Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) has urged the FBI to accept email submissions of Freedom of Information Act requests and address limits on FOIA submissions from the bureau’s portal following a policy change that requires FOIA requests to be sent online or by fax and letter.

He told David Hardy, chief of FBI’s record and information dissemination section in a letter published Thursday that the 3,000-character limit for submissions on the FBI portal may not be enough for requesters to explain why they seek relevant records.

Wyden also asked Hardy to clarify if the bureau intends to exclude requests for internal FBI communications, memos, emails and guidance as well as update the terms of service to explicitly authorize requests for document types other than the record types that the terms state.

The senator noted that the FBI also added a technical protection measure that he believes may limit automated submissions from researchers and journalists as well as implemented a requirement for requesters to determine whether they are in the U.S. or not.

Wyden wants to know the bureau’s reasons for implementing such measures and an online portal separate from the existing multiagency FOIA website that other Justice Department components use.

A subpanel within the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has started a series of hearings to gather ideas on how to facilitate reforms to the civil service system and assess the federal hiring process, Federal News Radio reported Thursday.

Nicole Ogrysko writes Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma), chairman of the Senate committee’s regulatory affairs and federal management subpanel, said during a Thursday hearing that the General Schedule system needs to be addressed and that he aims to seek feedback from federal managers on current processes and authorities that pose a challenge to their jobs.

The subpanel’s hearing comes weeks after President Donald Trump issued a memo that would bar federal agencies from hiring new employees until the Office of Management and Budget drafts within 90 days a plan on how to implement attrition to shrink the size of the federal workforce.

“Congress can either watch as the administration deals with the federal workforce through executive actions, or it can find consensus and work with the administration, take up the mantel of substantive legislative reform,” Lankford said.

He also noted that modernizing the civil service system should start with updates to the federal hiring process, according to the report.

Charles Miller, a member of the Trump administration’s NASA transition team, has said the White House is set to clear a set of memos that would set up three task forces that aim to examine various issues related to space commercialization, Space News reported Friday.

Miller wrote in a Jan. 23 email that one task force would study the feasibility of a return mission to the moon and would direct NASA to conduct an “internal competition between Old Space and New Space” in an effort to bring astronauts to the lunar orbit by 2020, Jeff Foust wrote.

“We have to be seen giving ‘Old Space’ a fair and balanced shot at proving they are better and cheaper than commercial,” Miller wrote in the email addressed to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Rep. Robert Walker.

“If this initiative can be approved quickly by the White House, and appropriately funded, we will see private American astronauts, on private space ships, circling the moon by 2020.”

Robert Lightfoot, acting NASA administrator, said in a Feb. 3 memo that no new guidance has been released with regard to the agency’s current work, the report noted.