China has agreed to structural changes across technology transfer, intellectual property, financial services, foreign exchange and currency and agriculture areas under a phase one trade agreement with the U.S. government.

The White House said Friday that the U.S. government has agreed to change its Section 301 tariffs under the deal, which could benefit U.S. manufacturers, farmers, service providers and inventors.

China committed to making significant purchases of U.S. agricultural products, manufacturing goods, energy products and services. The trade deal also includes the implementation of a new dispute resolution system to help ensure effective enforcement.

The Strategic Capabilities Office and the 30th Space Wing demonstrated a prototype ground-launched ballistic missile during a flight test at the Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Efforts under the flight test are intended to help the Department of Defense gather data for the development of potential technologies, Vandenberg AFB said Thursday.

A team comprised of industry and government personnel worked for nine months in preparation for the flight test.

“The men and women of Vandenberg work diligently to execute launches efficiently, and we remain committed to providing robust support to our mission partners,” said Col. Bob Reeves, vice commander for the 30th Space Wing.

The U.S. Navy also conducted a separate flight demonstration for a ground-launched cruise missile in August at San Nicolas Island, Calif.

The Department of Veterans Affairs’ office for customer service improvement plans to launch a Customer Experience Institute that will work to oversee interagency collaborations on CX efforts, Fedscoop reported Thursday.

The VA’s Veterans Experience Office, established in 2015, was designated as a leader for the Trump administration’s customer experience improvement initiative under the President’s Management Agenda in 2018. The new institute will work to sustain and formalize all CX-related activities across the federal government.

“We have credibility in this space because we’ve actually been able to build and mature customer experience capabilities,” said Barbara Morton, deputy chief of the VEO. According to Morton, the government also needs to consider experience metrics in addition to operational metrics when evaluating programs.

“In government, we have an important opportunity to expand the way we think about measures of success,” she said.

An office within the White House has updated a strategy on Earth observation data with efforts to better collaborate with industry and other sectors, Space News reported Wednesday.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy’s National Science and Technology Council released the National Plan for Civil Earth Observations on Monday.

Lawrence Friedl, a NASA program director who co-chairs the U.S. interagency Group on Earth Observations, said the plan includes work from industry, government, academia and nonprofits.

“We really want to emphasize this is a national Earth-observation plan, not a federal Earth-observation plan,” he said Monday at a meeting with the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

The plan also considers trends and technologies that have changed the Earth observation practice since 2014.