Senate approved a bill that would require the Energy Department to launch a program aiming to use analog, non-digital and physical systems to protect U.S. electric power grids from cyber attacks, Nextgov recently reported. The Securing Energy Infrastructure Act would provide $10M for a two-year pilot program led by Energy’s national laboratories and backed by the agency’s industry partners.

The bill also includes establishing a new federal working group to assess the recommendations from the program. The group would include representatives from the departments of Energy, Homeland Security and Defense, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. The Senate agreed to provide $1.5M to fund the working group.

Sens. Angus King, I-Maine, and Jim Risch, R-Idaho, introduced the bill in 2017.

“For years we’ve seen the danger of cyber attacks grow as bad actors pursue larger and more sophisticated incursions on our vital systems, but the federal government’s response has not matched the severity of these threats,” King said. “This commonsense, bipartisan bill is an important step in the right direction, and will help protect America’s critical infrastructure from devastating attacks before they happen,” he added.

The House has yet to vote on a similar bill introduced in the past year.

FBI Director Christopher Wray has said a group of Chinese state-sponsored threat actors compromised the computers of U.S. government agencies, firms and other organizations worldwide to steal large volumes of confidential business data and intellectual property.

Wray made the remarks during a recent press conference announcing the indictment of two members of the APT 10 cyber hacking group – Zhu Hua and Zhang Shilong – linked to the Chinese state security ministry.

He mentioned APT 10’s involvement in the theft of personally identifiable data from over 100K service personnel of the U.S. Navy and cyber attacks against health care, agriculture, oil and gas and biotechnology firms.

Wray also cited the bureau’s collaboration with colleagues at the departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Defense as well as the Naval Criminal Investigative Service to conduct an investigation into the group.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen have called on China to stick to its 2015 commitment to refrain from carrying out cyber-based IP theft that threatens the national security and economic competitiveness of other countries.

“We will continue to hold malicious actors accountable for their behavior, and today the United States is taking several actions to demonstrate our resolve,” Pompeo and Nielsen said in a joint statement released Thursday.

A watchdog report shows that the U.S. Air Force saw a multi-year delay in the acquisition and deployment of “base in a box” kits in Europe due to poor planning and lack of centralized management, Defense News reported Wednesday.

The service originally planned to field Deployable Air Base Systems, which provides easy-to-deploy facilities, equipment and vehicles, in fiscal year 2019. However, the inspector general of the Department of Defense found that the Air Force fell behind schedule and might deploy the first DABS kits by fiscal 2022.

The IG said in the report that the delay comes as the service failed to assign a single program manager to handle the multiple organizations involved in the program. Watchdog added the Air Force also did not provide a “unified master schedule” for the acquisition and deployment of DABS across Europe. The IG said the issues would delay the completion of the program until fiscal 2026.

The Air Force agreed to assign a program manager to handle the DABS program and provide the DoD IG with another timeline to pre-position initial 10 kits in 2021.

The General Services Administration plans to issue a playbook to guide the agency and potentially the entire government in automating digital tasks, FCW reported Wednesday.

GSA wants to utilize robotic process automation bots, which can automate various tasks, such as data manipulation, data entry, email handling, data reconciliation and extracting data from documents. To help the government implement RPA, the agency plans to establish a community of practice in January to connect federal employees and officials who work on the technology.

The community will also help GSA create a government-wide playbook to guide other agencies in automating daily tasks. The Trump administration expects five percent of federal occupations to be entirely automated, while 60 percent of jobs could be partially automated. GSA is automating some internal processes with RPA, including the agency’s financial system and invoices.

The agency may soon include data entry in their efforts among other larger “higher value” applications, according to GSA’s RPA Program Director Ed Burrows. The federal government launched its first process automation bot in 2017.

Margaret Weichert, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, said the Trump administration aims to integrate workforce efforts through executive councils and agencies in 2019, Federal News Network reported Wednesday.

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Weichert noted that the government will focus on the collaboration of agencies in workforce initiatives such as reskilling federal personnel, fostering employee engagement and shortening hiring procedures. A fourth quarter update posted on Performance.gov states the administration is slated to develop a reskilling strategy to re-deploy existing federal staff by the end of March.

“Agencies were widely interested in using automated career paths and leveraging technology platforms to make career paths accessible to employees,” according to the update.

OPM and the Office of Management and Budget, where Weichert concurrently serves as deputy director for management, have begun collaborating with other agencies to study data on federal workforce operations and potential ways to address the need for reskilling and redeployment.

The Trump administration will hold an industry day in January to assess career-pathing strategies used by the private sector.

Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan held his first national security meeting informing senior military officials about his plans as head of the Department of Defense, SpaceNews reported Wednesday.

At the Pentagon, he told secretaries and undersecretaries of military services and other defense officials that he will continue the efforts set by former Secretary Jim Mattis under the national defense strategy. Shanaha also called on the officials to keep their focus on China’s growing threats to the U.S.

The call comes as the 2018 National Defense Strategy identifies Beijing as well as Russia among the biggest threats to the U.S. military due to their rapid development of new weapons and defense systems. However, the acting secretary did not mention Moscow in his discussion about “great power competition.”

Prior to taking office as DoD acting lead, Shanahan expressed interest in modernizing the military and investing in advanced space technologies and hypersonic weapons to deter foreign threats, particularly China. He is leading reorganization efforts at the Pentagon to establish President Trump’s proposed Space Force.