Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan has released a memo that lays out the Defense Department’s plan to establish by 2020 a new “space force” that would serve as the country’s sixth service branch, SpaceNews reported Thursday.

John Rood, defense undersecretary for policy, will work with the Joint Staff, military services’ secretaries and DoD’s legislative office to come up with a legislative proposal for the new space force for submission to the Office of Management and Budget by Dec. 1, according to a copy of the Monday memo obtained by the publication.

Shanahan directed Rood to provide a “space governance committee” with an interim report by Oct. 1 and the Pentagon comptroller to draft a proposed budget for the new service by Oct. 15 for inclusion in the funding request for fiscal 2020.

The report said the memo also covers DoD’s action plans for the establishment of a unified space command, space operations forces and a space development agency.
 

The General Services Administration plans to announce within the next two weeks a second agency that will lead new centers of excellence  to accelerate information technology modernization efforts across the government, Federal News Radio reported Thursday.

Kelly Olson, acting director of GSA’s Technology Transformation Service, said that GSA will start to conduct an in-house application process for employees who want to support the CoE project.

The Agriculture Department serves as the first “lighthouse” agency of the initial five CoEs.

“Something that we’ve learned at USDA and will be the same for everywhere we go, is you cannot go in somewhere and just drop technology down and move on to the next. There’s been a focus on reskilling the workforce, changing management, managing through culture and expectations,” Olson said Thursday at a breakfast event hosted by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association  Bethesda’s chapter.

She added that GSA seeks to incorporate some of the best practices from the department into the next host agency.

GSA selected four companies in March to provide IT support services at the USDA-hosted CoEs and released in July requests for quotes for the second phase of the effort.

Alan Thomas, commissioner of the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service, has said the board that oversees the Technology Modernization Fund plans to award the next round of funding for information technology upgrades at agencies amid uncertainty in budget allocation for TMF in fiscal 2019, Federal Times reported Thursday.

“We did not take into account whether we were going to get another tranche of money in there,” Thomas, a member of the Technology Modernization Board, said Thursday at an Association for Federal Information Resource Management event.

“One of the key things that we’re looking at for projects is the ability to pay back, so there’s a revolving fund.”

The departments of Agriculture, Energy and Housing and Urban Development received $45M in combined funds in June as part of the initial funding awards under TMF.

The House Appropriations Committee passed a bill in July that would add $150M in fiscal 2019 funds to TMF but some Senate lawmakers said they would like to see some results before they obligate more money for the fund, the report added.
 

Conference members of both chambers of Congress have reached a compromise to combine the $674B defense spending bill with a measure that would appropriate fiscal 2019 funds for the departments of Health and Human Services, Labor and Education, Defense News reported Thursday.

“The Defense and Labor-HHS bills account for the lion’s share of discretionary spending,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.).

The conference report on the “minibus” measure includes a continuing resolution that aims to prevent a government shutdown by funding other federal agencies through Dec. 7 to give lawmakers time to negotiate other appropriations bills.

USA Today reported that the House on Thursday voted 377-20 to approve a package of bills that would allocate fiscal 2019 funds for the Department of Veterans Affairs, military construction, energy and water infrastructure and legislative branch.

The package is now headed to the White House for President Donald Trump’s signature, the report added.
 

A new Congressional Budget Office analysis has found that performing a common type of maintenance work on the U.S. Navy’s Los Angeles-class attack submarines (SSN-688) at the service’s public shipyards is more expensive than at private shipyards, USNI News reported Thursday.

The finding stems from CBO’s examination of Docking Selected Restricted Availability overhaul work for attack submarines and three cost comparisons made between private and public shipyards for different time periods.

The agency also found that public shipyards recorded $26.1M in unadjusted average cost of DSRA maintenance compared with $20.9M at their counterparts in the private sector, according to the report’s summary obtained by the publication.

CBO then took into account the overhead costs to reflect the move to the mission funding model and found that the average DSRA costs “at private shipyards were 38 percent lower than at public shipyards” between 1993 and 2017.

“The Navy looks forward to reviewing the details and analysis in the CBO report. Ship maintenance is critical to meeting the [National Defense Strategy],” Capt. Danny Hernandez, a spokesman for the service, said in a statement.
 

The Government Accountability Office recently said that the rate at which the Defense Department conducts competitions when procuring products or services has declined in the past five years despite government-wide efforts to encourage the practice.

The federal watchdog agency noted in an audit report published Wednesday that from 2013 to 2017, the DoD’s competition rate went down by more than 4 percent even as the competition rates of civilian agencies went up by 1.6 percent.

The GAO, drawing from previous DoD assessments, attributed the regression to multiple factors including the complexity of the DoD’s contracting procedures and the lack of data rights resulting in the government’s reliance on original equipment manufacturers for the upkeep of purchased systems.

The GAO did observe, however, that memos promoting the practice of conducting competitions were issued from 2010 to 2015 by then-undersecretaries for acquisition, technology and logistics.

DoD programs that implemented or aligned with the memos’ recommendations yielded better acquisition outcomes or gained billions in buying power, the GAO reported.

The Office of Management and Budget has administered a symposium encouraging public and private sector entities to develop ways to retrain government employees as part of the President’s Management Agenda, FCW reported Wednesday.

The PMA, which was released in March, states that the Trump administration aims to reorganize the federal workforce using practices from private companies.

As part of the reorganization, the government has started implementing a plan to merge some of the responsibilities of the Office of Personnel Management, like retirement services, federal employee healthcare and insurance, into the General Services Administration.

During the symposium, Margaret Weichert, deputy director for management at OMB, also discussed the proposed Government Effectiveness Advance Research center as part of the workforce reshaping plan.

Weichert previously explained that the GEAR center will retrain employees for modern jobs, as well as guide the government in streamlining its service delivery processes.

Additionally, OMB used the symposium to initiate discussions on technology, performance management and civil service reform.