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Anti-fraud overhaul clears House despite Democratic concerns over privacy and IG independence

Sean Michael Newhouse — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:38:01 -0400

As the Trump administration prioritizes combating fraud in federal programs, the House this week passed almost a dozen bills, several of which are bipartisan, intended to strengthen agencies’ ability to detect and stop fraudulent payments.

The Fraud Prevention and Accountability Act (H.R. 8312) would establish an inspector general office within the Treasury Department dedicated solely to countering grift in programs that provide funding to non-federal entities.

This new IG for Fraud, Accountability and Recovery would subsume the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, a panel of IGs that was created in 2020 to oversee COVID-19 spending. Congress expanded the jurisdiction of the interagency entity, however, to include programs funded by the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The measure also would authorize the Treasury to share, on a voluntary basis, data tools with state and local governments that administer federal funds in order to prevent improper payments, such as by screening potential awardees against a centralized fraud database.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., characterized the measure as “the culmination of years of work to understand how agencies can improve their operations to protect hard-earned taxpayer money from fraudsters.”

“This legislation ensures there’s a permanent governmentwide anti-fraud analytics function to assist agency inspectors general with their fraud work,” he said during floor debate on Wednesday.

Most House Democrats opposed the bill, in particular because of the transfer of the PRAC to the new IG office. The committee is currently housed under the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, a central group for the agency watchdogs that the Trump administration blocked from receiving funding for more than a month last year.

The president also has fired nearly 20 IGs and has replaced many of them with individuals who worked in his first or second administration.

“Taking the PRAC out of CIGIE and moving it to a third new Treasury IG is another attempt to weaken the case for funding CIGIE and to further dismantle what remains of a community already very severely weakened by the Trump administration,” said Rep. James Walkinshaw, D-Va., during floor debate on Wednesday.

Walkinshaw also referenced objections to the bill from nonprofits like the Center for Democracy and Technology, which argued that the data sharing provisions would result in the collection of “significantly greater amounts of sensitive information from agencies across the federal government, functionally creating a master database on all Americans.”

The House passed the measure in a 240-181 vote with the support of 28 Democrats.

Lawmakers also passed, without any recorded opposition, bills that would increase, from $10,000 to $20,000, the minimum monetary reward for federal employees whose disclosure of fraud, waste or mismanagement leads to cost savings (H.R. 428) and require certain government workers to receive training on preventing fraudulent and improper payments (H.R. 8428).

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Senate rejects Cyber Force push as debate over cyber structure continues

Thomas Novelly — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:40:12 -0400

An effort to create a new cyber-focused military service under the Army narrowly failed in the Senate, but the lawmaker who proposed it isn’t backing down.

Last month, Defense One exclusively reported that Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., was spearheading a markup amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that would create a Cyber Force. The effort ultimately failed by a vote of 14-13, with four Democrats and 10 Republicans swatting the amendment down. Nine Democrats and four Republicans voted in favor.

“We remain optimistic about Cyber Force and the Senator will continue to push for its creation,” a Gillibrand spokesperson said.

While the Senate Armed Service Committee’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act sidelined the creation of a Cyber Force, it does scrutinize various Pentagon policy changes meant to strengthen U.S. Cyber Command, the current cyber-focused combatant command.

The committee’s version of the NDAA “directs an independent review of whether CYBERCOM is adequately organized and resourced to meet its expanding authorities and responsibilities” and also calls for “an independent study on the roles, responsibilities, authorities, and resourcing of the Principal Cyber Advisors of the military departments.”

The push to establish a Cyber Force under the Army, similar to how the the Space Force and Marine Corps sit under the Air Force and Navy, was in tandem with a new think tank report examining the perceived cost, time, and benefits of setting up a new cyber-focused service branch.

Joshua Stiefel, a former House Armed Services Committee staffer, co-chaired the Center For Strategic and International Studies and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Commission on Cyber Force Generation. The findings, released earlier this month, said the creation of the service “would address longstanding structural challenges and build the Cyber Force the United States needs for this critical domain of warfare.”

Stiefel told reporters earlier this month that the findings were released at a pivotal moment where it seems CYBERCOM has been given a significant amount of authority, but concerns over how the military handles its cyber-focused troops still persist.

“What's interesting is that as someone who was in the legislative process for almost seven years, we tried, I tried, my colleagues tried everything and it seems as if we've reached that breaking point where there isn't any more authority to give to address this problem that doesn't start to begin to chip away or take away from the service chiefs,” Stiefel said. “And that dilemma means we're at this precipice.”

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Lawmakers press for tighter oversight of fast-growing prediction markets

Amelia Twyman, States Newsroom — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:27:58 -0400

A group of 16 Senate Democrats is calling on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to tighten its regulation of prediction markets, citing concerns over insider trading and other consumer harms as betting on future events grows in popularity.

The senators, led by Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., asked the CFTC to offer guidance to those participating in bustling prediction markets such as Kalshi and Polymarket in an effort to restrict event contract manipulation and insider trading, according to the June 1 letter.

“The volume of event contracts trading on prediction markets has grown exponentially over the past 18 months,” the senators wrote. “These markets have a significantly higher proportion of retail participants than traditional derivatives markets, heightening customer protection concerns.”

The senators sent the letter before the CFTC proposed rules Wednesday that would ban bets on war, assassination and other extreme events, which critics said did not do enough to rein in the industry.

Lawmakers also want the CFTC to conduct detailed reviews of participating futures markets to ensure that their policies and procedures are clearly outlined and that they are equipped with adequate resources to prevent market abuse.

On a similar note, they wrote that the commission should instruct the markets to monitor the terms and conditions of event contracts, as ambiguous contract language can lead to conflicts over resolution and payout once an outcome has occurred.

“Sufficient resources should be devoted to anticipating and addressing such issues prior to contract listing, rather than after problems arise,” the senators wrote.

In addition to Klobuchar, the letter was signed by Sens. Lisa Blunt Rochester and Chris Coons of Delaware, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet of Colorado, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, Cory Booker and Andy Kim of New Jersey, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.

Concerns around insider trading

Prediction markets allow consumers to bet on the outcomes of future events and trade in products commonly called event contracts.

Most event contracts offer two possible outcomes, presenting traders with the option to bet either “yes” or “no.” The price of each outcome at any given time, expressed as a fraction of a dollar, corresponds to the market’s forecast of an outcome occurring, with $1 meaning 100%, according to the CFTC.

That system leaves the markets vulnerable to manipulation by people with inside knowledge of an event, which is partly what prompted the Democratic senators to write the letter, they said.

For example, a U.S. soldier was charged in April with making more than $400,000 on Polymarket by betting the United States would launch a military operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Prosecutors say the soldier used classified information to make the wagers in advance of the operation.

The senators did not give the CFTC a deadline to carry out their requests. Rather, they urged the commission in their letter to consider their recommendations as it continues to develop rules and guidance for the prediction market industry.

The CFTC did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment in time for publication.

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Surveillance authority nears historic lapse as House deadlock meets intelligence leadership fight

David DiMolfetta — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 11:49:58 -0400

The House failed to approve an extension of a powerful foreign spying authority on Thursday, putting it on course to statutorily lapse for the first time in its history, even as President Donald Trump has named his choice for a permanent spy chief in an apparent bid to defuse a fight over the intelligence community’s leadership.

Hours after the 218-198 vote on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — which was fraught with bipartisan objections to Bill Pulte’s appointment to serve as acting director of national intelligence — President Donald Trump said he would name Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to serve in the role permanently.

Section 702 lets agencies like the NSA and FBI collect communications of foreigners abroad without a warrant, but the calls, texts and phone calls of Americans communicating with foreign targets can also be gathered, a caveat that has long raised constitutional concerns with privacy advocates.

“Few people anywhere in the Legal Community are respected at the level of Jay,” Trump said in a Truth Social post Thursday. “I encourage the United States Senate to confirm Jay as soon as possible.”

An impasse between the White House and Democrats has persisted, with Democrats warning that Pulte’s role in mortgage fraud reviews last year could foreshadow an abuse of intelligence tools to target the president’s political opponents. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump praised Clayton, and said Pulte would only be in his post “for a short while.”

It’s unclear how the appointment of Clayton, who appears to not have prior national intelligence experience, would affect the outcome of a 702 extension. After Thursday, the House is scheduled to recess until June 23, making it likely that the spying power would statutorily lapse for the first time in its existence for at least a week.

In a statement, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that he has “known and respected Jay Clayton for many years” and believes “he is a capable public servant.”

But he said the timing of the announcement is suspicious, noting that “the president could have put forward a qualified nominee from the beginning. Instead, he waited until the House of Representatives went out of town, choosing a path that raises the risk of an entirely avoidable lapse in a critical national security tool.”

Warner added that there needs to be a guarantee that Pulte will not serve as acting DNI in order for the Senate to take up a FISA extension.

“Either Director [Tulsi] Gabbard must remain in place or the administration must designate the Senate-confirmed Principal Deputy DNI as the acting head through any transition,” he said, referring to Aaron Lukaas, a number two official in that office.

“I have known Jay Clayton for decades and worked with him during his time as Chairman of the Securities Exchange Commission,” Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.

“During that time, he had the independence of mind and respect for the law that are necessary for any Director of National Intelligence,” added Himes. “I am hopeful that he will maintain that independence and provide apolitical high-quality intelligence to policymakers. The Senate should evaluate and confirm his nomination quickly. It is critical that we have a permanent DNI in place and move past the Bill Pulte disaster.”

Section 702 of FISA, enacted in 2008, codified parts of the once-secret Stellarwind surveillance program created under the Bush administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In 2013, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed documents detailing how the authority was used, fueling a global debate over privacy and mass surveillance. The program is frequently used to track myriad national security threats.

In March, the Trump administration notified Congress that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court renewed certifications for the surveillance program, letting it operate for another year even amid an expiration. The certifications can cover broad categories of national security risks, such as nuclear weapons and cyber threats.

But the split between the court’s recertification process and Capitol Hill’s role in extending the authority itself can create uncertainty for providers — such as AT&T and Microsoft — who are required to comply.

A congressional aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to communicate private discussions, said staff on the House intelligence committee are assessing how the spying authority can still be used in the event of a lapse. One concern, said the aide, is that data collected under the 702 authority could become increasingly out-of-date, and, therefore, be less effective.

Civil liberties advocates contend that Section 702 collection can continue even after a statutory lapse because of the way annual certifications are approved, and that other authorities remain available to support national security operations.

A former intelligence official told Nextgov/FCW that, while collection activities would immediately, lawfully continue, firms may enter an “odd legal space” where providers mandated to comply with the law could argue that they don’t need to supply information. If access under 702 is curtailed, the intelligence community would likely explore ways to lean on other lawful collection authorities, the former official added.

Glenn Gerstell, former general counsel at the NSA, echoed these points.

“Companies may say they are not 100% certain the authority still applies,” he said in an interview.

Two areas — terror attacks and cyberattacks — might present a higher risk with the authority having lapsed, Gerstell added, because they are fast-moving developments that often rely on single tips that intelligence analysts must run down.

“702 is a great way to find and pursue that tip. It’s a great tool for quickly getting an answer,” he said. “If the FBI hears a ransomware attack has been made, and they believe it to be foreign-generated, they’re going to want to move with lightning speed to figure out where it’s coming from.”

“It feels like we’re playing Russian roulette with national security,” he later added.

The NSA, CIA, FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — which all have authority to access Section 702 data — did not return requests for comment.

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Expanding paid leave for federal workers is back on the table

Erich Wagner — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:32:06 -0400

A bipartisan trio of House lawmakers on Thursday reintroduced legislation aimed at expanding federal workers’ access to paid leave to handle illnesses and other circumstances not included in the 2019 law granting feds paid parental leave.

The Comprehensive Paid Leave for Federal Employees Act, introduced by Reps. Don Beyer, D-Va., Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., and Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., would grant federal employees up to 12 weeks of paid family leave each year to attend to a serious health condition or to care for a spouse, child or parent. The measure would also cover absences needed to help a family member who is the survivor of domestic violence, sexual assault or stalking, as well as to attend to a family member’s deployment into active duty military service.

When Congress passed the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, the House’s version included a provision providing 12 weeks of paid parental and family leave to feds. But during negotiations with the Senate, the measure was stripped down to remove the family leave portions, and feds became eligible for paid parental leave in October 2020.

The lawmakers’ bill was first introduced in 2021 by then-Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., who previously had spearheaded the campaign for paid parental leave. In a statement, the lawmakers argued that feds’ current access to unpaid family leave is unrealistic given today’s cost of living.

“Unpaid leave may protect a job on paper, but for too many working families, it is not leave they can actually afford to take," Fitzpatrick said. “When a federal employee faces a serious illness or needs to care for a loved one, the choice should not be between earning a paycheck and being present for their family. Without paid leave, workers can be pushed out of careers they have spent years building, agencies lose experienced public servants, and taxpayers lose operational expertise that cannot be easily replaced.”

“We’ve already made meaningful progress by securing paid parental leave for federal employees and expanding paid leave for service members who transition to the federal workforce,” Beyer said. “The next step is expanding family and medical leave to all federal workers, because every American deserves the peace of mind that comes from being able to take time off to care for their health or a loved one without losing a paycheck.”

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Most Americans think government workers are competent and should be nonpartisan, according to recent surveys

Sean Michael Newhouse — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:40:21 -0400

Support for a nonpartisan civil service rebounded this year, according to a report released Wednesday by the Partnership for Public Service. A recently launched survey series from a Harvard research center also found that majorities of Americans view public sector employees positively.

In total, 76% of respondents in the spring Partnership survey agreed that a nonpartisan civil service is important for a strong democracy in the U.S., which is a 10% increase compared with last year. The upswing was driven by Republicans and Independents; both of whom experienced double-digit increases in support since 2025.

Still, 38% of respondents agreed that "presidents should have the right to fill any government job with people that agree with their policies.”

President Donald Trump last week formally converted around 8,000 career federal employees in “policy-related” positions to Schedule Policy/Career, which removes their civil service protections. Agency worker organizations and good government groups, including the Partnership, have criticized the new job classification and argued it will lead to hiring based on political affiliation.

The Partnership survey also found that “civil servants received the highest level of support” since the nonprofit started conducting annual polls in 2021. This year, 61% of respondents agreed that “most civil servants are committed to helping people like me” (a five-point increase since 2025) and 65% reported that “most civil servants are competent” (an eight-point increase).

These results come from a nationally representative poll of 1,000 U.S. adults conducted between March 31 and April 5.

The survey also found that 52% of Americans oppose the Trump administration’s changes to government, which is an increase from 49% in 2025. In particular, 56% of Independents this year objected to the reforms compared with 42% in 2025.

Additionally, one in three respondents said they have been, or know someone who has been, impacted by the administration’s federal funding and/or workforce cuts.

In December 2025, the Harvard People Lab launched “Perceptions of Public Servants,” a quarterly series of national representative surveys to track views of U.S. public sector workers. Its analysis, for the most part, does not distinguish between federal, state and local government employees.

Researchers reported in a June white paper that most Americans believe public sector employees are competent (68%), have integrity (57%) and express warmth (51%). Conversely, only about a quarter of respondents described such workers as innovative. These results came from a March survey.

The research center also found that, between December 2025 and March 2026, there was a roughly 9% drop in respondents reporting they were “somewhat” or “very” interested in public sector jobs, with the largest decreases among Democrats, women, late career workers and Black people.

The Trump administration has sought to excise diversity, equity and inclusion programs from the federal government.

According to the white paper, stereotypes of public sector employees are “strong, consistent predictors” of wanting a career in public service. For example, “a one standard deviation increase in how favorably respondents view public sector employees’ integrity is associated with a seven percentage point increase in career interest.”

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Why Social Security’s funding gap matters to federal retirement

Tammy Flanagan — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:00:00 -0400

The 2026 Social Security Trustees Report released this week has a familiar warning and a shorter clock.

Social Security is not going anywhere, but the program is moving closer to the point where it will no longer be able to pay full scheduled benefits from its current revenue. The report says the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund can pay full benefits only until the fourth quarter of 2032. After that, incoming revenue would cover about 78% of scheduled benefits unless Congress acts. If combined with the disability trust fund, the system could pay full benefits until 2034, then benefits will be reduced to about 83% of the promised amount.

To be sure, there is nothing indicating that benefits will stop. Payroll taxes will keep coming in, and Social Security will still pay most of what it owes. But it will mean an automatic cut if lawmakers do nothing.

That is why the comparison to 1983 matters. Congress faced a Social Security emergency then, too, and acted before full checks were interrupted. The difference is that today’s problem is less a sudden cash crisis than a slower, deeper mismatch between promised benefits and projected revenue.

For many Americans, these reductions would cause or worsen impoverishment and create financial hardship for most retirees.

Got a question for federal retirement expert Tammy Flanagan? Send to us at newstips@govexec.com and she might answer it during our live webinar at 2 p.m. on Thurs., June 18.

What the report really says

The trustees track two funds: one for retirement and survivors benefits, and one for disability benefits.

The headline number in 2026 is the retirement fund’s projected depletion in late 2032. The combined projection stretches to 2034, and the disability fund remains in much stronger shape on its own.

The bigger point is that the gap is no longer abstract. It is close enough that every year of delay makes the eventual fix harder. Analysts estimate a 75-year actuarial deficit of 4.42% of taxable payroll, with a present-value shortfall of roughly $31 trillion. In plain English, there is no tiny fix left. Congress can still solve the problem gradually, but not painlessly.

Why the gap keeps growing

Social Security runs mainly on payroll taxes, so the math works best when there are many workers relative to retirees.

Over time, that balance has changed. Birth rates are lower, people live longer and the baby boom generation is already retiring. The result is a smaller worker-to-beneficiary ratio and a larger bill for benefits.

That is the key contrast with 1983: Then, lawmakers were trying to stop an immediate payment crisis. Now, they are confronting a bigger structural problem that has been building for years.

The 2026 report also reflects lower projected fertility, lower assumed immigration and policy changes that reduce tax revenue from the taxation of benefits.

In other words, Social Security is being squeezed by demographics, economics and policy at the same time.

What can Congress actually do?

The menu is not endless.

Congress can raise more revenue, slow the growth of future benefits, change eligibility rules or mix those steps to avoid relying on one substantial solution.

That was the logic in 1983, too.

The difference is scale: Today’s shortfall is larger, and the politics may be tougher.

For most current civilian employees, the Federal Employees Retirement System is built on three parts: the FERS Basic Retirement benefit, also known as a pension, the Thrift Savings Plan and Social Security. In other words, Social Security is not a side benefit for most federal workers and retirees today. It is an important leg of retirement income and a source of disability and survivor protection for families.

For many federal employees, especially those under FERS, the program is an integral part of retirement security rather than an add-on.

Raise more revenue

The most straightforward option is to bring in more money. Congress could raise the payroll tax rate or lift the taxable wage cap so high earners pay more of their income into the system. Supporters say that is the cleanest way to close the gap. Critics say it would reduce take-home pay or increase labor costs.

In 1983, lawmakers accelerated already scheduled payroll tax increases. This time, the debate is more likely to center on the wage cap and broader revenue measures.

Slow future benefits

Another approach is to slow the growth of future benefits, especially for higher earners. That can mean changing the initial benefit formula, trimming annual cost-of-living increases or expanding some form of means testing.

Supporters argue that promised benefits have outgrown dedicated funding.

Opponents warn that even gradual cuts would hit workers who rely heavily on Social Security and have little savings to fall back on.

Raise the retirement age

Raising the full retirement age beyond 67 is another familiar proposal.

Supporters say longer life expectancy makes it reasonable to wait longer for full benefits.

Critics counter that this is a benefit cut by another name, especially for workers in physically demanding jobs or with shorter life expectancies.

Because the 1983 amendments already raised the full retirement age from 65 to 67, any new increase would feel less like a tweak and more like a second major rewrite of Social Security’s retirement promise.

How about a compromise?

Many policy specialists think the only realistic answer is a blended package: some new revenue, some slower growth in benefits and stronger protection for people who depend most on the program.

That was also the basic logic in 1983.

The challenge now is that compromise is harder in a more polarized Congress, and every serious fix creates obvious political losers.

The June 10 House Ways and Means Committee hearing on Social Security

Commissioner Frank J. Bisignano’s June 10 testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee added another wrinkle: Social Security’s finances are now being debated alongside the agency’s day-to-day performance.

In this hearing, the focus was on customer service and modernization. Lawmakers pushed back on whether seniors, people with disabilities and other beneficiaries are experiencing better access. That matters because even a strong solvency plan will be harder to sell if the public does not trust the agency running the program.

Does 1983 still matter?

The Social Security Amendments of 1983 remain the clearest benchmark for what a rescue looks like.

That bipartisan deal, signed into law on April 20, 43 years ago, provided a combination of faster payroll tax increases, taxation of some benefits, a phased increase in the full retirement age and broader coverage for more workers, including all federal employees first hired after 1983, who were then required to pay FICA taxes.

Lawmakers acted before the crisis became unmanageable and spread the pain across multiple groups.

Today’s problem is harder in one important way: It is not just a short-term liquidity scare. It is a long-term structural mismatch between benefits and revenue after decades of delay.

That means Congress needs a broader, more long-lasting package than it adopted in 1983, with more emphasis on revenue and clearer protections for lower-income retirees.

What is Congress waiting for?

Social Security reform is hard for an obvious reason: Every real solution will make some groups unhappy.

Higher taxes anger workers and employers.

Slower benefit growth alarms retirees and near-retirees.

A higher retirement age sparks backlash from labor groups and people in physically demanding jobs.

Lawmakers often promise protection and attack the other side’s ideas rather than vote for a package of trade-offs.

The trouble is that waiting only makes the final fix larger and harsher.

The bottom line

The lesson of the 2026 trustees report is simple: Social Security still has time, but not much easy time left.

The retirement trust fund is projected to run short in 2032, and the combined system will face automatic benefit reductions in 2034 if Congress does nothing. The 1983 comparison shows that bipartisan reform is possible. It also shows why delays are dangerous.

Then, lawmakers acted before the crisis became unmanageable. Now, they face a larger structural shortfall after years of drift.

The most plausible solution is not a miracle fix, but a politically painful compromise that mixes new revenue, slower benefit growth and protections for the people most dependent on the program.

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DOJ shutters alleged China-linked operation targeting current and former feds

David DiMolfetta — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 08:00:00 -0400

The FBI and Justice Department seized 13 websites allegedly used by Chinese intelligence operatives to target current and former U.S. officials and military personnel with access to classified government information.

In a press release, the DOJ said the domains were designed to look like legitimate consulting firms and were used to advertise vague, well-paid consulting roles aimed at security clearance holders. The campaign, which allegedly began in November 2023, sought to entice Americans into producing research reports or sharing insider information on topics of interest to the Chinese government, according to court documents.

The seized domains included sites associated with firm names like Centrik Global Consulting, Rightinfo Consulting, Finnacle-Vesper Consulting, CYDF Consulting, Pulse Wave Global, Catalyst Global Solutions, Horizzen, GeoIndopacific, SafeSec Group and others.

The campaign relied on familiar job-market platforms and freelance sites to advertise positions such as “Senior Analyst” and “International Affairs Consultant.”

The Justice Department said the operators used aliases, fake personas, stolen identities and artificial intelligence-generated photographs to make the companies appear credible. The alleged scheme also involved encrypted messaging apps, including Telegram, overseas payments, cryptocurrency and online payment accounts registered under false names, according to an affidavit filed in support of the seizure warrants.

The takedowns mark the latest U.S. government effort to disrupt foreign intelligence schemes that blend online recruiting and financial incentives to reach Americans with access to sensitive national security information.

Waves of federal layoffs over the past year have pushed thousands of government employees and contractors into an uncertain job market. That disruption has created renewed collection opportunities for foreign intelligence services.

Nextgov/FCW reported in January that a suspected Chinese intelligence outfit contacted a former senior State Department official late last year and offered payment for an assessment of U.S. policy priorities in Venezuela. The person who contacted the former official claimed to be affiliated with a sham consulting firm that had previously surfaced in research first reported by Nextgov/FCW last September, that assessed the firm was part of a broader network of fake companies tied to China.

The U.S. has sought to further publicize targeting efforts. In a rare public disclosure, Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Hale issued a memo in November warning that foreign adversaries are targeting soldiers, civilians and their families through fake companies and phony recruiters. The advisory was sent to more than a million personnel across the Army, and later to members of the media, marking an unusually direct acknowledgment of the threat.

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Return-to-office push put GSA’s network infrastructure to the test

Edward Graham — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:00:00 -0400

Telecommunications services provider MetTel announced on Wednesday that it successfully completed network upgrades to 11 General Services Administration offices across the U.S. to help meet the needs of the Trump administration’s return-to-work mandate.

President Donald Trump signed a January 2025 executive order requiring that federal agencies “take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements,” the vast majority of which evolved out of the COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020. But an influx of employees back into offices also means that existing bandwidth and broadband services often need to be modernized.

MetTel said it outfitted the GSA offices “with Software-Defined Wide Area Network technology, 22 new high-capacity network circuits and Voice over IP services,” with the circuits being “tailored to the unique needs of each site.”

The work was conducted through GSA’s $50 billion governmentwide Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions contract to modernize its existing operations. MetTel received a $230 million task order under EIS in 2020 for network and voice infrastructure services.

A GSA spokesperson said in a statement to Nextgov/FCW that, “as the government’s needs continue to evolve, EIS contractors remain a dedicated partner, ready to respond to new requirements and support digital transformation efforts.”

MetTel has already taken steps to help modernize GSA’s operations, including announcing in November 2025 that it deployed “a nationwide network and voice infrastructure modernization” across the agency under the EIS contract.

In an interview with Nextgov/FCW, Don Parente — MetTel’s vice president of public sector — said that, “because we moved them to a software-defined architecture, it made it easier for us to very quickly spin up the dial and get additional bandwidth flowing for them.”

Parente said GSA’s previous SD-WAN adoption and embrace of faster broadband internet services, including Starlink, enabled it “to really pivot quickly when they needed to bring all these people back in the new office.”

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Bisignano deflects customer service questions in congressional testimony

Erich Wagner — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:25:05 -0400

Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano on Wednesday touted a year of “transformation” at the beleaguered agency, touting improved service metrics and deflecting repeated questions regarding changes to their underlying methodology.

Bisignano testified before a joint session of the House Ways and Means Committee’s Social Security and work and welfare subcommittees, excoriating the Biden administration and former Commissioner Martin O’Malley for what he called a “failed service model” in the agency’s push in 2024 to encourage Americans to make an appointment ahead of visiting a field office.

“Before I arrived in May of 2025, SSA had four different leaders in five months and was an agency in turmoil,” he said, frequently overwhelming his microphone. “The American people endured a failed service model with the Biden administration’s so-called appointment-focused service, which turned people away who traveled to our field offices.”

But O’Malley told Government Executive after the hearing that’s not true: the agency specifically warned field office workers not to turn away any person seeking walk-in services.

“Yeah, that’s totally false,” he said. “We were doing everything we could to encourage people to make appointments, but we also admonished many times that no one is ever to be turned away. It’s similar to what we did with the [Motor Vehicle Administration in Maryland], which is we told people, ‘Hey, you should make an appointment,’ but we never turned anyone away.”

Indeed, a 2024 message to SSA employees regarding the Appointment Focused Service initiative makes clear that field offices can and should continue to provide walk-in service. Language on ssa.gov similarly still strongly encourages people make appointments in advance.

“SSA is expanding appointments (phone, video or in-office where appropriate) to enhance our service delivery and improve the customer experience,” the transmission states. “We will continue to promote online services and will not refuse in-person customer service at our [field offices and Social Security card centers]. By scheduling most in-person customers for appointments, we can minimize wait times, promote online and automated services, and ensure that staff can focus on delivering quality service to each customer.”

Bisignano also continued to tout purported improvements in customer service metrics, which have been hotly disputed by advocates and the agency’s unions due to recent changes to how those statistics are measured.

“[We’ve reduced] the average speed of answer on the 800 number to the lowest level in a decade to under 5 minutes in May 2026—an 89% reduction from an all-time monthly high of 42 minutes in fiscal year 2024,” he wrote in his written testimony.

But those figures are misleading for two reasons. First, the 42-minute average wait time figure dates back to November 2023; by the end of 2024, average 1-800 wait times had fallen to 12 minutes. The second problem is that last summer, Bisignano changed SSA’s methodology for calculating call wait times by omitting the time customers who elected to be called back rather than be put on hold waited for their call back, instead calculating their wait time as “zero.”

Last December, the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General released a report noting this change—and that those who elected to use the 1-800 number’s call-back feature waited an average of one hour 49 minutes to be served—but ultimately found the agency’s published metrics to be “accurate.” And in March, The Washington Post reported that an earlier draft calculated a new “total wait time” metric that reflected those people’s waits alongside those who elected to stay on the phone, but it was removed before publication.

American Federation of Government Employees Council 220 President Jessica LaPointe, whose union represents field office and teleservice center employees, said in a statement Wednesday that Bisignano’s metrics paper over a staffing crisis. The agency has lost more than 7,000 employees since Trump returned to office last year, bringing its headcount to a 59-year staffing low, which dates back to before the creation of Supplemental Security Income, and the agency has reassigned around 2,500 field office employees to man the 1-800 number to spread the workload.

Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis., pressed Bisignano on his reassignments.

“We have 2,500 employees with specific skillsets all removed and put on the 800 number so when people do call, depending on who answers, they might not have the answers or the skillset to help them, and so they don’t get the proper answers,” Moore said. “[Is] the 800 number and the shuffling of staff—is that supposed to realize some efficiencies that we haven’t seen?”

“I think a good way to think about this whole situation is that we used to have 400 people on the phone at 8 a.m. and that was not a sufficient number,” Bisignano said. “That was predating me, the era you well remember when we told people that appointments were needed.”

“Well then why are people waiting 46 minutes and then when they do get somebody, that person can’t answer questions because they weren’t put through to the right benefits officer?” Moore asked. “Do you think the 1-800 number thing is a magic bullet in place of not having enough employees?”

“What I think in fact is with the right amount of staff in the right places—” he responded.

“Well I don’t agree with you on that,” Moore interjected.

“You wouldn’t know how to manage 50,000 people anyway," Bisignano said.

Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., asked Bisignano about training standards for the field office-turned call center employees, citing Government Executive’s February reporting that the materials instructed workers to suggest that “suicide is only one option” if they encounter callers who express ideation toward self harm.

“These employees used to get months of training and then would shadow a full time phone operator, but now they’re getting three hours’ training and placed on the phones basically the same day,” Beyer said. “These are bizarre and dangerous instructions.”

“I think we amended that message, and, by the way, we got that from an authority and went back to the authority,” Bisignano said. “If you want to make that what this hearing is about, that’s kind of fine. We can talk about that one line, we can also talk about the fact that your wait times are down 76%, we can also talk about how field office visits were down 3%.”

“I just wanted you to say you were addressing the issue,” Beyer said.

“We addressed it four months ago when it occurred,” Bisignano said.

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A year after sounding the alarm, NIH dissenters say political influence is entrenched at research agency

Sean Michael Newhouse — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:46:22 -0400

Last year, a group of National Institutes of Health employees compiled their objections to the workforce and research funding policy changes that the Trump administration was making at the agency into the “Bethesda Declaration,” which mirrored other civil servant-led documents that were released around the same time at the EPA and Federal Emergency Management Agency.

On Tuesday, 74 current and former NIH staffers, 39 of whom are named, published a one-year update to the “Bethesda Declaration,” arguing that the administration’s overhauls have led to increased political influence at the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research.

“The chaos of 2025 has been replaced with coordinated, systematic, institutionalized destruction in 2026,” they wrote.

NIH has shed more than 4,400 staffers, or about one-fifth of its workforce, since the start of 2025, according to federal employee data. The declaration signers also said that directorships at 14 of NIH’s 27 institutes are unfilled.

They expressed concerns that Schedule Policy/Career, a recently implemented directive to make it easier to fire 10,000 career federal employees in “policy-related” positions, would further hurt staffing. Specifically, the signers contended that frontline NIH workers involved in “regular scientific administrative work,” rather than policymaking, are set to be converted to the new job classification.

The NIH employees also criticized certain appointments at the agency, including Kristine Blanche — an integrative medicine practitioner and the wife of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — at an NIH advisory council and Kyle Walsh — a neuroepidemiologist and friend of Vice President JD Vance — as head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

“Positions of authority and accountability at NIH are increasingly filled by people who lack the technical knowledge or integrity to make sound decisions about the future of health research in the United States,” they wrote.

Additionally, the Partnership for Public Service nonprofit recently reported that the Trump administration has installed six political appointees at NIH as of March 2026. The historical average number of such officials at the agency between 2009 and 2024 is 0.7.

While NIH has reinstated thousands of research grants that it terminated in 2025, often because of a court order, the letter signers emphasized that more than 1,000 grants have not been restored, according to a tracker website. They further argued that the sudden nature of the cancelations hurt not just the researchers but also, in many cases, the study participants.

“Terminated studies, including clinical trials, were initially allowed no time or funding to ethically close out, safely disenroll participants or follow through on commitments to participants,” they wrote. “After months of harm, NIH finally changed policy to allow terminated studies to request costs to support an orderly study closeout. However, the damage caused by abrupt trial discontinuation and disruption was entirely foreseen by NIH staff and should never have occurred.”

The NIH employees also slammed a change to the agency’s grant review process requiring a certification that funded research does not include certain words associated with diversity, which has held up some grant disbursements and forced scientists to rewrite proposals.

“NIH leadership has justified these acts by establishing the ill-defined concept of ‘Gold Standard Science’ and then claiming that any research project that doesn’t align with the administration’s political priorities does not meet the standard,” the letter signers wrote.

Other issues flagged in the new “Bethesda Declaration” include:

A proposed rule from the Office of Management and Budget that would overhaul the federal grantmaking process, including by requiring political appointees to approve awards to ensure they advance the president’s priorities.
A 24% reduction in the number of NIH grants issued in fiscal 2025 compared with the average of the previous 10 years.
A policy that all purchasing orders more than $15,000 must go through a “lengthy, centralized process that takes so long it effectively functions as an arbitrary limit on essential laboratory tools and resources.”

A spokesperson for the Health and Human Services Department said in a statement to Government Executive that agency Director Jay Bhattacharya has made “scientific integrity, open inquiry and academic freedom central priorities at NIH during the Trump administration” and met last year with the “Bethesda Declaration” organizers.

“Director Bhattacharya is committed to transparency, open inquiry and constructive debate and remains open to continuing direct conversations with the authors of the Bethesda Declaration to discuss their concerns firsthand,” the spokesperson said. “While disagreement is a healthy part of science, he believes the most productive path forward is through direct engagement and dialogue.”

The letter signers also noted that trust in NIH has decreased; a survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania found that 62% of respondents in February said they have confidence in the agency compared with 75% who reported the same two years ago.

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OPM's long-planned HR overhaul moves ahead with $396M award to Oracle

Nick Wakeman — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:01:26 -0400

The Office of Personnel Management is sticking with the incumbent as the agency moves forward with a plan to modernize human resource systems across the government.

OPM has picked Oracle for the 10-year, $395.8 million Federal HR 2.0 contract that will cover more than two million federal employees. Oracle faced challengers such as Workday, IBM, SAP and Economic Systems Inc.

IBM and Economic Systems filed protests earlier this year objecting to terms in the solicitation. IBM withdrew its protest and GAO denied Economic Systems’ protest on June 1. Once the protests were resolved, OPM was clear to make its award.

Much of what OPM uses to manage HR functions is run on PeopleSoft, which Oracle acquired in 2005. Oracle recently extended its support for PeopleSoft through 2037, which includes updates and fixes.

The contract is structured as a firm-fixed-price award with a 10-year ordering period. Requirements include core HR and personnel action processing, payroll and benefits integration, audit-ready reporting, and time and attendance tracking.

The system also has to comply with security standards such as FISMA and FedRAMP, as well as be interoperable with existing federal IT systems.

OPM wants the core implementation to be completed by the fall. Other phases will follow for agency transitions, and then licensing and sustainment.

More than 100 HR systems currently operate across the federal government. Federal HR 2.0 is OPM’s attempt to wrangle all that into a single, integrated platform.

The goal of the program is to centralize HR functions across government agencies. OPM wants a platform that can be the infrastructure for a data-driven federal HR ecosystem, according to solicitation documents.

Some of the functions OPM wants include position management, personnel action, records processing, workforce analytics, and employee and manager self-service capabilities.

Given that the award was announced Wednesday, the clock is ticking for competitors to file protests. Companies generally have 10 days to file after a debriefing.

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Why Congress separated immigration funding from oversight

Jennifer Shutt, States Newsroom — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 07:00:00 -0400

House Republicans on Tuesday approved three years of funding for immigration enforcement without any new guardrails on how federal agents operate.

The 214-212 vote sent the nearly $70 billion package to President Donald Trump, who is expected to sign the measure. Republican senators approved the bill earlier this month, with Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski the only GOP member in opposition.

Rep. Kevin Kiley, I-Calif., who conferences with Republicans, voted no along with Democrats.

Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., argued Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol need the additional funding so they can deport anyone in the country without proper authorization.

“They want you to think that it’s just everybody coming in to seek the American dream,” he said. “We have a legal method for that to happen.”

Scalise then read a list of Americans killed by people who were present in the United States without legal status.

“It’s not some hypothetical. It’s happened over and over and over again,” he said.

Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said he opposed Republicans’ plans to “give a blank check to ICE without any guardrails, any oversight, or any accountability.”

“Donald Trump promised America that he would target violent felons who are here illegally, but instead taxpayer dollars are being used by ICE and his violent mass deportation machine to target and brutalize American citizens, in some cases killing them,” he said.

Jeffries contended that “immigration enforcement should be fair, just and humane” and that ICE “needs to conduct itself” according to the same standards other law enforcement agencies follow.

Funds will stretch over 3 years

The legislation will provide $38.53 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, $26.02 billion for Customs and Border Protection and $5 billion for the secretary of Homeland Security.

The funding, which lasts through September 2029, is in addition to the $170 billion Republicans provided in their “big, beautiful” law. About $100 billion of that remains unspent, according to Democrats.

Republicans opted not to place any new constraints on how federal immigration agents operate or provide additional funding for oversight, despite officers killing two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January.

Those shootings led Democrats in Congress to demand new restrictions on officers, prompting weeks of bipartisan negotiations during a 76-day shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security.

That stalemate ended in April after lawmakers approved DHS’ annual appropriations bill without funding for ICE or the Border Patrol. Republicans had to remove those provisions to move the legislation through procedural votes in the Senate that require the support of at least 60 lawmakers.

A new path

Republican leaders then turned to the complex budget reconciliation process to provide three years of funding for ICE, CBP and the DHS secretary without requiring any changes to how they operate.

The special legislative pathway allows bills to move through the Senate with simple-majority votes as long as they adhere to certain rules.

Senate Republicans originally included, but later removed, $1.46 billion for several Department of Justice programs and $1 billion for the Secret Service to make security upgrades linked to the new White House ballroom, also called the East Wing Modernization Project.

The funding for ICE, CBP and the DHS secretary clears the way for the Trump administration to continue its immigration crackdown until just a few months before his second term is scheduled to end.

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Building cyber-resilient payroll systems in government

Linda Jones — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 06:00:00 -0400

Payroll systems don’t usually make headlines, but in 2024, the State Department warned employees about a payroll fraud scheme where cybercriminals posed as staff to reroute direct deposits.

It started with spoofed emails that looked like they came from real employees and retirees, and some included fake 1099 forms loaded with malware. The goal was simple: Get in, change payment instructions, and disappear before anyone noticed.

It’s a sharp reminder that payroll is a high-value target. Essential, but vulnerable.

What the Threat Landscape Looks Like Now

Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting payroll and HR platforms because they know exactly what’s inside: credentials, Social Security numbers and bank details — prime ingredients for identity theft. Phishing attacks are the most common, but business email compromise is also rising. In these cases, attackers impersonate vendors or internal departments to reroute funds or gain access to sensitive files.

And while external threats get the most attention, internal risks shouldn’t be overlooked. Overly broad access or outdated permissions can lead to accidental exposure or worse. Then there are third-party tools that connect to payroll systems, like file transfer software or benefits integrations. These add convenience but also risk.

Take the 2023 MOVEit breach, for example. A vulnerability in a file transfer tool allowed attackers to steal sensitive data from government contractors, including personal information tied to Medicare. The breach showed just how damaging a weak link in the software supply chain can be.

Core Cybersecurity Measures Every Payroll System Needs

There’s no single fix for these risks, but there are clear priorities. Multi-factor authentication should be standard for everyone with access to payroll platforms, especially admin users. Role-based access controls help limit exposure and keep users from seeing more than they need to.

Encryption is critical, with masking and tokenization adding protection. Agencies should scan for vulnerabilities, log activity, and flag unusual access.

The good news is that there are solid frameworks out there. The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cybersecurity Framework and the CIS Controls give agencies clear starting points. The latest NIST update even highlights the need to embed cybersecurity into HR practices like employee onboarding, offboarding, and system deprovisioning. That’s especially important when payroll and HR platforms overlap, as they often do.

Security vs. Compliance: Where Agencies Get Stuck

Just because a system checks the compliance boxes doesn’t mean it’s secure. Some legacy platforms technically meet Federal Information Security Modernization Act or Fair Labor Standards Act standards, but still rely on outdated security protocols or lack support for basic protections like MFA.

Another common issue is access sprawl: giving employees more permissions than they need “just in case.” It may help in the short term but makes lateral attacks easier. The best approach is one where IT, HR and compliance teams work together — not separately — to close these gaps.

Why it’s Hard to Fix but Worth it

Upgrading payroll is tough. Legacy systems, limited budgets and staffing gaps all slow progress. But the risk of doing nothing keeps growing. As more agencies move to cloud-based systems, there’s a real opportunity to rethink not just how payroll works but how it’s secured. Modern platforms offer stronger baselines and make it easier to adopt tools like MFA, encryption, and behavioral monitoring.

At its core, payroll is personal. It touches every employee in the agency. When it breaks down, people feel it fast.

That’s why cybersecurity shouldn’t stop at the perimeter or the server room. It needs to extend into the systems that keep the government workforce running. Treat payroll like the critical system it is, and you’ll be protecting more than just data. You’ll be protecting trust.

Linda Jones, SHRM-CP, is the Vice President of Administration and a Board Member at Software Solutions Inc., where she has provided leadership for nearly 20 years. In her role, Linda oversees human resources, facilities management, vendor negotiations, and special projects.

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NDA proposal for feds draws scrutiny on Capitol Hill

Erich Wagner — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:45:09 -0400

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., on Tuesday said the Trump administration’s recently unveiled plan to make federal employees sign a non-disclosure agreement “threatens” the federal workforce’s constitutional rights and creates a chilling effect on would-be whistleblowers and demanded information into how it was developed.

Last month, the Office of Personnel Management formally proposed requiring all federal employees to sign NDAs barring them from divulging “confidential” information in most cases, prompting swift outcry from civil service groups and employment lawyers. A draft copy of the document bars signatories from disclosing information related to internal agency operations, personnel and procurement matters and “any sensitive, pre-decisional or deliberative material.”

In a letter to OPM Director Scott Kupor, the Illinois Democrat criticized the proposal as “over-broad” and likely to make it more difficult for whistleblowers to divulge allegations of waste, fraud and abuse.

“Although OPM has stated the proposal does not supersede existing whistleblower protections, rights guaranteed on paper can be rendered ineffective if employees reasonably fear discipline, civil liability or criminal penalties for exercising them,” Krishnamoorthi wrote. “As drafted, the NDA will leave federal employees questioning whether communications with Congress, inspectors general, law enforcement or other authorized oversight bodies could jeopardize or seriously damage their careers . . . Federal employees should not be forced to guess which communications are permissible and which could expose them to punishment.”

Krishnamoorthi particularly questioned OPM’s citation of “confidential” information, which he said is never “clearly defined” in the document.

“OPM itself recognizes that federal employees have the right to disclose evidence of violations of law, gross waste of funds, abuse of authority and threats to public health or safety to Congress, inspectors general, and other authorized recipients,” he wrote. “Yet the proposed NDA threatens disciplinary, civil and potentially criminal consequences for violations involving an undefined category of ‘confidential’ information. When employees cannot confidently distinguish between protected disclosures and prohibited conduct, many will understandably choose silence rather than risk punishment.”

The Democrat demanded information on OPM’s legal analysis of whether the proposed NDA comports with the First Amendment and the Whistleblower Protection Act, a definition of “confidential” for the purposes of the document, as well as any potential consequences federal employees who refuse to sign the agreement would face, and whether it would apply equally to both career employees and political appointees.

“In its draft notice, OPM also cited unauthorized disclosures to the press—including reporting on OPM’s own controversial personnel proposals—as the primary justification for this rule, arguing that leaks ‘risk chilling candid interagency feedback, disrupting orderly decision-making, and weakening trust within and among federal agencies,’” Krishnamoorthi wrote. “This proposal notably does not mention the most high-profile information disclosure of this administration—Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s sharing of operational military strike details over a Signal group chat. That omission raises a direct question about whether this policy is designed to apply consistently across all federal employees and officials—or whether it is aimed primarily at career civil servants who speak out about wrongdoing.”

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After year of pushing employees out, OPM embraces familiar recruiting playbook

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:08:41 -0400

President Donald Trump came into his second term with the goal of downsizing the civil service, and his administration in nearly one-and-a-half years has more than erased gains to the government workforce that occurred under former President Joe Biden. Despite the emphasis on removing or otherwise pushing out agency staffers, Office of Personnel Director Scott Kupor said that he is seeking to streamline the process for bringing people into government.

In fact, several of the proposals he laid out at a Tuesday event hosted by Axios are similar to efforts Biden officials pursued to improve agency hiring.

“We’ve got to find people where they are,” Kupor said, specifically advocating for the use of Handshake, a popular networking website for college students.

Agencies have been using that platform for years. Handshake actually reported in 2024 that the college graduating class of that year applied for a higher percentage of government jobs on its website than the prior year’s senior cohort.

On Tuesday, Kupor also seemed to reference shared certifications, which enable different agencies to hire candidates from the same job announcement. In particular, he bemoaned that a job seeker who is rejected at one agency may be well-qualified for — but unaware of — a position at a different department.

“In the perfect world that I want, [if] you are somebody who wants a job with the federal government [and] you tell us what your general interests are, quite frankly we should push to you the opportunities that we think are relevant,” he said. “If it turns out the first one isn’t right, then we should push you to the second one, third one.”

Shared certifications have been a feature of OPM hiring plans under both the Biden and Trump administrations.

Kupor also argued that the federal government should not target younger workers for recruitment with the assumption that they’ll want to spend their entire careers in the public sector.

“We’ve had this marketing message, which is, come [to the government] and we basically will give you a 40-year career,” he said. “I’m obviously older than this age cohort, but I happen to have daughters in this age cohort, and I don’t believe anybody under the age of 30 today thinks in more than two- or three-year increments.”

But in recent years, experts have pointed to agencies’ historical association with stable employment as one of the top reasons that could persuade early-career workers to want to serve in government.

In its 2024 report, Handshake found that job stability was the top factor that graduating seniors in the survey reported would make them more likely to apply for a job. As a result, the company said this was, in part, what made the federal government attractive at the time to new workers.

And Michelle Amante, senior vice president of government programs at the Partnership for Public Service nonprofit, told Government Executive in April 2025 that the Trump administration’s mass removals of federal employees would cause government jobs to lose their appeal as stable positions safe from layoffs, which many civil servants accept as a tradeoff for making less money.

“We are going to lose Generation Z. They are not likely to want to come back and work for the government,” she said. “And then the generation after them, Generation Alpha, they're watching all of this play out. They're in their formative years watching what is happening in government. Why would they want to come work for an employer that not only does not provide stability but also does not provide a good environment to work in — where federal employees feel traumatized day in and day out?”

Gen Z refers to individuals born between 1997 to 2012, and Gen Alpha designates those born after.

Kupor, who worked for decades in the tech industry as an executive and investor, said that he was drawn to OPM because he’s found that workforce strength is an underappreciated factor in what makes organizations successful.

“What I’ve learned over my 16 years now in the venturing world is, what really matters at the end of the day is the talent that you have,” he said.

On Tuesday, Kupor also touted Tech Force, which was launched at the end of 2025 to recruit early-career software and data engineers into the government. In many respects, the program is similar to the U.S. Digital Corps, which was started in 2021 to provide opportunities in agencies to younger tech talent.

While OPM set a goal to bring on 1,000 individuals through Tech Force as soon as March, officials on May 28 said they’ve made 180 to 200 hires and have only onboarded 10 people.

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GAO warns detention camp failures could become a blueprint for billions in new spending

Ariana Figueroa, States Newsroom — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 16:03:55 -0400

A hastily constructed immigrant detention facility on a military base in Texas wasted millions in federal funding and failed to meet basic standards, according to a report released Tuesday by a nonpartisan government watchdog.

The report by the Government Accountability Office documenting problems at Camp East Montana is one of the first independent investigations into a facility quickly constructed from the $170 billion in immigration enforcement and detention funding provided by Republicans’ "big beautiful" law enacted in July 2025 as part of the president’s mass deportation campaign. The camp is considered the largest immigrant detention center in the United States.

The Department of Defense and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in August 2025 set up the soft-sided detention site of Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. It was intended to hold as many as 5,000 immigrants and is still operating under a private contractor as well as ICE.

The facility was plagued with several tuberculosis cases and at least four detainee deaths, with one ruled a homicide by the local coroner. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit against the government over inhumane conditions.

"The facility also did not meet key detention standards, risking the safety and security of detained noncitizens and staff," GAO said.

The report came as the U.S. House this week prepares to take final steps to pass a $70 billion package to fund immigration enforcement through the end of fiscal year 2029. President Donald Trump is expected to sign the legislation into law.

Congressional Democrats requested that GAO conduct a report on Camp East Montana, including Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois, Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Gary Peters of Michigan, and Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi.

Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that he was concerned the U.S. military was responsible for the quick construction of the detention camp.

"Preventable deaths, inhumane conditions, and millions of dollars in waste are the direct result of the Pentagon cutting corners and handing a billion-dollar contract to an inexperienced vendor that wrote its own performance standards," Reed said.

$1.3 billion contract

GAO investigators found that the Department of Defense's contracting vehicle used to handle the $1.3 billion contract for Camp East Montana provided no flexibility and resulted in paying for meals and employee services during times when no immigrants were detained at the facility, resulting in millions of dollars in waste.

For example, the Army paid the full cost for guards, medical services, transportation, meals and other services from Aug. 1, 2025, to Aug. 15, 2025, when there were no detainees at the facility, wasting up to $11.5 million, GAO said.

"Further, because the Army set a fixed price for meals based on the capacity of the facility, it paid about an additional $423,000 for meals it did not need when the facility was operating below its designated capacity from Aug. 16, 2025, through Sept. 30, 2025," according to the GAO report.

Same failures could repeat, GAO says

GAO investigators also noted that the same mistakes could be made with the Department of Homeland Security's ongoing move to spend $38 billion to convert warehouses for the purpose of detaining thousands of immigrants.

"GAO points out that ICE's planned facility expansion — a $38 billion program to convert warehouses into detention facilities using the same contracting vehicle — risks repeating every one of these failures at a dramatically larger scale," according to the report.

Investigators made four recommendations, including that ICE consider tiered pricing for food to account for fluctuations in detained immigrant populations and ensure that new facilities meet detention standards before housing immigrants.

The report notes that DHS and DOD agreed with the recommendations. DOD deferred comment to DHS, which did not immediately respond to States Newsroom's request for comment.

Homicide investigated

Investigators also raised use-of-force concerns, including one in January in which an autopsy found the death of a detainee was due to asphyxia and ruled it a homicide.

"However, the contractor did not provide use-of-force and death reports to ICE, as required," according to the report. "In addition, evidence associated with the incident was missing or destroyed."

Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the GAO report "damning."

"We now know even more details of how dangerous and irresponsible the Trump administration's mass deportation campaign truly is," he said in a statement. "Excessive use of force, lacking medical and mental health care, and wasted taxpayer dollars are emblematic of this mass deportation scheme. The American people have rightfully expressed outrage at these policies, and it's time to hold ICE and their private contractors responsible."

GAO investigators noted several health issues. They pointed out that none of the detainees with HIV or diabetes had treatment plans in place.

Also, facility employees did not follow proper procedure for tuberculosis screening. One contractor used a questionnaire rather than administering the required skin tests for tuberculosis.

Investigators found that, as a result, a detained immigrant with tuberculosis was housed with the general immigrant population in November.

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Union renews call for lawmakers to override Trump’s anti-union EO at the Pentagon

Erich Wagner — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 08:00:00 -0400

The nation’s largest federal employee union last week urged House lawmakers to once again bar the Defense Department from implementing President Trump’s executive order stripping two-thirds of the federal workforce of its collective bargaining rights.

In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order banning unions at most federal agencies, citing a seldom-used provision of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act to exempt workforces from federal sector labor law under the auspices of national security. A second order, signed last August, added a half-dozen more agencies to the initial edict.

The measure—and its implementation—have been tied up in a myriad of court cases ever since. While efforts lawsuits challenging the initiative governmentwide have been thus far unsuccessful in halting its rollout, some unions have preserved feds’ collective bargaining rights at particular agencies, including for Defense Department employees represented by the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers and the Federal Education Association.

Not so for the American Federation of Government Employees, whose contracts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered terminated in April. In a letter to the top Democrat and Republican on the House Armed Services Committee last week, Daniel Horowitz, AFGE’s legislative director, urged the committee to once again approve a proposal nullifying Trump’s executive order as it pertains to Defense Department workers.

Last year, the panel voted on a bipartisan basis to include the amendment, proposed by Rep. Donald Norcross, D-N.J., in the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, and the bill ultimately passed the House with the measure in tact. It did not become law, as the Senate stripped the provision from its version of the bill.

In the letter, Horowitz argued that Trump’s use of the Civil Service Reform Act’s so-called national security exemption greatly exceeded congressional intent.

“The statutory exemption Congress wrote into Title 5 was deliberately narrow, reserved for agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency whose missions are uniquely incompatible with bargaining,” he wrote. “Applying it broadly across the entire Department of Defense departs significantly from that design and longstanding precedent. It is telling that President Trump never invoked [this exemption] during his first term.”

Though Trump did not cite that authority in his first term, he sought to delegate it to then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper in 2020. Esper ultimately declined to use that power.

Horowitz noted that a group of 16 House Republicans urged members of the bicameral conference committee to keep Norcross’ amendment in the NDAA last year, arguing that the edict “jeopardizes” rather than strengthens national security. And the Pentagon already has safeguards to ensure collective bargaining activity does not interfere with national security concerns.

“Restoring collective bargaining is not about expanding rights or constraining management,” he wrote. “Existing agreements already contain robust management rights provisions, emergency authorities, and national security exemptions that allow commanders and program managers to act when mission requirements demand. What collective bargaining provides is a structured channel for identifying and resolving workforce problems before they become operational ones, including improving safety, retention, productivity and accountability.”

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Practical steps agencies can take to mitigate financial disclosure controversies

John L. Martin — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 07:00:00 -0400

John Windom was the public face of the Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) project for the Veterans Affairs Department. It’s one of the largest IT modernization projects the federal government has undertaken.

The Justice Department recently charged him with “alleged failure to disclose his receipt of thousands of dollars in cash, casino chips, gift cards and other gifts from contractors while leading the project.”

The indictment says he was “fully aware of ethics laws and regulations restricting his acceptance of gifts.” Yet he “routinely accepted personal benefits such as gifts, meals, alcohol, entertainment and other services” in the course of his duties. Further, he “used his position ... to encourage, monitor, and facilitate contracting and subcontracting opportunities.”

Potential weak spots in financial disclosure

Financial disclosure is a mandatory process for any government employee who independently exercises significant judgment in taking action in certain designated areas. The purpose of disclosure is to remove potential conflicts of interest and prevent taxpayer-funded decisions that lead to personal gain.

At the time of this writing, these are only allegations of wrongdoing. Windom is entitled to a presumption of innocence until the matter is settled in court. However, the controversy calls to mind three weaknesses in the financial disclosure process for federal employees.

People can still conceal financial assets to protect their personal interests. While most civil servants are honest people doing patriotic work, there are always bad actors. Disclosure alone isn’t enough to prevent a bad actor from omitting financial interests that conflict with their duties.
People will "forum shop" for an ethics official who gives them a desired answer. In other words, someone asks the same ethics question to multiple offices until they get the answer they want.
There are multiple processes involved in financial disclosure, and these processes are commonly siloed and decentralized. This means there’s no single ethics official or compliance lawyer who sees the whole picture. That may not be true in this instance, or at every agency, but it is not uncommon by any stretch.

3 steps ethics offices can take to reduce risk

Earlier in my career, I served as a government lawyer and became familiar with these issues. In my role now, I work with over 40 different federal agencies on financial disclosure. Indeed, I facilitate a working group of ethics officials focused on sharing best practices.

Those experiences have provided me with a wide-angle view of the financial disclosure landscape — and how to solve these challenges.

1. Create a well-defined and centralized process

Most agencies do have a centralized process for collecting and validating annual financial disclosure forms, such as OGE Form 450 (confidential financial disclosure) or OGE Form 278 (public financial disclosure). What often isn’t centralized is the supplemental forms for widely attended gatherings (WAGs), travel reimbursement and outside activities.

These are all areas of overlap that can be important ethical signals to monitor. For example, travel paid for by third parties can also reveal outside influence or possible conflicts. That signal can go unnoticed in a decentralized environment. The ethics officials who review the annual financial disclosure forms often have no visibility into intermittent travel disclosures by government employees.

The fix is to centralize all related processes. Every ethics official involved in reviewing any of these forms should have access to what is reported by the employee across all forms and previous decisions by other ethics officials, so they have a full picture.

2. Create a clearinghouse and common entry point

A centralized process requires a centralized repository for all related disclosure data. This becomes a clearinghouse for all decisions. Ethics officials should be able to query the system, see who reviewed disclosure forms and see any steps required to mitigate potential conflicts in recent history.

Part and parcel to a centralized process and clearinghouse is a common entry point. Every review of any disclosure form has to start at the same place. This eliminates the opportunity for forum shopping.

3. Drive agency-level alignment on ethics guidelines

The propensity for forum shopping is partly driven by legal interpretation. What one ethics lawyer sees as a potential red flag, another might see as routine.

There are good reasons why this might happen. For example, one ethics official may be less concerned about outside activities, generally, than others in their agency. Or one ethics official has previously encountered issues with certain widely attended gatherings, while another official is unaware of that experience, and so approves of the attendance.

Each agency should strive to align all ethics personnel around common guidelines that fit the needs of their organization. This ensures uniformity, but it can also improve efficiency through self-service tools, like answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs). Ideally, this solves the majority of routine inquiries that fall within a normal distribution.

The best defense against conflicts of interest

Matters like those surrounding John Windom are infrequent, which is a testament to the honesty of the government workforce and the disclosure policies currently in place. However, when incidents do occur, the severity of impact — the cost to taxpayers, negative publicity and the loss of public trust — is quite high.

The best defense is a well-defined and centralized process that gathers every financial or other personal interest disclosure (WAG, travel, outside activities) that any given government employee is required to make. While it cannot prevent a bad actor from concealing gifts and perks intended to influence decision-making, it does facilitate more comprehensive reviews and increases the odds that, at some point, they are going to get caught.

John L. Martin, Esq., is a former government lawyer currently consulting with Intelliworx, where he works with over 40 federal agencies on financial disclosure best practices.

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Another lawsuit alleges DOJ is illegally rejecting telework requests from employees with disabilities

Sean Michael Newhouse — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:40:00 -0400

A group of employees with disabilities at the Executive Office of Immigration Review alleged in a lawsuit on June 3 that agency officials are categorically denying reasonable accommodation requests for telework following President Donald Trump’s directive in January 2025 mandating that federal staffers return to in-person work.

While that order ended telework and remote work flexibility for most government workers, civil servants with qualifying disabilities are exempt from its requirements. Plus, agencies are legally required to provide reasonable accommodations (e.g. flexible schedules and accessible technology) to such employees unless doing so would cause an “undue hardship.”

But staffers with disabilities alleged these rules have been flouted by officials at EOIR, a Justice Department agency that adjudicates immigration cases.

“Since late April 2025, on information and belief, the agency has granted no telework reasonable accommodations to EOIR employees, including new requests for telework reasonable accommodations and requests to renew previously approved telework reasonable accommodations,” their attorneys wrote in the filing.

One of the named plaintiffs, Kimberly Panian, said that during a May 2025 meeting to discuss her telework reasonable accommodation request an agency official told her that EOIR had not granted any such requests under the new administration.

Panian, who has worked at the agency as an attorney-advisor since 2018, has Type I diabetes and experiences migraines with stroke-like symptoms. In March 2020, she requested a full-time telework accommodation due to fears that her diabetes could expose her to more severe COVID-19 complications. While that request was approved, all EOIR staffers shortly thereafter were directed to work from home due to the pandemic.

“Ms. Panian also noted [in a 2022 accommodation renewal request] that when she has a migraine episode, she cannot manage her blood sugar, which puts her at considerable risk due to her diabetes,” according to the lawsuit. “Her request explained that she is better able to manage her symptoms from home and emphasized the danger of having a medical emergency at work due to the court’s lack of cell service and trained individuals to help her.”

But her requests for telework have been denied since the policy change, and she was ordered to return to the office by April 20, 2026. Since that date, she has used nearly 250 hours of sick and annual leave and will run out by the middle of June.

“In addition to skyrocketing blood sugar and increased migraines, Ms. Panian has been in a constant state of increased anxiety and has experienced numerous panic attacks and other mental health symptoms. Given her precarious health, the stress and anxiety create a domino effect that worsens her ability to manage her diabetes, migraines and related symptoms,” her lawyers wrote. “The medication and medical equipment on which Ms. Panian relies are incredibly expensive, and she lives in constant fear that she will have to jeopardize her life by returning to in-person work to protect her livelihood and health insurance.”

EOIR attorney-advisor Hoi Yee Baxter, the other named plaintiff, teleworked even before the COVID-19 pandemic but requested work from home as a reasonable accommodation after being diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer in September 2024. That request was approved on Jan. 13, 2025.

Ultimately, however, her accommodation was revoked about a year later, and she was directed to begin working in-person by Feb. 2, 2026. Like Panian, she has relied on leave since then and is set to run out in June.

“[Baxter] has spent the time she would be working [instead] thinking about her lung cancer, stressing about losing her job and contemplating death,” according to the filing. “EOIR’s denial of her telework reasonable accommodation request has had a compounding and negative impact on her mental health. She experiences increased headaches, stress, and anxiety.”

Democracy Forward — a national legal organization that is behind many of the lawsuits against the Trump administration, which is representing the plaintiffs along with the employment law firm Burakiewicz & DePriest — argued that EOIR’s apparent telework policy violates the Rehabilitation Act’s prohibition on disability-based discrimination in federal programs.

“The Rehabilitation Act requires federal agencies to engage in an individualized, good-faith process to provide reasonable accommodations — not impose blanket bans driven by politics and ideology,” said Elena Goldstein, Democracy Forward’s legal director, in a statement. “This policy of categorically denying telework accommodations is unlawful, dangerous and fundamentally inconsistent with the federal government’s obligations under disability rights law.”

In response to a request for comment, EOIR said that it “declines to comment on litigation-related matters.”

The lawsuit cites an April 2025 EOIR email that said officials would take a “closer look” at telework reasonable accommodations because the component has “slightly more than 2% of all DOJ employees” but “is responsible for approximately 11% of all full-time telework reasonable accommodations granted department-wide.”

A separate group of DOJ employees with disabilities alleged in a recent lawsuit that officials discriminated and retaliated against them “as part of a systematic, agency-wide practice of refusing to grant requests for telework as a reasonable accommodation.” And Government Executive previously reported that Terry Jackson, a former DOJ employee with disabilities, settled with the agency after alleging that he was fired for requesting telework as a reasonable accommodation.

Many EOIR immigration judges have been removed since the start of Trump’s second term in what they allege are politically motivated mass firings.

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What makes an effective intelligence chief? A former DNI official points to the answer

Gregory F. Treverton, The Conversation — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:30:57 -0400

President Donald Trump’s choice for acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, has proved controversial. Pulte’s lack of background in national security matters has sparked resistance from Democrats on Capitol Hill, which is not surprising. But some Republicans, too, have expressed dismay at the president’s choice, a Trump loyalist who currently runs the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

“I see no evidence of any qualifications for that job,” said U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas.

The current director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is leaving the job at the end of June 2026.

Here’s why it matters who holds the job of director of national intelligence.

Principal national security adviser

To speak of telling truth to power seems terribly old-fashioned these days, but as a veteran of White House intelligence operations, I know that is the essence of the job.

The director of national intelligence is the president’s principal adviser on intelligence, though the CIA director has remained somewhat co-equal in that role. In past administrations, the director of national intelligence has been responsible for both the President’s Daily Brief, where the most crucial and sophisticated intelligence is presented, and for the work of the National Intelligence Council.

Most of the President’s Daily Brief items are still done by the CIA, but the director of national intelligence or a deputy briefed the president, daily in most administrations but one or two times a week in the first Trump administration. Now, it is not clear the briefings take place.

The issues in those briefings lean toward the immediate and tactical: What is the situation on the ground in the wars in Iran and Ukraine? If the United States does X, how will the Iranian regime or Russian President Vladimir Putin respond?

But intelligence strives to push presidents and their colleagues to think more strategically: What are the implications of hypersonic missiles? What is the trajectory of the relationship between Russia and China? What are China’s geostrategic objectives, and what is the role of the Belt and Road Initiative in that vision? What if, far from toppling it, U.S. and Israeli attacks push the Iranian regime to become more hard line, or even produce some “rally ’round the flag” effect among previous opponents of the regime.

9/11 led to intelligence changes

I was chair of the National Intelligence Council from 2014 to 2017, providing day-to-day intelligence support to the National Security Council and its committees, as well as trying to find time to do more strategic intelligence, looking at trends and connections across issues, producing what are called National Intelligence Estimates.

The director of national intelligence, known as the DNI, sits atop the 17 agencies that make up what is called the U.S. intelligence community. The director neither runs those agencies nor has full control of their budgets.

Rather, the director of national intelligence coordinates them, which sometimes seems like the proverbial herding of cats. They assemble a combined budget for intelligence, but many of the big agencies, such as the National Security Agency, which makes and breaks codes and intercepts signals of interest, belong to the Pentagon.

The creation of the director of national intelligence position was a direct result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The report of the 9/11 Commission was vividly damning about the failures of communication between agencies in the run-up to 9/11. In meetings in New York that summer, CIA and FBI officers were literally unsure what they could tell each other: The former wondered whether the FBI people were really cleared to hear this, while the latter feared that talking might blow a case they were working on. That lack of coordination played a role in letting the plotters slip through intelligence, often in plain sight.

The result of the commission’s work was the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which created the director of national intelligence position.

Before that, the director of central intelligence wore two hats, as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and loose coordinator of the broader intelligence community. Hardly surprisingly, directors of central intelligence spent most of their time running the CIA, for that was the source of their troops – and their troubles when they arose.

A score of blue-ribbon panels over 50 years had recommended breaking the director of central intelligence’s conflict of interest – coordinating agencies and their budgets while running one of them – and creating a director of national intelligence position.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence for whom I worked as chair of the National Intelligence Council, constantly emphasized “integration.” Across agencies, integration mostly means talking to each other and sharing information. This works against the natural tendency to scoop your colleagues.

Across disciplines, integration means better aligning what information intelligence agencies collect with what analysts need.

How integration works

If presidents want to know what the CIA thinks about a particular issue, they can simply ask. Usually, though, the question is what does the intelligence community think, and then the question goes to the National Intelligence Council, the director of national intelligence’s interagency group for intelligence analysis.

The National Intelligence Council is organized like the State Department, with officers for regions and functions. Once a question has been presented, the relevant national intelligence officer will convene his or her colleagues from the other agencies. They will argue about the answer to the question, a process sweetly called “coordination,” then agree on the answer. If need be, the process can be done in a few hours.

Major strategic analyses – national intelligence estimates – like one done in 2022 on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic out to 2026, may take months. In all cases, though, the analysis carefully records where there are differences of view in the intelligence community.

In my last year chairing the National Intelligence Council, of the 700 or so analyses we did, about 400 were responses to questions – called “taskings” in governmentese – from the national security adviser or one of the deputies.

National intelligence officers are national experts from inside or outside federal government, and their deputies – the heart and soul of the NIC – are all assigned from intelligence agencies. The largest number come from the CIA, but I worked with a cyber analyst from the Secret Service and a wonderful analyst from the New York Police Department.

Resolutely nonpolitical stance

What was striking then and has struck me both times I’ve had the privilege of running a U.S. intelligence agency is the dedication of the officers.

They work for the nation, not for a political party or ideology. As chair of the NIC, I had no idea of the politics of my people, save for the several closest to me. For them, telling truth to power is not a slogan. It is what they do. They are always worried about “politicizing” – producing an assessment to suit a policymaker’s preference or, worse, being pressured to do so.

The president’s daily briefers, for instance, give up a year of their lives to come to work at 4 a.m., learn their briefs and then fan out across Washington to brief senior officials. They like being “on the team” of the person they brief, but they become uncomfortable if the conversation turns political.

The director of national intelligence sets the tone for that resolutely nonpolitical stance and polices it through principles articulated in the agency’s analytic integrity and standards. As chair of the NIC, for instance, I’d receive regular assessments of both the quality of our analyses and whether we risked becoming “politicized.”

For their part, do politicians and agency leaders like it when their pet projects are assessed by intelligence as unwise or infeasible? Of course not. I’ve been on that side of the intelligence-policy divide as well. But the United States is much the better for it.

This story, originally published on Dec. 4, 2024, has been updated to reflect that Bill Pulte has been chosen by President Trump to be the acting director of national intelligence.

Gregory F. Treverton, Professor of Practice in International Relations, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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VA CIO nominee vows to create program management office

Edward Graham — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:31:08 -0400

President Donald Trump’s pick to serve as the next IT lead for the Department of Veterans Affairs told lawmakers this week that the agency’s technology operations are “a target-rich environment” for change, and he committed that organizational transformation would be among his top priorities if confirmed to the role.

During a Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday, Gary Shatswell — the administration’s nominee to serve as VA’s next chief information officer and assistant secretary for information and technology — said VA needs “a culture of transparency and accountability, achievable through agile program management, which will also accelerate mission delivery.”

VA’s IT operations are sprawling, with the agency reporting more than 16,000 personnel working on these technology services. Many high-profile modernization efforts overseen by the Office of Information and Technology, however, have received particular scrutiny for delays and cost overruns across administrations.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., told Shatswell during Wednesday’s hearing that “my beef is the bipartisan failure to really modernize the VA,” and said he’s previously had discussions about establishing “a program office that includes members on this committee … seeing the progress every day, so that you've got champions here behind an IT modernization effort.”

Shatswell told him that a program management office is “a necessary piece that does not exist at the leadership level of OIT,” noting that previous attempts to create the unit failed because “there had not been the requisite tooling to ensure that the visibility and the process [were] actually managed.”

He said creating the office is “one of the first tasks that I will be going after” if confirmed to the role, adding that the unit would enhance VA employee accountability and operational transparency by ensuring “that everyone knows what’s going on and what’s the status and the priority of their piece within the work that OIT is doing.”

“I call it a program or portfolio-value office because, at the end of the day, we need to be driving the right value to the veterans, and that's the focus of everything that we should be doing,” Shatswell said.

Shatswell is Trump’s third nominee for the VA CIO role since the start of his administration, and the first to receive a hearing before lawmakers. VA Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence has been performing the duties of the role in the interim.

Shatswell is a current VA employee, having served as senior advisor to VA Secretary Doug Collins since December.

When asked by Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kansas — the panel’s chairman — whether the senior advisor role is “the administration's training ground for individuals that they may want to place within the department,” Shatswell told him, “I can tell you my experience: that was the way that it was.”

Shatswell has previously held a variety of tech leadership roles across private industry, including as Group CIO at Unilever Prestige, as CIO at Paula's Choice Skincare, as vice president of IT at Sur La Table and as CIO at Sizzling Platter.

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Trump memo pushes national security agencies to move faster on AI

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:16:17 -0400

President Donald Trump on Friday signed a national security memo aimed at speeding up government use of advanced artificial intelligence across the military and intelligence community, while also trying to harden those systems against foreign theft and manipulation.

The National Security Presidential Memorandum reflects a growing view inside the White House that U.S. security agencies are moving too slowly to adopt frontier AI tools, even as the evolving technology improves rapidly and rivals like China seek ways to craft their own versions.

It calls for agencies like the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of the National Cyber Director to build “deep, proactive” relationships with AI companies so that cutting-edge models can be made available to national security personnel faster.

It also instructs officials to identify areas where AI could improve government operations, including intelligence analysis and cyber threat detection. At the same time, the memo says the tools cannot be used for unlawful surveillance of Americans, language that speaks to long-running civil liberties concerns over how agencies collect, analyze and process data.

The memo also focuses heavily on protecting U.S.-developed AI models from foreign adversaries. It directs senior officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and NSA Director Gen. Joshua Rudd, to work with private-sector companies on security protocols meant to prevent advanced models from being stolen, copied or compromised.

One area of concern is model distillation, a technique in which an AI system repeatedly queries another AI system in an attempt to mimic its performance and build out a separate model. The White House in April accused China of carrying out “industrial-scale” distillation attacks on U.S. AI systems.

The memo also directs agencies to work with industry to secure the infrastructure that supports frontier AI, including the data centers that store the enormous amounts of computing power needed to run advanced models. Data centers have recently become more attractive targets during periods of geopolitical tension.

Trump recently signed an AI security executive order that leans heavily on voluntary cooperation with industry. That order encourages developers to submit powerful new models to a 30-day government review before public release.

More AI-related guidance is expected soon. Nick Andersen, CISA’s acting director, said last week that the cyber agency is preparing a binding operational directive focused on AI-enabled cyber threats.

The administration’s approach to AI has shifted in recent months as officials confront a new class of cyber-focused models, including Anthropic’s Mythos, that can rapidly identify vulnerabilities across computer networks. The model has become a major driver of government discussions over how advanced AI systems could reshape both defensive and offensive cyber operations.

Last week, Anthropic said it is expanding Project Glasswing — its controlled-access program for giving trusted organizations early access to Mythos — to about 150 additional entities. The new group spans more than 15 countries and includes organizations in water, healthcare, communications and other critical infrastructure sectors.

OpenAI’s recent release of GPT-5.5-Cyber, which also demonstrated sophisticated cyber capabilities, has further heightened concerns in Washington over how quickly these systems are advancing and how they could reshape both cyber defensive and offensive operations.

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Lawmakers aim to force the Army to detail its transformation plans

Meghann Myers — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:34:21 -0400

When the Army launched its “transformation initiative” a year ago, lawmakers immediately implored service leaders to show their work as they made plans to buy new things and get rid of old ones, including the cost tradeoffs and a timeline. They didn’t get those answers, so House lawmakers have inserted a requirement for an annual report and briefing into this year’s defense authorization bill.

On Thursday, the House Armed Services Committee completed its markup on the bill, adding detailed instructions for an annual update on the Army Transformation Initiative—and also the Army’s Transformation-in-Contact/Continuous Transformation efforts, requiring specifics on new capabilities and ones that have been phased out.

The goal of the Initiative “was to position the Army for future fights, streamline force structure, and eliminate wasteful spending,” Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said during a May 15 hearing of the HASC, which he chairs. “Congress shares those goals, but as questions arose, it became clear that the Army hadn't done all of its homework.”

The provision in the House’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act would require the Army to provide an annual report, on or by Feb. 15, “detailing the programmatic choices made to implement.”

By March 15, the service would also have to brief the committee on:

How any changes to the National Defense Strategy, or other DOD planning document, informed the Army’s choices.
An “inventory and assessment” of all exercises related to Army transformation since 2023.
An inventory of all capabilities or capacity phased out as part of Army transformation, with a timeline and assessment of how they have affected readiness.
An inventory of planned investments with an assessment of how they will contribute to the joint force.

The service did send experts for closed-door briefings to lawmakers over the past year, a U.S. official told Defense One, in an attempt to provide details and explain the rationale for its plans.

“We initially saw a ton of support from members of Congress, until it potentially impacted a parochial interest,” said the official, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record about the matter. “That's when they got all sticky about it.”

The Army’s helicopter purchases were of particular concern to House members both last year and this year, as the service’s budget request included funding to buy just one UH-60 Black Hawk and five MH-47 Chinooks. Army officials said it made sense to buy fewer older aircraft as the MV-75 Cheyenne II approaches.

In hearings, lawmakers expressed concern that reducing purchases would undermine the helicopters’ supply chains.

In May, the House’s first NDAA mark-up bumped up procurement to seven Black Hawks and 12 Chinooks.

“Nobody's saying we don't need Chinooks or Black Hawks or Apaches, we don't need to modernize, etc.,” the official said. “But we have so many more, based on the force-structure side, than we think is required to fight a conflict.”

The question went to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during his May 12 testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, where he announced that the Defense Department would be taking a second look at the initiative.

“There are some very good things in the Army Transformation Initiative, and there are some things that we needed to get another look at,” Hegseth said. “And so I think you'll see a review of some of those things, and we’ll get back to you.”

The Pentagon refused to provide any details on what that review looked like or whether Hegseth had his eye on other updates. A few days later, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll testified before HASC, apparently unaware of Hegseth’s concerns.

“I don't know all the depth of what was implied, but I absolutely agree that we will take a hard look with the Office of Secretary of War and make sure that we are synced with their strategy and their plans as they look across the joint force and balance their requirements and needs of the military as a whole,” he said.

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Trump’s edict making 8,000 feds at-will employees draws swift outcry

Erich Wagner — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:57:34 -0400

Organizations representing federal workers and good government advocates were quick to decry President Trump’s move this week to formally strip around 8,000 federal workers of their civil service protections, making them at-will employees, though the exact contours of the initiative’s scope remain unclear.

Wednesday’s executive order implements Schedule Policy/Career, a new job category within the excepted service -- formerly known as Schedule F -- designed for career employees in “policy-related” positions who lack the removal protections in Title 5 of the U.S. Code and of the right to appeal adverse personnel actions. Under Office of Personnel Management regulations that took effect in March, whistleblower complaints from Schedule Policy/Career employees would no longer go to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, instead being referred internally to the employing agency’s general counsel for review.

The edict tasks agencies with reclassifying the roughly 8,000 federal workers into Schedule Policy/Career within seven days -- by June 10 -- as well as set up a separate bonus pool for those workers to recognize “outstanding work.” And OPM is expected to propose new regulations setting up a new governmentwide presidential award program for the job category.

Has the return of Schedule Policy/Career affected you or your work? Reach out to Erich Wagner at ewagner@govexec.com or ewagner.47 on Signal to share your story.

A 200-page appendix accompanying the executive order lists the various positions slated for conversion, subdivided by agency and subcomponent and accompanied by position codes used on an internal basis. As such, the veracity of administration officials’ claims regarding the precise number of impacted employees, or that 97% of them occupy GS-15 or Senior Leader pay grades, remains murky.

The State Department told employees in an email Thursday that Trump placed 100 positions into Schedule Policy/Career with Wednesday’s order but did not specify how many employees would be affected.

“Employees encumbering these crucially important positions will be notified by the Bureau of Human Resources within seven work days,” the email stated. “These changes will allow the department to reward high performance and ensure that we are well equipped to promptly and effectively address poor performance and misconduct. These roles remain career positions and will continue to be filled through merit-based hiring procedures.”

The nonprofit Protect Democracy on Thursday solicited federal employees whose jobs appear in the executive order’s appendix to provide information about their position and duties to better ascertain its scope.

A Defense Department employee, who declined to be named for fear of retaliation, told Government Executive that while they were not personally set for reclassification into Schedule Policy/Career, each of their supervisors are. None of them influence policy, they said.

“First line supervisors are responsible for the oversight of their employees’ projects and the successful execution of those,” the employee said. “They hire and evaluate their direct reports annually and handle execution of disciplinary actions as needed. They have ZERO authority to establish policy. All of that is dictated down to them from their senior leadership.”

Federal employee unions have filed multiple lawsuits challenging the legality of Schedule Policy/Career, filed last year but effectively held dormant until the policy was set for implementation. In statements Thursday, their leaders vowed to block it in court.

“The administration continues to focus on trying to strip federal workers of the rights that Congress gave them instead of letting them do the jobs that the American people count on them to do,” said National Treasury Employees Union National President Doreen Greenwald. “Now that the administration has officially ordered the transfer of an untold number of employees to Schedule Policy/Career—so that they are, in the administration's view, easier to fire—the litigation surrounding this initiative will resume. NTEU looks forward to aggressively pursuing that litigation and fighting to ensure the American people have their government services delivered by federal employees who were hired based on merit and skill, not partisan affiliation.”

“The practical implications of this action are clear,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees. “Workers who once felt comfortable reporting waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement at their place of employment because they were protected from retaliation will now be afraid for their jobs if they speak out. That is a disservice to them and to the millions of Americans who rely on the federal government every day.”

And while it appears those legal challenges are set to finally kick off, Stephanie Rapp-Tully, partner at federal employment law firm Tully Rinckey, PLLC, while some may try to challenge their reclassification before the Merit Systems Protection Board, it could take some time before individual employees can file litigation of their own.

“For an individual to bring an action, they have to have suffered a harm,” she said. “You could be reclassified as Schedule F and maintain your employment, never face an adverse action and retire as planned. That could be your trajectory—you don’t know. It’s not until they pursue an adverse action that someone has suffered a damage.”

A perhaps overlooked change for Schedule Policy/Career employees is the inability to respond to a proposed adverse personnel action before it takes effect.

“Agencies are not required to provide advanced notice or ally for a written reply on any disciplinary or adverse actions,” Rapp-Tully said. “[They’re] also not entitled to see the evidence against them, which is a huge component . . . and they couldn’t appeal agency decisions to the MSPB. It’s the true definition of at-will.”

NextGov/FCW reporter David DiMolfetta contributed to this report.

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