The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton

New military aircraft designs don't necessarily require super jet engines or hundreds of billions in development costs. A case in point: The Navy's bid for a light plane that can take off and land in less than a football field. The Naval Air Systems Command recently hired a company called Electra to study the development of such an electrically-powered plane. For more, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with the founder and CEO of Electra.aero, John Langford.

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It seems every agency is chasing after ways to use artificial intelligence. AI brings special challenges for security. Now the National Security Agency (NSA) has published what it calls guidance for strengthening AI system security. For what's in it, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with the Acting Chief of the NSA's AI Security Center, Tahira Mammen.

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On today's episode of the Federal Drive with Tom Temin:

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A key member of the Postal Service’s leadership board is calling on the agency to slow down its network modernization plans, citing persistent mail delays in regions going through these changes.

Ron Stroman, a member of the USPS Board of Governors, and a former deputy postmaster general, said Thursday that “we need to slow down new network changes until service has gotten close to our service targets for 2024.”

Stroman called for USPS to slow down a major part of its 10-year reform plan, a day after a quarter of the Senate made a similar request to the agency.

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The U.S. Development Finance Corporation fired a whistleblower who refused to sign off on a road project in Africa. That is according to the Project on Government Oversight. POGO reports, the project didn't meet the agency's standards for displacement of people and the fired analyst who wouldn't sign off on it. For more, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with POGO senior investigator Nick Schwellenbach.

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The Postal Service managed to cut hiring times thanks to some reforms back in 2019. But for thousands of job postings, it gets no applicants. Those are among the top findings of an audit by the Postal Inspector General. For details, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with the Deputy Assistant IG for Finance, Pricing and Human Capital, Alan MacMullin.

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On today's episode of the Federal Drive with Tom Temin:

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Lawmakers on the House and Senate Armed Services committees have previously signaled openness to boosting the Pentagon’s budget beyond the 1% cap imposed by the Fiscal Responsibility Act.

Now, top appropriators who allocate funding for the Pentagon are pushing for a higher topline number, but negotiations on going beyond the budget caps are “not going well.” 

“We are a long way from increasing the caps. There’s a number of political reasons why that’s the case. What I would tell the folks on both sides of the aisle is that if we don’t do a good job in deterrence right now, it’s going to cost us a hell of a lot more money later,” Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chair Jon Tester (D-Mont.) said during the Ash Carter Exchange conference Wednesday. “The negotiations on the budget caps are still in flux.”

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It’s been four years since the Defense Department created six new acquisition pathways — including one specifically intended to speed up software acquisition. But as often happens with policy reforms, implementation is off to a slow start, so officials are building a cadre of software experts at the Pentagon to help speed up adoption.

DoD created the software acquisition pathway as part of a broader overhaul to make its acquisition system more “adaptive” to the particular products or services the department buys. The software pathway in particular came out of a recognition that most of DoD’s traditional approaches were geared toward large weapons systems. It’s designed to encourage rapid development and close coordination with users, and also eliminates some steps of the traditional acquisition process that don’t make sense for software.

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