Brendan Carr, a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, has applauded the introduction of a bipartisan bill that would direct FCC to publish a list of companies that hold an FCC authorization and have links to China and other foreign adversarial governments. The proposed ruling is part of efforts to counter the influence of such regimes on U.S. telecommunications infrastructure.

In a statement published Monday, Carr called on Congress to advance the passage of the fielded Foreign Adversary Communications Transparency Act, which he said would help strengthen U.S. national security.

“Increasing visibility into entities with FCC authorizations that have relationships with authoritarian regimes would bring much needed transparency and help strengthen America’s communications networks against threats from malign actors,” Carr said.

Reps. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., reintroduced the bipartisan FACT Act in the lower chamber on Friday.

Raj Iyer, the outgoing chief information officer of the U.S. Army and a two-time Wash100 awardee, discussed how the Digital Requirements and Resourcing Construct has been established to provide the CIO office, along with the service’s G-6, Gen. John Morrison, with more authority when it comes to making decisions and prioritizing information technology requirements, Federal News Network reported Monday.

“So for the budget cycle that starts 2025, the CIO with the G-6 as the co-chairman, now has what’s called the Digital Requirements and Resourcing Construct,” he told FNN in an interview.

“What the Army has done this year is we’ve moved about $5 billion of the $16 billion budget under this new construct, where the CIO now gets to prioritize the requirements. We do the racking and stacking of the priorities, and then we decide, based upon urgent requirements and future modernization efforts, how we need to rebalance the portfolio,” Iyer noted.

Iyer, who is set to step down as Army CIO on Feb. 10, said his office is looking for opportunities where it can address duplication to reduce IT spending and is focused on shifting the network subportfolio under the construct in preparation for the 2025 budget cycle.

“My intent and hope is that when we do this well, next year, we will start to add other parts of the subportfolio under this new construct: things like business systems and then some of the larger acquisition programs, like tactical radios,” he said. 

“That’s how we will slowly scale up and ramp up to the full portfolio. But we’re going this year after the part of the portfolio that requires the greatest help right now, and especially because of so much progress we have made with the unified network and cloud, that was important for us to rebalance our portfolio,” Iyer added.