The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton

As the Defense Department keeps its eye on China and Russia, a new rival is also emerging for the military to contend with — heat.Extreme heat is becoming an increasingly prevalent challenge. A study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the number of extreme heat days have tripled since the 1980s and are likely to continue to increase.

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The National Science Foundation is testing ways to streamline data sharing in and out of government. It's got two years to build a National Secure Data Service to standardize data access. It will then recommend to Congress whether to continue the program. For how the National Secure Data Service might function, Federal News Network’s Jory Heckman spoke with former U-S Chief Statistician Nancy Potok.

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In the last several years, Congress has passed and three presidents have signed into law massive expansions of the federal government. Now the government has new programs to launch and thousands of people to hire. But my next guest cautions the public sector should avoid the mistake of trying to act like business, a piece of advice the government often gets. Bob Tobias is a professor in the Key Executive Leadership Program at American University, and he joins me now.

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The larger the budgets and deficits grow, the more elusive auditable financial statements of federal finances seem to get. The Government Accountability Office says the Treasury Department has made good progress on some deficiencies. But new ones have popped up. We get the latest from the GAO's director of financial management and assurance issues, Dawn Simpson.

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Thirty some years after the end of the Cold War, missiles remain a threat to United States. And now space, where most crucial military communications occur, has become a contested domain. For an update on how the military deals with these threats, I spoke with the deputy to the commander of the Army Space and Missile Defense Command at his office within Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville, Alabama. Richard De Fatta is a retired Army colonel, now the senior civilian executive at SMDC. We started with where the command fits into the military org chart.

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The Veterans Affairs Department was the only large agency to improve its employee satisfaction score last year. It raked number five in the large agency "Best Places to Work" listing. Gina Grosso, the VA’s Assistant Secretary for Human Resources and Administration, told Federal News Network’s Drew Friedman, that COVID-19 really changed how the VA, like many other agencies, is thinking about its own workforce.

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In about 30 days, one of the longest running and most successful small business programs will expire. The House will have 14 days in September with votes scheduled to reauthorize the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program when it returns to Washington, D.C. after Labor Day. Meanwhile, the Senate reconvenes on Sept. 6 and doesn’t spell out how many days it plans to be in D.C. and voting on bills. To be sure, the fate of the SBIR program hangs in the balance of what Congress can do by Sept. 30.

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The vacation season for federal contractors is over. Just a month remains in the fiscal year. Now they're working overtime to make numbers. But now's not the time to make mistakes that could cost you future business or draw a protest. Federal Drive host Tom Temin got a few year-end do's and don'ts from federal sales and marketing consultant Larry Allen.

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If the nation is to have a so-called green future, many scientists and engineers believe more nuclear power generation will be part of the equation. Nukes are expensive to operate. But researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory think they've found a way to use artificial intelligence to drive down costs. For more, Federal Drive host Tom Temin spoke with Roberto Ponciroli, Argonne's principal nuclear engineer.

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The zeitgeist of the past two years could well be embodied by the video conference call. These virtual conference rooms have become the principal way groups communicate with so many people teleworking or still wary of COVID. Now a detailed academic study shows that the video meeting format limits creativity relative to how many ideas people come up with when they meet in person. Federal Drive host Tom Temin went in serach of the details by talking with the study's principal author Melanie Brucks, assistant professor of marketing at Columbia University.

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