Four senators have asked the chief financial officers of 13 agencies to address their “use it or lose it” spending at the end of the fiscal year.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs said Wednesday that Sens. Ron Johnson, Claire McCaskill, Rand Paul and Gary Peters expressed concerns that agencies may possibly spend more money by the end of fiscal year 2018 compared to previous years.

The legislators found in a study that agencies spent a total of $11.1B in the final week of fiscal year 2017, which is almost five times higher than their average weekly spending throughout the year.

“Although not a new phenomenon, use it or lose it spending can lead to waste and abuse of taxpayer dollars,” the senators wrote in their letter to David Norquist, CFO of the Defense Department.

They asked the 13 agencies to provide information ensuring that they will not make wasteful or “abusive” spending in the last quarter of 2018.

The agencies of the chief financial officers the four senators approached are:

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• Department of Defense
• Department of the Treasury
• Department of Veterans Affairs
• Department of Homeland Security
• Department of Energy
• Department of Justice
• Department of State
• Department of Transportation
• Department of Health and Human Services
• General Services Administration
• NASA
• National Science Foundation
• Social Security Administration

The Government Accountability Office has pointed out that the Census Bureau has yet to address more than 3K security issues afflicting multiple systems that the bureau will use to carry out the 2020 Census.

GAO said in a report published Thursday that among the unresolved security problems detected during the Census Bureau’s systems assessment process, 43 were deemed either “high risk” or “very high risk,” while more than 2.7K had to do with infrastructure components under development by the technical integration contractor.

The government audit agency noted that majority of the bureau’s systems will use personally identifiable information, and that such information will be collected from “over a hundred million households across the country,” underscoring the importance of ensuring security.

With a handful of systems still in the development phase, the watchdog emphasized the need for the bureau to provide enough time to conduct the requisite security assessment and “ensure that risks are at an acceptable level before the systems are deployed.”

Three former NATO leaders have asked the alliance to name the new headquarters in Brussels after Sen. John McCain, Defense News reported Thursday.

McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona and a U.S. Navy veteran, passed away Saturday at the age of 81 due to brain cancer.

“Whether advancing the cause of freedom across the former Soviet states of eastern Europe or defending the multilateral international order at a time of scepticism, his work was a beacon for all of us who believe that transatlantic unity is the only means of ensuring peace,” the three former NATO secretaries general said of McCain in a letter published Thursday.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen co-wrote the letter with George Robertson and Javier Solana.

The new $1.4B headquarters will accommodate 29 embassies and 4.2K personnel in support of the alliance’s political and administrative operations.

The fiscal 2019 defense authorization bill that President Donald Trump signed into law two weeks ago was named for McCain, who served as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

U.S. Army Undersecretary Ryan McCarthy has said in an interview that the Army Futures Command comes at a time when the military needs to keep pace with advancements in technology and formalize its business relationships.

McCarthy explained that the Futures Command was established to initiate formal collaborations to speed up the delivery of information and results, the service said Friday.

He added that having a military-industry relationship enables contractors to help the Army solve problems and informs those vendors about what the service seeks in a product or service.

“Clearly we want them to be successful, but we have to communicate to them what exactly we want. And we have to be consistent so they can invest in their products and services, allow them to evolve and bring the cost down,” McCarthy said.

The Army official also noted that the organization ultimately intends to bring capabilities critical to the priorities of the service’s Chief of Staff through the Army Capabilities Integration Center and the Research, Development and Engineering Command.

Lastly, McCarthy believes that creating a cost-efficient lifecycle plan is important in developing weapons systems.

“Getting a life-cycle plan in place that’s not only cost-efficient for managing and upgrading these systems over time, but also keeps operational rates up, is absolutely critical,” he said.

Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie has said VA will work closely with the Defense Department over the next decade in efforts to deploy and ensure interoperability of their updated electronic health record systems., FedScoop reported Thursday.

Wilkie said at the American Legion National Convention that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis instructed him to make VA’s electronic health care system work to continuously record the medical data of U.S. warfighters during and after military service.

As part of its health IT modernization effort, VA awarded Cerner a potential 10-year, $10 billion contract in May to help the department adopt the same EHR system as DoD.

VA’s Office of Electronic Health Record Modernization, led by Genevieve Morris, will oversee the preparation, deployment and maintenance of the platform and support tools.