The Government Accountability Office has called on eight federal departments and their component agencies to organize their policies and review and approval processes for their information technology budgets. 

The GAO said in a report published Tuesday that despite meeting the Office of Management and Budget’s requirements for establishing a method for implementing the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act, the departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, Justice and Treasury lack practices for ensuring that their chief information officers are properly managing and reporting their IT budgets.

The aforementioned agencies have no clear way of verifying if their CIOs checked their IT portfolio, which should include appropriate estimates of all IT resources included in their budget request.

The four organizations also did not state in their FITARA implementation and delegation plans how they would execute OMB’s requirements.

The GAO noted that the absence of a standard approach for addressing IT budgeting requirements could create inconsistent practices for facilitating the oversight of CIOs on IT budgets.

The agency advised the four departments to demonstrate their implementation of OMB requirements and develop ways of ensuring that their IT budgets are informed by reliable cost information.

Other agencies that the GAO mentioned in its report include the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, FBI, Internal Revenue Service and National Nuclear Security Administration.

Researchers at the Department of Homeland Security have built a new tool that offers faster assessment of soil conditions around bridge pillars after hurricanes and heavy rains that may affect bridge stability. 

The DHS said Tuesday that its Science and Technology Directorate developed the Soil Probe with the Coastal Hazards Center of Excellence. The tool mainly analyzes the erosion of soil around a structure caused by water flow.

Soil Probe eliminates the need to take samples for laboratory testing, which traditional assessment requires to check soil resistance to erosion. The device also has minimal dependence on power because of its rechargeable batteries and requires only two personnel to operate. 

“This device can be used in places where taking samples is not feasible,” said Mohammed Gabr, a professor at North Carolina State University and developer of Soil Probe.

The DHS said transportation and bridge engineers, contractors as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency can use the instrument in future field assessments. 

“The testing is rapid — it can go 30 feet deep within five minutes — and can be done in many places along a bridge for a complete mapping of the bridge foundation support area,” Gabr added. 

A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office shows that the Defense Department is failing to properly guide contracting officials in awarding contracts through the lowest price technically acceptable process.

GAO said Tuesday some DOD officials admitted they were confused about how to apply two of the eight criteria for using the LPTA process.Â

Four of the 14 contracting officials interviewed by the agency said they did not understand how to apply the criteria to see if “the goods being purchased are predominantly expendable in nature, nontechnical or have a short life expectancy or shelf life” and if the lowest price “reflects full life-cycle costs, including for operations and support.”

“Absent clarification on how to consider these two criteria, DOD increases the risk that its contracting officials will not consistently implement the requirements” in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017, the GAO said.Â

The agency estimates that 26 percent of contracts and orders valued $5M and above in fiscal year 2017 from DOD were released using the LPTA process.Â

The Pentagon agreed with the GAO’s recommendations to revise its regulations and issue a new guidance by end of fiscal year 2019 on how contracting officials should apply the two criteria.

Jake Wooley, Department of Energy information technology program manager, has said the modified guidance on the Data Center Optimization Initiative seeks to simplify some reporting requirements around the program, Federal News Network reported Tuesday.

Wooley explained at a MeriTalk-hosted event that the updated guide aims to streamline a few of the reporting methods that the Office of Management and Budget established for both DCOI and the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative.

The draft guidance will also lay out the characteristics of a tiered data center, as well as direct agencies to update their data center inventories annually instead of quarterly.

Wooley noted that OMB is expected to coordinate with agencies to set requirements according to their missions needs and closure and consolidation goals, with some regard to cost savings.

OMB Cloud Strategy Leader Bill Hunt will be head authority for the implementation of the new DCOI instructions. 

“I believe this new guidance will reflect much of the feedback and input that OMB has received from the agencies as we look to move forward in the new DCOI,” he added.

The Defense Department‘s inspector general has determined that the DoD failed to fully carry out the mandate of a 2015 statute designed to enhance the cybersecurity posture of government and private organizations.

The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 called on seven federal agencies, including the DoD, to develop policies that would facilitate the sharing of classified and unclassified cybersecurity threat indicators and defense measures among government as well as private entities, the DoD IG stated in a recently-released audit report.

The DoD IG observed that CISA was enacted inconsistently across the DoD, noting that “none of the four DoD Components reviewed” — namely the National Security Agency, the DoD Cyber Crime Center, the Defense Information Systems Agency and U.S. Cyber Command — “implemented all of the CISA requirements.”

The inspector general attributed this deficiency to the failure of the Defense Department’s chief information officer to promulgate an agency-wide CISA implementation and compliance directive.

The DoD IG went on to push for the formulation of such a directive since the fragmentary implementation of CISA prevents the DoD from gaining “a more complete understanding of increasing and persistent cybersecurity threats by leveraging the collective knowledge and capabilities of sharing entities.”

Michael Griffin, defense undersecretary for research and engineering, has said the Defense Department seeks to expand its budget for directed-energy weapons for missile defense operations in the next few years, Defense News reported Tuesday.

Griffin noted during a Center for Strategic and International Studies-hosted event that DoD’s future investments in missile defense will focus on “laser scaling” across various technologies.

He added that there is a need to increase the number of sensors in low-Earth orbit to deter hypersonic attacks from adversaries.

“We need to think about space as a domain which our adversaries seek to remove from our use, and respond accordingly,” the DoD official said.

During CSIS’ event, Griffin also said he believes missile defense decisions should remain under the Missile Defense Agency‘s responsibilities instead of transferred to the military.

He added that technologies such as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system and Standard Missile-3 should be prioritized at DoD’s level.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has conducted a seven-day exercise on Plum Island in New York to simulate a cyber attack on the U.S. power grid, Nextgov reported Tuesday.

At least 100 people participated in the exercise that kicked off Nov. 1 to replicate “black start” or the restoration of power at two utility stations that were shut down for weeks by a cyber attack.

Several teams of grid operators, cyber researchers and cyber adversaries carried out the fourth black start exercise under DARPA’s Rapid Attack Detection, Isolation and Characterization Systems program.

The report said cyber researchers from Perspecta Labs, BAE Systems and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association used situational awareness tools and platforms designed to assess cyber attacks and isolate parts of the grid during the exercise.

Walter Weiss, RADICS program leader, told Nextgov the exercise sought to evaluate the capability of the cyber tools to counter the attacks launched by threat actors.

“We exercise with that absolute worst-case scenario where everything’s gone wrong, everything’s failed for a month and ask how are our tools still relevant,” Weiss said.

He said DARPA intends to continue conducting the exercise every six months through 2020 under the RADICS initiative.