The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton

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

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Non-fungible digital asset. It's a term few people even heard of five years ago. Now it's the cause of an effort to figure out the best regulatory policy for these blockchain doodads. Like, which agency should actually take the lede here. To learn more, Federal Drive host Tom Temin spoke with Information Technology and Innovation Foundation VP Daniel Castro.

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Whistleblowers have played a critical role in policy changes at the Veterans Affairs Department over the years, but it comes at a cost for many of them. Some face demotions, workplace hostility, other indignities. There are mechanisms in place to protect them from being punished, but how have they performed? The Government Accountability Office recently took a look at whistleblower retaliation cases at the VA. To learn more about what they found, Federal Drive Executive Producer spoke with Thomas Costa, a Director on GAO’s Education, Workforce, and Income Security team.

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Perhaps you have heard of CMMC, the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program. Now in its 2.0 version, it is supposed to lay minimum cybersecurity standards on contractors doing business with the Defense Department. But it is like a storm on the horizon that never really arrives. Some company executives are skeptical. Federal Drive host Tom Temin spoke with one such skeptic: Matt Hodson, the Chief Information Officer of Valeo Networks.

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

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The Small Business Administration expects the federal government to meet upcoming targets for more of its contract spending to go to small companies, but is trying to reverse a significant decline in the number of small firms actually doing business in the federal marketplace.

The total number of federal contracting dollars going to small businesses keeps going up year over year. More than $154 billion in federal contracts went to small businesses in fiscal 2021 — about 27% of all government contract spending that year.

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

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

A new report from the General Services Administration's Inspector General didn't have many nice things to say about its Multiple Award Schedule’s Transactional Data Reporting (TDR) pilot. First criticizing the agency for not using the data, then calling the data itself unusable. This left at least one contracting expert confused on the IG's true intent here. For more, Federal Drive host Tom Temin spoke with Larry Allen, President of Allen Federal Business Partners.

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It's fair to say, federal agencies will never buy commercial cloud computing services from Chinese vendors. But China aims to take the lead in cloud computing worldwide. To examine that competitive challenge to the United States, Federal Drive host Tom Temin spoke with Jim Lewis, Senior VP for the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

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Only a couple of shipyards in the United States can build Navy ships. Hundreds of small shipyards, though, build important pieces of the country's at-home infrastructure: barges, ferries, tugboats. That is why the Transportation Department, through the Maritime Administration, has an ongoing program of grants to small shipyards, to help them stay afloat, so to speak. For an update, Federal Drive host Tom Temin spoke with MARAD Administrator, retired Navy Rear Admiral Ann Phillips.

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