The Daily Scoop Podcast

The General Services Administration has eliminated its 18F program, an internal team of tech consultants and engineers that develops open-source tools to improve digital services across the federal government. The announcement, which came over the weekend, is the latest in the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to slash the federal workforce. The move was foreshadowed weeks ago when Elon Musk,...

Customs and Border Protection has issued internal paperwork to authorize an evaluation of Starlink, the satellite internet service provided by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, according to documents identified by FedScoop and a spokesperson for the agency. CBP has created a privacy threshold analysis — an internal document used to analyze potential privacy risks associated with a new technology and whether a p...

Federal agencies will be required to build centralized systems to track every payment they issue for contracts, grants and other expenditures under an executive order issued Wednesday. President Donald Trump’s order calls for each agency head to team with that agency’s assigned DOGE team lead in building the new IT system. Each payment would be submitted to the system and include “a brief, written...

A group of 21 engineers, data scientists, designers, project managers and other tech experts resigned from their positions at the U.S. Digital Service on Tuesday, writing in a letter to the White House that they would not “carry out or legitimize” the actions of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. The technologists said in their letter that they all left senior tech positions in the p...

If you missed last week’s Zero Trust Summit at the Spy Museum in downtown D.C., you’re in luck. We have a replay of what was one of the best panels of the day focused on U.S. military cybersecurity and the adoption of zero trust across the services. FedScoop's Billy Mitchell was joined by Wanda Jones-Heath of the Air Force and Ann Marie Schummann of the Navy, principal cyber advisors for their res...

The Pentagon is set to begin its termination of thousands of select probationary employees in the coming days as part of the Trump administration’s unfolding campaign to “maximize efficiency” by rapidly reducing the size of the federal workforce. Darin Selnick, who is performing the duties of undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, announced the plans in an email to reporters on Fri...

A federal judge in Washington on Thursday denied a request by federal worker unions to halt the firing of probationary workers in the U.S. government, saying the court likely lacks the authority to hear the claims. Instead, the claims brought by the National Treasury Employees Union and others must be brought before the Federal Labor Relations Authority, Judge Christopher Cooper of the U.S. Distri...

Katie Arrington has been named the deputy chief information officer for cybersecurity and chief information security officer at the Department of Defense, a department spokesperson confirmed. She assumed the role effective Feb. 18. A familiar face, Arrington comes back to the Pentagon where she was the chief information security officer for the department’s acquisition and sustainment organization...

The National Science Foundation fired 168 probationary employees Tuesday as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the size of the federal workforce, the agency confirmed. In a written statement, NSF spokesman Mike England pointed to President Donald Trump’s executive order last week that included plans to reduce the size of the federal workforce as part of the work of the Department...

American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley said the federal worker union would fight mass firings of government employees, calling the Trump administration’s actions a politically driven abuse of the probationary period. His statement comes after reports that probationary employees were fired from agencies across the federal government. In his statement, Kelley r...

A source familiar with the inner workings of the U.S. Digital Corps, a two-year fellowship for early-career technologists to show coding work and work through interagency agreements across the federal government that is managed by TTS, said that DOGE representatives asked them and others to show coding work. The source said that the DOGE representatives asked them and others to show coding work th...

The General Services Administration is following suit with a memo from the Office of Personnel guidance that came out in January, giving agencies the authority to terminate employees who: “have served less than a year in a competitive service appointment, or who have served less than two years in an excepted service appointment.” Employees who fit this description, as well as temporary employees o...

President Donald Trump accelerated his reduction of the federal workforce Tuesday with an executive order that minimizes agency hiring allowances, requiring four workers to depart for every one hire to be made. The order to implement Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency ”workforce optimization initiative” calls on the Office of Management and Budget director to submit a plan to reduce the f...

Federal employees would be banned from using the Chinese artificial intelligence platform DeepSeek on their government-issued devices under new legislation from a bipartisan group of House lawmakers. The No DeepSeek on Government Devices Act, introduced by Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., Darin LaHood, R-Ill., and 16 of their House colleagues Friday, comes after weeks of panic in Silicon Valley foll...

A federal judge Thursday limited access to a Treasury Department payments system that various Department of Government Efficiency surrogates had burrowed into at the behest of Elon Musk. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, in response to a lawsuit from a coalition of labor unions against the Treasury Department and Secretary Scott Bessent, wrote in...

The Department of Energy on Friday replaced its chief information officer with a network engineer from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, FedScoop has learned. Dawn Zimmer — who’d been serving as Energy CIO since Ann Dunkin resigned from the role as the Biden administration left office — has been removed from the role by the department’s leadership, two sources with direct knowledge of the move told FedScoop. Zi...

House Republicans on Wednesday temporarily blocked Democratic efforts to subpoena Elon Musk, turning back an attempt to bring the tech billionaire before Congress to answer questions about what his Department of Government Efficiency delegates are doing in federal agency computer systems. During a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the size of the federal government, rankin...

A new memo from the Office of Personnel Management has recommended that federal agencies reclassify the position of chief information officer, in what appears to be an attempt to make the technical position far more political than it’s previously been. Specifically, the new designation would have the chief information officer serve as a “general” employee rather than a “career reserved” employee....

Last month, the Harvard National Security Journal published what’s thought to be the first legal scholarship on the subject matter of unidentified anomalous phenomena, the modern term for UFOs. Dillon Guthrie — a D.C.-based attorney who has served as a counsel at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, an advisor on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and a legislative aide to Senator John Ke...

The Army UH-60M Black Hawk helicopter that fatally collided with an American Airlines passenger plane Wednesday night over the Potomac River was not equipped with experimental autonomous flight capabilities, defense officials familiar with the ongoing federal investigation told DefenseScoop. There’s said to be no survivors in the aftermath of the tragic crash, which happened around 9:00 p.m. local...

The main website for USAID went offline this weekend and thousands of staffers may have lost access to their email accounts amid rumors that the Trump administration intends to eliminate the agency. The website went dark after staffers associated with the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency gained access to the domain and then blocked USAID employees, a person familiar with the matte...

President Donald Trump issued an executive order Monday night tasking the Pentagon to build a plan for a multilayered missile defense system underpinned by both space-based sensors and interceptors. Under the directive, titled “Iron Dome for America,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is required to develop “a reference architecture, capabilities-based requirements and an implementation plan” to a...

A lawsuit filed in federal court Monday alleges that the Office of Personnel Management set up an on-premise server to conduct last week’s mass email blast to federal employees and store information it received in response without doing a privacy impact assessment on the system as required by law. Filed by two anonymous federal employees in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the...

The Department of Defense houses one of — if not the biggest — workforces in the world. It is a Fortune 1 company, if you think about it that way. And managing a workforce that large and complex doesn’t come easy. However, the department believes that modern technology can play a role in making workforce management more effective. To discuss that, Wyatt Kash recently spoke with Mark Gorak, princip...

The FedRAMP Emerging Technology Prioritization Framework, which was established last year to accelerate the use of systems like artificial intelligence in the federal cloud, has been eliminated as part of President Donald Trump’s rescission of the Biden administration’s AI executive order. A person with direct knowledge of the matter confirmed the program no longer existed. The Emerging Technology...