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The Daily Scoop Podcast: Daily Summaries Delivered
by The Daily Scoop Podcast
A podcast covering the latest news & trends facing top government leaders on topics such as technology, management & workforce. Hosted by Billy Mitchell on FedScoop and released Monday-Friday.
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- 3 days ago16 min
Trump announces a new nominee to lead CISA
Also in this episode: Form.io CEO Gary Wetzel explains why government digital intake forms need to be viewed as far more than visual templates but rather as complex gateways to enterprise backend systems. While agencies often struggle with legacy PDFs, rigid third-party platforms, and separate front-end and back-end development, Wetzel argues forms must be treated fundamentally as APIs that should reside natively within agency IT environments. Form.io addresses this challenge by utilizing a unified, self-hosted JSON data structure that synchronizes front-end rendering directly with backend database schemas. Proven by deployments like Pay.gov, this embedded middleware approach simplifies data collection, accelerates digital modernization, and enforces strict public-sector security and compliance standards. Listen to the entire interview. This segment was sponsored by Form.io. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
- 4 days ago4 min
GSA appoints Jennifer Hill as new head of its Federal Acquisition Service
Jennifer Hill, a former banking executive, will lead a government contracting operation worth more than $125 billion as the new commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, the General Services Administration announced last week. Hill has been a GSA advisor since February, where she has helped to “improve government operations through procurement consolidation, streamlined processes, and more strategic use of the federal government’s purchasing power,” a press release said. GSA Administrator Ed Forst said Hill brings a record “of strategic execution, operational discipline, and results-driven leadership that will strengthen GSA’s ability to deliver best-in-class value across acquisition and real estate.” Hill was previously chief financial officer of Bank of America Merrill Lynch and managing director of Goldman Sachs, according to her LinkedIn. FAS oversees more than $125 billion in business volume with about 16,000 companies and provides “comprehensive procurement, technology, fleet, travel, and charge card solutions to more than 80 federal agencies.” A Delaware-based defense and aerospace company has settled a case with federal agencies over government allegations that the firm neglected its cybersecurity obligations in its contracts. The contractor ILC agreed to pay $13 million to resolve the False Claims Act allegations involving its contracts with the Department of the Army, Missile Defense Agency and National Aeronautics and Space Administration. ILC, according to the government, submitted false or fraudulent claims for payment on contracts with the agencies because it knew it hadn’t complied with the contracts’ cybersecurity requirements over a period between 2018 and 2024. For instance, ILC allegedly used a third-party company to store sensitive data in the cloud without proper safeguards, and didn’t develop and update mandated security plans for each of its covered information systems. American industrial manufacturing giant Ingersoll Rand, the parent company of ILC, said it inherited the issue when it purchased the firm. A spokesperson for Ingersoll Rand said the company took prompt action to address the identified issues after acquiring the company and was in compliance with applicable requirements by October 2024, adding that the firm resolved the allegations with the U.S. Department of Justice without an admission of liability. The $13 million settlement is one of the bigger settlements since the Justice Department began using the False Claims Act in 2022 to penalize contractors over cybersecurity shortcomings. The False Claims Act is a Civil War-era law passed to deal with fraudulent contractors. Under the law, a private citizen can raise allegations that the contractor defrauded the government and is entitled to receive a portion of any settlement. The whistleblower in the ILC case, Philip Root, the company’s former director of cybersecurity, will receive $2.35 million. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
- 1 weeks ago4 min
A new push to relaunch Congress’ expert tech office
A bipartisan bill to resurrect Congress’ Office of Technology Assessment and rebuild it as the Congressional Office of Technology was introduced last week, with just about two months left on the congressional calendar to pass the legislation. This new bill is the latest attempt to restore the OTA, which provided bipartisan tech-based information for Congress from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s before it was defunded. Rep. Mark Takano, D-Calif., the bill’s lead sponsor, said the shuttering the office amounted to “stripping Congress of the ability to access unbiased scientific and technological expertise as we entered the digital age.” The bill is co-sponsored by California Republican Rep. Jay Obernolte, as well as Democratic Reps. Sean Casten and Bill Foster of Illinois and Don Beyer of Virginia. Similar bills to revitalize the office have been introduced but did not advance in previous congresses. The office would coordinate with the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Research Service so it doesn’t duplicate work, as GAO and CRS have filled in the gaps left by the OTA since it was defunded. The office would report on emerging science and tech trends “of national importance” with a staff possibly consisting of scientists and engineers on leave from universities, industry, or research groups, who could serve for up to one year. The General Services Administration is “not effectively” protecting controlled unclassified information in its Google Drive, exposing it to all GSA users and contractors, its Office of the Inspector General found in a recent report. The OIG found that 116 files in its search included physical security information, personally identifiable information, general proprietary business information or other CUI that were shared agency-wide. This included Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, addresses and vendor proposals with pricing information, as well as site and floor plans, with details on building vulnerabilities and security areas, it said. The report said: “These exposures leave GSA vulnerable to significant reputational risk and potential litigation.” More than half of the files identified contained physical security information, and five of the files contained PII. The OIG put some blame on ineffective management of the agency’s third-party data loss prevention tool, which it did not explicitly name, though GSA Chief Information Officer David Shive mentioned a tool called Cloudlock in his response. This tool, which GSA has spent $7.8 million on as of September, did not detect exposed documents with current search terms and can only handle files up to 15 megabytes. About a third of the files contained the phrase “for official use only” or some variant of it, which was not caught by the tool. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
- 1 weeks ago4 min
Did Trump use AI to inform military operations?
Two top congressional leaders are pressing for answers on President Donald Trump’s use of AI chatbots, potentially to make decisions about U.S. military operations. Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin and Robert Garcia requested a closed-door briefing with a White House representative to discuss document retention policies with AI, cybersecurity safeguards and data access controls, among other things. The duo also asked for information on any past incidents involving AI chatbots that raised concerns. In a letter to the White House the Democrats cite reports that in December 2025, during an Oval Office meeting with Elon Musk, the president allegedly used Grok to seek advice on carrying out presidential duties, including asking it to opine on how Venezuelans would respond to the capture of President Nicolás Maduro. Raskin and Garcia cited the U.S. military’s strike on an Iranian elementary school and a near-miss in which the military prepared to intercept a misidentified ship as other examples of AI misuse. The former led to the deaths of 123 children, and the latter, they said, “could have easily precipitated a war with China.” The congressional leaders requested a briefing by Nov. 11 to give their respective committees time to take appropriate legislative and remedial actions. The lawmakers argued that inputs by Trump and his staff, as well as the outputs they received, fall under the Presidential Records Act of 1978. The rule changes the legal ownership of official records of the president from private to public and sets up a structure for document release and management following the end of a presidential term. The Treasury Department last week began requiring the use of ID.me to access the agency’s platform to buy and redeem U.S. savings bonds. Two Senate Democrats want the department to rethink that decision. In a letter sent last Thursday to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and IRS CEO Frank Bisignano, Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said the “needlessly rushed deadline for transitioning to” ID.me to gain access to TreasuryDirect should be delayed “at a minimum” until after the 2027 tax filing deadline. The lawmakers argued that U.S. savings bonds are mostly held by older Americans who may not have “the digital proficiency” to make the change to ID.me. TreasuryDirect is the only electronic platform where users can buy and claim those bonds, which are backed by the U.S. government and considered among the safest investments a person can make. A Treasury official said in an email that ID.me is a government-trusted tool that will safeguard the personal and financial information of users and protect against unauthorized access and identity theft. ID.me has for years been in the crosshairs of Democratic lawmakers and privacy advocates over concerns about the digital identity verification and login service’s security practices and use of biometric data. Wyden and Warren, ranking members of the Senate Finance and Banking committees, respectively, hit on those points in their letter. An ID.me spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the service, which the Treasury Department has used since 2021, “has consistently outperformed alternatives in customer service, ease of use, expanding access, protecting taxpayer data, and fighting fraud that costs American taxpayers billions each year.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
- 2 weeks ago4 min
Inside DOGE’s involvement in National Science Foundation grant terminations last year
Newly obtained FOIA records reveal details about the level of White House and DOGE involvement in terminating grants last year at the National Science Foundation. The FOIA documents were obtained by Democracy Forward, which has frequently gone toe to toe with the Trump administration in federal court, and show NSF communications involving DOGE affiliate Zachary Terrell from April and May 2025. The correspondence suggests Terrell recommended terminating grants from congressionally mandated programs and, notably, indicated that the White House had provided a list of grants to cut. The records show that Terrell wrote in a message sent May 19, 2025 that he claims the White House sent him “a list of misinformation related grants that should be terminated,” and he then provided a list the agency hadn’t terminated yet. It’s not clear who the recipient was, but the message was sent through an account associated with Terrell’s NSF email. The list that followed his message was redacted. While DOGE’s presence at NSF and role in grant terminations was generally known, questions remained about the details of that involvement as well as the role of the White House in the science agency’s operations. With the end of an already-extended deal in sight, the General Services Administration has secured an expanded OneGov agreement with Anthropic for its Claude models. GSA said Tuesday that federal agencies will have access to a 40% discount on token-based usage across Claude models with consumption-based pricing and no minimum purchase required. Anthropic is in an ongoing legal battle with the Pentagon, though its relationship with officials elsewhere in the federal government appears to be solid. The new OneGov agreements have been highly anticipated as agencies contend with dependency on promotional pricing. Anthropic initially extended its original deal until the end of October, offering a $1 per user offering for Claude for Government. The new agreement follows the lead of OpenAI, which switched to consumption-based pricing last month as part of its new OneGov deal. Consumption-based pricing has rapidly replaced seat-based pricing in private-sector enterprises, and the trend is bleeding into the federal government. GSA sees the pricing model as one that “scales with actual use.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
- 2 weeks ago4 min
The Pentagon wants AI procurements to support Trump’s ‘truth-seeking’ and ‘ideological neutrality’ directives
The Pentagon issued new guidance last week focused on implementing the Trump administration’s so-called “truth-seeking” and “ideological neutrality” principles in AI procurements. A memo dated Oct. 20 from John Tenaglia, the Pentagon’s head of acquisition, noted that the initiative is “in direct support” of a previous executive order from President Donald Trump on “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government” and a White House Office of Management and Budget memo on “Increasing Public Trust in Artificial Intelligence Through Unbiased AI Principles.” Trump’s EO, issued last year, laid out the administration’s “truth-seeking” and “ideological neutrality” edicts for AI procurements, stating that large language models purchased by federal agencies “shall be truthful in responding to user prompts seeking factual information or analysis” and “prioritize historical accuracy, scientific inquiry, and objectivity, and shall acknowledge uncertainty where reliable information is incomplete or contradictory.” The models must be “neutral, nonpartisan tools that do not manipulate responses in favor of ideological dogmas such as DEI,” Trump wrote, adding that developers “shall not intentionally encode partisan or ideological judgments into an LLM’s outputs unless those judgments are prompted by or otherwise readily accessible to the end user.” Tenaglia noted in his memo that compliance with the White House directives is mandatory. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published a strategy Monday that focuses on taking a leading role in cyber defense, prioritizing protection of critical infrastructure and building the ability to withstand attacks. The 10-page strategy — “CISA 2030: Defend, Harden, Prevail” — largely reaffirms existing roles for the agency, but CISA will begin reviewing its core services and capabilities within 60 days to make sure they meet key objectives, followed by implementation over the next 180 days and an update on its progress after one year. Acting CISA Director Nick Andersen said in a foreword that the agency needs to act with “renewed purpose” in the face of threats, saying: “The threat landscape we face today is not static.” The strategy is also meant to align with the administration’s broader cyber strategy, published in March, and last year’s executive order on state and local preparedness. “I call on every company and organization in the critical infrastructure community — from owners and operators to vendors and technology manufacturers — to act now,” Andersen said in a comment released with the strategy. “CISA 2030 provides a focused roadmap to strengthen defenses, eliminate adversarial footholds, and deny them any advantage that could endanger the nation’s security, economy, or public health.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
- 3 weeks ago5 min
A federal judge rules OPM illegally shared millions of employee records with DOGE
A U.S. district judge in New York found that the Office of Personnel Management violated federal privacy law and flouted cybersecurity practices when it shared federal employee records with members of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency. In a Tuesday ruling, Judge Denise Cote of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said that OPM granted DOGE agents access to systems holding records for tens of millions of past, current and aspiring federal workers without a credible reason. Cote said the government provided no explanation for why DOGE’s purported modernization efforts needed access to personally identifiable information (PII) when that access wasn’t needed in past modernization efforts. “The record also provides no support for a finding that it was the pursuit of a modernization agenda that prompted OPM to grant sweeping and expedited access to a score of DOGE Agents to its systems of records containing PII,” Cote said. The decision is a win for federal workers and their advocates in a long-running challenge to DOGE’s controversial activities premised on an aspiration of efficiency. The Department of Housing and Urban Development officially has a new chief information officer — a familiar face with an exceptionally similar background to his predecessor.David Julian, who has served as HUD’s assistant CIO since July 2025, wrote in a LinkedIn post last month that he had taken over as the agency’s top IT official. HUD did not respond to multiple requests for comment at the time, but an update to the agency’s website this week confirmed the news. Julian replaces Eric Sidle, who left HUD in July to become the Interior Department’s CIO. Like Sidle, Julian worked for several years in the electric vehicle industry — at the same two companies. He was a senior staff autonomy program manager for the EV maker NIO from 2018 to 2019, according to his LinkedIn profile, before spending the next three-plus years in various engineering roles at Chargepoint, an EV charging network and hardware provider. Prior to his move into the EV world, Julian spent a decade at Apple, where he was head of data pipeline operations for autonomous systems, per his bio. He overlapped with Sidle at Apple for about five years. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
- 3 weeks ago5 min
DeepSeek set to be banned from federal civilian agencies
The Department of Homeland Security is banning the use of Chinese AI model DeepSeek and its affiliates by civilian federal agencies. The notice, published Tuesday in the Federal Register, cites the Federal Acquisition Supply Chain Act and a review by the Federal Acquisition Security Council to bar federal agencies from buying all information technology products and services from parent company Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence. The notice includes a copy of a letter from Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin ordering the exclusion of DeepSeek products on June 26, indicating the ban has been in place for months. Mullin claimed that DeepSeek’s models present “multiple threat vectors” to civilian federal agency IT systems. Some are unique to the company’s country of origin, while others identify potential privacy and mass data collection concerns that could also apply to other Chinese and U.S. AI models. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
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About The Daily Scoop Podcast
A podcast covering the latest news & trends facing top government leaders on topics such as technology, management & workforce. Hosted by Billy Mitchell on FedScoop and released Monday-Friday.
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