The Department of the Navy announced Tuesday that Barry Tanner will serve as the chief information officer for both the Navy and Marine Corps on a permanent basis. Tanner enters the role having served as the department’s acting CIO following Jane Rathbun’s departure from the position in 2025. Prior to taking on that job, he served as the Department of the Navy’s deputy CIO beginning in 2024 and has held a number of IT leadership posts in both the military and private sector. As CIO, Tanner will be tasked with overseeing a number of ongoing modernization efforts within the Navy and the Marine Corps. He will primarily focus on the department’s enterprise-wide adoption of artificial intelligence, implementation of zero-trust cybersecurity, securing cryptographic modernization and improving overall cyber readiness, according to the DON. While serving as deputy and acting CIO, Tanner was instrumental in several Department of the Navy efforts to modernize its IT infrastructure — including Operation Cattle Drive and the Naval Enterprise Networks program.

An electronic health records modernization contract between the Department of Veterans Affairs and Oracle is getting a nearly $17 billion boost, according to an award notice posted Wednesday. The massive contract to overhaul how the department tracks health information for veterans will raise its current almost $10 billion ceiling to nearly $27 billion, the notice said and the VA confirmed. This new estimated value is “based on historical work executed to date, the standard deployment model, and all other requirements necessary to deploy and sustain the EHR under the approved accelerated deployment schedule, which is required to meet VA requirements and Veteran’s needs,” proposed contract modification documents released last week said. The documents cited “unanticipated complexities in deploying this system, extensive site-specific customizations, as well as the other factors … VA has reached the current contract ceiling sooner than originally planned.” The modification would not make any changes to the nature of the work, the documents said, and would add three one-year firm-fixed-price optional ordering periods, allowing for the contract to extend to May 16, 2031.

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency has selected Steven McAndrews to take over as chief information officer, per multiple sources familiar with the matter. He will step into the role shortly after his last day as the National Nuclear Security Administration’s deputy CIO, which will be Aug. 21. Karen Sutton will fill the vacancy as acting deputy CIO at NNSA, per an agency spokesperson. McAndrews is well acquainted with government technology. In addition to stints at the U.S. Census Bureau and the Office of Management and Budget, he also worked at the Department of Homeland Security as an IT security specialist from 2018 to 2020, according to his LinkedIn. Zeke Maldonado, who has served as acting CIO at FEMA since February, will drop back to the deputy CIO seat to assist in the transition.

Defense Department leaders instructed 30 American universities and specialized technology institutes to immediately audit their academic, financial and research connections to foreign entities that the government considers too risky or hostile to engage with.The initiation of these probes, revealed on Monday, marks DOD’s latest move in a yearslong effort to counter what it views as adversarial influences infiltrating U.S. academia. “To maintain eligibility for future federal research funding, the notified universities must complete a comprehensive audit of all identified foreign collaborations, assess the exposure of sensitive or export-controlled research, and implement strict mitigation plans, including the termination of problematic partnerships,” the Pentagon’s press release stated. “Institutions are required to report their findings and actions directly to the Department no later than August 31, 2026.” You can visit Brandi Vincent’s story on DefenseScoop to see the DOD’s full list of notified schools.

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Some OneGov artificial intelligence deals will be extended and some companies will be offering new deals for others, a General Services Administration official said last week. Birgit Smeltzer, director of the agency’s Office of IT Products, asked for people to “keep working with us” as GSA negotiates bargains. “Some of the [original equipment manufacturers] have already agreed to extend some of the limited-time offers, and some are looking at producing new offers for us,” she said. “We continue to work very closely with the OEMs to get extension of those offers, or maybe get new offers in place. We look very much at what makes sense for the government and what may not have taken flight so much, and put some offers out there that work for our agencies.” Smeltzer told FedScoop that some of the OEMs include the AI offerings, as well as other deals, but did not say when the new deals will be announced. Three popular deals — for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude — are expiring next month. Touting prices as little as $0.47 to $1 per agency, the barrier to entry to state-of-the-art technology has all but vanished — by design. Founded in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order for more “cost-effective” solutions in federal contracts, the GSA has said OneGov deals accelerate AI adoption across agencies. Smeltzer also said the AI limited-time offers alone have saved the government $1.4 billion, and some agencies have used the deals to negotiate their own contracts outside of GSA.

Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg’s new instruction for the Pentagon to provide nearly $244 million through March for undisclosed Palantir products was influenced by the Trump administration’s Business Operators for National Defense program, according to two sources who said it also illustrates the government’s plans to further fast-track the tech giant’s military offerings. The somewhat vague, one-page memorandum — entitled “Funding Palantir” — was issued Aug. 4 and viewed by DefenseScoop last Wednesday. “Palantir is providing valuable support to improve efficiencies with the defense industrial base,” Feinberg wrote. “Their efforts are improving Department of War and prime contractor understanding of delays in production and maintenance of critical munitions and delivery vehicles, which are already resulting in process improvements.” Officially changing the Defense Department’s name requires an act of Congress, but President Donald Trump rebranded DOD as the Department of War last year. In the memo that surfaced last week, Feinberg directed the under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment and the Pentagon comptroller to “fund up to $243.9M for Palantir services through March 31, 2027” and to “work with the Military Departments to identify funding options for the period April 1, 2027 through December 31, 2028, as needed.” The deputy secretary did not indicate what specific Palantir products and services this fresh funding would enable and advance, or identify which pools of money across the agency the investments would flow from.

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President Donald Trump signed a national security memorandum Wednesday that lays the groundwork for private sector companies to take a larger role in helping law enforcement carry out offensive hacking operations against transnational criminal organizations. The White House said sustained fraud and other cyber-enabled campaigns from transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) warranted the memo, and cited a fraud-focused executive order from March as only the first step. ”This memorandum expands the fight against TCO-perpetrated cybercrime by incorporating the ingenuity of the private sector,” it reads. Under the memorandum, a federal coordination center “shall create, manage, and maintain a Program to authorize Participating Companies … to conduct Cyber Surveillance Operations and Cyber Effects Operations against foreign Cyber-Enabled Transnational Criminal Organizations (CE-TCOs), under the control and oversight of the Federal Government“ that would be “part of lawful investigatory, protective, or intelligence operations carried out by Federal law enforcement.” Participating companies would have to sign contracts with the Justice Department or Department of Homeland Security to “undergo rigorous vetting.”

The Department of Veterans Affairs has proposed expanding its contract with Oracle Center for electronic health modernization because it will soon run out of money, a contract update posted Tuesday shows. VA would be increasing the overall contract ceiling, already at a staggering near $10 billion, and extending the potential period of performance by three years due to the “unanticipated complexity of the effort,” contracting documents said. “Due to unanticipated complexities in deploying this system, extensive site-specific customizations, as well as the other factors … VA has reached the current contract ceiling sooner than originally planned,” the documents said. “VA anticipates using the remaining ceiling by the first quarter of fiscal year 2027 and thus requires an increase.” While the new ceiling value is redacted in the documents, they did say the estimated value is “based on historical work executed to date, the standard deployment model, and all other requirements necessary to deploy and sustain the EHR under the approved accelerated deployment schedule, which is required to meet VA requirements and Veteran’s needs.” The VA said “technical glitches impacting use of the system,” training issues, clinical gaps or functionality errors “with potential impact on patient safety,” and COVID-19 restrictions on on-site deployment delayed the modernization, and it cannot be fully accomplished in the remaining time.

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The Department of Energy is gearing up to create a new class of science-specific, open-weight AI models in collaboration with industry as part of its recently launched Genesis Open Models Initiative. The agency is collecting information from interested organizations that want to partner on the project. Contributions are welcome throughout the development lifecycle — from the base, foundational systems to domain-specific datasets and fine-tuning expertise to shape adapted versions for particular applications. In an overview of the initiative, the department explained: “These Genesis models aim to provide researchers, national laboratories, industry partners, and the broader open science community with powerful, transparent, and extensible AI models that can be adapted to a wide range of scientific domains and use cases. By releasing models with open-weights, DOE seeks to galvanize the scientific and AI communities around shared infrastructure for science.” The agency said the first model in its new class, called Genesis-Science-1, is under development. U.S.-based open intelligence lab Arcee is working on the model alongside DOE scientists and other contributors. The Genesis Open Models Initiative is the newest branch to grow from the ever-expanding Genesis Mission. The core of the effort includes goals to combine the latest technological advancements to stand up supercomputers, launch a national platform and double the productivity of the country’s research-and-development budget.

Taxpayers felt a slowdown in the IRS’s processing of paper returns this filing season due in part to a reduction in experienced IT acquisition staff, according to a watchdog report released Monday. Despite a 19% year-over-year decrease in the number of paper returns it received, the tax agency processed 46% fewer individual paper returns and 80% fewer business paper returns over the same time period, the Government Accountability Office found. A March report from the watchdog predicted the delays, flagging that the agency’s “critical systems for processing and scanning paper tax documents would be unavailable at the start of the 2026 filing season and that IRS would rely on vendors to mitigate the issue.” Per IRS officials, the system to process individual paper returns was unavailable for the first six weeks of 2026, while the scanning system for business paper returns was out of commission for the entirety of the most recent filing season.

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A website created by President Donald Trump’s DOGE to tally its purported cost savings contained myriad data quality issues and inaccuracies, a congressional watchdog reported Thursday. In a review of the Department of Government Efficiency’s “Wall of Receipts” website, the Government Accountability Office found the group didn’t use transparent methods to produce its figures, included lease terminations that predated DOGE’s creation, and listed savings with unknown origins. The findings again call into question the roughly $215 billion DOGE claimed to have saved the government and adds to reporting on the deficiencies of the website’s accounting. The New York Times, for example, has previously documented errors and deletions on that page. FedScoop has reported inconsistencies between officials’ publicly stated savings claims and the figures included on the website. GAO concluded its report by recommending that the website prominently display the existence of the data-quality issues and limitations. “Prominently displaying data limitations would enhance the value of the Wall of Receipts by providing users with the information that they need to interpret and use the data appropriately,” the report said. According to a letter included within the report, the audit was ordered by Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. Peters is the ranking member on the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and Blumenthal is ranking member of its subcommittee on investigations. The report came a day after GAO released another report that revealed little available documentation of financial disclosures and completion of ethics and records management training by DOGE personnel.

A House-passed bill to scrap educational requirements in federal contracting jobs cleared a key Senate panel Thursday, putting it on track for a vote before the full chamber. The Skills-Based Federal Contracting Act (H.R. 5235) advanced out of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee by a 10-0 vote. No senators commented on the legislation during the business meeting. The bill, led by Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., would block federal solicitations from including any minimum education standards, unless the contracting officer provides a written justification on why the agency needs an exemption. “Washington created the paper ceiling. This bill tears it down,” Mace said in a statement. “A four-year degree should not be a government-mandated checkbox when hardworking Americans have already proven they can do the job. Demonstrated ability should open doors in this country.” The legislation passed the House in February and has been a pet project of Mace’s for years.

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Only a fraction of the 206 DOGE personnel identified by a congressional watchdog had paper trails associated with ethics and records management training and financial disclosures, a congressional watchdog reported Wednesday. The findings came as part of a Government Accountability Office report focused on identifying the employment statuses and administrative activities of personnel while a part of the notorious, and now mostly defunct, Department of Government Efficiency. According to the report, GAO obtained relevant training and disclosure records for just 64 of the DOGE personnel it identified. Of that number, 49 completed ethics training, 18 completed records management training, and 38 submitted financial disclosures. It also identified that 27 DOGE officials were “special government employees,” which means they could hold employment elsewhere while working for the federal government temporarily. GAO noted that type of designation creates difficult ethics issues. But GAO reported difficulty finding even that level of information as a result of lack of responsiveness from multiple federal entities and limited information it received, the report revealed.

The Technology Modernization Fund would be able to finance new projects through Dec. 11 under a provision in a Senate bill to avoid a government shutdown this fall. The current version of the fiscal 2027 Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill authorizes $5 million for the fund, and though the bill has not yet received a floor vote in either chamber, the TMF is prioritizing artificial intelligence and projects to support faster permitting with the money it has left. But the Senate version of the continuing resolution, moving through a legislative vehicle (HR 6500), cleared its first hurdle Monday night with a motion to invoke cloture 89-4. While the chamber is set to continue consideration throughout the week, the House is out until the last day of the month, and its “clean” version stands in opposition to the Senate bill’s authorizing extensions like the TMF.

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Throughout 2026, you cast your nominations for the FedScoop 50, and the results are in. Hundreds of top executives from across the government tech landscape are now up for vote to see who will be honored among this year’s FedScoop 50. Voting is open now and runs through September 25. Make your voice heard to help us select who will be recognized on this year’s list. One of those nominees in the prestigious Golden Gov category for this year is Department of Energy CIO Dawn Zimmer. Zimmer joined the Daily Scoop Podcast to discuss how the agency is balancing innovation and security in the age of AI, what the Genesis Mission means for her office, how AI adoption is going across the department and much more.

A senior General Services Administration technology official has been placed on administrative leave after criticizing the government’s veterans’ hiring preference on his personal LinkedIn page, the agency confirmed Monday. Pete Waterman, director of FedRAMP and a career GSA official, said in the July post that his office needs experienced tech professionals, but federal hiring is “terribly broken.” “Veterans preference is brutally unfair when taken to the extreme of blocking any consideration of non-veterans, but we’re seeing that everywhere these days,” he wrote. “The future for FedRAMP is pretty dark if we can’t hire experts from private sector who have actually worked on cloud services.” GSA Administrator Edward Forst said in a statement that “we categorically and completely disagree with a senior employee’s recent remarks denigrating veterans preferences in hiring,” noting that veterans represent about 30% of GSA’s workforce. “GSA has zero tolerance for comments that disparage or disrespect America’s veterans,” Forst said. “The men and women who have worn and continue to wear our nation’s uniforms deserve our respect and unwavering support.” Veterans’ preference requires federal agencies to prioritize hiring qualified veterans before civilians.

OpenAI’s self-reported breach in which an agent escaped testing and autonomously hacked the open-source AI tool company Hugging Face is generating interest in a congressional investigation. In a Friday open letter, dozens of public interest groups, progressive organizations, and academics urged lawmakers to open an investigation into the incident to determine whether stronger safeguards and independent oversight of AI model development and testing is needed. They called the incident “a historic inflection point” for AI. The letter comes after OpenAI’s July 21 disclosure of the breach added fuel to the fire of preexisting concerns about the capabilities of the ever-learning technology. According to the ChatGPT maker’s statement, an agent driven by several of its models found a way to break free of a testing sandbox, gain internet access, and discover ways to breach Hugging Face — all in an effort to cheat on a benchmarking test. OpenAI has been working with Hugging Face and third-party organizations to investigate and analyze the incident. The organizations that wrote the letter argued the incident arose from OpenAI’s own choices on system capabilities and testing design, including decisions it made on objectives for the agent and safeguards to prevent any issues.

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The Trump administration’s top IT official, Federal CIO Greg Barbaccia, is headed back to Palantir after he leaves government later this month, a White House official confirmed Friday. The news was first shared offhand by General Services Administration leader Edward Forst during a Thursday graduation ceremony for the U.S. Digital Corps. FedScoop verified the move with a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be more candid. Barbaccia previously announced his departure in an email to the CIO Council earlier this month. In that email, obtained by FedScoop, Barbaccia said it was a “difficult decision to leave government” and that he planned to depart at the end of August. It did not, however, share where he planned to go. Prior to joining the Trump administration, Barbaccia spent roughly a decade at Palantir in roles such as head of intelligence and investigations.

Department of Defense CIO Kirsten Davies recently approved a far-reaching directive laying out policy, responsibilities and procedures for information technology category management and digital modernization investments. The new guidance follows in the footsteps of other Trump administration tech-buying initiatives meant to streamline enterprise IT procurement and leverage economies of scale across the government’s massive footprint, like the General Services Administration’s OneGov initiative for federal civilian agencies. DoW Instruction 8000.02, which was approved by Davies on July 23 and became effective July 29, applies to all components of the department. It covers “all IT assets, including IT services, hardware, software, licenses, and associated components, in all IT categories (including national security systems (NSS) within DoW authorities and defense business systems) relevant to DoW mission and operations,” the directive states.

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Existing FedRAMP certification is no longer required for Department of Veterans Affairs contractors to win bids, a top agency IT official said Tuesday in a memo obtained by FedScoop. Any acquisition documents, including requests for information, proposals or quotations, should not state or imply that a cloud company must have already completed the governmentwide security check, Zack Schwartz, principal deputy assistant secretary in the VA’s Office of Information and Technology, said in the memo. Schwartz wrote that the “memo supports VA’s ability to sustain momentum with mission needs to provide secure technology solutions in a dynamic cyber risk environment, while avoiding unnecessary delays in the procurement of critical systems and services.” He added that the “distinction is intended to preserve acquisition flexibility while maintaining VA’s risk management and operational security standards.” Instead, cloud systems, services and solutions companies must fully comply with other security requirements — including those from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, VA directives and handbooks — and receive a VA Authorization to Operate, which could be granted in 60 days.

The Department of Homeland Security is expanding its AI use for FOIA processing in response to a sizable backlog and increasing number of requests, per the agency’s annual report. In fiscal 2025, DHS started with 221,068 pending FOIA requests. After receiving more than 1 million requests and processing nearly the same amount, the agency ended the year with 245,572 pending requests. Despite the uptick, DHS said it maintained its backlog — defined as the number of requests or administrative appeals at the end of the fiscal year that are beyond the statutory time for a response — at just 16% of total requests received. Technology could help the agency make a bigger dent in the years to come. “The DHS Office of Privacy continues to invest, develop, implement, and deploy new technological advances in FOIA processing,” the agency said in its 2025 FOIA report, published Thursday. “It expects to launch additional automation tools this coming year to further improve efficiency and reduce administrative redundancies.

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