President Donald Trump has said he projects the defense budget to be $700B for fiscal 2020, Stars and Stripes reported Wednesday.

The figure reflects a drop of more than 2 percent from the $716B National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2019 that Trump signed in August.

The president said the increase in the defense budget for FY 2019 seeks to support the procurement of new submarines and ships as part of the country’s military rebuilding efforts.

He also signed in September an appropriations package that would allocate $674B in FY 2019 funds for the Pentagon.

Trump on Wednesday directed his Cabinet secretaries to implement a 5 percent cut in their proposed budgets for the next fiscal year.
 

The Commerce Department has begun to solicit public comments on draft practices in the proposed Federal Data Strategy that seeks to meet one of the cross-agency priority goals in the President’s Management Agenda.

A Federal Register notice published Wednesday says the working groups have classified into five objectives the proposed practices in the strategy, which aims to leverage data as a “strategic asset” in order to advance transparency and facilitate oversight.

Those objectives include data security and protection; management of data as a strategic asset; and efficient use of data assets.

The department will accept comments on the proposed practices through Nov. 16 and plans to issue another request for input in January 2019 to seek feedback on a year-one plan for the strategy’s implementation.

The Federal Data Strategy will guide agencies in data collection and management and inform actions for program data, mission-support information, statistical data and other data assets, according to the notice.
 

The General Services Administration plans to implement robotic process automation at the agency to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs, FedScoop reported Tuesday.

GSA Administrator Emily Murphy described the initiative during the 2018 Imagine Nation ELC conference, noting that the adoption of RPA is meant to supplement the agency’s data-driven efficiency efforts that resulted in $900M worth of savings in fiscal year 2017.

Murphy, a 2018 Wash 100 awardee, said that adopting RPA “in and of itself will save 10,000 hours of work a week” and would give the GSA “that ability to reskill the workforce to high-value work.”

The RPA initiative aligns with the President’s Management Agenda, which the White House promulgated earlier this year.

The PMA calls on federal agencies to transition “time, effort and funding” from the performance of repetitive administrative and compliance tasks “toward accomplishing mission outcomes” through various strategies including the use of tools like automation.

The GSA seeks to roll out RPA within the year.

Margie Graves, deputy chief information officer at the Department of Homeland Security, has said the government is nearly ready to release the updated version of the Trusted Internet Connections mandate, Meritalk reported Tuesday.

Graves explained at the 2018 Imagine Nation ELC Conference that TIC 3.0 will permit federal organizations to leverage cloud services under the condition that they meet the intent of controls, implement the offerings in their environment and run them in between on-premises software and cloud services.

She added that the modified initiative will also complement the Trump administration’s Cloud Smart Policy, which guides agencies in migrating their applications to a secure cloud network.

Additionally, the new initiative aims to zero out trust in information technology modernization efforts to help the government respond to data breaches.

John Kindervag, field chief technology officer at Palo Alto Networks, believes that the zero trust should be the “grand” strategic objective when dealing with data.

Stephen Kovac, vice president of global government and compliance at Zscaler, also said employing a zero trust approach will help the government protect networks and save costs.

James Geurts, assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy for research, development and acquisition, has said the service should review its acquisition processes and understand manned-unmanned teaming to better participate in expeditionary warfare, National Defense Magazine reported Tuesday.

Geurts noted at the National Defense Industrial Association’s 23rd Expeditionary Warfare Conference that the U.S. armed forces should rapidly respond to threats and field necessary technologies to win over enemies in the battlefield.

He said the Navy is working on organizing its “other transaction” agreements to continue procuring and deploying modern technologies such as artificial intelligence to warfighters.

The service increased the number of its OTAs in 2017 but has not fully leveraged them compared to the other service branches.

Geurts added that there is also a need for the Navy to determine how to split mission assignments with autonomous systems for expeditionary warfare operations.

“The challenge for us is understanding how to make those unmanned systems integrated into our formation in a way that makes sense,” Geurts noted.

The Navy assistant secretary said the service should identify how to incorporate unmanned systems into a concept of employment enabled by manned technologies to give the military a competitive edge.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has released a report that calls for public companies to develop and implement internal accounting controls while taking into account the risks associated with cyber fraud.

“Cyber frauds are a pervasive, significant, and growing threat to all companies, including our public companies,” SEC Chairman Jay Clayton said in a statement published Tuesday.

“Investors rely on our public issuers to put in place, monitor, and update internal accounting controls that appropriately address these threats,” he added.

The investigative report shows that nine public firms lost approximately $100M due to “business email compromises,” which involved threat actors who pretend to be vendors or company executives and use emails to lure corporate staff to transmit funds to their bank accounts.

SEC said the firms involved in the investigation operate in consumer goods, technology, real estate, machinery, financial and energy markets.

The FBI estimates BEC-related fraud has accounted for more than $5B in corporate losses since 2013, according to the report.