there intensive and frequent communications with the customer and/or end users of the system? So, when you go through [an] attribute, you’re trying to assess whether that group has all of those practices adopted into the organizational culture or not,” Kasule said at an event.

The tool is used to score organizations across nine attributes, including transparency and openness, craftsmanship, Agile development championship, user-centered design, acquisition and continuous integration. Workplaces are categorized as novice, intermediate and expert based on their scores in those attributes.

The General Services Administration and the Consumer Product Safety Commission have begun their information technology modernization partnership through the Centers of Excellence program, FedScoop reported Tuesday.

“We’re working with the GSA COE on the development of an enterprise data strategy and implementation plan to support ongoing work to support of the CPSC’s commitment to evidence-based decision making and the importance of data and analytics in agency operations,” a spokesperson for CPSC told the publication.

Anil Cheriyan, director of GSA’s Technology Transformation Service, mentioned the CoE-CPSC partnership at the White House AI summit. He also cited that the CoE team is in “active discussions” with the Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.