Carlos Del Toro, secretary of the Navy and a 2023 Wash100 awardee, has established a new office tasked with providing independent, data-driven assessments and recommendations on developing guiding principles and priorities to advance the lethality of the naval force.

Cara LaPointe, former co-director of the Institute for Assured Autonomy at Johns Hopkins University, will head the Department of the Navy Office of Strategic Assessment, or DON OSA, as director, the Navy said Monday.

LaPointe is a former naval surface warfare officer with over two decades of experience in national security, technology policy and Navy leadership.

Her Navy career includes roles such as deputy technical director of the littoral combat ship program and chief of staff to the deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for unmanned systems.

She was also an expert adviser for global emerging technology initiatives at the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and a member of the DON Science and Technology Board.

Under her leadership, the DON OSA will help drive the service branch’s current readiness investments and future modernization efforts to maintain its global competitiveness.

“Data-driven assessments looking strategically across the entire DON enterprise in support of the Joint Force will help us make smarter choices as we balance investments in current readiness and future modernization in order to enhance the Department’s competitiveness against the pacing threat,” Del Toro said.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Council on Environmental Quality have released updated guidance on implementing nature-based solutions to address the impacts of the climate crisis on U.S. infrastructure, communities and ecosystems.

The Nature-Based Solutions Resource Guide 2.0 provides nearly 300 resources to equip communities and agencies with implementation tools necessary to advance effective nature-based solutions and inform communities about available funding programs offered by the federal government, the White House said Saturday.

According to the guidance, there are 140 federal funding programs offered by a diverse set of agencies that support or could support nature-based solutions to climate change.

Examples of nature-based solutions implemented by federal agencies are transportation and facility construction, wetland restoration, coral reef protection, farm and forest management and community development.

The guidance cited the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Natural Infrastructure for Water Security project in Peru, the Department of Agriculture’s Central Sierra Recovery and Restoration Project and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Regional Coastal Resilience Grants program for the Pointe au Chien Tribe.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has signed a memorandum of agreement with NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Department of the Air Force to strengthen coordination and expand collaboration on space weather research-to-operations-to-research.

Under the agreement, the agencies will collaborate on transitioning models, observations, forecast applications, techniques and other capabilities from research into operations to improve space weather forecasts and services, NOAA said Friday.

The agencies will also provide and acknowledge feedback and exchange operational data on the impacts of space weather on critical infrastructure.

The collaboration addresses the need for a formal interagency process for transitioning space weather forecasting capabilities as identified by the White House Space Weather Operations, Research and Mitigation Subcommittee.

“Strengthening collaborations and coordination across the federal government in transitioning space weather research to operations is critical for minimizing and mitigating the potential consequences of space weather events, and for supporting the growing commercial space enterprise,” said Stephen Volz, director of NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service.

The Department of Energy is investing $42 million to establish research and development hubs focused on inertial fusion energy.

The Inertial Fusion Energy Science and Technology Accelerated Research program will be led by the University of Rochester, Colorado State University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, DOE announced Thursday.

The multi-institutional hubs will specialize in several disciplines including laser energetics and laser-plasma interaction. The agency will use $9 million from fiscal year 2023 funding and $33 million from the fiscal 2024 budget to support the three facilities.

The University of Rochester will lead the Inertial Fusion Energy-Consortium on Laser-Plasma Interaction Research hub, which will be managed by four other universities and private companies.

CSU will oversee the Inertial Fusion Science and Technology center, whose members include General Atomics.

The National Science and Technology Accelerated Research for Fusion Innovation and Reactor Engineering center will be led by LLNL, which last year achieved fusion ignition for the first time in scientific history.

“Harnessing fusion energy is one of the greatest scientific and technological challenges of the 21st Century,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm remarked. “The scientists in these hubs will be the vanguard of game-changing and planet-saving breakthroughs.”

NASA has selected eight teams to develop university-based technologies designed to advance the capacity of small spacecraft to support the agency’s Earth, lunar and deep space science and exploration missions.

The University SmallSat Technology Partnerships, or USTP, initiative aims to boost small spacecraft capabilities in three areas: Earth- and Global Navigation Satellite System-independent position navigation and timing; edge computing and machine learning architectures, software and devices; and high specific power systems and thermal control, NASA said Friday.

USTP participants will partner with NASA research centers to work on the three technology topic areas.

Under the first topic, Georgia Institute of Technology will collaborate with the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the California Institute of Technology with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, in Southern California, and the University of Minnesota with the Ames Research Center in California.

JPL will also work with the California State Polytechnic University Pomona and the University of Michigan on two separate projects under the second research area, while the Marshall Space Flight Center will partner with Utah State University​.

The third topic area involves partnerships between Pennsylvania State University and the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, as well as the University of Dayton and the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

U.S. Transportation Command officials said challenges in information technology integration are pushing back the deployment of a new model for moving military members’ household goods, Federal News Network reported Friday.

Andy Dawson, the director of TRANSCOM’s Defense Property Management Office, said the Global Household Goods business model reform is “more complicated than most people realize” but noted that the complicated process is “on purpose and by design” because the guardrails are put in place to reduce risks to service members.

HomeSafe Alliance, the single move manager for the Global Household Goods contract, or GHC, has developed HomeSafe Connect to help manage its interactions with moving companies and service members.

The transition to the new model requires the Department of Defense to build its IT infrastructure, called MilMove, which will replace the Defense Personal Property System.

Dawson said MilMove will act as the initial customer interface where base transportation offices develop their initial move requirement.

“But then the move is then transmitted to HomeSafe Connect, where then the now-reformed process really starts to move into automation — from the pre-move survey to the inventory process,” he said.

The Small Business Administration is seeking public comment on a proposed revision of its methodology for defining small enterprises.

The 2023 version includes the disparity ratio approach for calibrating the representation of small businesses in awarded federal contracts, as well as the use of the next-generation Federal Procurement Data System, a.k.a. FPDS, to calculate size standards based on industry factors, SBA said in a notice posted Monday on Federal Register.

The SBA Size Standards Methodology white paper is revised every five years to align with current federal market conditions and industry structure.

In the 2023 draft, the disparity ratio approach will replace the current procedure for determining the federal contracting factor, which is the difference between a small enterprise’s share of total contract obligations and its receipts from industry. Instead of the difference, the new approach will compute the utilization ratio for the number of contract shares and availability ratio for industry receipt shares.

Another proposed change is the use of FPDS and the System for Award Management, or SAM, data to calculate the 20th and 80th percentile values of industry factors for evaluating subindustry exceptions to size standards. SBA said this change will enable comparability in the values and consistency in data reporting.

The period for public feedback ends on Feb. 9, 2024.