The Daily Scoop Podcast

A federal judge in California granted Anthropic’s request for a preliminary injunction Thursday, preventing implementation of President Donald Trump’s governmentwide ban on its technology and the Pentagon’s designation of the company as a supply-chain risk. In her decision, San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Rita Lin said the government’s actions appeared to be “designed to punish Anthropic”...

As the Trump administration makes a bid to hire more young people in the federal government via the Tech Force, the leader of the Office of Personnel Management told lawmakers he doesn’t believe stability is the biggest draw for the next generation. Director Scott Kupor told lawmakers on the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government at a Wednesday oversight hea...

The General Services Administration has proposed draft contract language that would define the government’s relationship with AI service providers in a major federal acquisition program in the aftermath of the fallout between the Defense Department and Anthropic. The proposed language includes terms and conditions for government data use, defines what it means for AI to be unbiased, creates a requ...

Amid ongoing conflicts and looming threats from peer adversaries like China, conversations around the American defense industrial base have shifted from capacity to resilience and speed. Meanwhile, software, AI and autonomy have emerged as key drivers for modern military operations, and with that, the DIB has evolved to incorporate new, non-traditional vendors that don’t see themselves as prime de...

The Defense Department and its federal partners issued a warning Friday to drone operators, threatening to impose massive fines, imprisonment and other measures on those who illegally fly unmanned aerial systems in restricted airspace. Drone incursions over stateside military bases and other restricted areas have been widespread in recent years as commercially available systems proliferate. Just t...

A new Office of Personnel Management hub for shared human resources services is open for business, the agency announced Tuesday. In a memo to federal agency leaders, OPM Director Scott Kupor said the HR Shared Service Center aims to “reduce fragmentation” within the government and allow agency staff to focus on their mission rather than administrative work. Per the memo, that new center provides a...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched a strategy and guidance for use of artificial intelligence on Thursday, setting a direction for the agency’s own work and providing resources for public health officials across the country. Those documents point to a desire to promote adoption of the technology, empower the workforce to use it, and ensure the tools are governed properly. But,...

The Army has awarded a mega contract to Anduril Industries that the U.S. military hopes will boost its ability to defeat drone threats. The Pentagon unveiled the $20 billion firm fixed-price deal Friday evening as part of its daily list of contract announcements. That announcement addressed the types of technologies involved, but was scant on details about the mission areas the capabilities would...

Staff in the upper chamber of Congress now have the go-ahead to use Senate data with three popular generative AI chatbots thanks to approval from an office that oversees the legislative body’s administrative operations. A recent notice from the Senate Sergeant at Arms’ chief information officer announced the approvals for Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, expanding on pre...

U.S. government agencies continued to have low compliance with a statute designed to ensure that federal websites, software, and other products are accessible for people with disabilities, according to a recent federal review. In a new report, the General Services Administration found that alignment with the accessibility statute known as Section 508 was a 1.96 on a 5-point scale, continuing a tre...

Anthropic’s $50 billion commitment for data-center construction projects in New York and Texas still made it on a list of investments the Trump White House said it helped secure, despite an ongoing feud between the company and the U.S. government. That tally, which was posted in a release online Sunday and emailed Monday, listed Anthropic’s commitment among dozens of other private-sector investmen...

Anthropic’s relationships with other federal contractors face irreparable harm following the Trump administration’s governmentwide ban on the company and determination that it’s a “supply-chain risk,” the Claude maker said in a lawsuit filed in a federal district court Monday. The legal challenge against the Pentagon, as well as multiple federal agencies and officials, seeks immediate and injuncti...

The Office of Personnel Management removed Claude and added Grok and Codex in an update to its public disclosure of AI use cases dated Wednesday. Removal of Claude comes after a disagreement between its maker, Anthropic, and the Department of Defense over the technology’s guardrails culminated in President Donald Trump issuing a governmentwide ban on the company late last week. In the following da...

A range of AI use cases — from coding assistance to workflow automation — face alteration or retirement as federal agencies work to comply with a Trump administration directive to remove Anthropic tools from their systems within the next six months. The recent clash between the Claude maker and President Donald Trump comes after federal officials have spent years building up AI capabilities in gov...

More than 70 Democrats in the House and Senate are pushing the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general to open a new investigation into the agency’s “warrantless purchases of Americans’ location data.” In a letter sent Tuesday, the lawmakers tasked IG Joseph Cuffari with investigating whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement is purchasing illegally obtained location data about Ameri...

The high-stakes dispute between Anthropic and the U.S. military led to a sweeping decision Friday by President Donald Trump to remove the AI startup’s technology from all federal agencies. Already, several agencies are taking action. The General Services Administration, Department of State, and Department of Health and Human Services immediately indicated in public statements, comments, or interna...

The partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security is impacting the preparation of cities hosting the 2026 FIFA World Cup, according to stakeholder testimony Tuesday. Beginning Sunday, Secretary Kristi Noem halted all non-disaster-related Federal Emergency Management Agency response efforts and scaled back FEMA operations to “bare-minimum, life-saving operations only.” Host city represent...

Cybersecurity has been getting bigger recognition as an integrated enabler in key U.S. military operations in Iran and Venezuela. That comes on the heels of the Pentagon last year introducing a new cyber mission force generation model as part of the larger Cybercom 2.0 effort. So, who better to discuss the growing prominence of cyber in the defense space than the principal cyber advisors of the va...

After a series of protests that led to a protracted evaluation period, the General Services Administration is moving forward with the Alliant 3 procurement, announcing Friday the first round of awards for the governmentwide IT services contract. GSA said in an online award notice that it received 133 proposals for the Alliant 3 Governmentwide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) solicitation and selected 4...

Federal Chief Information Officer Greg Barbaccia will be adding two new titles — at least temporarily — to his work in government. The General Services Administration announced Thursday that Barbaccia will join the agency as the acting director of Technology Transformation Services. He’ll be replacing Thomas Shedd, one of the few officials left at the agency who helped carry out the so-called Depa...

Inadequate information-sharing and deficient data practices across the Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Defense were to blame, in part, for the midair collision near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport last year, according to the National Transportation Safety Board’s final report. NTSB found that the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization was “made aware of and had multiple opportu...

Customs and Border Protection has increased deployments of surveillance technology along the northern border over the past five years despite sluggish hiring levels of IT personnel needed to monitor the tech, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office published Thursday. The staffing rate for information systems specialists has remained below target levels for half a decade but...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection personnel — not American service members — shot down an object with a military laser earlier this week near El Paso, Texas, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation. Troops with Joint Task Force – Southern Border were not authorized to shoot down drones in the area. The task force — which works hand-in-hand with federal law enforcement and serves...

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s top official rejected claims from lawmakers Tuesday that the Department of Homeland Security component is building a database for protesters. The alleged detractor database has been referenced in several reports by think tanks, letters to DHS officials from lawmakers and in interviews with border czar Tom Homan. During Tuesday’s House Homeland Security Co...

Many Americans by now have received their W-2s or other important tax documents, which can only mean one thing: it’s officially tax filing season. You might be ready to submit your documents, but is the IRS itself ready? That’s a big question mark looming over the 2026 filing season after the tax agency unleashed seismic cuts to its workforce last year and has pumped the breaks on many of its effo...