FCW Insider: August 18, 2021

OPM's new rules for student hiring

New rules published Tuesday by the Office of Personnel Management give agencies direct hire authority for appointing post-secondary students.

IRS looks to experiment with augmented reality

Taxpayers might soon be able to file their financial documents with the help of AR capabilities thanks to an experimental procurement technique the IRS is using to test and deploy innovative technologies and solutions.

Government-industry communication, the Soraya Correa way

Steve Kelman takes a look at the former DHS chief procurement officer's push for reverse industry days and other dialogue-drivers.

Watchdog says contractor oversight was lacking in Afghanistan

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction's newest report calls out the government's failure to oversee contractors as a source of waste, fraud and abuse.

Quick Hits

*** The General Services Administration is looking for contractor support in multiple IT procurement and strategy offices to help with price transparency, obtaining best value and to generally help "to run IT like a business by leveraging authoritative data to make data-driven decisions and analyze tradeoffs between cost, quality and value."

*** Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is calling on President Joe Biden to reinstate a ban on the social video network TikTok after it was reported that the Chinese government asserted an ownership stake in TikTok's parent company ByteDance. The Trump administration announced plans to ban TikTok, claiming national security risks, but that ban was never put in place. The ban was revoked by executive order this June.