A new American Customer Satisfaction Index report has found that citizen satisfaction with federal government services received a score of 68 out of 100 in 2016, up 6.4 percent from 63.9 in 2015.

ACSI said Tuesday the figure is the highest government satisfaction score the index has recorded since 2012 and that federal government’s scores when it comes to customer service, information quality, processes and quality of government websites climbed to three-year highs in 2016.

The ACSI Federal Government Report 2016 is based on interviews with randomly selected 2,380 federal service users conducted between November and December 2016.

The departments of Interior, State and Energy landed the top three spots in the ranking of federal agencies for customer satisfaction and received scores above the average federal government score of 68.

The report also pointed to the Department of Health and Human Services as the agency “most responsible for the current federal government-wide satisfaction gain.”

HHS’ citizen satisfaction score rose by 8 percent to 67 in 2016 driven by updates to the HealthCare.gov website, which citizens use to access healthcare services as part of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the report added.

David Shulkin, nominee for the Veterans Affairs secretary post, has said that he would implement efforts to increase former service members’ access to care services in the private sector if the Senate confirms him, USA Today reported Wednesday.

“Should I be confirmed, I intend to build an integrated system of care that would strengthen services within the VA that are essential for veteran well-being and use services in the community that can serve veterans with better outcomes and value to the taxpayer,” Shulkin told Senate Veterans Affairs Committee members during his nomination hearing Wednesday.

Donovan Slack writes Shulkin also informed the committee of his plans to overhaul a “choice program” to allow for the transfer of veterans into VA-sponsored private sector care.

The report said President Donald Trump wants the department to establish a 24-hour hotline for VA complaints as well as an option for veterans to receive VA-paid care from the private sector.

A three-member research team led by NASA technologist Vivek Dwivedi is working on a foldable radiator designed to control heat on small satellites.

NASA said Tuesday the radiator’s design is based on origami and the device works to change shape to lessen or conserve heat.

The space agency funds the effort through the Center Innovation Fund that supports “high-risk” technologies.

Dwivedi works to produce a coating to optimize the radiator’s heat control functions while his research partners from Brigham Young University, Brian Iverson and Rydge Mulford, collaborate to advance the design of the three-dimensional radiator.

The vanadium oxide-based coating is intended to address temperature changes facing on-orbit satellites, NASA noted.

The team believes the combination of origami and vanadium oxide-based coating could pave the way for the creation of a radiator for tiny spacecraft called CubeSats.

Dwivedi also seeks to determine the radiator’s potential applications on other spacecraft components such as solar-array panels.

The Government Accountability Office has called on the General Services Administration to inform tenant agencies if their high-security leased offices are owned by foreign companies.

GAO said in report published Monday it found that GSA leases high-security space from foreign owners in 20 buildings for 26 tenant agencies, including organizations that perform  classified operations and store sensitive data.

Owners of the high-security space include companies based in Canada, China, Israel, Japan and South Korea, the government watchdog added.

Nine of 14 agencies that GAO surveyed said they did not know that their leased facilities are foreign-owned while five agencies were not concerned or had taken actions to address risks.

Federal officials told GAO that occupying space in foreign-owned buildings could pose risks such as espionage, money laundering and unauthorized cyber and physical access.

Auditors noted GSA does not know the beneficial owners of leased offices since the agency is not required to gather such information from prospective lessors.

The watchdog urged GSA to determine whether a high-security leased space is owned by a foreign entity then forward that information to tenant agencies for security purposes.

The White House has issued new guidance to provide federal agencies information on exemptions permitted under the hiring freeze on federal civilian positions and instructions on how agencies can ask for exemptions from the Office of Personnel Management.

Positions that are exempted from the hiring freeze include military and federal uniformed personnel, officials appointed to non-career posts in the Senior Executive Service, employees hired by the U.S. Postal Service and federal civilian staff hired by the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, according to the memo published Tuesday.

The Trump administration also exempts from the hiring freeze appointments made through the Pathways Internship and Presidential Management Fellows programs, temporary employees tasked to perform seasonal workloads and job offers made before Jan. 22 provided that the hired individual will begin work on or prior to Feb. 22.

Agencies that seek to exempt certain positions from the hiring freeze should explain to the OPM the urgency of the position and its association with critical mission requirements and discuss the reason why personnel reallocation is not possible.

The hiring freeze will cease once the Office of Management and Budget implements a long-term plan to shrink the federal workforce’s size through attrition, according to the document.