House Democrats passed two bills this week in a bid to end the partial government shutdown without funding President Trump’s border wall, New York Post reported Thursday.

One bill would provide temporary budgeting to eight of the nine closed agencies until September, while another would fund the Department of Homeland Security until Feb. 8. However, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi noted the chamber will not support construction of Trump’s wall.

“We’re not doing a wall,” Pelosi said. “The fact is a wall is an immorality. It’s not who we are as a nation.” Without the wall’s funding Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the upper chamber will not “waste its time” to pass the House proposal, CNBC reported Thursday. 

White House issued a statement on Thursday warning that Trump’s advisers would recommend that the president veto the Democratic bills. The president “cannot accept legislation that provides unnecessary funding for wasteful programs while ignoring the nation’s border security needs,” the White House said. Bipartisan congressional leaders expect to meet with White House officials on Friday to discuss Trump’s requested $5B funding for the border wall.

The U.S. Navy has tested a new Littoral Combat Group concept for a coordinated deployment of disaggregated forces, USNI News reported Thursday. 

In late 2018, the service branch deployed San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock USS Somerset along with Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Wayne E. Meyer to support ground forces in South America. The U.S. 3rd Fleet said the Littoral Combat Group 1 tested the command and control of assets under a single commander. The deployment enabled the Navy to learn how attack and transport ships can support ground forces in certain operations, such as law enforcement detachment and humanitarian assistance.  
The Navy plans to use the lessons learned from the test to create a proposal to use the LCG concept in future operations. The service is also working on how the Marine Corps can battle for sea control from ashore by coordinating submarines, surface ships and ground forces.

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.