The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security aim to provide “user-friendly” technologies for employees in an effort to mitigate threats and address mission needs, MeriTalk reported Wednesday.

William Snelson, associate director of operations at DOJ’s U.S. Marshals Service, told MeriTalk that federal employees must match the technological skills of adversaries to stay ahead of threat actors.

Snelson, who spoke at an event hosted by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, added that employees’ user experience must be optimized in areas such as mobile applications and data accessibility.

Daniel Tanciar, deputy executive director of policy, program analysis and evaluation for Customs and Border Protection‘s office of field evaluation, said DHS is working to develop user-friendly technology for employees including a mobile passport system.

Tanciar added DHS needs to rely on technology to meet its mission and that the department will continue to apply mobile technology and analytics in its data management and threat detection efforts.

The Treasury Department has launched the USAspending.gov database on Amazon Relational Database Service in an effort to provide citizens access to federal government spending data.

USAspending.gov data related to federal contracts, loans, grants and employee salaries can be accessed as a public PostgreSQL snapshot on Amazon RDS, AWS said Tuesday.

The database contains federal spending data for the second quarter of fiscal 2017 and will add records dating back to fiscal 2000 by summer.

The company said the launch of the database on Amazon RDS seeks to comply with the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 that aims to facilitate access to government financial data on the USAspending.gov website as part of government transparency efforts.

The U.S. Marine Corps wants to deploy a small unmanned aircraft system built using three-dimensional printing technology to support the military branch’s combat operations in the coming weeks, Defense Systems reported Monday.

Capt. Christopher Wood, co-lead for additive manufacturing at the Marine Corps headquarters, said that the Nibbler UAS will aid surveillance missions alongside other 3D-printed drones that the service branch is currently developing, the report stated.

Wood added the Marine Corps aims to establish a small manufacturing function and produce a “near infinite” range of UAS that can be produced from basic materials, such as a fixed-wing UAS and a small quadcopter for building clearing operations.

He noted that the Marine Corps will forward deploy these 3D-printed UAS technologies into a combat zone “as soon as possible,” according to the report.

Frontis Wiggins, chief information officer at the State Department, has said the agency aims to address issues with the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act implementation as well as change the way it acquires IT platforms and services through IT franchises.

Wiggins told Federal News Radio in an interview that aired Friday the IT franchise concept would require every office within the State Department to comply with certain standards and make adjustments to their implementation as required based on their location.

“You look at the CIO’s office as a franchise organization… and you have downstream franchisees that then have an agreement that says they will abide by the following rules and regulations,” he told the station.

“The idea is we are going to create a template and pilot it with a couple of early adopters and actually have them help us adjust the franchise arrangement,” Wiggins added.

Wiggins also cited other the agency’s IT efforts such as the migration of applications to the cloud, initiative to provide WiFi service to agency employees worldwide and the department’s adoption of the two-factor authentication process.