A White House official said Thursday that President Donald Trump has decided to drop plans to establish an advisory panel focused on infrastructure, Reuters reported Friday.

The formation of the proposed Advisory Council on Infrastructure is part of an executive order Trump signed in July.

The council would have consisted of representatives from construction, real estate and transportation sectors if the administration had moved forward with the plan.

The announcement came a day after the president dissolved the American Manufacturing Council and the Strategic and Policy Forum.

Prior to the disbandment of the two business councils, several member CEOs decided to leave in response to Trump’s remarks on violence and race relations following a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The White House has released a new memorandum to provide federal agencies information on the administration’s priority areas in research and development and guide them as they create and submit their fiscal 2019 budget requests to the Office of Management and Budget.

The memo published Thursday directs agencies to invest in R&D efforts that seek to advance U.S. military superiority such as the development of missile defense platforms, hypersonic weapons, strategic deterrent and computing capabilities as well as space-based and autonomous systems.

OMB Director Mick Mulvaney co-wrote the document with Michael Kratsios, deputy assistant to the president at the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The memo asks agencies to support R&D work on cybersecurity platforms that aim to protect the country’s critical infrastructure from cyber attacks as well as law enforcement and border surveillance systems designed to facilitate detection of illegal activities.

Agencies should continue to advance research in biometrics, machine learning, autonomous systems, quantum computing and other emerging technologies that would help advance the economy, according to the memo.

The document also states R&D practices the Trump administration wants agencies to prioritize such as increasing government accountability, supporting early-stage applied research and advancing interagency coordination programs.

The administration also wants agencies to integrate science, technology, engineering and math education into their workforce training initiatives and support the modernization of the country’s research infrastructure.

The State Department‘s office of inspector general has called on the Bureau of Diplomatic Security to address issues in its security clearance process.

The OIG said in a report published July that certain factors may slow down the processing of security clearances such as unclear roles and responsibilities; insufficient resources; and an influx of student interns that require clearances.

The Bureau’s Office of Personnel Security and Suitability processes initial clearances for new employees as well as requests to transfer clearances from other government agencies, known as reciprocal clearances.

PSS also handles conversions — the security clearance process for personnel who are moving to another position within the State Department.

Auditors found that PSS does not provide exact processing times for initial and reciprocal security clearances in its reports to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which prevented the OIG from determining the timeliness of the security clearance process.

PSS reports blanket estimates instead of actual times to ODNI and maintains databases with contradicting timeliness data, the OIG report said.

Exact processing times for conversions are also unknown because PSS does not keep any data on such efforts, the report revealed.

The OIG urged the Bureau of Diplomatic Security to address the accuracy of reported timeliness data; outline clear roles and responsibilities for its clearance workforce; conduct a workforce analysis; and estimate costs associated with the clearance process.

The report also recommended the bureau to try to retrieve funds spent on investigative services for other
agencies and better identify the type of clearance that student interns might need.