Renee Wynn, chief information officer of NASA, said agencies should work with the Office of Management and Budget to come up with policies with regard to mobile communications, FedScoop reported Tuesday.

“OMB is already beginning to think about what policies need to change in order to enable this because otherwise CIOs like myself are going to have to make risk-based decisions that are outside some of the policy frameworks because they don’t match up,” Wynn said Tuesday at an Advanced Technology Academic Research Center event.

She mentioned the Trusted Internet Connections 3.0 guidance and provided updates on the space agency’s mobile priorities including acquisition and mobile security.

A group of cybersecurity experts formed a nonprofit organization to protect U.S. presidential campaigns from foreign interference. U.S. CyberDome will offer cybersecurity services to campaigns for the 2020 presidential elections, the organization said Tuesday.

Jeh Johnson, former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, chairs CyberDome’s board of advisers. Advisers include James Clapper, former director of national intelligence and a two-time Wash100 Award winner; Michael Morell, former CIA director; Michael Chertoff, former DHS secretary; and Francis Taylor, former undersecretary for intelligence and analysis at DHS.

“All candidates should have the freedom to speak their minds, without fear of retaliation or meddling by a foreign adversary,” said Joseph Drissel, founder of U.S. CyberDome. “We are providing the best protection from the best cyber minds in the country so they can do just that.”

The Internal Revenue Service will soon post a solicitation on Pilot IRS, a procurement vehicle that will be an avenue for the IRS to access technology which will improve its processes, Nextgov reported Monday. Scheduled to be issued in August, the program’s first solicitation will be regarding the automation of contract-related financial updates.

The three goals of Pilot IRS are to upgrade the data of the IRS, to put a ceiling on the work performed by government employees on data improvement projects and to be able to enhance IRS’ data in the near future, optimistically by the end of September.

“The quality of the data is inconsistent because different contracting activities use different approaches, use different systems and, frankly, as we in the IRS have experienced firsthand, the bulk of the obligations come in the fourth quarter and in September,” said Harrison Smith, deputy chief procurement officer at the IRS.

Procurement through Pilot IRS will have four phases. Projects, which require approval at the end of each stage, will cycle through a $25K proof-of-concept phase, a $75K prototyping phase, a limited deployment phase, and a $3M scaled deployment phase. The IRS intends to issue awards for the first phase by the end of fiscal year 2019. Interested parties may submit their questions until Aug. 9.

The Air Force Research Laboratory has collaborated with academic and corporate institutions to study polymides, a type of heat-resistant material used in the spacecraft and spacecraft component production, in order to enhance the defenses and operational capabilities of current and future space vessels. When Kapton, a polymide film, is exposed to space-like radiation, only certain, but not all, chemical bonds are changed through a process called irradiation, according to a U.S. Air Force statement published Monday.

Afterwards, when the polymide has been given time to ‘recover,’ the investigation team, through a modeling method that emulated real-world conditions, discovered that Kapton “forms a new material with the pieces left behind after the damage.” For their modeling system, the team used Reactive Force Field molecular dynamics, also known as Reaxff.

By using this model, scientists can investigate different chemical bonds and potentially learn how to develop better radiation-hardened materials. The partnership included the AFRL, Assurance Technology Corporation, Johns Hopkins University, Pennsylvania State University and Hunter College of the City University of New York.

Angela Bailey, chief human capital officer of the Department of Homeland Security, said during a Senate hearing that the agency intends to clarify its hiring regulations by spring 2020, Fedscoop reported Wednesday.

Bailey told the Regulatory Affairs and Federal Management Subcommittee that DHS is working with experts to identify the technical and leadership skills it needs and will invest up to $40K for training following the establishment of the DHS Cyber Talent Management System. She added that DHS will use the system to assess returning personnel’s private sector experience in order to clarify payment matters.

“We need to look at ways to make hiring or rehiring federal staff more flexible, so long as the agency has thought about the policies that they need to do it,” noted Yvonne Jones, director of the Government Accountability Office’s strategic issues team.

The Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories is developing an artificial neural network that uses dragonflies’ hunting capacity as a basis for enabling missiles to intercept targets such as hypersonic platforms, C4ISRnet reported Tuesday.

Sandia’s Frances Chance is leading the yearlong effort to develop and test algorithms based on dragonflies’ cognitive functions, which include the ability to react to maneuvers within 50 milliseconds. If successful, findings from the project which will be passed on to scientists for weapons development.

“The challenge then is: Is there anything that we can learn from how dragonflies do this that we can then bring to the next generation of missiles, or maybe even the next-next generation of missiles?” she said. The project is funded by Sandia’s Autonomy for Hypersonics Mission Campaign and is slated to conclude in September.

The General Services Administration has found that most contractors agree that the agency’s proposed consolidation of multiple award schedules has a clear format and will benefit industry. In November 2018, GSA announced that its plans to unify 24 contract vehicles into a single government-wide vehicle to simplify agencies’ procurement procedures.

The agency issued two requests for information on the initiative in June and received 586 responses on the RFI on the MAS vehicle’s format. GSA received 480 responses to its RFI on the vehicle’s categories and special item numbers and found that 84 percent of current contractors agree on the clarity of the vehicle’s category, subcategory and SIN mapping reforms. GSA expects to issue the final MAS solicitation on Oct. 1.