The U.S. Marine Corps and Navy have announced plans to leverage commercial services, replace aging systems, accelerate ship and aircraft acquisition, build shipyard workforce and increase international partnerships to address recently found readiness issues.

Workforce shortfalls and gaps, ship maintenance delays and unavailable aircraft contributed to deployment challenges for the two military branches, the Government Accountability Office said in a new report posted Wednesday. 

John Pendleton, director of defense capabilities and management at GAO, said the Navy and Marines are also facing budgetary shortfalls and an aging and shrinking fleet of ships, submarines and aircraft. 

To address such issues, Navy Secretary Richard Spencer said his service plans to implement several corrective actions such as:

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• Partnering with the private sector to maintain ships and aircraft
• Speeding up acquisition of new weapon systems and ships
• Increasing funding for maintenance by $1.1B 
• Partnering shipyards with the private sector 
• Increasing public shipyard workers from 34.9K to 36.7K

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Meanwhile, the Marine Corps plans to improve readiness by increasing investments in aviation, modernization, combat vehicles, close combat lethality equipment, cyber and ground equipment.

Both military branches also plan to strengthen alliances and attract new international partners through combined and joint exercises.

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to establish a new council that will work to encourage investments in urban and economically distressed areas.

The secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the assistant to the president for domestic policy will respectively serve as chairman and vice chair of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council, according to the executive order published Wednesday.

The policy directs the council to evaluate the measures each agency can implement to focus federal investments on “qualified opportunity zones” and other economically distressed areas and seek feedback from government officials and private-sector stakeholders on how to revitalize such zones.

The council will also coordinate interagency efforts to help private and public sector officials come up with economic growth strategies as well as recommend policies that seek to reduce administrative and regulatory burdens.

The council has 90 days to develop a work plan for the implementation of its function and mission, according to the EO.
 

The Department of Transportation has earmarked $1.5B in grants for 91 infrastructure projects in 49 states and the District of Columbia, the DOT said Tuesday.

The Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development Transportation Grants program will focus on projects that seek to improve transit, road, rail and port operations in support of the department’s efforts to refurbish and construct more than 200 bridges across the U.S.

A team of 222 DOT career staff reviewed submissions and selected projects based on their impact on safety, quality of life, economic competitiveness and environmental protection.

The team also chose projects that will promote innovation, foster partnerships between the public and private sectors and gain non-federal revenue for investments in transportation infrastructure.

The DOT will allocate discretionary grant funding through the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018, and will award a maximum of $25M for a single project.

The department said the BUILD effort aims to re-balance a 10-year under-investment in rural communities.

The Federal Communications Commission established a new office to apply economic and data analysis on policy formation activities.

The agency said Tuesday, its new Office of Economics and Analytics will consist of commission economists, as well as former staff of the now-defunct Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis, OEA’s predecessor. OEA will feature four divisions to focus on economic analysis, industry analysis, auctions and data. Ajit Pai, FCC commissioner, proposed the new office in April 2017.

“This will be a single office to bring together the great economic and data work already being done by FCC staff,” said Pai.

The U.S. Marine Corps plans to integrate units focusing on cyber, signals, electronic and information warfare into the service’s forces, C4ISRnet reported Tuesday.

The service will implement marine expeditionary force information groups in traditional formations. Lt. Gen. Lori Reynolds, the deputy commandant for information, will oversee all groups. Kenneth Bible, USMC’s C4 directorate deputy director and deputy chief information officer, said at the Charleston Defense Contractors Association Defense Summit that MIGs forces would work to aid information support operations, psychological operations and military deception efforts.

Bible added the service is in the process of figuring out how MIGs can further support marine expeditionary forces. Reynolds has instructed the MIGs’ advisory group to formulate exercises for more joint engagements.

The commandant cited NATO’s Trident Juncture exercise as an example of testing limited assets with commanders.

The Government Accountability Office called on the departments of Defense and Health and Human Services to review their records of contract awards due to misreported noncompetitive contracts. 

Contracting officials at the DoD and HHS found misreporting competitive and noncompetitive between fiscal years 2013 and 2017, GAO said in a report posted Tuesday. 

“Federal data estimates 30 percent of IT spending is noncompetitive—or about $15B annually. However, this estimate may not be accurate,” the watchdog report stated.   

GAO said DoD, HHS and the Department of Homeland Security provided inaccurate competition data in the Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation. The errors were found in 22 of the 41 contracts reviewed. The watchdog also discovered that 7 percent of noncompetitive IT contracts and orders released by the three agencies in the past fiscal years were used to support outdated or obsolete legacy IT systems. GAO warned that misreporting contracts could lead to competition data being inaccurately recorded and misguides federal agencies in planning and achieving objectives.

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DHS has already identified issues that caused the errors and took corrective action. The DoD and HHS have yet to respond to GAO’s recommendations to determine the reasons behind the high rate of miscoding for contracts and to improve the reliability of the competition data.