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.

The U.S. Air Force’s 4th Special Operations Squadron has received the first delivery of an updated AC-130J Ghostrider gunship equipped with the aircraft’s Block 30 configuration, Military.com reported Friday. The service branch accepted the initial AC-130J Block 30 unit during a ceremony at Bob Sikes Airport in Crestview, Fla., according to a USAF SOCOM press release.

The Block 30 model features updated avionics technology and software, a precision-focused 30mm cannon and the same 105mm cannon mounted on the AC-130U Spooky, the squadron’s employed gunship. The Ghostrider is also designed to carry and fire 250-pound, guided small-diameter bombs and AGM-114 Hellfire missiles.

The squadron intends to keep the first new gunship as a test-only unit for around a year before deployment in late 2019 or early 2020.

NASA will request $21 billion in total budget for fiscal 2020, reflecting a two percent drop from its current spending and a five percent rise from the agency’s funding request in 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday. People familiar with the proposed budget told the publication that NASA is expected to request a funding increase of over $500 million for lunar exploration and related missions in 2020 to advance government-industry partnerships on moon landers.

The report said the potential funding for lunar exploration seeks to build on the space agency’s selection of nine companies, which secured spots on a potential $2.6 billion contract to deliver scientific instruments and other payloads to the moon as soon as 2020. The space agency’s FY 2020 spending plan would allocate approximately $300 million more for the lunar gateway and $230 million in additional funds to support the development of “descent modules” to bring cargo to the moon’s surface, one of the sources said.

To support its lunar missions, NASA plans to reduce spending on deep space exploration programs that are expected to receive approximately $5 billion in total budget for FY 2020, sources told WSJ. The report added the space agency’s FY 2020 spending plan is scheduled for Monday.