Government Executive - Tech

Justice Department creates new task force to police AI misuse

Grace Dille — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 08:00:00 -0500

The Department of Justice announced on Thursday the formation of an artificial intelligence task force designed to safeguard the department against malicious AI actors.

The new task force, known as the Super Intelligence Task Force — or DOJ-SITF — will be co-chaired by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and Associate Deputy Attorney General Stephen Weiss.

“The DOJ-SITF will ensure that America’s leadership in SI is not compromised by the misuse of SI by foreign state and state-sponsored actors, transnational criminal organizations, and individual or corporate actors engaged in fraud or other unlawful conduct,” Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote in an Oct. 13 memo.

“The DOJ-SITF will also take affirmative measures, as appropriate, to promote American SI dominance,” he said.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in late September instructing agencies to refer to artificial intelligence as “super intelligence,” which he called more accurate. Super intelligence already had an established definition — “any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest,” per philosopher Nick Bostrom — that is separate from the meaning of artificial intelligence.

The DOJ previously established an AI Litigation Task Force in January under former Attorney General Pam Bondi. Blanche said the new task force will incorporate the work of the AI Litigation Task Force and coordinate the DOJ’s affirmative civil litigation as it relates to AI.

The task force will also organize the department’s criminal and civil law enforcement efforts involving AI, recommend enforcement priorities to prevent the misuse of AI and develop guidance on the prosecution of unlawful AI-related conduct.

Blanche said the DOJ-SITF will also serve as the department’s main point of contact with the Super Intelligence Force that Trump announced last month. That task force, led by National Intelligence Director Jay Clayton, coordinates the government’s engagement with various organizations and AI companies.

“The SI Task Force at the Department of Justice will facilitate our partnership with SI Force Chair Jay Clayton as we ensure critical SI technologies serve the American people and are not manipulated by bad actors at home or abroad,” Blanche said in a statement.

“The Department of Justice will continue identifying and prosecuting individuals whose use of SI violates the law, including by maliciously targeting American taxpayers, critical U.S. infrastructure, or other aspects of our national security,” he added.

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Companies warn cyber threat sharing could suffer without new legal protections

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 17:48:48 -0500

A coalition of 35 industry groups is urging Congress to use the annual defense policy bill to renew a law that gives companies legal protections when they share information about cyber threats with the federal government.

In a Nov. 1 letter to the leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, the groups asked negotiators to keep a provision in the House bill that would extend the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 through 2035. The law lapsed during last year’s record government shutdown and has since stayed in place through a series of spending bills. Its current extension expires Dec. 11.

The signers include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Business Software Alliance, American Bankers Association, Airlines for America, the American Public Power Association and the National Rural Water Association.

“In this environment, the speed and breadth with which defenders share information determines whether they keep pace with adversaries,” the groups wrote. “That speed depends on the legal certainty CISA 2015 provides.”

The key liability protections in the law are designed to shield firms from lawsuits and regulatory penalties when sharing threat information with federal partners like the FBI or National Security Agency. That data often includes personal or proprietary information tied to individuals and companies affected in cyber intrusions.

Industry groups have consistently warned lawmakers that allowing the measure to lapse would create legal risks for companies sharing breach data, leading to a drop in private sector threat disclosures.

On the first day of the shutdown last year, cybersecurity attorneys were already fielding calls from clients about whether their existing agreements still protected them.

Congress restored the law through January 2026, when it reopened the government in November 2025. Lawmakers extended it again in February of this year, this time through Sept. 30, then moved the deadline to December in a stopgap funding bill.

A sticking point in the Senate reauthorization process has been what else to put in a longer renewal. Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., pushed for a 10-year extension during last year’s shutdown.

But Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., told Roll Call last month that he wanted a provision barring federal officials from pressuring social media companies to restrict speech. Paul — who has routinely pushed back on clean extensions of the law — said he and Peters had discussed the amendment several times without reaching an agreement.

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VA physicians’ and dentists’ association urges pause in new health record system rollouts

Edward Graham — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 11:08:35 -0500

A leading association representing physicians and dentists across the Department of Veterans Affairs’ network of almost 170 medical facilities is calling on lawmakers to halt additional rollouts of the agency’s new Oracle Health electronic health record system until independent evaluations of the software can be conducted.

In an Oct. 12-dated letter, the National Association of Veteran Affairs Physicians and Dentists asked Congress “to pause further deployments of the Oracle electronic health record (EHR) while protecting funding for patient care and safety at the sites already converted, and to allow deployments to resume only when VA has demonstrated that the system can support safe, reliable care.”

The request from the professional association — which says it represents the interests of approximately 20,000 physicians and dentists — was sent to the chairs and ranking members of the House and the Senate Veterans’ Affairs, Appropriations, Oversight and Government Reform and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs panels.

Nineteen VA medical sites now use the new EHR system, with the agency completing its most recent go-lives at two facilities in Ohio and Alaska on Saturday. The modernization project is part of a broader federal push to deploy a single interoperable federal EHR system across agencies like the Defense Department, Coast Guard and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, although VA’s component of the initiative has been slowed by roadblocks.

After facing a host of technical and usability challenges, cost overruns and patient safety concerns since the first modernized software rollout in 2020, VA paused most deployments of the Oracle Health EHR system in April 2023 to address the numerous issues plaguing the modernization project.

The Biden administration announced plans in December 2024 to resume deployments of the new software at four Michigan-based VA medical facilities in 2026. VA Secretary Doug Collins subsequently raised the total number of site rollouts this year to 13.

The missive, which NAVAPD disclosed on Thursday, comes on the heels of increased lawmaker scrutiny about the cost and future of VA’s massive modernization project, even as the agency has touted its successful resumption of EHR deployments.

VA initially signed a $10 billion contract with Cerner in May 2018 to modernize its legacy health record system, known as the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, or VistA. Cerner was subsequently acquired by Oracle in 2022 and rebranded as Oracle Health.

The agency and Oracle moved last month, however, to extend their contract to include an additional $17 billion ceiling and three one-year option periods — a move that reportedly surprised lawmakers from both parties.

Following a contentious House Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing on the EHR modernization project last month, Democrat and Republican lawmakers voted 19-0 to subpoena both Oracle Chairman and Co-founder Larry Ellison and Oracle CEO Mike Sicilia to appear before the panel to further discuss the EHR modernization project’s cost and status.

As part of the fiscal year 2027 VA budget measure, NAVAPD asked top lawmakers to only allow EHR deployments to continue after VA “has completed an independent patient-safety assessment at the converted sites, corrected the critical deficiencies that assessment identifies, and documented each site's readiness with meaningful input from frontline physicians, dentists, and nurses, and reported the results to the Committees.”

The association also called for the committees to require that VA report and publicly disclose any documented patient safety events at the medical facilities using the new Oracle Health EHR software.

In addition to this future reporting requirement, NAVAPD also asked the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee to obtain patient safety incident data from Oracle “when its executives appear under subpoena.”

A spokesperson for Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., who chairs the House committee, told Nextgov/FCW that the panel “has and will continue to have oversight of the VA electronic health records deployment and program to ensure it delivers modern healthcare for veteran patients and VA providers nationwide,” and noted that “as part of that oversight, the Committee intends to hear from the CEO of Oracle on November 19th in an open hearing on progress made, as well as the look ahead going forward.”

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Trump’s AI chatbot conversations may have to be preserved as presidential records

Grace Dille — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 07:00:00 -0500

The top Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight panels are calling on President Donald Trump to preserve his conversations with artificial intelligence chatbots, including billionaire Elon Musk’s Grok.

Reps. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Robert Garcia, D-Calif., sent a letter to Trump last week demanding that the White House preserve “any prompts” that the president or his staff have submitted to AI chatbots such as Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity. They also said the White House must preserve any AI-generated outputs in response to those prompts.

The lawmakers said their request “is not optional,” noting that the Presidential Records Act requires the adequate documentation of presidential records.

“Preserving the President’s and his advisors’ AI prompts is thus essential to preserving an accurate historical record and informing future administrations against the gaping national security vulnerabilities created by this Administration’s apparent reliance on unsecured, privately operated AI systems,” they wrote.

Raskin and Garcia are also requesting a closed-door briefing with the president and his staff by Nov. 11 on their use of AI chatbot technologies.

The lawmakers said their request is informed by reporting from Time that said Trump “sought the chatbot’s advice on carrying out some of your presidential duties, including asking Grok to opine on how Venezuelans would respond to the capture of President Nicolás Maduro.”

Weeks later, the lawmakers said, Trump “ordered the U.S. military, without congressional authorization, to attack Venezuela and capture President Maduro.” They added that Trump “reportedly ‘came away thinking Grok was ingenious.’”

The top Democrats called the episode “deeply troubling” because Trump allegedly consulted a chatbot, not Congress, on military operations. They also said the unsecured use of AI chatbots exposes the United States to national security risks and “malign influence from unknown and unaccountable third parties.”

The lawmakers are requesting details on the White House’s document retention policies governing AI-generated materials, AI chatbot contracts, Trump’s use of AI chatbots, and cybersecurity safeguards applied to AI chatbot usage.

"The White House preserves all required records in accordance with the law," a White House official told Nextgov/FCW.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to include comment from the White House.

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Ex-government tech leaders pitch new vision for America.gov

Christian Robles — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 14:38:56 -0400

A group of civic technologists is urging the next administration to automate benefits enrollment rather than just build a one-stop shop for residents to apply for them.

New administrations have long promised to build one-stop shops Americans can use to navigate government programs such as Social Security. The Trump administration’s version of that vision is America.gov, an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that provides Americans with information about government programs and will allow Americans to apply for certain programs next year.

But one-stop shops don’t solve all of the challenges Americans face in navigating the social safety net, according to a Tech Viaduct paper released Friday.

“We can only go so far, even with AI, at band-aiding over and piecing together a really broken and really inconsistent safety net,” Marina Nitze, former CTO of the Veterans Affairs Department under President Barack Obama and lead paper author, told Nextgov/FCW.

The next administration should fix the technical back end of the social safety net, in addition to offering a digital front door like America.gov, the paper argues.

By doing so, Americans would be able to use America.gov, as well as any AI agent, company or nonprofit, to assess whether they qualify for a government program and submit the necessary data, the paper envisions.

There are four steps to fix the back end of the social safety net, according to the paper.

The first step is for the administration to document the eligibility criteria for benefits administered by agencies such as the Social Security Administration.

The second step is to establish one authoritative source for each eligibility criterion — such as income and citizenship status — that benefit programs must accept as the truth for eligibility determination.

The third step is to rewrite program eligibility criteria so that the authoritative sources can actually serve as the basis for eligibility determinations. Tech Viaduct previously urged Congress to take the lead in standardizing technical definitions used for eligibility determinations such as disability, homelessness and income.

The final step is to validate that benefit programs pass standardized test scenarios to prove they are following the law.

The four-step process is simple on paper but has multiple complexities.

For example, some data will not have authoritative sources, such as a common SNAP question about whom someone regularly prepares food with, according to Nitze. In those cases, government officials should determine whether the question should be eliminated, streamlined or replaced with self-attestation, she said.

States may need financial incentives to determine how authoritative sources integrate with existing information technology systems for programs like SNAP and Medicaid, Nitze added.

To advance the four-step process, there needs to be a “commanding presidential directive to hold agency heads accountable” and collaboration with Congress in rewriting statutes as needed, according to the paper.

Pitching the vision

Tech Viaduct is a project of Democratic think tank Searchlight Institute that is preparing day one plans for the next administration.

Project staffers will attend the “What’s Next” conference in Denver in a few weeks to pitch 2028 campaigns on the new paper titled “Integrated Benefits: Our Vision for America.gov,” according to the Searchlight Institute.

Mikey Dickerson, the first administrator of the U.S. Digital Service and a senior Tech Viaduct advisor, is slated to speak at the event along with 2028 hopefuls such as former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

The Tech Viaduct team plans “to make the case that Integrated Benefits is a precondition to any future Democratic trifecta being able to enact its most ambitious plans — from universal health care to a reformed tax system and more,” the think tank told Nextgov/FCW.

But the paper argues that its new vision for benefits delivery is bipartisan.

“For conservatives who are more concerned about waste and fraud, adjudicating the same facts independently in every program is maddeningly expensive for federal, state, and local budgets alike,” the paper states. “Done well, [the four steps] will combat fraud by making honest mismatches disappear, so the real fraud stands out.”

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DHS personnel leak exposes contact details and sensitive job information

David DiMolfetta — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 14:52:14 -0400

Searchable records identifying more than 41,000 current and former Department of Homeland Security employees and contractors were published Wednesday, exposing contact information and details about sensitive assignments across the department, according to the organizations behind the release.

The transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets — known as DDoSecrets — said it received the data from a hacktivist group calling itself the Department of Peace. The group claimed to have obtained the records through an identity service used by DHS. Famed Swiss hacker and journalist known as “maia arson crimew” also had involvement. She said in an X post that she was not involved in procuring the data and “worked on this story as a journalist conducting source work, research and data work.”

The information includes names, phone numbers, email addresses, job titles and internal group memberships, with records covering Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other parts of DHS. Some entries describe roles involving surveillance, computer forensics and undercover work.

Nextgov/FCW corroborated portions of the data, including one official’s work phone number that the reporter for this story had independently obtained before the leak. Checks of several other listed numbers showed they were associated with AT&T, which provides communications services to DHS. LinkedIn profiles for several people named in the data also matched the job titles and positions listed in the records.

Some of the records also appear to be historical. Nextgov/FCW identified names of employees in CISA who have since left their roles at the cyberdefense agency housed in DHS.

DHS said it was “aware of a potential breach and is actively working to address the situation swiftly and effectively.” The department said it was working to protect employees and would provide more information when available.

The release, dubbed “Icepick,” offers a view into how personnel and responsibilities are organized across DHS. Its publishers described that visibility as a tool for public accountability. The exposure of employees’ assignments and professional connections can also help malicious actors identify sensitive targets and craft convincing impersonation attempts.

The Department of Peace said the breach was a response to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s pledge to intensify immigration enforcement.

“On July 17th, Markwayne Mullin said he was ‘turning up the heat.’ This is what happens to ICE when you do that,” a group spokesperson told the outlet. The group previously claimed a DHS hack involving contractor records in March.

DDoSecrets co-founder Emma Best said the latest release could support journalism, public records requests and congressional oversight.

The hackers said they collected the data from an Okta single sign-on service used by DHS. Such services let employees access multiple workplace applications through one login. Okta said it was aware of the reporting but had found no evidence of a compromise of its own systems.

“Okta is secure, and we have no evidence our data or systems were compromised,” a company spokesperson said.

The disclosure follows other recent incidents involving federal personnel information. A breach claimed by criminal hacker group ShinyHunters exposed sensitive FBI employee records, including information about intelligence and surveillance roles. Separately, a Defense Manpower Data Center breach affecting roughly 3 million people involved months of unauthorized access to a file-sharing system.

DHS has also faced scrutiny over its ability to detect intrusions. Earlier this year, personnel twice dismissed signs of hackers inside the Homeland Security Information Network before confirming a breach, Nextgov/FCW first reported.

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FEC takes down electronic filing platform after attempted hack

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 17:47:46 -0400

The Federal Election Commission has pulled down multiple filing systems amid reports indicating that the agency was targeted in a cyberattack.

The hacking attempt, first reported by Reuters, put the government’s primary campaign finance regulatory agency in the crosshairs. The FEC does not administer U.S. elections, and cyber incidents related to the commission would not affect how votes are cast in next week’s midterm elections.

A notification email obtained by Nextgov/FCW indicated that several systems remained offline, including various filing search features, campaign finance report validation tools, and other feeds and channels. The notice adds another update will be provided Wednesday morning.

On Tuesday night, an FEC spokesperson referred Nextgov/FCW to a commission status update page, adding that electronic filing systems are offline and that staff are “actively working to restore service.”

An update issued around 8:20 p.m. ET Tuesday night says an issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.

The incident is timely, as it comes days before midterm elections will be held in the U.S. and as groups pour record levels of money into campaign efforts. The disruption hinders organizations from submitting the FEC’s required 24-hour and 48-hour disclosure reports, which detail political spending on individual races.

A disruption to campaign finance reporting can limit timely public visibility into election spending, said Gabrielle Hempel, a security operations strategist at cybersecurity firm Exabeam.

“What is the backup process, how are filings received and disclosed while the system is down? How quickly can the agency restore service without sacrificing the integrity of the data? Disruptions like these can have a massive impact on public trust without ever actually touching a ballot,” Hempel said.

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DHS secretary plans post-election security review

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 17:45:03 -0400

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin plans to review the nation’s election security posture after the midterms and consider changes aimed at bolstering public confidence in voting systems.

Mullin outlined the plans during an all-hands address at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s headquarters Tuesday, according to a CISA official with direct knowledge of the remarks. The official was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details of the speech.

The secretary told employees he intended to hold a “debrief” after the elections and weigh whether changes to systems were needed to improve trust in election outcomes among voters. He also said DHS was not seeking to “suppress” votes and said the department’s goal is ensuring ballots are secure and legally cast.

The scope of that review and the changes Mullin might pursue remain unclear. But his remarks come as the Trump administration has sought greater control over election procedures, including attempted restrictions on mail voting that would require voters to appear on new Postal Service lists before their ballots could be transmitted.

More recently, the Justice Department asked Washington state to withhold ballots from hundreds of people flagged as alleged noncitizens, following a similar effort in California. Audits and studies have consistently found noncitizen voting to be rare.

Election cybersecurity work can include protecting voter registration records, keeping voter check-in systems available and preventing attacks that knock polling-place information or results websites offline. Disrupting those services can cause confusion and delays for voters, though they do not directly affect how people cast their ballots.

Foreign influence campaigns can separately seek to discourage participation or undermine confidence in the outcome by spreading false claims about candidates or amplifying divisive political issues online. Current and former officials previously told Nextgov/FCW that cuts to certain federal programs have weakened relationships used to identify and counter foreign influence campaigns, even as artificial intelligence makes deceptive messages easier to produce and spread.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn. — the top Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence panels — said last week that U.S. intelligence has described Russian disinformation and more targeted Chinese influence efforts. The lawmakers said they have seen no indications of a foreign operation to manipulate voting machinery or alter ballots.

Mullin’s address was first reported by Politico. His remarks come as CISA tries to boost election security support following staffing and program cuts that state officials say have disrupted their access to federal expertise.

The agency’s September election plan assigns its 10 regional directors an election adviser role and describes a free platform for sharing threat information among election officials, state intelligence hubs and federal partners. Mullin pledged at the time that the plan would be “implemented in full.”

Some state officials have warned that renewed assistance arrived too late for parts of their midterm preparations. One Arizona cybersecurity official said last month that their state had been without a CISA cybersecurity adviser since March 2025.

The debate over CISA’s election work stretches back to 2020, when the agency affirmed the security of that year’s election and rejected President Donald Trump’s false claims that it had been stolen. Trump and his allies have since accused CISA of enabling government censorship through its work to counter election-related disinformation.

Those grievances have helped shape much of the administration’s efforts to narrow the agency’s role during Trump’s second term. In the last year, officials have also undertaken acute efforts to scrutinize the security of voting infrastructure.

Although voting machines and related systems contain known security vulnerabilities, officials and cybersecurity experts have found no evidence that these flaws have been widely exploited in a way that would alter election outcomes.

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Federal agencies have until Thursday to fix website security flaws

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:02:12 -0400

Federal civilian agencies have until Thursday to address two critical PHP vulnerabilities that CISA has now warned are being exploited by hackers, escalating the government’s response to flaws in software used to operate websites worldwide.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added both flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog Monday, setting an Oct. 29 remediation deadline. The designation marks a change from CISA’s initial warning last week, when the agency said it had not observed exploitation. The catalog entries do not identify victims or describe the evidence behind the decision, leaving the scale of successful attacks unclear.

Known collectively as PHP2Shell, the vulnerabilities can allow hackers to run commands on a web server without an account or password, potentially enabling them to steal data or alter a website.

PHP handles tasks such as processing forms and retrieving information for websites built with WordPress, Drupal and other platforms. Because the defects are in PHP itself, a website can be exposed even if its own code and plugins are up to date.

The federal action follows several days of attempted hacks, alongside conflicting assessments of whether those attempts worked. Cloudflare reported millions of attempts last week.

Two security companies have since corrected earlier findings about the vulnerabilities. Sophos said its initial report of successful exploitation instead reflected scanning and failed attempts. Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 said Sunday that it could not confirm PHP2Shell was the entry point in an attack against a European government agency, retracting an earlier assessment.

The extent of federal exposure also remains uncertain. A Nextgov/FCW review last week found roughly 900 Shodan search results associated with federal, state and local government websites that showed signs of PHP use, though many of those PHP builds may have already been updated or were up-to-date prior to the vulnerabilities becoming public.

Repairs are progressing globally. Censys’ PHP2Shell tracker listed more than 10 million services as patched since Oct. 21. PHP’s developers released fixes last week.

CISA has urged organizations to locate PHP across their systems, including where it is embedded in other software, and prioritize internet-facing installations. Systems that can’t be promptly updated should be taken offline, according to its alert.

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SSA ‘corrects’ millions of Social Security Number database files

Christian Robles — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 17:52:09 -0400

The Social Security Administration has used internal and external data to correct nearly 15% of all active Social Security Numbers across 330 million U.S. citizens and nearly 390 million total records, according to a press release from last Tuesday.

The agency says updates to its SSN databases reflect its commitment to protecting Americans’ identity, preventing fraud and preserving proper program administration.

“The Social Security Number database is our country’s books and records. The database’s accuracy is essential to maintaining integrity of government services for citizens,” SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano said in the release.

The agency says the SSN cleanup effort has added 17 million death dates to records that previously lacked them by using internal SSA and State Department data.

SSA says it has updated roughly 25 million records missing citizenship information by using the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements — or SAVE — services. The agency is currently working on correcting another 8.5 million records with inaccurate immigration status.

“This is the first time SSA has undertaken an effort of this scale, and I am proud of the work we have done to strengthen the foundation of identity data relied upon throughout government and the economy,” Bisignano said.

The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, an independent nonprofit, raised concerns about SSA’s push to clean SSN data in an Oct. 23 blog post.

The group warned that the SAVE database is “incomplete and prone to errors,” pointing to instances where the system has mistakenly flagged U.S. citizens as non-citizens.

“Now, some of the SAVE inaccuracies will be transferred into SSA’s files, doubling down on the use of inaccurate data and making it even more difficult to find an uncorrupted file to check data against,” Max Richtman, the committee’s president and CEO, said in the post.

The group also argued that the Trump administration could not be trusted with updating SSA data because of past alleged misuse, such as intentionally including living people in a database of dead people and a former Department of Government Efficiency employee uploading sensitive information into a thumb drive.

An SSA spokesperson referred to the agency’s release when asked for comment on the SSN corrections.

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NOAA wants better forecasts. First, it needs to rethink how it handles weather data

Christian Robles — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 11:36:00 -0400

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is in the middle of moving multiple systems to cloud-based technologies to improve weather forecasting.

NOAA operates two physical supercomputers for the Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System, or WCOSS. The agency uses the system to generate weather models used across NOAA offices and shared with the general public.

The two supercomputers are serviceable for about five years, but NOAA is now “pushing the limits” of what physical infrastructure can handle, David Michaud, director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction Central Operations, told Nextgov/FCW.

To move information off of the supercomputers to NOAA’s 122 local weather forecast offices, the agency may have to reduce data size, Michaud said. For example, three-dimensional weather models present different variables about the Earth’s surface and layers of the atmosphere. But to get the data to offices, specific variables and layers may have to be omitted, Michaud explained.

“Trapped data is actually probably not my biggest problem. It's actually data that we've deleted and will never get back,” Neil Jacobs, NOAA administrator, said at the Google Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday.

To solve this, NOAA is shifting high-performance computing operations from on-premises hardware to the cloud.

While the two WCOSS supercomputers each operate at a speed of 14.5 petaflops, they are difficult to modify. With a cloud-based computing solution, NOAA can more easily adapt its technology as weather modeling evolves, Michaud explained.

NOAA aims to have a “full-scale system” for high-performance computing operations available by the end of 2026, with a go-live by the end of 2027, Michaud said.

The agency is currently learning how the cloud works with its weather models and determining how it wants to configure the cloud, he added. Google Cloud is the primary provider of high-performance computing operations for NOAA’s WCOSS modernization project.

“For the NOAA workforce, the move to cloud [high-performance computing] provides a more streamlined, flexible environment, enabling meteorologists and researchers to quickly adapt future modeling innovations,” Brent Mitchell, vice president of go-to-market at Google Public Sector, wrote in a blog post.

NOAA’s move to the cloud extends beyond the WCOSS.

Jacobs said that National Weather Service forecasters currently have to download data using Linux workstations in their offices and process the data locally. If issues such as an office evacuation arise, other offices have to cover for forecasters’ work. And if NOAA upgrades the resolution of weather models, forecasters don’t get that data until later, he said.

To resolve these issues, NOAA announced it would move the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System to cloud-based technologies by early 2028, allowing NWS forecasters to access data — such as forecasts and warnings — miles away from their offices, according to a NOAA news release.

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USPTO looks to AI agents to ease examiner workloads

Edward Graham — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 13:34:31 -0400

Although agentic artificial intelligence systems are poised to help the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office significantly reduce the time it takes to review applications by streamlining rote tasks, a top official with the agency said the capabilities also have another added benefit — empowering skilled examiners to rely more on human-to-human interactions rather than the typical stream of impersonal correspondence.

Barry Schindler, USPTO’s acting commissioner for patents, said the agency currently has a diverse staff of patent reviewers, including PhD biochemists who review relevant patent applications. Rather than bogging these personnel down with tedious tasks during the three-step pre-exam, examination and post-exam patent lifecycle process, Schindler said USPTO has turned, in part, to a new agentic tool — called Compass — to help.

Examiners reviewing man-made or altered DNA sequences, for instance, first have to see if the submitted sequences are correct before determining whether or not they can be patented.

Schindler said these reviewers frequently have to engage in a “back and forth, back and forth, back and forth” dialogue with applicants, which is largely conducted through written correspondence. Now, Schindler said Compass “does what's called a formality check” to speed along the process.

“So then what happens now? I've got a PhD biochemist who had been hired to do what they were supposed to do,” Schindler said during the Google Public Sector Summit on Tuesday.

With a current backlog of 700,000 applications for review, and a staff of around 9,000 patent examiners, USPTO needs to turn to AI agents for help, he said, adding that further adoption of these tools can help promote more consistency in the review process.

“You as an applicant may get an examiner who has 20 years of experience, and at the same time you may get an examiner who has two years,” he said. “We put our examiners online almost immediately; we have to. We have this backlog. So what we're looking to do with this whole [AI] and [agentic agents thing] is how do we start getting consistency? So that examiner who has two years, how do we impart that knowledge that's similar?”

Providing patent examiners with a consistent review process and giving them AI tools to help navigate often cumbersome tasks, Schindler said, means skilled employees can more fully leverage their talents.

“The thing that is missing — and we don't have time to do it — is the human interaction,” Schindler said, noting that patent examinations are often “a negotiation” between applicant and examiner.

“If part of that iterative process is, instead of the examiner just putting paper — they do paper — back and forth, can we get the examiner on the phone and start having this human interaction? And examiners will say, ‘I love that, but I don't have time because I'm doing this [other stuff],’” he said.

Rather than taking sometimes five years for applicants to receive a patent, Schindler said “we can shorten that to one year, because you can pick up the phone and have conversations” by using agents to help shoulder some of the other workload.

Adoption of these tools, however, doesn’t need to be large. Schindler said even small uses of these capabilities are beneficial and noted that some research studies have shown that too much reliance on AI tools can impair cognitive skills.

“If somebody starts relying on agents and [they] don't understand the fundamentals and don't continue to learn the fundamentals, they can get dumb,” he said. “And so I have that issue that I have to think about: [using] agents, but how does the agent assist and not take over?”

Focusing on the underlying problem, rather than a one-size solution, Schindler added, is a necessity when it comes to maximizing the effectiveness of new capabilities like those offered by agents.

USPTO has previously touted some of the other AI tools it’s rolled out to help improve its internal operations, including an enterprise AI tool named Scout — a chatbot assistant used by personnel to help analyze, draft, research and summarize content.

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ICE wants AI to take on more of its legal workload

Ross Wilkers — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 17:55:51 -0400

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has started to look at the landscape of cloud-native electronic discovery software tools to aid its office responsible for handling legal, regulatory and compliance matters.

ICE is launching this effort to aid its Office of the Principal Legal Advisor, which staffs 2,300 attorneys and 350 support personnel that handle large volumes of cases and related data. This office acts as the government’s sole representative in immigration removal proceedings before the Executive Office for Immigration Review.

Artificial intelligence and agentic AI functions are a must for ICE in its search for a commercially available software-as-a-service platform that can support the full lifecycle of electronic discovery, the agency said in a Monday sources sought notice.

The notice cites potential use cases for the platform as including litigation, investigations, administrative proceedings, Freedom of Information Act-related cases, regulatory matters, congressional inquiries, and other discovery or compliance activities.

ICE’s desired specs for the platform include natural language and semantic search, automated summarization, AI-assisted review and coding, contextual analysis, and agents that can carry out and coordinate multi-step discovery workflows.

The request for information also spells out how the platform should cover information governance and legal holds from initial data collection work to the processing, review, analysis and production stages.

ICE is asking submissions to be sent in the form of white papers that include a capability narrative and responses to functional requirements in AI, agentic AI, governance response structures and questions surrounding the standard Electronic Discovery Reference Model framework.

George Socha and Tom Gelbmann developed EDRM in 2005 to standardize how legal, technical and compliance teams handle electronically-stored information during litigation and investigations.

Responses to the RFI are due by 2 p.m. Eastern time on Oct. 28.

All throughout the RFI, ICE uses the term “Super Intelligence” to comply with President Trump’s September executive order mandating agencies use the SI terminology in official communications.

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State Department orders ‘super intelligence’ wording across all official communications

David DiMolfetta and Jory Heckman — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 13:33:21 -0400

The State Department has instructed personnel to replace “artificial intelligence” with “Super Intelligence” in official communications and rename its AI-related programs and systems, bringing President Donald Trump’s terminology change into the daily work of U.S. diplomacy, according to two people familiar with the matter and contents of an unclassified cable obtained by Government Executive and Nextgov/FCW.

The cable — dated Monday and addressed department-wide — tells staff to use “Super Intelligence,” or “SI,” in new letters, emails, public messages, websites, reports, remarks and policy documents, subject to legal exceptions. Existing material should be updated when staff next revise it.

“All official titles and the names of Department governance bodies, systems, platforms, inventories, and programs must use SI in place of AI,” the cable states.

The instructions implement Trump’s Sept. 29 executive order, which directed executive agencies to adopt the new terminology across official communications. The cable shows how that broad instruction is being translated into specific requirements for diplomats and the department’s internal operations.

The order says the wording should reflect the advancing capabilities and promise of American technology. For now, however, it defines “Super Intelligence” as the same technologies and systems covered by the existing statutory definition of AI. In computing science, super intelligence is defined differently than the generative artificial intelligence technologies used today.

In recent weeks, administration officials had previously discussed the terminology change with certain State bureaus, people familiar with the matter said. But the cable appears to be the first organization-wide directive outlining where the new language must be used. The Associated Press previously reported such communications with State’s international organizations bureau.

The transition, while expected for some time, is significant because it would change how U.S. diplomats describe the fast-evolving technology in policy documents and discussions with overseas counterparts.

Foreign organizations retain their own names in internal writings. The cable specifically tells employees not to change references to China’s World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, even as the department replaces the term in its own materials.

The notice also spells out several exceptions to the replacement rule. Employees must preserve language required by law and existing legal citations, including quotations from statutes, regulations, treaties and other legal instruments. Contracts and grants are also excluded, pending further guidance.

Previously published documents, cables and archived web pages should not be revised or reissued solely to change the terminology, it adds. The instructions also preserve the published titles of existing presidential actions, programs and organizations, such as America’s AI Action Plan, unless the department provides further direction.

One program has already changed names. The cable says the American AI Exports Program is now the American SI Exports Program, citing an earlier State Department cable. The program’s public website already uses that name to describe its work helping American companies sell technology overseas.

For staff handling international agreements or departmental rules, the cable directs questions about terminology to the appropriate policy or legal office.

The vocabulary change is already appearing in senior officials’ public remarks. National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross repeatedly referred to AI as “super intelligence” and “SI” during an Oct. 1 discussion on AI safety, following Trump’s order.

Office of Personnel Management CIO Adam Starr also used “SI” in remarks last week, describing efforts to help agencies adopt the technology. Starr said OPM had launched a SuperIntelligence Governance and Adoption Program, or SI GAP, to assist other agencies.

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This cybersecurity agency is supposed to protect U.S. elections. Officials fear it’s been compromised by Trump

Doug Bock Clark and Andy Mannix, ProPublica — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 17:59:47 -0400

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it.

The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it and report back the findings so they could be given to the White House, according to two former administration officials with knowledge of the request.

The proposition was shocking to CISA’s career staffers, according to one of the former officials. CISA typically worked to thwart hackers. Moreover, the agency had been directed not to alert the voting machine company if it uncovered flaws, contrary to its standard practices. The request made the CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference.

“My thought was they could keep it in their back pocket to invalidate any [election] results they don’t like,” one of the former officials said. “This goes against everything CISA represents.”

The CISA employees repeatedly told the political appointees that their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative. The appointees eventually stopped pressing CISA.

Though not acted on, the request shows how the Trump administration has tried to use the agency for its own ends while draining it of resources for one of its critical missions: protecting the nation’s voting systems.

In Trump’s second term, his administration has laid off or pushed out more than 1,000 CISA employees, shrinking the agency by about one-third. The president’s 2027 budget proposal would reduce funding for the agency by another $700 million, which could necessitate 900 additional layoffs.

In response, Democratic lawmakers have called for an investigation into CISA’s ability to do its job and demanded answers as to why federal funds are not being used to support election security as directed by Congress.

Since Trump signed the CISA Act in 2018, the agency has worked with state authorities and voting machine vendors to help protect election infrastructure from cyberattacks. During Trump’s second term, though, CISA has abandoned much of this work. Several state election authorities said the agency provided them no assistance — and no explanation for its absence — during the most critical planning stages for the upcoming midterms.

“There is a difference between deprioritizing and being nonexistent,” said Ryan Macias, an election technology and cybersecurity expert who has worked as a consultant for CISA. In 2025 and through mid-September 2026 — when the bulk of preparations for the election typically would have been completed — “they were nonexistent. Literally nonexistent.”

While Trump has repeatedly warned that America’s elections are vulnerable to hacking, in some cases repeating disproven claims, experts said his administration is undermining the federal government’s role in helping secure them.

Though CISA re-emerged in September with a last-minute security plan for the election, some state officials told ProPublica they fear that what is left of the agency has been compromised by a conspiracy-obsessed presidential administration. In recent months, in reviving debunked theories about the 2020 election, the Trump administration has declassified troves of records, including sensitive material that state officials provided to CISA. Some state authorities said they no longer trusted the administration enough to share information with CISA, a key to the agency’s success in past elections.

“They’ve violated the entire premise of that information-sharing relationship,” said one former high-ranking federal cybersecurity official who now advises state governments on national security. “There’s no fucking way they’re ever going to give any information to CISA. And it’s unclear if they ever will in the future.”

A spokesperson for the White House declined an interview request but defended Trump’s handling of election security in an emailed statement. “President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections,” said Lauren Bis.

Bis referred specific questions about CISA’s handling of elections to DHS. DHS and CISA did not respond to interview requests or to a detailed list of questions.

“There’s no fucking way [state governments are] ever going to give any information to CISA. And it’s unclear if they ever will in the future.”
A former federal cybersecurity official who advises state governments

Current and former CISA employees and state election officials describe an agency that has become significantly less equipped to help states fight legitimate cyber threats. State leaders say they have used their own resources to shore up gaps left by CISA, such as paying for sensor technology that can detect unusual activity in election networks. But some services, like intel on foreign actors, can’t be replicated. Some people interviewed said they were worried that Trump and his allies continue to ratchet up rhetoric about voting security, particularly about threats to voting machines. Officials in one large voting jurisdiction said they have met privately with machine vendors to come up with a contingency plan if the federal government seizes their machines or declares them unusable.

“I don’t pay attention to what the president says. I pay attention to what his administration does,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said. “And what they’ve done is basically cut us off and left us on our own.”

Defending elections from hackers wasn’t always part of DHS’s remit.

Throughout the mid-1990s and 2000s, a series of cyberattacks rocked the federal government, demonstrating the emerging threat. In 2007, hackers broke into the Pentagon and stole terabytes of sensitive data. The digital heist, by an unknown foreign adversary, was so damaging that one intelligence leader later described it as an “espionage Pearl Harbor.”

Under George W. Bush, DHS underwent a reorganization to more effectively combat terrorism and respond to disasters like Hurricane Katrina. The department dedicated resources under an office called the National Protection and Programs Directorate to help fortify advanced cyber defense systems and important infrastructure. The office’s work ranged from helping secure events like the Super Bowl to protecting chemical plants to issuing cybersecurity warnings to the private sector and the public. In 2018, Trump signed a bill making the office a stand-alone agency, allowing for more federal funding and transforming it into, essentially, the ultimate tech support desk for anything DHS designated “critical infrastructure.” The bill renamed the agency CISA.

Though Trump helped create CISA, he didn’t much appreciate the work the agency did under its old name to expose the extent of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Russian agents had unleashed a massive disinformation campaign, with a Kremlin-backed troll farm creating thousands of social media accounts posing as Americans and promoting Trump, according to bipartisan reports from the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released before the 2020 election. A dozen Russian military agents were indicted for what the Justice Department described as “a sustained effort to hack into the computer networks of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic National Committee, and the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton.”

Trump publicly downplayed this interference, but DHS leadership saw the Russia attack as an escalation. In January 2017, before Trump took office, DHS upgraded America’s elections to the status of critical infrastructure. This placed the polls and all voting technology used in federal elections under the watch of what would soon become CISA.

To carry out this function, CISA needed help. But states and voting machine vendors were wary about sharing data on weaknesses in voting systems, fearing it could be exploited if certain details were to become public. State officials were also reluctant to cede any role in election preparation to the federal government.

Gradually, though, CISA and state election officials negotiated a fragile trust. At its center was a commitment: The sensitive information states and vendors shared with CISA would be kept confidential.

“It took years and years of building trust, of talking to election officials, of hiring people with elections experience who could be validators for the work that CISA wanted to do, before they finally built strong working relationships,” said Derek Tisler, who specializes in election security as counsel for the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan institute based out of New York University School of Law.

Under Director Chris Krebs, CISA hosted penetration testing in which its agents would try to hack into a state’s system to locate weaknesses that could then be patched, along with tabletop exercises simulating a series of potential catastrophes around elections. CISA also offered regular secret-level briefings to secretaries of state to share federal intelligence. And CISA paid for sensor technology that looked for potential malicious online activity on election networks, notifying officials about emerging threats.

“The staffing was there, the expertise was there, the visibility was there, the funding was there,” Macias said.

The consortium shared data as run of the mill as spambots as well as more serious threats. If Virginia caught unusual activity in its system, it could let other states know to be vigilant.

While CISA had prepared for attacks from the Chinese and Russian governments, or lone wolf hackers, few there had expected the threat to elections would come from inside the White House. But when Trump refused to concede to Joe Biden in 2020, claiming the vote had been rigged, CISA became a key component of the guardrails that ultimately led to the election results being certified.

The agency, in a statement co-signed by secretaries of state and voting machine vendors, vouched for the election’s integrity, calling it “the most secure in American history.” When Krebs publicly rebutted claims amplified by the White House as “unsubstantiated” or “technically incoherent,” Trump fired him over Twitter.

As Congress prepared to vote on certifying the election results, it was members of CISA, along with the FBI, who convinced then-Attorney General Bill Barr that the conspiracy theories embraced by the president could be explained by human error, not systemic fraud or hacking.

When Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, his administration immediately started to dismantle CISA. The administrative notices were sent out just a couple of weeks after the inauguration and included the team in charge of dispelling disinformation.

For the employees under the DOGE microscope, work became impossible, said one former senior CISA employee. “Those groups couldn’t even order a pizza.”

DOGE laid off people critical to the agency’s election work, including those who’d worked closely with states. The Trump administration cut funding for the technology that monitored web and election servers, blinding the federal government to breaches it had detected.

When it came time for states to prepare for the 2026 midterms, CISA had disappeared.

On the evening of July 16, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, dozens of election officials and their staffs gathered for a reception near Mount Rushmore. It was the third night of an annual conference for secretaries of state, drawing participants from red and blue states. They’d spent the week discussing state voter roll maintenance and voter ID — issues that at times made for disagreements.

At about 8 p.m., a wave of discomfort swept through the crowd, visible on attendees’ faces as they glanced frequently at their phones, according to people at the event. Any minute now, Trump was going to address the nation on election security. Some at the reception worried he would declare a national emergency, as his allies had urged him to do months earlier, and use it as a pretext to direct the government to seize voting machines.

Then reports on the speech began rolling in, and the mood shifted. The claims Trump was making were unsubstantiated and outlandish. Many had been examined ad nauseam, including by those at the reception, and roundly debunked. The collective anxiety that was palpable moments earlier melted away, as many saw the speech as another attempt to revive disproved theories unlikely to be taken seriously by most voters.

“Everyone just sort of guffawed and put their phones away and went to the bar,” recalled Quinn Raymond, co-founder of VoteShield, a nonprofit that works with states to help monitor voter registration data, who was at the event.

Still, if the speech made little impact, records published by the Trump administration to support the president’s claims damaged the already eroding relationship between CISA and state election officials. The material included raw information states had shared with the agency that was supposed to remain private, such as a log of communications from Election Day 2020 detailing activity being monitored in several states.

“It betrayed the trust of all partners who were willing to share information at the time,” said Geoff Hale, who worked on CISA’s elections team from the agency’s inception until last year. Now he specializes in election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital and civil rights.

Bis, the White House spokesperson, denied that the Trump administration broke any agreements in releasing the information. “The release of such information is exactly the sort of transparency news organizations should applaud,” she said. Bis also defended Trump’s speech, saying it had been fact-checked “by the agencies whose evidence was released and did not mischaracterize any information.”

Hale and others said the speech was one of several instances demonstrating the Trump administration’s reckless attitude toward sensitive data collected by CISA. Earlier this year, Politico reported that acting CISA Director Madhu Gottumukkala had uploaded records to ChatGPT, even though DHS had barred its employees from using the unsecure program. A CISA spokesperson told Politico that Gottumukkala had been permitted to use the technology for a “short-term and limited” basis.

Last May, an independent journalist named Brian Krebs exposed that CISA published private data, including passwords, cloud keys and other information, on its public GitHub page, in a folder labeled “Private-CISA.” A CISA spokesperson told the journalist there was no indication that sensitive data was compromised.

Some state election authorities were also alarmed to see the lengths to which the Trump administration went to legitimize the president’s fixation on the 2020 race.

In fall 2025, Missouri election officials produced a memo stating Andrew McCoy Warner, a Department of Justice official and prominent 2020 election conspiracy theorist, had called several clerks asking for access to voting machines. Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, had also led an operation in Puerto Rico to seize election machines. When the private cybersecurity contractor hired to examine the machines, Mojave Research Inc., failed to find evidence supporting claims about 2020, the federal government became “dissastified” with its services and stopped renewing its contract, its CEO later told reporters.

A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told reporters in August that Mojave’s work ceased because it had completed its contract. Testifying before Congress in March, Gabbard said the seizing of voting machines came at the request of an assistant U.S. attorney in Puerto Rico.

“What happened in the second Trump administration is from almost day one — I mean, literally the first two months — they took all that was built up by Trump 1 and just decimated it,” said David Becker, founder of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit that works with state election authorities. “Election officials lost trust in the federal government.”

It didn’t help that, in his speech, the president mocked CISA’s defense of the 2020 election, calling the statement about it being the most secure in history a “very pat line” concocted as part of a deep-state cover-up. One former career CISA employee described being crestfallen at the Trump administration’s erosion of all they’d accomplished.

“We worked so hard to build that trusted relationship,” said Caitlin Durkovich, former DHS assistant secretary for infrastructure protection and co-founder of the cybersecurity firm Civira Partners. “I don’t know how you put it back together.”

A few weeks after Trump’s speech, the state election officials gathered once more, this time for a video call with Nick Andersen, who had replaced Gottumukkala as CISA’s acting director.

Though the primaries were already under way, this was the first time many had met Andersen, a former cybersecurity adviser to Trump’s White House who had joined CISA a year earlier. Andersen is also a district representative for the Republican Party in Virginia, according to the party’s website. In March, he gave a speech to the Fairfax GOP chapter titled “Fighting Democrat Redistricting.”

Speaking over video in August, the boyish-faced former Marine Corps engineer announced that DHS was preparing to release a plan on how it would work together with state officials to secure the election, according to five people who were present at the video meeting, some of whom shared notes with ProPublica.

Many on the call were stunned at what they perceived as a lack of understanding of election planning. Early voting for the general election was just around the corner. They had spent over a year preparing for the midterms, and there was no more time for ambitious work.

Some peppered Andersen with questions: Where had CISA been when there was still time to make improvements?

Andersen blamed any lapses or perceived breaches in trust on the federal government shutdown in fall 2025, twirling his pen uncomfortably and sipping from a Monster energy drink.

Fontes, Arizona’s secretary of state, was blunt about his feelings regarding working with Andersen and CISA, according to several of the people on the call.

“I told him I didn’t trust him,” Fontes recalled in an interview. “I did raise my voice a little bit, because I’m frustrated — very frustrated — that they would have the temerity to come in, clear the entire deck of competent professionals, stop supporting the states, eviscerate the coordination efforts that they had and then suddenly come in and say: ‘Oh, we’re from the federal government. We’re here to help.’”

Indeed, one recently departed CISA official said attempting to do the agency’s typical election work now would be futile. In previous years, CISA had finished almost all its preparations with the states by Labor Day.

“That ship has sailed,” the official said.

CISA published its security plan for the 2026 election on Sept. 24. The 13-page document describes how, over the past two years, CISA has “recommitted to its statutory mission and remains resolute in strengthening the security of elections.”

State officials said their planning will ensure a secure election, even without help from CISA. Yet they and cybersecurity experts worry that Trump will say the election was hacked if Republicans don’t win in November.

The security plan calls for “leveraging collaborative partnerships” with states the agency has abandoned since Trump took office. Shenna Bellows, Maine’s secretary of state, said she’d welcome that but was skeptical of the agency’s motivations.

“For CISA to promise election officials now, at this point in time, that they are going to be a resource for the 2026 election is too little, too late,” she said.

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Senator warns hundreds of federal web addresses may lack key spying protection

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 10:52:00 -0400

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., is urging the Trump administration to close an encryption gap that could let foreign adversaries track visits to sensitive government websites, including the FBI’s tip portal and a veterans crisis line, according to a letter sent to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Office of Management and Budget on Monday and first seen by Nextgov/FCW.

Wyden asked CISA and OMB to require that agencies implement a web security standard that hides the name of the website someone is visiting. The protocol, known as Encrypted Client Hello, protects the website name when a user’s browser connects to a site and has been supported by major browsers and some web infrastructure providers since 2023.

Wyden’s office identified 350 federal web addresses that lack the encryption specification. They include sites that facilitate intelligence community job applications, immigration services, health information and U.S. diplomatic websites around the world.

“This visibility could lead to malicious eavesdroppers identifying whistleblowers, profiling cleared federal personnel, tracking Americans seeking crisis support, and mapping interactions between agencies,” Wyden wrote to CISA acting director Nick Andersen and deputy federal chief information officer Thomas Flagg.

He also asked OMB, working with CISA and the Office of the National Cyber Director, to require that cloud and network providers support the technology to qualify for federal contracts. He requested responses by Nov. 20.

Nextgov/FCW has requested comments from CISA and OMB.

Federal websites generally encrypt the information people read or submit, though hackers can still learn which sites they visit by monitoring their internet traffic.

The letter singles out two services whose visitors could be particularly vulnerable.

The Department of Veterans Affairs’ Veterans Crisis Line platform uses Amazon Web Services, which does not currently support ECH for the site, according to the letter. Wyden warned that the exposure could help foreign adversaries identify veterans seeking mental health assistance. Additionally, the FBI’s tips.fbi.gov site uses Cloudflare, a provider that supports ECH, but the portal has not enabled it, the senator added, arguing the current arrangement could put people contacting the bureau at risk of identification.

The possible FBI exposure also comes after a prolific criminal hacker group recently stole troves of sensitive employee information tied to the bureau’s jobs portal.

The list of sites without the protocol also includes hotline.oig.dhs.gov, the DHS inspector general’s complaint hotline; civilrights.justice.gov, the Justice Department’s civil rights reporting portal; and apply.intelligencecareers.gov, an intelligence community recruitment site. Federal HIV information sites, including hivinfo.nih.gov and clinicalinfo.hiv.gov, are also listed.

To craft the list, Wyden’s staffers tested federal web addresses using third-party network providers to see if ECH successfully hid which specific websites were being visited, a spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW. The protection only appeared to work on sites relying on Cloudflare’s free service tier, the spokesperson added.

The letter does not establish that adversaries have tracked visitors to any of the listed addresses.

Wyden argued the government can close these gaps using technology already supported by major browsers and deployed across millions of websites. For agencies whose providers support ECH, enabling it can be as simple as changing a setting, he said.

“Modern federal zero trust cybersecurity practices rely on protective software installed directly on agency devices, so enabling [Encrypted Client Hello] would strictly improve the cybersecurity of federal networks,” Wyden wrote.

The effort follows his September call for NSA to update its advice about virtual private networks. A Congressional Research Service analysis requested by his office at the time warned that foreign intelligence services with broad visibility into internet traffic could potentially connect VPN users to websites by comparing traffic patterns.

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CMS hopes to quadruple provider suspensions over next 6 months, official says

Christian Robles — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 08:38:00 -0400

SANTA FE, N.M. — The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services plans to expand provider suspensions and publish the results of a pilot testing whether artificial intelligence can prevent Medicaid fraud, a senior agency official said Thursday.

The two moves are the latest in the Trump administration’s technology-enabled drive to trim fraud, waste and abuse in federal health care programs. The push has helped yield $41.9 billion in savings for fiscal year 2025, or a 59% increase over the previous year, according to a slideshow CMS Deputy Administrator Kimberly Brandt presented at the ADAPT conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In April 2026, CMS launched a “Medicaid War Room” to curtail fraud, waste and abuse. The CMS arm has stopped $342 million in improper payments as of Sept. 2026 and sent 124 notices of intent to exclude providers, according to the slideshow.

“My hope is that suspension number will quadruple over the course of the next six months,” following new exclusion authority granted by the Health and Human Services Department earlier this week, Brandt said.

With that power, CMS can kick providers out of Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE and other federal health care programs. Brandt previously said she urged congressional offices to give CMS the exclusion authority.

Beyond CMS’ push to exclude certain providers, Brandt noted that the agency is piloting AI and machine learning to detect Medicaid fraud.

The pilots use AI to flag suspicious billing patterns — such as upcoding, phantom services and geographic anomalies — in near real-time before Medicaid payments are made, according to the slideshow. The pilots are also testing a shared platform where CMS, Medicaid Fraud Control Units, program integrity contractors, states and law enforcement work on high-risk cases together.

“If proven out, the goal is to scale this into a national, standardized, continuously improving platform that stops fraudulent Medicaid payments before they’re made,” the slideshow said.

Brandt said CMS will soon publish the results of an Indiana Medicaid fraud pilot the agency conducted with Oracle, and that it is also actively working with five other states on Medicaid pilots. But the agency is also using other technologies to further its mission to combat fraud, waste and abuse.

CMS is utilizing a “Netflix-type algorithm” that compares new providers and suppliers with ones the agency already has a relationship with, Brandt said. The technology allows CMS to put suspicious providers and suppliers on a watchlist for the first six months after they enter a federal health care program. The agency has cut about 67% of those providers and suppliers because they did not follow or comply with program rules, she said.

Earlier this week, the Trump administration announced it cut subsidies for 189,000 people on the Affordable Care Act exchanges after it found those same enrollees had duplicate health care coverage or were dead. The administration said it found some of the duplicate beneficiaries through periodic data matching of Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Brandt added that the agency is “doing even more” analysis of the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File so as not to issue payments to dead people, though she did not elaborate on what the analysis was.

Even so, CMS’ use of technology to claw back fraud has not been perfect, Brandt acknowledged.

“There are a lot of things about WISeR that are not working,” Brandt said, referring to a controversial pilot of AI-supported prior authorizations of Medicare items and services that have a high risk for fraud.

Hospitals and Democratic lawmakers have criticized the six-year initiative for delaying and denying seniors’ access to care since it launched at the beginning of the year. The House Ways and Means Committee advanced a provision to end the WISeR program in June, while the Senate has rejected efforts to stop it.

“Especially because of the congressional scrutiny on [the WISeR program, CMS Innovation Center staff] are committed to trying to get that right and get it better,” Brandt said.

Among the lessons CMS has learned from the WISeR model are that technology requires continuous oversight, human clinical review is essential and provider feedback is an important monitoring signal, according to the slideshow.

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AI offers Secret Service unique mission enhancements, official says

Edward Graham — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 16:41:16 -0400

Artificial intelligence is providing the U.S. Secret Service with new capabilities to carry out its protective and investigative missions, the agency’s IT and AI lead said on Thursday, with further adoption of the technologies poised to help it respond even better to future risk environments.

Given the Secret Service’s directive to both safeguard top U.S. officials and visiting dignitaries and to conduct criminal investigations, Chief Information Officer and Chief AI Officer Chris Kraft said “we have to look broadly at what's the art of the possible” when it comes to leveraging AI for its operations.

While Secret Service, like other federal agencies, has leveraged AI to streamline mundane back-office operations or other rote tasks — Kraft noted during the SAP Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C., that “with generative AI, there's huge opportunity to automate things, such as invoice processing or contracts or other capabilities” — its unique mission positions it to utilize some of the more cutting-edge AI capabilities.

The service is trying to navigate an unprecedented threat environment with an understaffed workforce. During an interview with 60 Minutes on Sunday, Secret Service Director Sean Curran said threats against the agency’s full-time protectees are up more than 40% since last year, with around 10,000 threats made on those individuals since January.

“I believe that artificial intelligence can help us as we investigate those threats, monitor those threats [and] bring together correlations between seemingly disparate information,” Kraft said, referencing Curran’s interview. “I also think when you look at facial recognition and biometrics, [you see] the things that you can do — and at scale — with artificial intelligence.”

Kraft said, for instance, that an object detection tool could help the agency quickly identify how many individuals are in one space “at a speed that a human is not able to do that.”

The Secret Service currently lists three AI use cases in its most recent public inventory, with two of those uses — a model to support criminal investigations through facial recognition matches and another that is used to decipher license plates from poor-quality images or videos — currently deployed by the agency. Kraft said the agency’s AI adoption is meant to empower Secret Service’s human agents to better carry out their duties.

In an interview with Nextgov/FCW earlier this year, Kraft also said the Secret Service is working to embed AI specialists across its operations to help drive further adoption of AI tools.

Kraft highlighted that initiative on Thursday and said developing an internal AI team will allow experts to “go and work with different parts of the organization and accelerate, where it makes sense, our adoption of the technology.”

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OPM revamps online pay tables, spearheads AI adoption across federal workforce

Jory Heckman — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 17:18:32 -0400

The federal government’s human resources agency is revamping one of the most heavily trafficked tools on its website: annual pay tables for federal employees.

The Office of Personnel Management is planning to launch a new version of the online tables that agencies and employees use to look up federal pay rates each year.

Adam Starr, the agency's chief information officer, said on Wednesday that the agency’s pay rates website gets about 14 million visits each year, but hasn’t changed much since 2011.

“I always like to remember that 'OPM' really stands for ‘other peoples’ money.’ And in this case, it is your money. People come to OPM pay tables, asking us to show them the money, and for years these have been legacy, clunky sites,” Starr said Wednesday at the SAP Public Sector Summit sponsored by GovExec. “It’s not the experience that a federal employee deserves.”

Starr said the revamped OPM pay tables will launch “later this calendar year,” in the first quarter of fiscal 2027.

“We’re launching it in beta. This will be the default, but people can always fall back to the old version if they don’t like this new version. We’ll get feedback from the agencies, from the employees. We can iterate, relaunch, and get this in people’s hands. Because that’s how everyone’s doing it in industry, and government should be no different,” he said.

Starr said OPM tested the pay table redesign with an accessibility expert who uses a screen-reader. He said that individual “had absolutely no issues using it.”

“For too long, I think civil servants have really suffered with outdated technology that doesn’t keep at the frontier,” Starr said, adding that OPM is looking to give employees the “latest and greatest tools.”

OPM’s pay tables are the latest in a series of government website refreshes happening under the Trump administration. The agency last year overhauled its federal workforce data website, and the White House’s Nation Design Studio is on a mission to transform more than 27,000 federal websites.

These efforts culminated recently in the launch of America.gov, a site that allows users to ask a chatbot questions about everything from qualifying for Medicare to finding a job to renewing a passport.

Starr described the OPM pay-table refresh as part of a broader plan to “make every part of the federal experience tech-first,” and to get federal employees “the best support that you need in every stage of your career.”

“This is kind of just an example of many of the modernizations that we’re trying to do across OPM, from consolidating 119 different HR IT systems to answering every phone call in our retirement services contact center,” Starr said.

OPM is also spearheading some of the Trump administration’s latest efforts to foster greater adoption of AI tools across the federal workforce. President Donald Trump signed an executive order last month rebranding AI across the federal government as “super intelligence.”

Starr said OPM has launched a consulting program called the SuperIntelligence Governance and Adoption Program (SI GAP), focused on helping other agencies adopt AI tools.

“Every SI transformation industry has HR at the table, and OPM is HR for the government,” Starr said. “Really, it comes down to being able to take measured risk of trusting your

employees with these tools, giving them the opportunity to experiment and reinvent their work — because just using it as a better chatbot or a better Google search is not going to reinvent the way that we have the enterprise work.”

Starr said that agencies – including OPM – have historically been too risk-averse with AI, and haven’t yet seized the “opportunity to reinvent their work” with these tools.

“I imagine a world where every employee is more empowered to do the impactful work that they need to do — that a lot of the tedium of the day can be automated,” he said.

Starr said OPM recently launched an AI agent to help process phone calls for the retirement services team.

“We showed it to the entire agency. People were aghast at how human it sounded, how helpful it was,” Starr said. “Literally today we released a new feature, and we released a new feature on Friday last week. And every day this is getting better.”

The federal retirement backlog under the second Trump administration has drawn scrutiny from House Democrats. The backlog sat at 55,681 pending cases on March 31, down from a peak of 65,237 the previous month. The backlog fell to 8,814 pending cases in September.

“We've historically had a large backlog of retirement claims, and it's not because the employees don't want to do good, but there's been processes that are highly optimized on paper that just can't improve until they're digital. They're now digital, and so how can we now optimize those and lead to faster retirements? How can we onboard people quicker?”

OPM in a recent memo directed agencies to use AI to speed up the hiring process for new employees employees. OPM Director Scott Kupor has also been tapped to serve as vice chairman of the administration’s interagency Super Intelligence Task Force.

Starr said OPM understands the importance of keeping guardrails around the data it holds. OPM in 2015 was the target of a massive data breach, exposing about 22 million federal records.

“We have a high risk tolerance for delighting our customers and a low-risk tolerance for security breaches,” he said.

OPM, he added, has three basic rules for AI use: employees are responsible for the work they produce with AI, can use only approved tools, and must stay signed in with official accounts.

“It’s on the CIO team to make sure this is secure, and just constantly thinking about what are the risks and how do we mitigate it. There are concerns about access to the internet via these tools, so we put in a cached version, so nothing hits the internet,” Starr said. “[We’re] just constantly looking at what are the concerns, knocking that down, and iterating and improving.”

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VA rolls out CLEAR login option and in-person identity verification pilot

Edward Graham — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:20:00 -0400

The Department of Veterans Affairs announced on Wednesday that it has rolled out a new identity verification login option from CLEAR and established a pilot program at six medical facilities to help veterans create online VA accounts in person.

The new services are billed as part of a broader digital modernization effort being spearheaded by GovCIO to enhance VA’s online services and integrate the CLEAR1 security identity platform onto the VA.gov website.

Veterans now have the opportunity to voluntarily create CLEAR accounts to access their VA services using facial recognition. The agency’s platform also offers other log-in services that use biometrics for identity verification, like Login.gov — the government’s single sign-on service for federal and state platforms — and ID.me — another private sector offering that can be used to verify users of federal platforms.

Veterans who create CLEAR accounts can also use the service to sign into Medicare.gov through a similar partnership announced by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services earlier this year.

The CLEAR accounts used to access VA.gov are different from those operated by the company that allow users to access CLEAR-verified airport security lines.

“Veterans want better customer service and convenience, and under President [Donald] Trump, VA is delivering,” VA Secretary Doug Collins said in a statement. “This technology is another way we’re changing VA to put Veterans first and make it easier for those who have worn the uniform to get the care and benefits they’ve earned.”

In addition to the new login option, VA is deploying CLEAR pods at selected medical sites to help veterans create identity verification accounts while at the facilities. Veterans who visit these biometric verification kiosks with the proper identifications can have their photos taken and then used to create CLEAR accounts.

The on-site identity verification pilot is now active at VA facilities in Atlanta, Georgia; Brooklyn, New York; Orlando, Florida; Palo Alto, California; San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Washington, D.C.

During a Wednesday interview on CBS Mornings, CLEAR CEO Caryn Seidman Becker said veterans can go to VA.gov and verify their identities with “one selfie, and you’re in.” She said the CLEAR pods’ pilot program will also allow the firm “to meet veterans where they are and help them to enroll there.”

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GSA still has problems with location data for federal properties, watchdog finds

Christian Robles — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:52:00 -0400

The General Services Administration is still not meeting the Geospatial Data Act of 2018’s requirement to maintain geospatial data, an Office of Inspector General report published Monday found. Previous 2024 and 2022 OIG audits also found that GSA was not fully compliant with the federal law.

GSA has two publicly available geospatial datasets — the Inventory of Owned and Leased Properties Dataset and the Federal Real Property Profile Dataset — that contain inaccurate or missing latitude and longitude coordinates, the OIG found.

The watchdog noted that about 78,624 — or 26% — of properties in the FRPP dataset with coordinates lacked distinct ones and “numerous properties” in that dataset contained erroneous coordinates. The finding echoes a June 2026 Government Accountability Office report that determined about 20% of buildings in the FRPP had coordinates that did not match their reported zip codes.

The OIG found that 634, or about 7%, of the GSA-controlled properties listed in the IOLP-buildings dataset lacked distinct coordinates. Approximately 20% of the IOLP-buildings dataset’s real property assets contained outdated and incorrect congressional representative data.

“GSA should identify cost-effective measures to improve the accuracy and usefulness of the latitude and longitude coordinates in the IOLP and FRPP datasets based on each property’s physical location,” the OIG wrote.

GSA did not maintain its geospatial data inventory for two years until it responded to OIG’s audit, according to the report. The updated inventory showed a roughly 22% increase in geospatial data assets compared to the 2024 inventory.

The OIG found that the agency did not maintain an updated inventory because it does not have a documented process listed in materials like the GEOSPATIAL DATA Standard Operating Procedure — or SOP — and Standards Guide.

“GSA should update its geospatial data SOP to establish a process for maintaining its geospatial data inventory, including defining roles and responsibilities,” the office wrote.

While the Geospatial Data Act requires agencies to search for existing geospatial data before procuring new data, the OIG found that GSA continues to not comply with that requirement.

Following the 2024 audit, GSA agreed to establish a search process, but the agency has not yet implemented it. GSA staff said in April that they were “evaluating resources to determine a timeline for updating the process,” the OIG wrote.

The report said that GSA’s delegation of Geospatial Data Act responsibilities is not effective, leading to some of the recurrent issues. GSA staffing cuts since 2025 have exacerbated those problems, the report added.

GSA did not respond to a request for comment on the OIG report by the time of publication.

GSA Chief Information Officer David Shive did sign a letter agreeing with all five of the OIG’s recommendations for improving geospatial data. The letter says GSA is “working on a plan to address” the recommendations.

Shive agreed to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of feasible corrective action plans for geospatial data accuracy, create a process for correcting IOLP congressional representative name data and establish protocols for GSA-wide compliance with Geospatial Data Act rules.

Shive also agreed to align the GSA’s geospatial strategy plan with a federal 2025-2035 strategic plan and update GSA’s GEOSPATIAL DATA SOP and Standards Guide.

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FBI removes Accenture contractor after missed security patch led to breach

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:29:20 -0400

The FBI has severed ties with a contractor working for Accenture amid a massive cybercrime intrusion that may have exposed data on thousands of bureau employees, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

Prolific cybercrime group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the hack last month. The data stolen contained employees’ addresses, phone numbers and information on their spouses, among other categories. It also revealed sensitive data on employees’ intelligence and surveillance roles, as well as private medical information.

Accenture is responsible for software patch management and maintaining custom code at the FBI, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the situation is sensitive. Oracle — whose PeopleSoft platform was the initial access point that ShinyHunters claimed to have exploited — provided the security patches that were not integrated, the person added.

FBI cybersecurity chief Brett Leatherman confirmed the removal of an unnamed contractor in a statement to Nextgov/FCW.

“To date, our review has determined that the incident occurred as the result of a security failure of a platform managed by a third-party organization — after a contractor failed to implement a security patch explicitly issued to secure the platform,” Leatherman said. “As such, the FBI has removed the contractor and taken all necessary steps to both mitigate any further risk and protect our workforce.”

The remarks offer the bureau’s clearest explanation yet of how the intrusion occurred, though they do not address why the patch was missed and how the FBI monitored the contractor’s work to ensure systems holding sensitive employee information were protected.

Reuters first reported the removal late Monday. The specific Accenture employee could not be immediately identified.

In a statement, the company said it’s “proud to support the mission of the FBI and will continue to do so.”

The breach follows recent findings from Google’s Mandiant that ShinyHunters had resumed widespread exploitation of a PeopleSoft vulnerability for which Oracle issued a patch in June.

The incident poses serious counterintelligence risks because the exposed records could help foreign intelligence services identify employees working on sensitive investigations and exploit personal information about them.

ShinyHunters has said it would not publish the stolen data, but its statement did not say the records had been deleted. Retired Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner, who previously led the Defense Information Systems Agency, told Nextgov/FCW last week that the group could still sell some or all of the information to foreign intelligence services or other buyers.

Authorities have also moved against suspected members of the group. Dutch police last week announced the arrest of an alleged leader, and Reuters reported Saturday that another suspected member, Saif al-Din Khader, had been detained in Jordan and was helping investigators locate other hackers.

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US spy chief tapped as White House AI czar

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 14:08:13 -0400

President Donald Trump named intelligence director Jay Clayton to serve as the White House AI czar, just two months after being sworn in as the nation’s top spy.

Clayton will head what Trump referred to in a Truth Social post as the “Super Intelligence Force” meant to coordinate the government’s engagement with various organizations, critical infrastructure providers and AI companies. The Trump administration has begun referring to AI as “super intelligence” after the president signed an executive order late last month calling for federal agencies to use the new phrasing.

According to its charter, the task force will create plans to handle AI-enabled threats, streamline breach notifications and improve government response capacities while aiming to avoid overregulation. Its creation follows growing public concerns over AI safety and cybersecurity risks, as well as heated political discussions over data center buildouts that power many of today’s AI systems.

“The risk of not being first is high,” Clayton told the Wall Street Journal in a Saturday exclusive that discussed the task force. “Not being first increases the identified, and unidentified, risks, particularly from our adversaries,” he said. “Being first will better enable us to address those risks on behalf of the American people.”

The task force features three vice chairs: Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael, Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson. Its members include Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other senior advisors, alongside external advisors like venture capitalist David Sacks — who previously worked as Trump’s AI and crypto czar early in the administration — and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. It will have 120 days to report on the risks and opportunities of AI and establish a plan for the federal government to tackle it.

The panel’s establishment marks a shift for an administration that has predominantly maintained a hands-off approach toward AI governance. But officials have faced mounting pressure over the past six months to respond as a new generation of sophisticated, autonomous AI models demonstrating advanced cybersecurity capabilities have repeatedly circumvented or escaped established technical safeguards.

Its creation highlights a steady group of voices in the administration and tech industry that believe the time for AI safeguard discussions should begin, though Trump and other officials have largely continued to lean toward a more relaxed approach to regulating the technology.

In public discussions, officials and researchers typically frame AI development as a trade-off between slowing down for safety and accelerating to maintain an edge over foreign adversaries pursuing AI for military and economic gains.

China has especially become a major player in the global AI race. Clayton’s appointment to the task force appears to signal a shift by the administration to cast AI as a geopolitical and national security subject area.

His dual role is a unique move for the White House, placing the current DNI — who oversees all 18 U.S. spy agencies — at the helm of broad domestic technology and economic policy discussions. Clayton brings a background as a corporate lawyer and former SEC chairman, making him a unique pick compared to people with more tech-focused backgrounds that hail from Silicon Valley.

The U.S. intelligence enterprise is poised to benefit from advanced AI adoption. Integrating AI has already transformed how spy agencies digest vast troves of collected data and build intelligence products, among other things.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that he welcomed the administration’s attention toward the fast-evolving technology but said Clayton’s new title lacks a coherent strategy.

“We still do not know what authority this new role will have, whether it will include developing safety standards or reviewing the most advanced models, or how it fits into the administration’s broader approach to AI,” Warner said in a statement. “That lack of clarity is especially concerning as leading AI companies themselves are confronting increasingly capable systems that can evade safeguards and exploit cybersecurity vulnerabilities.”

“I hope this appointment is an opportunity for the administration to move beyond slogans and toward a serious, coordinated national strategy for AI,” he added.

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Transportation works to ease fears about its new AI air traffic control tool

Edward Graham — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 08:00:00 -0400

The Transportation Department’s request to receive an additional $30 billion from Congress to push its massive air traffic control modernization project across the finish line would include new funding to finish overhauling existing IT systems and deploying new artificial intelligence capabilities.

Reactions to the recent rollout of new AI capabilities at Washington, D.C.-region airports, however, have underscored some of the broader national concerns about relying more on advanced technologies, with officials having to go out of their way to ease worries about the tools.

Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration, which is overseeing the ambitious effort to modernize management of U.S. airspace, announced on Sept. 21 that they officially rolled out a new AI-powered tool for Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Dulles International Airport and Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport that combines 200 different data streams into one system that can provide better flight traffic management.

FAA said at the time that the Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes and Trajectories — or SMART — tool synthesizes information like flight paths and weather patterns “to provide a comprehensive visualization of where planes are going, how much traffic the system can handle, and where congestion or weather could cause challenges.”

During a Monday press conference announcing the department’s request for $30 billion, Transportation Secretary Duffy cited SMART’s recent deployment and said it is “giving different tools to be predictive in what we not just see at this moment, but what we see in the future, because we want to deliver better for the American people, reduce their delays and reduce their cancelations.”

Duffy added, however, that while new tools like SMART can help enhance air traffic control management, the FAA's continued reliance on outdated systems means that more underlying tech modernization efforts are needed.

“I can operate SMART on that old operating system, but I want a new operating system so I can give new tools to the air traffic controllers,” he said.

Despite Transportation’s excitement about further deployments of the SMART tool, the fact that it is AI-powered has led to some unease from lawmakers and others.

Last month, prior to SMART’s rollout, Politico reported that airline industry officials had been “panicking” about the tool’s integration with other air traffic control systems before the FAA ultimately alleviated their concerns about the new capability.

Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., who represents the congressional district in which Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport is situated, expressed similar concerns and released a statement the day the SMART tool was set to be deployed that called for its impending rollout to be suspended, saying that “the FAA should not use my constituents as guinea pigs for an unproven AI air traffic control system.”

In an interview with Nextgov/FCW following SMART’s rollout at the D.C.-area airports, Beyer referenced growing global concerns about the capabilities of more advanced AI models and said his office received feedback expressing similar misgivings about the tool’s deployment.

“If it was just the constituents it would be one thing, but then the air traffic controllers were jumping in saying, ‘Hey, we don't know anything about this. We've not been part of the design. We didn't see anything ahead of time. We found that at the same time you did that it’s going to suddenly be made operational,’” he said.

Beyer said he subsequently spoke with FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford to share his concerns and had “a good conversation” with him about the SMART tool, including how it was created.

In a statement to Nextgov/FCW, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association said it “has not been involved in the design, testing or implementation of SMART and therefore cannot speak to its effect on the air traffic control workforce at this time.”

But Beyer said Bedford was reassuring and told him that the tool was designed by air traffic controllers who aren't in the towers right now but are the “30- and 40-year guys who've been doing it all their lives.” He added that Bedford also said SMART is operating at the D.C. region’s Terminal Radar Approach Control facility in Warrenton, Virginia, and not within the towers at Dulles or National airports.

“I think the feedback was you almost need big, busy airports in order to generate enough information to make AI relevant,” Beyer said about SMART first being deployed for the large airports in the Washington, D.C. region, instead of being piloted at smaller airports.

He added that he told Bedford “it would have been good to explain that to the American public,” particularly given the current global discussion around new AI capabilities.

In response to a request for comment, Transportation pointed to a Sept. 22 tweet from Duffy, in which he reposted Beyer’s release expressing concerns about the tool’s deployment and wrote: “Here’s the truth: HUMANS still control the airspace and HUMANS still make the calls. With SMART, we are giving air traffic controllers new technology and better data to make critical decisions.”

In a Fox News clip that was shared with the post, Duffy called SMART “a tool that’s used to better manage traffic” and said air traffic controllers “are the ones who will always manage airspace.”

Recent high-profile incidents where frontier AI models have taken undirected action — including one case in which OpenAI agents escaped from their testing environment and hacked into Hugging Face on their own volition — have exacerbated concerns from tech executives, lawmakers and others about whether guardrails are needed on advanced AI technologies.

President Donald Trump has been vocal about his desire to not overregulate the AI sector to ensure that the U.S. continues to outpace China in development of the technologies.

Duffy has previously drawn a distinction between the frontier models that have raised alarms from some sectors and the AI tools being used to help modernize the nation’s air traffic control systems.

During an event hosted by the National Artificial Intelligence Association in Washington, D.C. last month, Duffy said the air traffic control system upgrades are “going to be driven not by the most complicated AI, but AI that will provide information to [controllers], and will, I think, have a huge impact on the flying public.”

He also stressed that AI capabilities will never replace human air traffic controllers — a sentiment that the National Air Traffic Controllers Association similarly expressed.

“NATCA believes any new technology should complement and not replace the experience, training, and professional judgment of air traffic controllers who are responsible for the safety of the National Airspace System,” the association said.

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GSA memo to set AI-specific acquisition rules

Christian Robles — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 05:04:00 -0400

The General Services Administration is adjusting its acquisition regulation to include language aimed at protecting government data that contractors process in large language models.

Buried on page 129 of an agency memo signed by GSA Senior Procurement Executive Jeffrey Koses is a section titled “Basic Safeguarding of Data within Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence Systems.” The section details what data protections contractors and subcontractors must include when their LLMs process government data.

For example, the rules state contractors cannot use government data to train LLMs, inform advertising or sell to a third party. Contractors must also implement data handling procedures, including encrypted data transmission and audit logging systems. The memo clarifies the language does not apply to LLMs that contractors use internally for business purposes or products where the LLM functionality is “incidental to” its primary purpose.

The memo is originally from January, but states GSA signed off on the section with the LLM acquisition language in July and that it takes effect on Oct. 19.

GSA had sought to enact a similar draft LLM acquisition rule through a public comment period but ran into intense pushback from industry groups even after a round of modifications. Several stakeholders welcomed the memo’s take on LLM acquisition safeguards.

"GSA’s final AI terms and conditions mark a significant improvement from prior draft versions, and establishes a stronger foundation for safeguarding government data in AI systems,” Quinn Anex-Ries, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said in a Thursday statement.

Anex-Ries praised the rule for “almost entirely” removing language requiring contractors to adhere to “unbiased AI principles.” That language was one of the most controversial provisions of GSA’s draft rule, with some industry groups warning the agency there’s no clear way to test for compliance.

“The AI clause changed in ways industry asked for. It self-deletes when LLM use stays inside the contractor's own back-office systems, or when LLM functionality is incidental to a product the Government isn't using for AI. Flowdown reaches only subcontractors who design, develop, deploy or operate the model,” Kevin Martin, GSA program manager at Government Acquisitions Inc, wrote on LinkedIn.

However, “the workload that remains is still substantial for anyone whose product has LLM functionality in scope: a 120-day disclosure deadline, 72-hour incident reporting, deletion of embeddings and fine-tuned weights at closeout, 30 days of notice and concurrent access before a major model swap, and Government rights to benchmark the deployed model for bias and truthfulness,” he added.

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