President Donald Trump’s 2020 budget request would provide $718 billion to the Department of Defense to support modernization efforts and enhance the military’s readiness. The department’s proposed budget is $33 billion higher than the 2019 amount, representing a five percent increase, the White House said Monday.

The new budget would support programs for the military’s increased readiness and lethality, expanded alliances and partnerships, performance and acquisitions of tools, ships, unmanned vehicles and fighter aircraft. Trump also supports additional training for service members, modernization of the U.S. Nuclear Deterrent and development of autonomous systems, hypersonics and artificial intelligence-based technologies.

“DOD will increase the impact of its investments, as it rebuilds more lethal force, strengthens the network of allies and partners and implements reform,” according to the budget statement. 

Establishing the U.S. Space Force will also get a portion of 2020 funding as well as the programs under the U.S. cyber strategy.

Phyllis Bayer, assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy for energy, installations and environment, will retire from government service to “pursue other opportunities,” the service said Friday.

Bayer’s duties include supervising policy, restoration, modernization, construction and environmental protection activities involving Navy and Marine Corps facilities. She previously served as chief of staff for the Under Secretary of Defense Office for Personnel and Readiness and executive director of the Defense Business Board.

She also held leadership roles at the Office of the Deputy Chief Management Officer and the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s test and evaluation unit. The Navy is actively searching for a candidate to succeed Bayer. 

Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, criticized NASA and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in a recent letter to federal officials for opposing the proposed 5G network across the U.S., SpaceNews reported Friday.

Joint opposition by NTIA and the space agency to the FCC 5G proposal is “unacceptable,” Pai said in the letter, sent to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.

The FCC wants to auction over 2,900 licenses in the 24.25 to 25.25 bands of the electromagnetic spectrum on March 14. Ross and Bridenstine previously said that the plan would have a negative impact on the transmission of critical Earth science data.

Meteorologists warned that they would lose access to some portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that supports tasks for Earth observation. Under the FCC plan, the same spectral bands and adjacent bands used by agencies for data sharing will be provided for 5G technologies, which experts said could lead to interference.

Ross and Bridenstine asked Pai to attend a March 11 interagency meeting to discuss the issues. However, Pai rejected the invitation in his recent letter. 

“Notwithstanding the absence of any technical basis for an objection over the past two years to the FCC’s well-established protection limits, NTIA declined to agree with the FCC’s balanced approach on this issue,” Pai wrote.

The FCC plans to present the Trump Administration’s plans to protect passive microwave services from interference at the 2019 World Radiocommunications Conference in Egypt starting in October.

Lt. Gen. Eric Wesley, deputy commander of the U.S. Army Futures Command, said during South by Southwest event that startups may have to work with larger firms to deploy technologies to the military, Nextgov reported Saturday.

Wesley noted that the Army needs support from traditional contractors because startups are often hindered by the government’s burdensome acquisition procedures.

He added that the most realistic option is for larger contractors to purchase a startup’s offering that the Army is seeking for military purposes. Smaller companies wanting to retain control over their technologies may choose to conduct prototype development efforts with the Futures Command and partner with a large company for enterprise deployment and scaling.

The Army also wants to explore more options for startups to drive technological development and deployment by themselves.

“We want to be part of this ecosystem, and so we are embedding ourselves into it,” Wesley said.

The U.S. Army’s $190B budget request for fiscal year 2020 will include $21.8B for acquisition and $12.2B for research, development, test and evaluation, Defense News reported Sunday.

A Department of Defense official told the publication that the request represents an $8B increase from the 2018 budget and includes $120B in base funding and $31B for overseas contingency operations-for-base funds. The Army also seeks and additional $30B for traditional overseas contingency funding and $10B for emergency funds.

The service branch realigned $31B from terminated programs and cut $200M in acquisition funding to focus on prototype efforts instead of purchasing new technologies.

According to the defense official, the Army aims to achieve modernization goals by 2028 and will conduct force structure assessments to implement significant changes across the service. The Army’s budget request will be included in the $718B request that the Pentagon will submit to Congress next week.

The Government Accountability Office found that the Office of Management and Budget is not providing publicly available, comprehensive data that identifies hundreds of billions of dollars it annually collects in fees, fines and penalties. GAO issued a report on Thursday showing the lack of government-wide data from OMB, which could help Congress identify a certain agency’s performance and the trends in collections. 

Such data includes amounts of specific penalties that would increase government transparency and improve oversight of agency activities or programs, officials said. Other problems found in OMB’s collections data include lack of publicly available information, unnecessary fees included to the office’s report and exclusion of useful fee collections. 

“OMB doesn’t disclose the limitation that the total may exclude some fees and include other collections that are not fees,” GAO said. “As a result, some users of the data are likely unaware of the potential for the total fees to be overestimated or underestimated.”

GAO provided a set of recommendations to help OMB address concerns over its fee collections reporting across the government. The watchdog said OMB should improve its reporting on fees, penalties, update instructions to federal agencies to review accounts designated as containing fees and disclose limitations in the reported data. OMB did not respond to GAO’s recommendations.