An official at the Office of Management and Budget recently underscored the importance of equipping federal agencies with the ability to collect and leverage data when making decisions and formulating policy, FCW reported Thursday.

Speaking at a recent Urban Institute event, Diana Epstein, head of the Evidence Team at the OMB, endorsed the use of learning agendas to promote the adoption of evidence-based policymaking, a strategy that several agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the Small Business Administration, are already implementing.

The Trump administration earlier this year proposed reforms that would allow agencies to conduct data-generating activities, noting that “[if] we expect agencies to test innovative strategies and execute effective programs, we must enhance federal agencies’ ability to conduct program evaluation and other evidence building activities.”

“Bringing evidence to bear in decision-making is a critical component of good government,” the administration said.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened a hub where it can coordinate with public and private sector entities to address concerns and initiate developments in financial technology.

The agency said Thursday the Strategic Hub for Innovation and Financial Technology hub, or FinHub, will serve as a space where the SEC and the public can resolve issues in distributed ledger technology, automated investment advice, digital marketplace financing and artificial intelligence or machine learning, among other things.

The site will also allow the SEC’s personnel to internally collect and distribute information about FinTech, as well as inform domestic and international regulators about modern financial, regulatory and supervisory technologies.

The SEC appointed Valerie Szczepanik, senior advisor for digital assets and innovation and associate director of the SEC’s corporation finance division, to oversee the operations within FinHub.

Szczepanik noted that through the innovation center, the SEC will work to support entrepreneurs, developers and their advisers.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is hosting its annual Government-Business Forum on Small Business Capital Formation in cooperation with The Ohio State University’s National Center for the Middle Market.

The event, taking place Dec. 12 at the university’s Fawcett Center, aims to help small businesses adopt additional measures in capital development, the SEC said Thursday.

“Holding this event in Columbus, one of the top five best cities for entrepreneurs and startups, will give us the opportunity to hear directly from small businesses and their investors on ways to improve our regulatory system,” said SEC Chairman Jay Clayton.

The forum will feature a morning panel discussion on capital formation options for small businesses, with a follow-up session where participating groups will provide policy recommendations.

Interested participants may either attend the event’s breakout sessions in-person or via teleconference.

Registration for the event is open through Dec. 7.

Lt. Gen David Berger, commanding general of U.S. Marine Corps Combat Development Command, has said the service is working on speeding up its technology experimentation and deployment process, National Defense Magazine reported Thursday.

He noted during the National Defense Industrial Association’s recent Expeditionary Warfare Conference that Marine Expeditionary Force commanders have started initiating experiments for future combat, as past exercises only trained troops for present situations.

“The Marine Corps is really rapidly trying to learn faster, get stuff out to the field faster in … a 70 percent prototype sort of mode,” Berger added.

Brig. Gen. Christian Wortman, commander of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, said that the lab has begun taking on major experiments such as the Advanced Naval Technology Exercise. Wortman added that MCWL is set on executing the next ANTX, which will run for an entire year and focus on operating in contested environments to keep pace with adversaries developing anti-access/area denial or A2/AD weapons.

The upcoming activity will be held in April or May 2019 and include both Marines and Navy sailors.

NASA is eyeing the moon as an observational platform from which scientists can gather data on the sun or other celestial bodies.

Steve Clarke, NASA deputy associate administrator for exploration, said such efforts can serve as a step toward developing capabilities to embark on future Mars missions.

Missions to the moon have the potential to collect information about its external surface, such as heat flow, wind strength and atmosphere, Clarke noted. These findings would then be used to design technologies for Mars explorations.

“The strategy is that these will help us prepare for more complex future missions such as: searching for usable resources; building up a seismic network to understand the moon’s internal structure; and studying the lunar mineralogy and chemistry to understand the moon’s origins,” Clarke added.

Recent data from the Federal IT Dashboard system has shown that agencies subjected to the Chief Financial Officers Act have made a total of 3,216 data center closures against the target goal of 4,477 shutdowns, MeriTalk reported Thursday.

The website also indicated that among the agencies that have met their targets for tiered and non-tiered data center closures as part of the Data Center Optimization Initiative include NASA, the departments of Agriculture and Education, the Office of Personnel Management and the Social Security Administration.

The organizations listed in the IT Dashboard still need to shut down 1,261 data centers before the DCOI October 2020 deadline.

The General Services Administration launched the DCOI program to help agencies meet the Office of Management and Budget‘s requirements for consolidating and modernizing their information technology infrastructure.

The DCOI program management office provides federal organizations with necessary technologies and practices to comply with policies related to data center and IT infrastructure optimization.

The Food and Drug Administration has released a draft guidance to provide recommendations that seek to help companies address cyber risks in medical devices prior to the submission of premarket applications for their products.

FDA said Thursday the recommendations in the guidance document aim to facilitate the review process for premarket submissions and reduce the risk of patient harm associated with devices with cyber vulnerabilities.

The document covers several premarket device submissions such as premarket approval applications; 510(k) premarket notifications; de novo requests; product development protocols; and applications for humanitarian device exemptions.

The agency will accept comments within 150 days of notice publication in the Federal Register.

The draft document came days after FDA teamed up with the Department of Homeland Security to address cyber threats in medical systems.

Mitre worked with FDA on a playbook that seeks to ensure patient safety by providing a framework for health delivery organizations to prepare for and respond to cyber breaches involving medical devices.
 

Grant Schneider, federal chief information security officer, has said the national strategy for cybersecurity aims to help federal agencies get ahead of cyber threats and advance accountability, FedScoop reported Thursday.

“It’s really a shift from [an approach] about process and policy to action and accountability,” he said Thursday at DC CyberTalks.

Schneider highlighted the need for shared services in cybersecurity, especially when it comes to addressing workforce challenges.

“We’re never going to be able to attract all the talent we need at all the agencies. We don’t want to be competing with one another,” he noted.

“So how can we do things in a more common and shared way?”
 

Jeff Gossel, the senior intelligence engineer at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center’s Space and Missile Analysis Group, has said that China may have positioned a satellite on the far side of the moon for nefarious purposes, Nextgov reported Wednesday.

In May, the China National Space Administration launched the Queqiao satellite towards Earth-Moon Lagrange point 2, roughly 59,000 miles on the flipside of the moon, ahead of the Chang’e 4 robotic lunar rover mission planned for December.

Since the landing site for Chang’e 4 is located on the side of the moon constantly facing away from the Earth, a relay satellite is needed on that same side to allow human operators to control the rover.

The Queqiao satellite entered halo orbit around L2 this June.

Speaking at a recent Air Force Association event, Gossel speculated that the Queqiao satellite could give the Chinese military the ability to send attack spacecraft around the moon to outflank U.S. space assets in geosynchronous Earth orbit.

“You could fly some sort of a weapon around the moon and it comes back… and we would never know because there is nothing watching in that direction,” Gossel said.

Jeffrey Gossel, the senior intelligence engineer at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center’s Space and Missile Analysis Group, has said that officials need to pay more attention to the space-based surveillance assets of adversarial nations, Space News reported Wednesday.

Speaking at a recent Mitchell Institute event, Gossel noted that U.S. policymakers are much too preoccupied with armaments that competitor countries like Russia or China could use to shoot down American satellites.

Gossel pointed out that “it’s not those weapons that are as important as what our enemies have on orbit,” noting that such spacecraft already allow potential opponents to monitor U.S. activities and develop possible countermeasures.

Gossel proposed that the U.S. learn all it can about these information-gathering satellites and sensors to develop strategies that would render them ineffective.

“From an intelligence perspective we have to concentrate more on those things, not on the guns they’re shooting,” Gossel said.