The White House has issued a national security memorandum outlining safeguards and ensuring accountability concerning transferred defense articles and defense services.

The memorandum requires the Secretary of State to secure written assurances from foreign governments receiving defense services and articles from the U.S. Departments of State and Defense, the White House said Thursday.

The document also requires the secretaries of State and Defense to submit no later than 90 days from now a congressional report addressing the defense articles and defense services provided by the two departments.

The congressional report should include any new assurances obtained, an assessment of any credible reports, a description of procedures used to make the assessment and an analysis and evaluation of any reports indicating that the use of such defense services and articles “has been found to be inconsistent with established best practices for mitigating civilian harm.”

In the event that the reliability or credibility of assurances provided by the foreign country has been put into question, the secretary of State or Defense should report to the president and state the necessary steps to be taken to remediate the situation.

“Such remediation could include actions from refreshing the assurances to suspending any further transfers of defense articles or, as appropriate, defense services,” the memorandum reads.

The Department of Defense’s Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office will provide training to combatant commands to guide their implementation of the zero trust capabilities and technologies to secure enterprise-wide assets, Federal News Network reported Thursday.

Randy Resnick, director of the Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office and a 2024 Wash100 awardee, said his office is working with Defense Acquisition University to develop training courses, which will be available to DOD personnel with a common access card.

“It’s not mandatory for anybody to take the zero trust courses, but we’re working toward that model where it would actually either be mandatory to take the ZT 101 or thereabouts or roll it into the existing cyber courses and essentially update the cyber course to include zero trust,” Resnick said.

In January, Resnick and his team visited European Command to tackle DOD’s zero trust implementation goals. The team has two trips planned over the next month to visit Space Command and Northern Command in Colorado and Africa Command.

“What we’re trying to do is to talk about zero trust, the importance of it and talk live about what their requirements are, and talk about their implementation plans,” Resnick said.

The Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory has unveiled a new Earth-energy data visualization tool designed to enable optimized data access and enhanced online mapping experience.

NETL said Tuesday the EDX Spatial platform hosts vast amounts of Earth-energy data files from the DOE Fossil Energy Carbon Management and other public sources.

EDX Spatial is designed as the official geospatial data visualization, discovery and exploration tool of the Energy Data eXchange, a virtual platform hosting a collection of fossil energy research and development data and tools.

Data collections accessible through EDX Spatial are the Carbon Storage Open Database, Natcarb Viewer 2.0, Offshore Gulf of Mexico Collection, Rare Earth Elements and Coal Open Database and Global Oil and Gas Infrastructure Database.