The House of Representatives passed a bill to reauthorize the federal chief information officer in a move to fortify the nation’s cybersecurity.

The Federal CIO Authorization Act of 2018 would grant the executive with authority to report directly to the Office of Management and Budget‘s director as a presidential appointee, Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas said Friday. The bill would also appoint a federal chief information security officer to assist the federal CIO and require the submission of an information technology streamlining plan. Hurd and Rep. Robin Kelly, D-Ill. introduced the bill.

“Americans should be able to trust their government to keep their information safe,” said Hurd.

“By codifying and reauthorizing the federal CIO and CISO roles, we will continue streamlining government IT processes,” said Kelly.

The Pentagon’s top acquisition official said establishing a Space Force would help the government organize space programs currently spread out across multiple military services and agencies, Space News reported Saturday.

Ellen Lord, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, said the Department of Defense has been facing challenges to develop a unified strategy for investments in space. The official suggested reorganizing the government’s “federated series of efforts” under the Space Force to “get focus and clarity.”

“We’ve done a careful inventory of what all the different services are doing, because it has been rather distributed,” Lord said. “We want to make sure we’re effective in sharing all that.”

She noted her office has been working closely with administration officials and Congress to develop the Space Force. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson expects President Trump to submit a proposal to Congress in February 2019 to establish the new service branch. 

Defense Secretary James Mattis has said the Pentagon has launched several initiatives to advance the National Defense Strategy’s three lines of effort, Defense.gov reported Saturday.

Mattis told the audience at the Reagan National Defense Forum in California that the Defense Department has initiated the recapitalization of the nuclear deterrent in order to increase lethality.

“Our Close Combat Lethality Task Force is integrating human and technological factors to ensure our close-combat units never enter a fair fight,” he added.

Mattis also mentioned the country’s efforts to strengthen alliances in Afghanistan and the Indo-Pacific region as well as the 5.2 percent increase in allies’ defense budgets.

“Combined, our twenty-eight NATO allies have increased spending by $41B in the last two years, and it is now clear to every observer, including Moscow that NATO is strong and growing stronger,” he added.

He noted that DoD has started to implement corrective measures on issues raised in the first departmentwide financial audit that covered $2.7T in assets and advance tech development across artificial intelligence, hypersonics and space areas.

“The work goes on – in changed tactics, heightened incorporation of space and cyber operations, training and readiness, equipment and maintenance,” Mattis said.
 

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) have called on the Trump administration to back away from the plan to impose a $33B cut to the Defense Department’s budget for fiscal 2020.

Inhofe and Thornberry, chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, wrote in a Wall Street Journal commentary piece posted Thursday that such a move would force DoD to enforce cuts in “areas where most money can be saved quickly—troops, new equipment, training and maintenance—as it did under sequestration in 2013.”

Both lawmakers called on President Donald Trump to order DoD to proceed with the $733B budget that he initially proposed for fiscal 2020.

They noted that the planned $33B budget cut might force Defense Secretary James Mattis to sacrifice readiness, reduce capabilities needed to maintain superiority over Russia and China and plan for reduced troop levels.

Thornberry and Inhofe said they believe “deliberate reform” could help DoD generate savings and not through the proposed $33B budget cut, which they said was driven by concerns over the increasing national debt.

“But cutting defense will not close the deficit,” they wrote.

“The deficit would keep growing even if we eliminated the entire Pentagon budget.”