A top official at the Small Business Administration said previous changes in processes and operations allowed the agency to resume work immediately after the 35-day government shutdown, Federal News Network reported Tuesday.

William Manger, associate administrator of SBA’s Office of Capital Access, said the process improvements placed by the agency’s head Linda McMahon “greatly enhanced” their ability to get back to business. Manger made the remarks during a meeting with House Small Business Subcommittee on Investigations, Oversight and Regulations on Tuesday.

In late 2018, the SBA reduced the time to process and approve loan applications and stopped operations of its central service system during the government shutdown to limit the loans in queue. Both efforts allowed SBA to resume operations without any backlog of loan applications after the shutdown, Manger said.

Since reopening on Jan. 28, the agency approved nearly 8,000 loans and released a total of $3.7B. SBA said it also remains on schedule to implement changes in its Office of Credit Risk Management as required in the Small Business 7(a) Lending Oversight Reform Act of 2018. The law seeks to change OCRM’s supervisory duties by June.

A Pentagon cyber adviser said the lack of personnel and complicated security clearance process has slowed implementation of a congressional authority for faster hiring of cyber and tech workers at the agency, FCW reported Tuesday. During a recent meeting with the Intelligence and Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, Marines Corps Brig. Gen. Dennis Crall, deputy principal cyber adviser for the Department of Defense, said the agency faces delays implementing the Cyber Excepted Service program.

Congress granted DoD the CES authority to accelerate the entry of cyber and tech workers. Crall said the agency is set to enter phase 2 of the program but the same personnel and security clearance issues remain. He cited that the Pentagon needs to increase the five full-time personnel tasked with the initial rollout of CES. The official suggests hiring 10 people for the team to handle the hiring and training of thousands of cyber workers.

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Crall also called on other defense leaders to address security clearance concerns that are affecting CES. “The onboarding process can be very frustrating” and the long process could lead workers to “potentially lose interest,” he said.

A new government watchdog report shows that the Department of Energy remains on the government’s High Risk List for inadequate contractor management and oversight despite spending $200B on awards over the past decade and contracting changes. The Government Accountability Office issued the report on Tuesday highlighting the lack of proper reporting by DOE on the performance of its contractors.

The agency relies on the industry and academia for the management and operations of its facilities, particularly federal nuclear weapons laboratories, GAO said. However, DOE has been found providing less information on contractors’ cost performance in its Performance Evaluation Reports for fiscal year 2016. GAO said the PERs were not detailed, did not indicate significance of performance and applied only to specific activities.

“A key reason PERs did not include more cost performance information is that the DOE offices’ policies do not require specific assessments of cost performance or discuss how to ensure cost information is useful for future acquisition decision-making,” GAO said. 

Despite the lack of information, DOE still provided its contractors high performance ratings and more than 90 percent of performance incentives, the watchdog said. To improve data reporting, GAO recommends that DOE update its policies to require that PERs include quality information for overall assessment of contractor cost performance. 

Crystal Philcox, assistant commissioner of enterprise strategy management at the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service, said GSA has begun streamlining the acquisition process for buyers and suppliers as part of the Federal Marketplace strategy, FedScoop reported Tuesday.

Philcox said at an ACT-IAC event on Tuesday that the strategy involves several projects including an update to the contract-writing systems, development of product catalogs, e-commerce portals and schedules consolidation. She noted that teams have started working on business process maps for the acquisition lifecycle and expect to define the scope for the contract-writing system by this summer. GSA is looking at potential data sets to meet the requirements for the catalog project, Philcox added.

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Philcox said agency officials also expect to submit a report to Congress by the end of March to provide update on the e-commerce portal program’s implementation.
 

During an Association of the United States Army event, Ryan McCarthy, army undersecretary, said that the service branch has realigned around $30B in its five-year spending plan to address modernization needs, National Defense magazine reported Tuesday.

McCarthy noted that $22B will result from proposed program cuts while $8B will come from “cost avoidance” initiatives. He added that the proposed funding shift will result in changes affecting equipment funds and appropriations across the service’s entire budget.

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The $30B realignment, a $6B increase from the Army’s initial goal, will be reflected in the fiscal 2020 budget request slated to be released in March.