Scott Pace, executive secretary of the National Space Council, has said the Trump administration and NASA need to focus on long-term efforts to send humans to Mars, Space News reported Saturday.

The council has already called on Congress to invest in more resources for the planned 2024 moon landing in order to establish a sustainable lunar presence and enable Mars missions to begin in “roughly a decade”, Pace told attendees at the International Space Development Conference in Arlington, Va. Pace’s comments come after President Trump expressed his criticism of NASA’s moon landing plans in a tweet dated June 7.

“What he’s doing is stepping back and expressing, I think, a very understandable impatience with how long all of that takes, and sometimes we miss the bigger picture,” Pace said about the tweet.

Congress is seeking long-term cost estimates for the 2024 moon mission, but such projections are facing challenges due to technical limitations in projects like the lunar gateway, he added.

The Nuclear Regulation Commission’s Office of the Inspector General has released results of an audit on the agency’s cybersecurity operations. NRC OIG said Tuesday that it found the agency generally provides assurance on the cybersecurity of nuclear power plant licensees across digital assets.

However, NRC faces challenges in staffing cybersecurity inspectors due to demographic and resource limits, the office noted. The audit report also noted that NRC’s cybersecurity inspection program, while risk-informed, lacks performance measures. This gap stems from technical and regulatory constraints, and limits the inspection program’s efficiency and reliability.

OIG recommends NRC to identify skill gap and closure strategies via strategic workforce planning for the staffing issue, and develop cybersecurity measures based on operating experience and industry input. The agency’s management has confirmed agreement with OIG’s recommendations.

The National Governors Association picked six states to help in the development of strategies to enhance interagency operations and communications ahead of the 2020 election. Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Minnesota, Nevada and Virginia will work with NGA’s Homeland Security and Public Safety division to boost cybersecurity, promote cooperation and create statewide response plans for attacks on election systems, the organization said Wednesday. 

State cabinet agencies, election officials and governors’ offices will also join the initiative. The plan comes after National Summit on State Cybersecurity in Louisiana, where NGA and representatives from 50 states discussed efforts to address common cybersecurity challenges.

Christopher Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and 2019 Wash100 Award recipient, said cyber attacks during the 2016 election served as the “wake-up call” across the federal government. He added the incident changed how the public look at threats to elections.

The Department of Homeland Security admitted that President Trump’s plan to ban products from Huawei will be costly and complicated to implement, Politico reported Friday.

One official said U.S. companies may also face challenges to comply. Robert Kolasky, head of DHS National Risk Management Center, discussed Trump’s supply chain executive order during a webinar hosted by the USTelecom and Inside Cybersecurity. “Security can cost money,” he said. “And costs can sometimes be prohibitive to do things that might be optimal levels of security.”

Meanwhile, the supply chain task force at DHS plans to expand initiatives in the information and communications technology sector to further secure the U.S. industry.

Rick Driggers, deputy assistant director for cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity and infrastructure agency, said state and local governments should establish information sharing functions with federal cybersecurity agencies, FedScoop reported Thursday.

Driggers said at FedScoop’s FedTalks event the government does not have sufficient visibility on potential threats that may affect the local level. He also noted that local and state governments are being targeted by hackers backed by foreign entities.

“We’ve seen in the last couple years more focused attention from nation-state adversaries, particularly with ransomware to attack or cause disruption at the state and local level,” said Driggers. “At the end of the day, the state and local governments provide a lot of very valuable critical services to their populations. Those services going down causes a lot of disruption,” Driggers added.