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.

Four pilot projects focused on innovative carbon dioxide capturing methods will receive a cumulative total of $309 million in funding from the Department of Energy.

DOE announced Friday that its Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations chose four proposals in two power plants, a pulp and paper mill and an oil refinery in Kentucky, Mississippi, Texas and Wyoming as part of the Carbon Capture Large-Scale Pilot Projects Program.

One of the pilot projects is led by energy company PPL and will be carried out in its natural gas combined-cycle power plant in Kentucky. Its team will purify and convert captured CO2 into beverage-grade CO2.

RTI International will work with Amazon, International Paper and oil field services firm Schlumberger, or SLB, to trap 120,000 metric tons of CO2 annually and place it in a permanent geologic storage facility.

Israeli conglomerate Delek‘s U.S. business is utilizing its Big Spring Refinery Fluidized Catalytic Cracking Unit in Texas to transport residual CO2 through pipelines leading to a permanent storage site.

The fourth project, which is led by TDA Research and also supported by SLB, will set up a carbon capture system and use pipeline transport to move CO2 at the Wyoming Integrated Test Center.

The Government Accountability Office has released a new revision of the Government Auditing Standards, also known as the Yellow Book, which contains standards and guidance for federal audit organizations.

The 2024 revision includes a risk-based process for achieving quality management goals, a shift to a quality management approach, provisions for optional engagement quality reviews of generally accepted government auditing standards engagements and application guidance on audit matters for financial audits, the GAO said Thursday.

“This latest update enhances and modernizes the standards to perform high-quality audit work with competence, integrity, objectivity, and independence using a proactive and risk-based approach,” said Gene Dodaro, comptroller general of the United States and the head of the GAO.

Audit organizations must design and implement their system of quality management by Dec. 15, 2025, in accordance with the new revision.