The Department of Commerce Data Governance Board’s Metrics Working Group has released its final report outlining recommendations for developing evidence-building best practices to enhance program data management policies across the department.

The working group recommended that Commerce offices look into the Economic Development Administration and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s program models to identify and utilize innovative approaches to data linkage and evaluation.

The report highlighted EDA’s Good Jobs Challenge program, a $500 million program funded by the American Rescue Plan to accelerate local workforce development across the U.S.

According to the Metrics Working Group, the program created a pathway for tracking outcomes at the individual level by adopting evidence-based best practices such as collecting high-quality data for tracking equitable program outcomes, streamlining data collection processes based on the needs of multiple program stakeholders and ​​​​​​​linking program data with statistical data.

The Department of Defense has released the list of DOD installations and National Guard facilities where interim actions to expedite the cleanup of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS, are ongoing or will start in fiscal year 2024.

The effort aims to mitigate impacts to groundwater from an on-base PFAS source area and prevent the migration of PFAS-contaminated groundwater into nearby surface waters, DOD said Tuesday.

“Implementation of these interim actions to clean up PFAS is another step in the right direction for protecting public health and the environment,” said William LaPlante, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment and a 2024 Wash100 awardee.

The list includes more than 30 DOD bases and National Guard facilities located in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, Virginia and Washington.

In July 2023, the Pentagon issued a memo requiring military installations and facilities to take interim actions to address PFAS releases caused by DOD activities.

The Information and Communications Technology Supply Chain Risk Management Task Force has been renewed by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency for two years.

The extension will allow the task force to collaborate with CISA’s new artificial intelligence working group while continuing the development of products and services that could achieve the same success of the Software Assurance Buyers Guide, CISA said Tuesday.

ICT SCRM is led by CISA’s public-private advisory bodies, the National Risk Management Center Council and the Information Technology and Communications Sector Coordinating Council.

In 2023 alone, the task force created and published the Small and Medium-Sized Businesses Resource Handbook, Empowering Small and Medium-Sized Businesses Resource Guide and the Hardware Bill of Materials Framework for Supply Chain Risk Management.

“The Task Force recently stood up an Artificial Intelligence Working Group to identify AI related supply chain risks and mitigations. We welcome the renewal of the Task Force charter and continuing our important work to address our shared supply chain risk management challenges,” said John Miller, ITI’s vice president of policy and senior counsel and IT sector co-chair of ICT SCRM.

Stephen Bowdren, the Program Executive Officer Land Systems—or PEO LS—within the U.S. Marine Corps has issued a strategic plan outlining four lines of effort to streamline the acquisition process to accelerate the delivery of warfighting capabilities to the Marines.

The lines of effort under the strategic plan for fiscal years 2024 and 2025 are streamlining processes; learning, sharing and collaborating; building people and teams; and focusing resources to accelerate capability delivery, USMC said Tuesday.

The strategic plan offers information on how PEO LS intends to modernize its processes, experimentation, deployment, portfolio management and onboarding in the next two years and seeks to promote an innovative culture at the organization.

“We leveraged a study on one of our programs [Ground Based Air Defense] that included senior leadership interviews and discussion on how well we were engaging with them on the program,” Bowdren said on the plan’s development.

“We updated our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats from a previous strategic analysis effort that all Assistant PEOs contributed to and reviewed the strategy documents and Force Design documents,” added Bowdren.

The release of the strategic plan comes as PEO LS prepares to assume management of Marine Corps Systems Command’s existing programs as part of a planned reorganization aimed at supporting Force Design-related modernization efforts.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted 26-20 to pass legislation introduced by Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., to accelerate the sale and transfer of defense articles to international partners and address arms deals backlogs, Defense News reported Wednesday.

The TIGER Act aims to increase the dollar amount threshold at which the president can approve a defense arms deal without congressional notification from $14 million to $23 million.

If enacted, the legislation would also raise the threshold for the sale of defense articles, modifications and related training and services from $50 million to $83 million.

It would authorize the State Department to use the Department of Defense’s Special Defense Acquisition Fund, a revolving account for foreign military sale procurement.

The bill emerged from the bipartisan Technical, Industrial, and Governmental Engagement for Readiness task force headed by Waltz that aims to reform the U.S. FMS process.

“We should arm our allies and simplify the bureaucracy so they can do the fighting for our interests and less involve the United States,” Waltz said.