President Donald Trump has signed into law a package of bills that would allocate fiscal 2019 funds for the Department of Veterans Affairs, military construction and energy and water infrastructure.

A White House fact sheet published Friday says the minibus legislation would appropriate $86.5B in funds for VA, including $1.75B for MISSION Act programs, $1.1B for electronic health record system modernization and $8.6B for mental health services.

The measure would also allocate $15.14B for the country’s nuclear security strategy and $10.3B for 174 domestic and overseas military construction projects.

The Army Corps of Engineers would get $7B in fiscal 2019 budget to maintain the country’s water infrastructure.

The Energy Department would receive $13.4B in funds for energy initiatives, such as research-and-development work on nuclear and fossil energy technologies.

The Defense Department‘s Strategic Capabilities Office has identified programs wherein SCO believes it can apply artificial intelligence to assist military operations, C4ISRNET reported Friday.

SCO Director Chris Shank said nearly one-third of the office’s projects cover AI, machine learning or autonomous technology and seek to advance prototypes into tools.

“My job is to keep momentum going,” Shank told C4ISRNET in an interview.

“What I am trying to do is take it from a startup organization to a long-term sustainable one.”

The office supports the U.S. Navy‘s efforts to sustain fourth-generation fighter aircraft with technology under the Paladium initiative. A sub-project called Jarvis looks to implement a robotics platform for field maintainers to sustain and rebuild equipment parts.

The U.S. Navy would get $350M in fiscal 2019 funds to acquire a variant of the San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock under a minibus spending measure that passed the Senate on Tuesday, Defense News reported Friday.

The LPD-17 Flight II ship is designed to replace legacy dock-landing vessels used to launch amphibious vehicles onto the shore and helicopters.

The service would get $350M in additional funds to procure the Landing Helicopter Assault Ship 9, an additional $182.5M to purchase three more ship-to-shore connector vessel and $225M to buy an expeditionary fast-transport ship.

Bryan Clark, an analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a retired submarine officer, said the congressional move to boost funding for amphibious shipbuilding efforts seeks to support the Navy’s goal to achieve a 355-ship fleet.

The minibus measure is now headed to the lower chamber for a final vote, according to the report.

The U.S. Army’s Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center recently held its fourth annual open house where it demonstrated its investments in modern technologies for telemedicine, Federal News Radio reported Friday.

TATRC Director Col. Gina Adam explained that the center is leveraging innovations in computer and information technology, ultra-wide band as a communications network and artificial intelligence to boost medical care for warfighters.

The technologies that TATRC is experimenting with include drones for conducting medical operations and fetching injured soldiers from remote areas.

“The devices [we are working on] span from near-term emergent capabilities where we are looking to provide a telemedicine capability that would essentially allow the medic to phone a friend, a doctor,” said James Beach, research and development program manager at the TATRC’s Medical Intelligent Systems Lab.

He added that the Army intends to use AI to support medics when communication lines are tampered with.

A Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill contains a provision that would allow the Department of Homeland Security to attack drones that threaten national assets, Bloomberg reported Saturday.

Unveiled the same day, the provision is part of H.R. 302 which aims to provide the FAA with aviation safety funds to cover a five-year authorization period.

The House of Representatives will vote on the provision on Wednesday, and the Senate will cast its vote next week before the current authorization’s expiration on Sept. 30, the report noted.

The provision supports DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s push for legislation to regulate the growing amount of drones in U.S. skies.

Several senators have issued a resolution calling on Congress to prevent the U.S. Postal Service from being privatized, which the Trump administration intends to do under the government reorganization plan, Federal Times reported Saturday.

Twenty-seven senators agreed that transferring the government’s responsibilities over the USPS to a private company would increase prices, decrease the number of services being offered and create a dent in the U.S. critical infrastructure.

“Privatization of the U.S. Postal Service would hurt both low-income and rural Americans especially who live in areas where it might not be profitable to deliver to them,” the National Association of Letter Carriers said in a statement published Thursday.

NALC expects Congress to focus on the postal agency’s financial concerns instead of privatizing its operations.

The resolution follows a similar plan from the House of Representatives that was introduced in July 16.

Three U.S. Senate Democrats have sent a letter to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission inquiring about the steps it is taking to mitigate the potential discriminatory effects brought about by the growing use of facial analysis technologies in the workplace.

Senators Kamala Harris of California, Patty Murray of Washington and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, in a Sept. 17 letter obtained by Tech Crunch, expressed concern over “a growing body of evidence” indicating that facial analysis technologies, which are increasingly being implemented by employers for multiple purposes including hiring, amplify rather than reduce prejudice.

Citing reports documenting the apparent weakness of facial recognition systems in correctly identifying women or persons of color, the senators stated that such a deficiency “can encode and magnify gender, racial, and other biases” prevalent in society.

The senators went on to ask the EEOC for information about its preparedness to address possible discrimination complaints related to the use of facial recognition.

The lawmakers also requested that the EEOC develop guidelines that would instruct businesses on the fair use of facial recognition and how the use of such technology could potentially result in legal violations.

The EEOC has until Sept. 28 to respond.

The Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies has recommended that the U.S. Air Force procure 180 new B-21 Raiders to counter advanced attacks from adversaries, National Defense Magazine reported Friday.

Retired Lt. Gen. David A. Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, explained during a recent Air Force Association-hosted event that the service’s existing fleet of bombers is insufficient to meet defense requirements.

The organization noted in a new report that the Air Force should retain and modernize its existing B-1B and B-2 planes to increase the bomber inventory and maximize the remaining capabilities of their legacy fleet.

In addition, the report said the service should integrate its bombers in the future combat cloud for data gathering and processing purposes, and expand the payload capacity and range of planes to accommodate various missions.

The report also recommended that the Defense Department develop a new criteria for measuring system value on a standard cost per effect basis.

The General Services Administration has agreed to help the U.S. Marine Corps buy technology platforms and logistics services through a performance-based contracting method.

Both parties also established the Partnership Agreement Council to identify methods to update information technology systems and manage supply chain operations for the service branch’s procurement efforts, the GSA said Tuesday.

PAC members will hold a meeting on a quarterly basis to share information with each other.

Lt. Gen. Charles Chiarotti, deputy commandant of installations and logistics at the Marine Corps, and Alan Thomas, commissioner of GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, signed the performance-based agreement Aug. 29.