The Daily Scoop Podcast

Just days into his latest run as president, Donald Trump fired 17 inspectors general acoss the federal government. The move not only set off alarms in the government oversight and accountability community, but it also set an early precedent for how the Trump administration would deal with any entities he saw as threatening to his agenda as president. Diana Shaw has spent much of her career in the...

The U.S. Agency for International Development is taking its final steps toward shuttering, sending a memo last Thursday to bureau heads focused on recruiting workers on administrative leave to assist with final steps required to decommission the agency. The memo states that the “default position” is that all staff are reporting to work — except those who have been requested and approved to go on a...

Gen. Timothy Haugh, the commander of U.S. Cyber Command and the director of NSA, was fired Thursday, according to press reports and lawmakers. It was not immediately clear why Haugh was fired. However, his dismissal comes amid a purge of other national security officials at the National Security Council and NSA. It happened following a visit to the Oval Office of political activist Laura Loomer, w...

The White House Office of Management and Budget released a pair of memos to provide agencies with guardrails for how they use and purchase artificial intelligence in the government, replacing Biden administration guidance but maintaining some of the same structures. Both memos, which are dated April 3, represent some of the first major policy actions President Donald Trump has taken on the governm...

Members of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency now have access to technical systems maintained by United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, according to a recent memorandum viewed by FedScoop. The memo, which was sent from and digitally signed by USCIS Chief Information Officer William McElhaney, states that Kyle Shutt, Edward Coristine, Aram Mogahaddassi and Payton Rehling w...

More details have emerged on the Department of Defense’s Deferred Resignation Program. According to a new memo, the DOD will offer the program to eligible DOD civilian employees for a week between April 7 and 14. Voluntary early retirement authority will also be offered. The initiatives, ordered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, come as the Pentagon is looking to reduce its reduce civilian workfo...

The Internal Revenue Service on Friday placed around 50 IT executives on administrative leave, according to five sources familiar with the situation, the latest in the Trump administration’s gutting of the tax agency during the heart of filing season. The decision to cut the IT executives was made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to one of the sources, and was carried...

The Department of State is continuing to expand its artificial intelligence chatbot known as StateChat, including working toward a mobile version and the ability to query internal messages called cables. That’s what John Silson, director of analytics in the State Department’s Center for Analytics, recently told FedScoop reporter Madison Alder during an SNG Live event on AI and Automation. During t...

A bipartisan group of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee members reintroduced a bill Thursday that aims to overhaul federal software purchasing for better efficiency and reduced costs. The Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets (SAMOSA) Act would make agencies conduct “comprehensive” software inventories and undergo independent assessments of management pract...

Newly installed Federal CIO Greg Barbaccia has called for agency CIOs to inventory licenses with the five software vendors that earn the most from federal contracts by April 2 as part of a larger software accounting initiative. Barbaccia sent an email, obtained by FedScoop, to all federal CIOs on Monday requesting that agencies “complete a software license inventory to account for the full univers...

The federal government will shift from paper-based payments to electronic methods, part of what the White House said in a Tuesday executive order is an attempt to cut costs and reduce fraud. President Donald Trump’s EO on “modernizing payments to and from America’s bank account” requires the Treasury Department to phase out paper check disbursements and receipts by Sept. 30. That includes intergov...

After serving for nearly 18 months as the Department of Defense’s first-ever customer experience officer in the Office of the CIO, Savan Kong earlier this month parted ways with the Pentagon. Previously a member of the Defense Digital Service during his first tour of duty with the DOD, Kong helped build the department’s CXO office from scratch, fostering a culture that prioritizes the needs of ser...

Federal agencies must now allow any officials designated by the president or agency leadership to have complete access to unclassified records, data, software systems and IT systems, President Donald Trump declared in an executive order late Thursday night. Trump’s directive aims to stop waste, fraud and abuse by eliminating information silos, requiring agency heads to “ensure Federal officials de...

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday to consolidate the contracting of common goods and services, including information technology, under the General Services Administration. Within 30 days of the order’s issuance, GSA will take over as the executive agent of all governmentwide acquisition contracts (GWACs) for IT, as designated by the Office of Management and Budget. “Consoli...

Several federal agencies responsible for terminating nearly 25,000 federal probationary status workers told a federal court Monday evening that they’re complying with an order to reinstate those employees, giving thousands of people their jobs back for the time being. According to a status report and corresponding declarations filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, 18 feder...

The Pentagon is currently placing more than 20,000 employees on administrative leave and a path to full termination, following staff approval for voluntary participation in the Trump administration’s Elon Musk-inspired “fork in the road” initiative, according to top officials involved in the major workforce reduction plans. In an off-camera press briefing Tuesday, two senior defense officials prov...

A lawyer who’s said to have played a central role in the Department of Government Efficiency’s attempted takeover of at least one federal organization is now defending in court the DOGE email system used to send email blasts to the entire U.S. government workforce. During a Feb. 6 hearing, Jacob Altik joined the defense in the ongoing lawsuit where pseudonymous federal workers have accused the Off...

The Department of Homeland Security has selected Antoine McCord as its new chief information officer, a spokesperson with the agency’s Management Directorate confirmed Friday. As CIO, McCord will be tasked with overseeing DHS’s roughly $11 billion IT budget, the largest of any federal agency in fiscal 2025. A bio for McCord on the DHS website said he “emphasizes mission-driven leadership, focusing...

All non-critical and non-statutorily required work will cease at the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services as part of a 50% reduction of the office, according to Director Thomas Shedd. In his prepared remarks for a Thursday afternoon town hall, which were obtained by FedScoop, Shedd said that to deliver technology at GSA in a “more focused and streamlined way,” movin...

When the Trump administration began sidelining and laying off personnel at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, it started by targeting employees who worked on election security and disinformation. At the same time, the Department Homeland Security announced it would conduct a comprehensive review of CISA’s election security mission. Last week, the agency confirmed that it has com...

Early in the morning on March 1, without notice, the General Services Administration eliminated its 18F program, what was an internal team of tech consultants and engineers that developed open-source tools to improve digital services across the federal government. Just short of its 11th birthday, 18F had grown to be a staple in the federal government’s digital services development and acquisition...

Ethan Klein, an emerging technology policy adviser during the first Trump administration, has been nominated to be the White House’s chief technology officer, the Office of Science and Technology Policy confirmed Tuesday. After serving in the first Trump White House, Klein completed a PhD in nuclear science and engineering at MIT, where he worked to develop nuclear tech for arms control and nonpro...

The NSA’s former top cybersecurity official told Congress on Wednesday that the Trump administration’s attempts to mass fire probationary federal employees will be “devastating” for U.S. cybersecurity operations. In testimony to the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Rob Joyce, the former NSA cybersecurity director who retired from government service last year, warned lawmakers...

Weeks after being named the chief information security officer for the Defense Department, Katie Arrington was announced Monday as the Pentagon’s official “Performing the Duties of the Department of Defense Chief Information Officer.” The DOD Office of the CIO announced the move by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to place Arrington as the acting CIO in a post on LinkedIn. The post also confirmed...

Since the Trump administration took office Jan. 20, federal technology has become an essential element in the national news cycle. Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency have burrowed within agencies to gain access to key federal IT systems as part of their work to drive efficiency and cut waste and abuse. And as part of that, the Trump administration has fired huge swaths of the fe...