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Sonny Hashmi: GSA Aims to Speed Up AI Procurement Through Repeatable Acquisition Environment
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Sonny Hashmi: GSA Aims to Speed Up AI Procurement Through Repeatable Acquisition Environment

Sonny Hashmi, commissioner of the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service and a previous Wash100 Award winner, said the agency intends to establish a repeatable acquisition environment to help federal agencies accelerate their procurement of artificial intelligence tools.

“We want to leverage kind of our governmentwide buying power capability to do it once and repeat many times,” Hashmi told FedScoop in an interview published Friday.

“And so what we want to do is to be able to build the right kind of repeatable acquisition environment, so it could look like a [blanket purchase agreement], it could look like some sort of an acquisition vehicle that then allows agencies to do very quick turnaround task orders against,” he added.

Hashmi said GSA will conduct listening sessions with government and industry partners to determine the common requirements as it works to develop the acquisition environment for AI.

The FAS commissioner noted that the agency will work to facilitate the AI procurement process by applying the lessons learned from cloud acquisition.

Sonny Hashmi: GSA Aims to Speed Up AI Procurement Through Repeatable Acquisition Environment

Learn more about government AI initiatives at the Potomac Officers Club’s 5th Annual Artificial Intelligence Summit on March 21, 2024. At the event, top AI experts from both the public and private sectors will come together to discuss the impact of the technology on federal operations. Click here for more information, and click here to register to attend.

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Drenan Dudley Named Acting National Cyber Director
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Drenan Dudley Named Acting National Cyber Director

Drenan Dudley, deputy national cyber director for strategy and budget at the Office of the National Cyber Director, will assume responsibilities as acting head of the office while the White House awaits Senate confirmation for NCD nominee Harry Coker.

She will take over from Kemba Walden who has headed the ONCD on an acting basis since March when Chris Inglis, the nation’s first national cyber director, stepped down after almost two years in the position, NextGov reported Friday.

Dudley spent 16 years on the Senate Appropriations Committee before joining the ONCD in August 2022 as the assistant national cyber director for budget review and assessment.

“I look forward to continuing to implement the National Cybersecurity Strategy and supporting this administration’s continued efforts towards building a secure and resilient cyberspace that is aligned with our values,” Dudley said.

In July, President Biden nominated Coker, a more than four-decade public service veteran, as the next national cyber director.

The U.S. Navy veteran serves as a senior fellow at Auburn University’s McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security and an outside adviser to cyber and technology companies.

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Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin Travels to Ukraine to Discuss Security Assistance
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Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin Travels to Ukraine to Discuss Security Assistance

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has made a visit to Ukraine to emphasize U.S. support for the nation in the ongoing conflict with Russia.

During his time in Ukraine, Austin, a three-time Wash100 Award winner, will convene with the country’s leaders to discuss security assistance and determine a long-term plan for its forces, the Department of Defense said on Monday.

These conversations will center around strengthening the U.S.-Ukraine relationship and ensuring that the nation receives the warfighting capabilities necessary to combat Russian threats.

On Saturday, Austin spoke with Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s minister of defence, over the phone about recent battlefield developments and plans for the upcoming Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting, which will be hosted virtually later in the week.

Austin’s last visit to Ukraine took place in April 2022, when he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a 2021 Wash100 winner, met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and other officials to discuss U.S. aid to the country and associated diplomatic support.

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NASA Achieves ‘First Light’ With Deep Space Optical Communications Experiment
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NASA Achieves ‘First Light’ With Deep Space Optical Communications Experiment

NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications experiment on Tuesday achieved “first light” after a flight laser transceiver aboard the agency’s Psyche spacecraft transmitted and received near-infrared signals from Earth.

The DSOC experiment sent a near-infrared laser signal encoded with test data from a distance of nearly 10 million miles to a telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in California, NASA said Thursday.

The space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California reportedly oversees the DSOC experiment and the Psyche spacecraft.

The experiment is part of the Psyche mission that launched in October to study the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and seeks to demonstrate data transmission rates 10 to 100 times greater than today’s radio frequency tools aboard spacecraft.

“Achieving first light is one of many critical DSOC milestones in the coming months, paving the way toward higher-data-rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition imagery, and streaming video in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars,” said Trudy Kortes, director of Technology Demonstrations at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The transceiver aboard Psyche also sent test data through the downlink and uplink lasers as part of the experiment.

The DSOC team will now further develop the systems responsible for controlling the pointing of the transceiver’s downlink laser on the transceiver in order to start the demonstration of maintaining high-bandwidth data transmission between the transceiver and Palomar Observatory.

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New FTC Competition Means to Address Risks Posed by Voice Cloning
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New FTC Competition Means to Address Risks Posed by Voice Cloning

The Federal Trade Commission is launching a competition calling for the development of products, procedures or policies that would address the harms that might be brought about by artificial intelligence-enabled voice cloning.

The Voice Cloning Challenge is geared toward submissions that could limit the unauthorized use of voice cloning software, detect the use of voice cloning in real-time, or detect voice cloning in recordings, the FTC said Thursday.

The submission period will begin on Jan. 2, 2024, and conclude on Jan. 12. The winner of the competition will receive $25,000 in prize money.

FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine said, “We will use every tool to prevent harm to the public stemming from abuses of voice cloning technology.”

For her part, FTC Chief Technology Officer Stephanie Nguyen said, “The challenge is crafted in a way that ensures companies are responsible for the first- and second-order effects of the products they release.”

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CISA Casts Net for Further Public Feedback to Improve Software Security Attestation Form
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CISA Casts Net for Further Public Feedback to Improve Software Security Attestation Form

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is seeking public input regarding the draft version of the Secure Software Development Attestation Form.

CISA said Thursday that the form will be used by federal agencies to obtain from software developers attestation regarding the security of their products.

The form covers requirements that software developers must meet before their products could be used by government agencies.

A Federal Register notice posted Nov. 16 indicates that the current solicitation marks the second information collection request issued by CISA for the attestation form.

The agency had launched an initial 60-day commenting period in April, resulting in 110 comments received. The new collection request, meanwhile, gives the public another 30 days to provide feedback, with the submission period ending on Dec. 18.

Of particular interest to the government are comments that evaluate the necessity and utility of the information to be provided by software developers in accomplishing the attestation form, comments that help make the provision of such information less burdensome and comments that improve the quality and clarity of the required information.

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STARCOM Unveils Space Domain Awareness Doctrine Publication; Brig. Gen. Timothy Sejba Quoted
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STARCOM Unveils Space Domain Awareness Doctrine Publication; Brig. Gen. Timothy Sejba Quoted

Space Training and Readiness Command has provided the U.S. Space Force with a Space Doctrine Publication developed to present best practices and authoritative guidance regarding space domain awareness, or SDA.

The first operational level doctrine publication outlines how the Space Force could build and maintain SDA to ensure the U.S. has the freedom to operate in, from and to space, Space Operations Command said Thursday.

SDP 3-100, Space Domain Awareness, also underscores how important SDA is for all domain operations. Other highlights include characterization of the space environment, identification of roles and responsibilities of SDA-associated organizations and discussions about space capabilities and the orbital, terrestrial and link segments of space systems.

“Effective SDA is foundational for space forces to conduct prompt and sustained operations that fulfill the cornerstone responsibilities of the Space Force, preserving freedom of action in the space domain, enabling joint lethality and effectiveness, and providing independent options capable of achieving national objectives,” said Space Force Brig. Gen. Timothy Sejba, commander of STARCOM. “Space Force commanders and their staffs rely on timely and actionable SDA to satisfy these responsibilities.”

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Strider Teams With Scale AI to Deliver Data & AI Technology to US Government; Eric Levesque Quoted
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Strider Teams With Scale AI to Deliver Data & AI Technology to US Government; Eric Levesque Quoted

Strider Technologies and Scale AI have joined forces to provide data and artificial intelligence tools to U.S. government organizations.

The new partnership is intended to help federal agencies, identify, contextualize and respond to economic and national security challenges, Strider announced from its Salt Lake City, Utah headquarters on Thursday.

“Strider and Scale share a common goal to deliver critical insights to organizations to drive better outcomes,” said Strider Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder Eric Levesque.

He described the partnership as a “natural fit” and shared his excitement to collaborate with Scale’s team to support national security initiatives with technology offerings.

Under the partnership, Strider’s reservoir of public data, which includes more than 10 billion documents from primary sources of multiple languages, will be incorporated with Scale’s AI-based decision-making technology, Donovan. When combined, Strider’s collection of data will inform Donovan’s large language model platform, giving federal organizations access to these documents through a production-ready system that provides intelligence.

By bringing these offerings together, the two companies aim to deliver supplementary data that may enable agencies to develop a stronger understanding of risks posed by state-sponsored adversaries.

“This kind of information is critical for supply chain risk management and countering foreign influence efforts. Scale’s Donovan platform is well-suited to read and summarize such significant volumes of information,” said John Brennan, general manager of Scale’s public sector arm.

President Biden Signs Continuing Resolution Into Law
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President Biden Signs Continuing Resolution Into Law

President Joe Biden on Thursday signed into law a stopgap funding measure to keep the federal government operational through early 2024.

The continuing resolution would provide fiscal year 2024 funding through Jan. 19 for continuing federal projects and activities included in four appropriations measures, the White House said Friday.

These include veterans benefits, agriculture, military construction, housing, transportation and urban development.

Funding for defense and all other federal operations under eight appropriations bills will run until Feb. 2.

Biden’s signature came a day after the Senate passed the CR in an 87-11 vote. The House on Tuesday voted 336-95 to approve the stopgap bill to avoid a government shutdown.

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GSA Seeks to Simplify Multiple Award Schedule Clauses for Economic Price Adjustments
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GSA Seeks to Simplify Multiple Award Schedule Clauses for Economic Price Adjustments

The General Services Administration has started soliciting feedback on a proposed rule that intends to streamline and standardize the Multiple Award Schedule, or MAS, clauses related to economic price adjustments, also known as EPA, and eliminate certain requirements in the clauses to better align with commercial practices and standards.

The proposed rule was introduced as an amendment to the GSA Acquisition Regulations, according to a Federal Register notice published Thursday.

The proposed policy will consolidate four existing EPA clauses into a single clause, create a definition for EPA method and retain the MAS contracting officer’s authority to accept, reject or partially accept an EPA request.

GSA expects the changes to increase the number of offerings available through the MAS program, enhance customer satisfaction and reduce administrative costs on MAS contractors, particularly new entrants and small businesses.

Comments are due Jan. 16.

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