The Energy Department plans to award new and renewal grants worth a combined $100M over three years for university-led research projects on particle physics.

DOE said Thursday it will select proposals from interested universities on studies about dark matter and energy, particle acceleration and detection, proton collision via a peer review-based competitive process.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry said the grants are intended to help grow the country’s scientific community and sustain a physics research program for academia.

The department expects to allocate $40M to the funding opportunity for fiscal 2019.

Submission for letters of intent is due Dec. 5 and the application period will run through Jan. 22, 2019.

DOE’s Office of Science released the announcement as part of an annual re-competition that represents one-third of department-funded particle physics research program.

The Defense Information Systems Agency is set to hand over by December its oversight of satellite communications services procurement to Air Force Space Command, SpaceNews reported Thursday.

Clare Grason, division chief for satcom at DISA, said her office will become part of Air Force Space Command and will draft an acquisition strategy next year to address commanders’ satcom requirements.

“We’re seeing a different type of support to get after the transformation, to elevate commercial satcom to where it needs to be, as vital infrastructure,” Grason said Wednesday at the 2018 Global MilSatcom conference in London.

Grason noted that the command intends to change the process of awarding contracts to commercial satcom providers by using other criteria aside from vetting offers based on the “lowest price technically acceptable” approach.

“Over the next year we have an initiative to compete our contracts on a best value tradeoff basis while we develop a more comprehensive acquisition strategy for buying and using satcom differently,” she added.

Air Force Space Command will assume responsibility of the Enhanced Mobile Satellite Services program and commercial satellite leasing group, but DISA will continue to oversee ground systems and satellite gateway integration function, Grason said.
 

Ellen Lord, defense undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, has said the Defense Department plans to release this month a handbook on the use of “other transaction authority,” Inside Defense reported Thursday.

“They are very, very important contracts to use, because you don’t always know exactly what your requirement is,” she said of OTAs during the annual Naval Submarine League symposium held Thursday in Arlington, Va.

“OTAs are used when you’re really experimenting and prototyping a little bit to find out exactly what the art of the possible is,” she added.

She noted that DoD wants to have the OTA handbook in place by Thanksgiving followed by courses to be offered at the Defense Acquisition University.

Lord added the Pentagon will also issue a policy on rapid prototyping and procurement in early 2019.
 

U.S. Air Force Global Strike Command test-fired an LGM-30 Minuteman III missile on Nov. 6, Noozhawk reported Wednesday.

The intercontinental ballistic missile, which was armed with a mock warhead, was launched from an underground silo at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Joe Thomas, speaking on behalf of AFGSC, described the test as “reliable.” In such tests, the weapon “completes its flight path within a designated safety corridor, the equipment functions properly, sensor data is collected, and the reentry vehicle impacts where targeted.”

Thomas pointed out, however, that data collected during the test, and the analysis of that data, will not be divulged to the public.

The U.S. arsenal of Minuteman III ICBMs constitutes the ground-based component of the country’s strategic nuclear triad.

The earliest iteration of the weapon was put into service in 1968.

The Defense Department is set to release an enterprise cybersecurity strategy that aims to address the civilian and military use of mobile products and services, FedScoop reported Wednesday.

DoD Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy noted during the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Forecast to Industry event that mobility is a critical element in daily life and that it will be an important capability for warfighters in tactical missions.

He added that there is a need to support mobility in some way to enable the secure transmission of data from one device to another.

DoD will add its recently released Cybersecurity Analysis and Review framework in the forthcoming strategy, which will be issued by Deasy’s office.

Lisa Belt, acting director of DISA’s cyber development directorate, noted that the action plan will define the cybersecurity environment in its “complexity”.

She added that modified acquisition strategies will arise in cybersecurity in the next three to six months.

The ranking member of the House’s chief investigative committee has vowed to “shine a light on waste, fraud and abuse” in the current administration, Federal News Network reported Wednesday.

Elijah Cummings, in a statement issued following his reelection as representative of Maryland’s 7th district, bemoaned the fact that oversight of the executive department “has been virtually nonexistent” in the past couple of years.

Cummings, who is expected to become the next chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, expressed his intention to “probe senior administration officials across the government who have abused their positions of power and wasted taxpayer money.”

Cummings also stated his intent to investigate what he described as President Trump’s “decisions to act in his own financial self-interest.”

The lawmaker went on to note that, by putting Democrats in control of the House, the American public “voted for transparency and accountability.”

The public “voted to make sure our government works effectively and efficiently for the American people,” Cummings said, adding that elected officials “must now accept this mandate and fulfill our solemn duties under the Constitution.”

The Government Accountability Office has advised the Army Corps of Engineers to provide metrics for determining deferred maintenance for inland waterways, as well as modify its funding method for construction projects.

GAO said in a report published Wednesday the corps currently lacks indicators of deferred maintenance efforts, which hinders the execution of sustainment projects and presentation of estimated costs to the Office of Management and Budget and Congress.

Officials from the corps and Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works also recalled that various factors are taken into consideration before developing a standard definition for deferred maintenance.

“A single measure may not be useful to gauge the condition of the waterways because the effect of deferred maintenance projects on the reliability of the waterways will vary,” GAO noted.

The agency also found that the corps requests constructions funds in increments, which corps officials and stakeholders believe has caused schedule delays and increased costs as resources are procured separately. 

GAO added that the corps should change its budgeting approach to provide full funding for construction projects or focus finances on fewer initiatives first.

Tom Becht, interim director of the military satellite communications directorate at the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center, has said he believes commercial satcom providers should offer their services to the Defense Department as a group, SpaceNews reported Wednesday.

“We would be looking for a consortium view on how to supply DoD more commercial capability,” he said Wednesday at the 2018 Global MilSatcom conference in London.

Becht’s suggestion stems from DoD’s need to have flexibility when it comes to acquiring managed satcom services from many providers instead of having a lock-in arrangement with a single vendor.

“We still see a lot of independent commercial offerings from satcom providers. They are all good,” he noted.

“But it would be nice, instead of having 135 terminals, that we could figure out how to do this from an enterprise perceptive.”