The Department of Agriculture granted the Excellence in BioPreferred Procurement Awards to Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.

The awards recognize the national laboratories’ fiscal year 2018 works on bio-based products, the USDA said Monday. LANL used bio-based products as alternatives to traditional oil-based lubricants for metal-cutting machines. Meanwhile, LLNL recycled bio-based materials to produce cutlery, cups, containers and other food service ware. The laboratory recycled 68 metric tons of compostable waste last year.

“The Excellence in BioPreferred Procurement Awards initiative recognizes outstanding achievements in advancing the objectives of the BioPreferred Federal Purchasing Preference Program,” said Vernell Thompson, procurement analyst for the USDA BioPreferred Program.

The program is intended to generate manufacturing jobs and new commodity markets in support of the Rural Investment Act.

The Government Accountability Office reports that, over the past 10 fiscal years, U.S. Navy attack submarines suffered significant maintenance service delays resulting in protracted idle times and billions of dollars in support costs.

The GAO said following a recent audit that, from fiscal 2008 to the end of the current fiscal year, the Navy’s attack submarines will have spent more than 10,000 days sitting inoperable at various shipyards across the country due to on-going maintenance or delays. According to the government watchdog’s computations, the amount of time these boats will have spent idling translates to more than $1.5B lost in operating and support costs.

Maintenance delays have been attributed to the Navy’s over-reliance on public shipyards, which have been operating above capacity, and the underutilization of private ones. The GAO called on the Navy’s leadership to carry out a business case analysis to determine how to expedite maintenance services.

NASA will land its Mars 2020 Rover on the red planet’s Jezero Crater for a mission to search for past microbial life and gather rock and soil samples.

The space agency said Tuesday it evaluated over 60 potential landing spots before selecting the Jezero Crater, a former location of an ancient river delta.

Scientists say that the crater may have maintained ancient organic molecules and microbial life evidence in clays and carbonates currently within the area.

The Jezero Crater is also part of Mars’ Isidis Planitia, a large impact basin geographically above the planet’s equator.

“The landing site in Jezero Crater offers geologically rich terrain, with landforms reaching as far back as 3.6 billion years old, that could potentially answer important questions in planetary evolution and astrobiology,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

The mission will begin in July 2020 with United Launch Alliance providing the launch vehicle.

The Department of Transportation’s inspector general released a new report outlining the department’s management challenges in fiscal year 2019. 

The watchdog report released Nov. 15 listed aviation safety and security, rail, infrastructure safety, cybersecurity and procurement and financing processes among the areas that might require DOT’s focus in the current fiscal year. For the assessment, the IG looked at safety impact, documented vulnerabilities, large dollar implications and the department’s ability to effect change. 

The challenges cover the Federal Aviation Administration’s new safety oversight strategy as well as runway safety, aircraft evacuation, drug and alcohol testing. 

DOT is expected to have difficulty managing surface infrastructure safety and investments, establishing new flight routes and standardizing cybersecurity strategies. 

The intelligence community’s inspector general has called on the Defense Intelligence Agency‘s leadership to formulate a plan to reduce its backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests.

In September, the ICIG explained in a report that an FOIA request is considered part of an agency’s backlog when it remains unprocessed after 20 working days, or 30 days in special circumstances.

As of fiscal year 2017, the DIA had a backlog of 1,136 requests, the report stated. The agency attributed the issue, in part, to a loss of contractors in 2015.

Agencies with backlogs as high as 1K cases are required to have a formal plan to resolve the requests, but the inspector general learned that the DIA did not have one. The oversight office said that, without such a plan in place, “[the] DIA is unlikely to see sustained progress with backlog reduction.”

The ICIG recommended the DIA develop and implement a backlog reduction plan as soon as possible, to which the agency agreed.

The General Services Administration has proposed regulatory changes on how contractors inform the government about cyber incidents and how they secure confidential government information in solicitations. 

The GSA wants to update its General Services Administration Acquisition Regulation to include the new rules — Case 2016-G511 and 2016-G515 — according to a Federal Register notice posted Friday.

GSAR Case 2016-G511 would require contractors to comply with agency cyber requirements and standards to protect GSA information when submitting statements of work and responding to solicitations.  

The GSAR Case 2016-G515 rule would then update the agency’s 9297.2C policy to include standards on how the GSA and its contractors manage information technology systems, protect personally identifiable information and other confidential information and report cyber breach. 

The 9297.2C is currently not available for public comment but the GSA wants to open the policy for public and industry input for further improvement. 

“It establishes the requirement for contractors to preserve images of affected systems and ensure contractor employees receive appropriate training for reporting cyber incidents,” the GSA said in the notice. 

The U.S. Army issued a 118-page manual in October detailing the service branch’s goals for future information warfare missions, FifthDomain.com reported.

The guide entitled “The Conduct of Information Operations” discusses the six stages of the Army’s information warfare strategy which may include disrupting communications systems, monitoring persons of interest and fostering cyberattacks.

Lt. Col Joey Sullinger, a public affairs officer at the Army Combined Arms Center, noted that the manual will provide Army leaders and IO professionals with the essential information needed to conduct effective IO work in compliance with Army ethics.

The guide also contains details on the use of social media for intelligence gathering operations.

The inspector general for the National Security Agency wants to expand his office’s subpoena authority to require telecommunications companies that provide records to the government to join interviews about investigations and audits on the NSA, FCW.com reported Monday.

Robert Storch made the call after the House advanced a bill that would expand IG testimonial subpoena powers to contractors, grant recipients and former federal employees.

The watchdog said his office currently has limited ability “to compel people from outside the agency who are employed privately to talk to our people.”

Such additional authorities are expected to promote accountability and to help better monitor NSA activities.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Steve Russell, R-Okla., comes after Congress and advocacy groups criticized the NSA for admitting it overcollected hundreds of millions of phone records from telco companies. The agency attributed the violation to “technical irregularities.”

To further improve oversight, Storch said he also wants to require the NSA to declassify or provide the public with summaries of other products in the future.

Early in 2018, the IG released the first ever unclassified version of the agency’s semi-annual report to Congress.

The document provided information on cybersecurity problems within the agency, additional insight on issues like the impact of foreign surveillance programs on domestic spying and the number of complaints against the NSA.

The U.S. Army is testing a new web-enabled command post system built to consolidate existing mission systems and programs into a single user interface to speed up information sharing between service members and commanders, C4ISRnet reported Monday.

The Army recently put its new Command Post Computing Environment into a Network Integration Evaluation for initial operational test.

Col. Arthur Sellers, commander of the 3rd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, said the system made shared understanding faster for the troops that tested the technology. 

“Because it is more intuitive, because it is web-enabled I can do things quicker with my subordinate units,” Sellers noted. “Speed can be very decisive, especially against our near peer threat on the future battlefield.”

CP CE would replace the Army’s Command Post of the Future system. Unlike the older tool, the new command post system only requires a laptop for soldiers to access communication systems. 

AASKI, BowHead, ESP, Future Skies, General Dynamics and ManTech are among the contractors helping develop CP CE.

“We did the adopt and modify. We took a [commercial off the shelf] product and modified that to make the capability delivery,” said Col. Troy Crosby, program manager for mission command within the Army PEO-C3T. 

CP CE must pass the Network Integration Evaluation and an Army interoperability certification test before troops can use the system in the field.