Alan Thomas, commissioner of the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service, told Federal News Radio in an interview published Monday that comments from industry and agency clients help incite reforms to GSA’s schedules program and one of those changes is the elimination of the minimum purchase thresholds.

“We consistently hear from customers that minimum order quantities often times will lead them to cancel orders,” Thomas said.

“We are working with vendors on schedule to try and reduce or in some cases remove those minimum order quantities.”

Thomas mentioned other schedule modernization efforts in 2019 such as the procurement of “order level materials” under the same schedule, fee adjustments and transparency initiatives.

He noted that a working group at FAS is expected to provide recommendations on potential consolidation of schedule contracts by year’s end with implementation slated for late next year or 2020.
 

Gen. Paul Nakasone has said that the U.S. is currently in competition with adversarial nation states that avoid engaging in outright conflict and instead use “nibbling strategies,” which erode the country’s strategic advantages a little at a time, MeriTalk reported Friday. The head of U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency spoke at the recent Billington Cybersecurity Summit.

Nakasone pointed out how this “great powers competition” is taking place in cyberspace, where opposing state actors are carrying out “strategic campaigns” against the U.S., including the theft of intellectual property and personal information as well as attempted electoral disruption.

A 2017 and 2018 Wash100 awardee, Nakasone noted how cyberspace is a “dynamic domain” with “low barriers to entry.” Consequently, cyber dominance “is not always possible” and cyber superiority “can only be thought of as temporary.”

“Advantage goes to the side that innovates fastest,” Nakasone said, adding that, to remain at the forefront of technological advances, USCYBERCOM must continuously collaborate with its partners.

The House of Representatives has unanimously passed a bill that would create a threat-response framework to protect the U.S. against state-sponsored cyber attacks.

Reps. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., and Ted Yoho, R-Fla., introduced the Cyber Deterrence and Response Act which requires the President to identify cyber threat attackers, decide on sanctions and coordinate with allies on further action, the House Foreign Affairs Committee said Wednesday.

Ed Royce, who chairs the committee, said the legislation is intended to warn countries such as Iran, North Korea and Russia that the U.S. will retaliate against cyber threats.

Royce also cited the high cost of cyber attacks and the U.S.’ lack of a unified response framework against state-sponsored cyber threats, both of which the bill aims to address.

Stephen Schanberger, acquisition executive at U.S. Cyber Command, has said military cyber components collaborate to finalize requirements for the Unified Platform prior to a full transition of the program to the U.S. Air Force in fiscal 2019, Fifth Domain reported Saturday.

The system is intended to support cyber defense, planning command-and-control and situational awareness operations.

Lt. Gen. Stephen Fogarty, commander of the U.S. Army’s Cyber Command, noted at en event last month that military services are working to ensure long-term sustainability of the platform.

The Air Force issued in June a request for proposals notice that sought proposals from Alliant contract holders interested in pursuing the project to build the centralized infrastructure for joint cyber operations.

The service sought $45.8 million in research and development funds for the Unified Platform program through fiscal 2021.

A panel of military and legislative leaders and an analyst have said the U.S. Navy needs to control long-term costs for maintaining and modernizing weapon systems as the service adopts new acquisition processes, USNI News reported Friday.

Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center of Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, noted during a recent Defense News conference that the Navy should form a plan for when it needs to sustain or replace its assets.

He added that maintenance costs for ships or aircraft will continue to increase after 15 to 20 years of service.

Vice Adm. William Merz, deputy chief of naval operations for warfare systems, also said that it is difficult to maintain big assets such as ships, planes and weapons unless they can be modified during their service life.

Some of the new procurement vehicles the Navy is leveraging to develop or field new equipment include a mid-tier acquisition authority, an Accelerated Acquisition Board and rapid prototyping, according to Allison Stiller, deputy assistant secretary for the Navy for research, development and acquisition.

“All of these activities are intended to increase our agility and improve affordability,” Stiller added.

Vicki Hildebrand, chief information officer at the Department of Transportation, has said DOT has started to design a new “cleansing program” to facilitate crowdsourced cyber vulnerability hunting activities at component agencies, Nextgov reported Friday.

Plans for the cleansing program came after bug hunting services provider Synack identified vulnerabilities in computer systems at the department’s headquarters.

“We started with software we thought was rock solid,” she told reporters at the Billington Cybersecurity Summit.

“There were vulnerabilities we didn’t realize.”

FedScoop reported that Hildebrand aims to speed up cyber threat detection at the department through crowdsourcing methods.

“It goes back to being proactive. I don’t want to wait for a bad actor to tell me I’ve got a vulnerability,” she added.