The Department of Transportation has earmarked $1.5B in grants for 91 infrastructure projects in 49 states and the District of Columbia, the DOT said Tuesday.

The Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development Transportation Grants program will focus on projects that seek to improve transit, road, rail and port operations in support of the department’s efforts to refurbish and construct more than 200 bridges across the U.S.

A team of 222 DOT career staff reviewed submissions and selected projects based on their impact on safety, quality of life, economic competitiveness and environmental protection.

The team also chose projects that will promote innovation, foster partnerships between the public and private sectors and gain non-federal revenue for investments in transportation infrastructure.

The DOT will allocate discretionary grant funding through the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018, and will award a maximum of $25M for a single project.

The department said the BUILD effort aims to re-balance a 10-year under-investment in rural communities.

The Federal Communications Commission established a new office to apply economic and data analysis on policy formation activities.

The agency said Tuesday, its new Office of Economics and Analytics will consist of commission economists, as well as former staff of the now-defunct Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis, OEA’s predecessor. OEA will feature four divisions to focus on economic analysis, industry analysis, auctions and data. Ajit Pai, FCC commissioner, proposed the new office in April 2017.

“This will be a single office to bring together the great economic and data work already being done by FCC staff,” said Pai.

The U.S. Marine Corps plans to integrate units focusing on cyber, signals, electronic and information warfare into the service’s forces, C4ISRnet reported Tuesday.

The service will implement marine expeditionary force information groups in traditional formations. Lt. Gen. Lori Reynolds, the deputy commandant for information, will oversee all groups. Kenneth Bible, USMC’s C4 directorate deputy director and deputy chief information officer, said at the Charleston Defense Contractors Association Defense Summit that MIGs forces would work to aid information support operations, psychological operations and military deception efforts.

Bible added the service is in the process of figuring out how MIGs can further support marine expeditionary forces. Reynolds has instructed the MIGs’ advisory group to formulate exercises for more joint engagements.

The commandant cited NATO’s Trident Juncture exercise as an example of testing limited assets with commanders.

The Government Accountability Office called on the departments of Defense and Health and Human Services to review their records of contract awards due to misreported noncompetitive contracts. 

Contracting officials at the DoD and HHS found misreporting competitive and noncompetitive between fiscal years 2013 and 2017, GAO said in a report posted Tuesday. 

“Federal data estimates 30 percent of IT spending is noncompetitive—or about $15B annually. However, this estimate may not be accurate,” the watchdog report stated.   

GAO said DoD, HHS and the Department of Homeland Security provided inaccurate competition data in the Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation. The errors were found in 22 of the 41 contracts reviewed. The watchdog also discovered that 7 percent of noncompetitive IT contracts and orders released by the three agencies in the past fiscal years were used to support outdated or obsolete legacy IT systems. GAO warned that misreporting contracts could lead to competition data being inaccurately recorded and misguides federal agencies in planning and achieving objectives.

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DHS has already identified issues that caused the errors and took corrective action. The DoD and HHS have yet to respond to GAO’s recommendations to determine the reasons behind the high rate of miscoding for contracts and to improve the reliability of the competition data.

The Government Accountability Office has found that federal agencies reported $3.2T in total spending authority and permanent appropriations for fiscal year 2015, reflecting an 88 percent rise from FY 1994.

GAO said in a report published Tuesday that such inflation-adjusted growth was primarily driven by the use of permanent appropriations authority, which supports federal entitlement initiatives such as Medicare and the Old-Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance program.

The Social Security Administration and the departments of Health and Human Services and Treasury are the three agencies that comprised 75 percent of the total spending authority and permanent appropriations in FY 2015.

Offsetting collections reached a total of $421B in FY 2015, making it the second largest reported type of budget authority.

The report noted that the amount of spending authority and permanent appropriations that were not subjected to sequestration rose from 37 percent in FY 1994 to 57 percent in FY 2015.
 
 

Army Secretary Mark Esper has cleared a new policy that aims to provide the service with a strategy to advance innovation and modernization and sustain readiness through intellectual property management, the Army News Service reported Tuesday.

Esper approved the IP management policy Friday to facilitate acquisition and modernization reforms that seek to accelerate the delivery of new capabilities to warfighters amid emerging threats posed by adversaries.

Alexis Ross, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for strategy and acquisition reform, said the new IP policy focuses on long-term weapons systems sustainment and has four core tenets.

Those four principles are the need to create long-term IP requirements that address the lifecycle; collaboration with industry for custom IP rights; negotiation of prices for licensing rights; and communication with industry to meet the service branch’s needs.
 

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency aims to increase industry engagement in its five-year, $1.5B initiative to seek advanced electronics that will support U.S. defense systems and platforms for national security.

The agency said Monday it will host a proposers day on Dec. 19 to discuss with companies the opportunities with its ongoing Electronics Resurgence Initiative.

DARPA program managers will share ideas on how the government would utilize various technologies to build national defense hardware, such as artificial intelligence, large-scale emulation, cybersecurity, space applications, cognitive electronic warfare, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

“The success of ERI relies on cooperation with the commercial sector to address shared problems,” said William Chappell, director of DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office.

“DARPA seeks to procure the expertise and transition support of industry and the defense community to help accelerate the delivery of ERI-derived innovations for national security needs,” he added.

The agency said it also hopes to create a broad agency announcement at the event at Hilton Arlington in Virginia to seek proposals to develop, demonstrate and apply ERI electronic technologies.

DARPA announced in November the ERI Phase II that focuses on commercial and manufacturing services of the electronics industry.