The Daily Scoop Podcast

After the White House’s move last year to kill Direct File, three senators are asking the congressional watchdog to examine the alternative program the Trump administration is pushing: the IRS’s beleaguered Free File system. In a letter sent Sunday to acting Comptroller General Orice Williams Brown, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Angus King, I-Maine, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., requested a Government...

All active-duty Marines and reservists must complete a new Basic AI Course before the end of the calendar year, according to a new directive. The announcement comes amid a broader push by the Marine Corps, and the Defense Department writ large, to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence capabilities for warfighting and back-office functions. One of the strategic goals outlined in the Co...

The Office of Management and Budget plans to make public at least some of the technology contract data it’s collecting from agencies, per the government’s top IT official. Under a March memo, certain chief information officers are required to update OMB each month on contracts they or their subordinates have approved. That same memo also mandates data collection about pricing and agency use of ser...

A group of 32 congressional Democrats is calling for the Federal Aviation Administration to help hold Immigration and Customs Enforcement accountable following reports that the Department of Homeland Security unit is withholding aviation data. While deportation flights significantly increased last year, data about the air operations is difficult to find, according to the House members’ letter to F...

If you ask Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor how he thinks about the role of AI in his agency’s mission, he’ll tell you he sees two different prevailing perspectives: one with a “big OPM” mission and another for “little OPM.” At least that’s how he described it to me recently at UiPath’s Fusion conference in Washington, DC. During our interview, Kupor shared about juxtaposition,...

Federal CIO Greg Barbaccia has tapped the Department of Education’s chief information officer as the government’s new No. 2 IT official. Thomas Flagg will take over as deputy federal CIO after spending more than 11 years at the Department of Labor and leading Education’s IT shop since October 2024. In an email sent Thursday to agency CIOs and shared with FedScoop, Barbaccia said there was “an over...

The Office of Personnel Management is applying artificial intelligence to modernize the writing of position descriptions in the hiring process. OPM Director Scott Kupor touted the agency’s new USA Class tool during an interview at the UiPath Fusion conference, presented by FedScoop, as a way to streamline notoriously slow and complex federal hiring. The federal government “has a lot of jobs,” the...

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is urging critical infrastructure owners and operators to plan for delivering essential services under emergency conditions – potentially for months at a time. The federal government’s top cybersecurity agency warned that state-sponsored hackers, particularly two Chinese groups known as Salt Typhoon and Volt Typhoon, continue to threaten critica...

Eight U.S. technology companies have signed formal agreements to deploy their frontier AI capabilities on the Defense Department’s classified networks “for lawful operational use,” according to a Pentagon press release published Friday. DOD’s new deals with SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle follow a major contract dispute between the department...

The White House wants to revamp federal contracting practices by making cost-reimbursement structures the exception, not the rule, per an executive order signed Thursday. President Donald Trump’s order calls on the federal government to view fixed-price contracts with performance-based considerations as “the default and preferred method of procurement.” Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Dou...

Two DOGE associates dispatched to the Treasury Department in the early days of the second Trump administration flouted various IT security rules while the agency itself fell short on implementing proper cyber controls, a new watchdog report found. The Government Accountability Office examined access that a pair of DOGE staffers had to Bureau of the Fiscal Service payment systems from Jan. 20-April...

Less than two weeks after the IRS wrapped what its CEO called the “most successful filing season” in history, the House passed a pair of bills aimed at giving the tax agency better tech for its next go-round. The lower chamber cleared the BARCODE Efficiency Act and the Taxpayer Experience Improvement Act this week, teeing up the modernization-focused pieces of legislation for the Senate. The Depar...

One of the largest federal government labor unions expects to lose tens of thousands of members due to the Trump administration’s crackdown on collective bargaining agreements, a new court document shows. The National Treasury Employees Union said in a filing that President Donald Trump’s April 2025 executive order on exclusions from federal labor-management relations programs and subsequent Offic...

The General Services Administration announced 17 new Presidential Innovation Fellows, refreshing the technologist-focused program. A release shared with FedScoop ahead of the announcement described the 2026 cohort as “experts from top tech companies, startups, and organizations around the country.” Per that announcement, the fellows will serve their yearlong tours of duty at 10 federal agencies. T...

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has tapped Palantir for IT modernization and other digital work as part of a $300 million Blanket Purchase Agreement that continues the data analytics and software giant’s bonanza of business under the Trump administration. The first task order under the BPA, announced this morning, formalizes USDA’s work with Palantir — specifically the agency’s National Farm Se...

House Democrats are calling on the Trump administration to scrap its plans to collect health data about federal workers from insurance companies. The lawmakers argue that the sensitive information could be used to target employees seeking care it disagrees with. Signers of the letter, which was led by House Oversight ranking member Robert Garcia of California, were specifically concerned about the...

The Energy Department might be all in on artificial intelligence, but the increasing apprehension among the American public is starting to pose a challenge, according to the agency’s top official. During a budget hearing on Capitol Hill last week, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told lawmakers that “The country as a whole is going very negative on AI, and this is a risk,” AND that “It will be a loss...

Elon Musk-led xAI is pursuing a FedRAMP High Authorization as part of the company’s efforts to expand adoption of its tool Grok across federal agencies and their workflows. The company’s authorization pursuit is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a partnership first reported Monday by Fast Company and confirmed by FedScoop through a source familiar with the matter. Typically, the met...

The Department of Transportation is launching a new campaign with a focus on gamers as part of an air traffic controller hiring push, according to a Friday announcement. The agency is targeting early career professionals for the technical role as it prepares to open its annual hiring window next week. “To reach the next generation of air traffic controllers, we need to adapt,” Transportation Secre...

The deadline for federal agencies to implement risk management practices for high-impact AI use cases — or terminate them — has come and gone, but a handful of departments are still working to complete their requirements. FedScoop reached out to 28 federal agencies to inquire about the steps they have taken to ensure compliance within the April 3 timeframe. Some agencies fulfilled the requirements...

Immigration and Customs Enforcement surpassed its arrest goals in fiscal 2025 thanks to technology additions and data-sharing partnerships across the agency and federal government, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s latest annual performance report and plan. ICE more than doubled its fiscal 2025 goal with 167,651 arrests of individuals with criminal convictions or with pending crim...

After slashing IT spending across civilian federal agencies last year, the White House’s fiscal 2027 budget calls for a return to pre-Trump levels and then some. Though the proposal from President Donald Trump is just a starting point for haggling in Congress over what will ultimately be spent, the summary document released Friday projects $75.7 billion in federal civilian IT spending, up from $67...

The Office of Management and Budget is asking federal IT leaders to provide more information about what they buy and collect more data about those purchases from the private sector. A Tuesday memo mandates certain agency chief information officers both provide OMB with monthly updates on contracts that they or their subordinates approve, as well as require vendors to provide details about pricing...

The Department of Health and Human Services is reshuffling its top officials for data, artificial intelligence, and technology back under its chief information officer, undoing a 2024 reorganization of those roles under the Biden administration. In a Tuesday announcement, HHS said the department’s chief AI officer, chief technology officer, and chief data officer would move from the Office of the...

Accenture Federal Services and Booz Allen Hamilton will take the lead on contracts to help the National Weather Service replace a legacy IT system and transition its weather data and resources to cloud-based technology. The two contracts, announced last week, are aimed at transferring the functions of the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) to two new tools in a move the agency...