The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton

A seasoned overseer of federal grant-making has returned to government. After a stint at a large services contractor, Tom Yatsco recently became the inspector general at the Legal Services Corporation, one of the more unusual federal structures. He and Federal Drive Host Tom Temin has this conversation.

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The Veterans Health Administration recently participated, for the first time ever, in an annual survey of hospital quality conducted by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. VA did well. The survey is known as the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS). Starting off with the fact that this was not a VA survey, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with Dr. Shereef Elnahal, the VA's top medical official.

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

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It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say the Defense Information Systems Agency is in a heavy research mode.

Whether it’s around cybersecurity tools and capabilities or cloud services, DISA has no fewer than 14 ongoing or recently completed pilot initiatives.

Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, DISA’s director and commander of the Joint Force Headquarters-Department of Defense Information Network (JTF-DODIN), said each of these efforts include the military services as part of the effort to field capabilities that are less complex and more effective.

Take as an example, the three pilots to better protect internet boundaries.

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Tens of thousands of the Postal Service’s rural carriers saw a rocky start to this month, after a USPS payroll error resulted in missing and incomplete paychecks.

The National Rural Letter Carriers Association estimates USPS payroll issues impacted approximately 53,000 rural carrier employees.

The vast majority of those impacted — about 45,000 employees — were non-career rural carriers that cover routes for full-time career mail carriers as needed.

Rural carriers shared images with Federal News Network showing that their Sept. 1 pay stubs totaled $0 in take-home pay.

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The Air Force has big ambitions for incorporating artificial intelligence into warfighting. But there’s one big problem: As of now, the service doesn’t have the processes or infrastructure to test and evaluate AI with nearly the same rigor it’s long used and demanded for its less intelligent weapons systems.

That assessment is one of the key findings of a more than year-long study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NAS), whose authors emphasized the challenges in assessing whether an AI-enabled system will work as it’s intended are not unique to the Air Force, but rather, are common across federal agencies.

One of the biggest challenges the Air Force faces is that its test and evaluation infrastructure is designed to put physical weapons systems through their paces at defined points in time, before they’ve been fielded. In that process, once a bomber or fighter has been deemed suitable and effective for its missions, it’s turned over to the operational community.

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Now that the House has returned, Congress will start making a final push for something, we presume, as the fiscal year is set to expire in two weeks. For the play-by-play, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with WTOP Capitol Hill Correspondent Mitchell Miller.

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The cybersecurity team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), is about to finalize a new version of a signature document: The Cybersecurity Framework. Next week it holds a workshop to get one last round of input on the new framework draft. For more, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with Kevin Stine, the Chief of NIST's Applied Cybersecurity Division.

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One thing the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) never stops tinkering with is passenger screening, both techniques and supporting technology. Screening is light years from what it was in the days right after an earlier 9/11. Now it has published what it calls an open architecture roadmap, aimed at improving screening performance. For details on the roadmap and its goals, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin spoke with Erick Rekstad, SA Systems Engineer.

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

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