Dimitra Stratis-Cullum, biomaterials team leader at the Army Research Laboratory, said at a Defense One event in Washington, D.C. that the Army is studying synthetic biology capabilities for camouflage applications, Defense One reported Monday.

“We want our soldiers to be able to move and not be detected on the battlefield. We don’t want their infrared signature to be detected. There’s a whole host of signatures that we worry about that could allow them to be targeted,” Stratis-Cullum noted.

T’Jae Gibson Ellis, the Army’s spokesperson, added that synthetic biology is one of ARL’s top research priorities that will build on previous developments under the Living Materials program. According to Startis-Cullum, the lab will focus on studying capabilities for soldier survivability rather than modifying warfigters’ genetic makeup.

“Now we can actually take from nature, so if we could do that in a scalable, stable, limited way, we could bring new concepts to concealment,” she said.

The Department of Energy is investing $17 million in nine projects to generate energy for the country’s underserved and remote regions. DOE said Monday that it selected projects tackling a variety of energy research topics including chemistry, fusion energy, solar energy and fuel cells.

The projects are part of the federal government’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. Teams of scientists and engineers will work to boost research in participating institutions under the DOE investment. Institutions in Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, Nebraska, West Virginia and Wyoming will lead selected teams from Kansas, Louisiana, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island and South Dakota.

“These grants will advance science and technology in energy and manufacturing, while at the same time broadening the nation’s research base,” said Paul Dabbar, DOE undersecretary for science. DOE identified projects based on a competitive peer review.

The Government Accountability Office has reviewed the redundancy of activities, including human resources and public affairs, across six inspector general offices within the Department of Defense, GAO said Friday.

GAO is working to determine whether IG offices of the Department of the Navy, U.S. Southern Command, Defense Logistics Agency, Defense Contract Management Agency and Defense Media Activity had cases of fragmentation, overlap or duplication. The agency found that these offices did not exhibit significant examples of said issues.

Majority of the six offices use shared or department-wide resources to avoid such cases. GAO made seven recommendations to help DoD further prevent cases of these issues across IG offices. These recommendations include efforts to improve policy on DoD’s chief management officer and better support cross-functional activities.

Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment and 2019 Wash100 Award recipient, administered a workshop to determine the status and opportunities of the Department of Defense’s procurement workforce. The workshop took place at the Pentagon and revolved around a variety of related topics including talent mobility, attraction and retention and work-life balance, DoD said Monday.

Nineteen representatives of the 38,000-member early career procurement workforce took part in the workshop. Service acquisition executives and 4th Estate leaders selected the workshop’s participants.

“This workshop is only a first step, we plan to deliberately engage this sector of the workforce through additional workshops and other opportunities,” said  Jose Gonzalez, acquisition and sustainment director of human capital initiatives at DoD.

“The participants will continue as a cohort and an extension of the HCI office to lead change initiatives and to assess broad acquisition reforms,” Gonzales added.

The Office of Management and Budget issued an updated document on Friday to guide federal agencies as they prepare their budget requests for fiscal year 2021 and report their information technology spending, Nextgov reported Monday. The update to Circular A-11 includes a new section on measures to manage customer experience and enhance service delivery.

Section 280 requires agencies to annually assess how their initiatives with citizen-facing services meet the core CX functions: governance and strategy, measurement, culture and organization, service design and customer understanding.

High-impact service providers should come up with annual action plans containing several components: organization/accountability, CX program maturity, CX data collection and metrics and CX delivery improvement. Self-assessments should be submitted to OMB by Jan. 31, 2020, while action plans are due March 31, 2020. 

OMB also added the Technology Business Management framework to the document’s section on IT investments. Under this update, agencies should provide more granular data for IT spending by classifying costs into IT Towers and IT Cost Pools and submitting information on operations and maintenance and development, modernization and enhancement for each investment.

The Office of Management and Budget and the National Archives and Records Administration have issued a four-page memo instructing all federal agencies to migrate from paper-based documentation to an electronic records management system by Dec. 31. 

The June 28 directive — signed by David Ferriero, archivist of the United States, and OMB Acting Director Russell Vought — also calls for the development of agency plans to shutter analog recordkeeping hubs and transfer files from those repositories to a NARA-run federal records centers or a commercial storage facility by Dec. 31, 2022.

Agencies must appoint a senior official who will manage compliance with the Federal Records Act and a records officer to oversee recordkeeping operations and requirements. NARA intends to issue a set of guidelines and standards by Sept. 30, 2020, to help government personnel store, transfer and format records with metadata. 

The Office of Personnel Management is due to update position classification standards by Dec. 31 of next year in order to accommodate new electronic data processing functions.