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Tech bills of the week: Creating data privacy standards; Securing critical infrastructure from drones; and more

Alexandra Kelley, Natalie Alms, Edward Graham, and David DiMolfetta — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:11:00 -0400

Data privacy framework

A group of Republican lawmakers announced the introduction of two new data privacy bills on April 22: the SECURE Data Act and the GUARD Financial Data Act. Top Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the House Financial Services Committee — led by Reps. Brett Guthrie, R-Ky., and French Hill, R-Ark., respectively — teamed up to create and introduce the proposals.

Both measures focus on the same six pillars: data minimization, data access rights, data deletion rights, sensitive data, national standards and avoiding dual regulation.

The majority of these pillars give consumers control over how their data is collected and shared between institutions. It also defines sensitive data and mandates that controllers of that data take on more responsibility to inform consumers as to why and how their data is being collected and provide opt-out options.

They also create national standards to avoid the patchwork of differing laws across states.

“The Energy and Commerce Data Privacy Working Group was created to reset the discussion on comprehensive data privacy, taking wide ranging input from stakeholders and crafting a consensus bill that protects the privacy and security of Americans’ personal data,” the press release reads. “The SECURE Data Act is the result. This bill establishes clear, enforceable protections so that Americans remain in charge of their own data and companies are held accountable for its safe keeping.”

Protecting critical infrastructure from drones

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., introduced legislation on Thursday that would allow critical infrastructure operators to better guard against drone incursions, including enabling them to use kinetic solutions to bring down rogue aerial systems.

While federal, state, local and tribal entities and law enforcement officials have the authority to use counter-drone measures, the bill says that “private owners and operators of critical infrastructure lack clear statutory authority to independently detect, track, and mitigate in-flight unmanned aircraft systems threats.”

The legislation would establish a national certification program that would allow trained critical infrastructure owners and operators to take down unauthorized drones. Additionally, the proposal would direct the Department of Homeland Security to create a grant program that would enable critical infrastructure personnel to “purchase, install, and operate approved counter-unmanned aircraft systems.”

“Our hospitals, power plants, water treatment facilities, and other critical infrastructure sites can’t remain sitting ducks for potential drone attacks,” Cotton said in a statement. “My bill will ensure these important sites are protected from all unauthorized drones.”

No AI chatbots in kids' toys

The AI Children's Toy Safety Act, introduced by Rep. Blake Moore, R-Utah, aims to completely ban the creation and manufacturing of toys that include AI chatbots, citing data privacy concerns.

“Every aspect of how we adopt artificial intelligence must be human-centric,” Moore’s press release reads. “America will continue to compete, innovate, and strive to break barriers in AI development, but we must prioritize basic ethics and restrain these tools where they will negatively impact human activity when it comes to privacy, safety, human development, and addiction.”

Federal action against biosecurity threats

Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Ted Budd, R-N.C., both on the Senate Armed Services Committee, introduced legislation on Tuesday to protect against biological threats at a national security level.

The Engineering Biology Readiness Act comes as advanced generative artificial intelligence is projected to have a major impact on scientific research and discovery. It seeks to renew requirements for a National Biodefense Strategy and creates an interagency coordination effort to offer recommendations to mitigate the risks associated with frontier biological research.

“Bioengineering has tremendous potential to accelerate innovation in health care, science, industry, and more. But there are also significant risks if these innovations are used the wrong way,” said Kaine. “As this field continues to change and grow, this bipartisan legislation would help Congress assess and mitigate those risks, while ensuring Americans continue to benefit from advances in biotechnology.”

The proposed bill would specifically renew the congressional reporting requirement for the biodefense strategy and have it last for five years to ensure the inclusion of advances in biotechnology.

Balancing tech’s energy costs with low prices

A cohort of Republican House lawmakers introduced legislation on Tuesday that attempts to thread the needle between increasing manufacturing and technology usage while keeping energy prices low.

The DATA Act of 2026, introduced in the lower chamber by Reps. Nick Begich, R-Ark., Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, and Burgess Owens, R-Utah, targets updating federal regulations to allow hyperscalers to maintain isolated, off-grid power plants to support energy generation for their individual products, thereby protecting consumers from rising rates.

“America must win the race to lead in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies,” said Begich in the press release. “The DATA Act allows manufacturers to operate on fully self-contained, ‘grid-of-one’ power systems, so innovation can scale without forcing households to subsidize massive new energy demands or straining local utilities. For Alaska, this approach is especially critical. By leveraging our stranded energy assets and vast resource potential, this legislation creates a pathway for new jobs, new revenue, and long-term economic growth without raising energy costs for American families.”

Companion legislation exists in the Senate, introduced by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark.

Creating clear export control standards for chip sales to China

The chairman of the House China Select Committee rolled out legislation on Tuesday that would set guidelines on the types of advanced semiconductors that can be sold by U.S. companies to China-based firms.

The measure, from Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., attempts to limit China’s access to the most powerful chips that underpin artificial intelligence technologies. His bill, the Semiconductor Controls Adjusted to Limit Exports — or SCALE — Act, would direct the Secretary of Commerce, in coordination with the Director of National Intelligence, “to implement a process for establishing a rolling annual standard for the sale of certain integrated circuits to certain countries.”

The bill also sets a “rolling technical threshold” on the types of chips that can be sold to the Chinese market, with a press release from the congressman’s office saying that exports would only be permitted “up to 110 percent of the performance of chips that U.S. adversaries can already manufacture domestically at meaningful production levels which can be defined as at least 25 percent of their annual demand.”

Some U.S. lawmakers are concerned about China gaining access to American-made semiconductors and manufacturing equipment that can allow Beijing to ramp up development of its own more powerful AI tools. The bill’s introduction comes the same week that the House Foreign Affairs Committee advanced a package of similar export control measures designed to limit China’s access to powerful chips.

“The SCALE Act will help secure the future of America’s dominance in artificial intelligence by ensuring American companies never sell the best chips in the world to China,” Moolenaar said in a statement. “By grounding semiconductor export controls in objective metrics, we can ensure a level playing field for American business, while protecting national security as China races to catch up to us.”

Improving agencies’ use of risk assessment tools

A bipartisan House proposal introduced on Tuesday looks to establish a federal commission to verify that agencies are using appropriate and accurate hazard risk assessment tools purchased from the private sector.

The bill, the Advancing Consistent and Credible Use of Risk Assessment Tools and Evaluation — or ACCURATE — Act, is sponsored by Reps. Scott Franklin, R-Fla., and Gabe Amo, D-R.I.

Rep. Max Miller, R-Ohio, introduced the measure in the previous Congress.

The legislation would direct the Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology to create a “Commission on Hazard Risk Assessment Tools.” In a press release, Franklin’s office said this body “will recommend standards, methodologies, and procurement best practices to make these tools more consistent, credible, and transparent,” which would then be reviewed by the under secretary to determine whether or not they should be mandated for federal agencies to follow.

“Federal agencies are making significant decisions about disaster response, infrastructure, and insurance using private-sector risk tools, but too often there is no consistent standard for how those tools are evaluated,” Franklin said in a statement. “The ACCURATE Act brings greater transparency and accountability to the process by establishing clear guidelines for how these tools are reviewed and used. This is about making sure federal decisions are based on sound, reliable data and taxpayer dollars are being spent wisely.”

Postal Service electronic notifications

Rep. Hillary Scholten, D-Mich., introduced legislation on Thursday that would direct the U.S. Postal Service to study the feasibility of providing customers with electronic notifications about weather events and their impact on mail delivery times.

Scholten’s office said in a press release that USPS is currently not authorized to contact mail recipients to inform them of delivery delays.

“My Postal Alert and Weather Preparedness Act would take a commonsense step to modernize USPS communications so families can be better informed, plan ahead, and stay safe during inclement weather,” Scholten said in a statement. “This is about making sure our federal agencies are working smarter and more effectively for the people they serve.”

Grants for AI-powered veteran suicide prevention

Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, R-Pa., formally introduced a measure on Thursday that would direct the Department of Veterans Affairs to establish a grant program to provide support to organizations outside the agency looking to leverage artificial intelligence and more powerful predictive analytics for veteran-focused suicide prevention efforts. The bill is co-sponsored by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J.

A discussion draft of Mackenzie’s bill, the Data-Driven Suicide Prevention and Outreach Act, previously received consideration during a House Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Health legislative hearing in January.

The pilot program created through the legislation would be in effect through 2029 and include guardrails around the use, security and privacy of veterans’ data. VA has an internal predictive model, known as the Recovery Engagement and Coordination for Health-Veteran Enhanced Treatment — or REACH VET — program, that uses machine learning to identify veterans in the top 0.1% of suicide risk by analyzing health records for specific indicators of potential self-harm.

In an interview with Nextgov/FCW last month, Mackenzie said his proposal builds upon VA models, like REACH VET, “that already have been out there and use predictive analytics to identify vets who are at the highest statistical risk for suicide, and proactively kind of connect them with tailored care and outreach.”

He added that his measure would “allow grant funding for the development of those predictive models created with AI and machine learning, so that we can figure out what’s best to evaluate those risk factors and figure out which ones are the ones that we should be paying attention to most closely that contribute to incidents of suicide.”

Stopping fraud in federal programs

On Thursday, the heads of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the House Budget Committee, James Comer, R-Ky., and Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, introduced two bills meant to tamp down on fraud in government programs.

The first directs agencies to delay government payments if there’s reason to think that they’re fraudulent, and allows the Treasury Department to return payment requests to government agencies if they’re at risk of fraud.

The other directs Treasury to work with agencies to verify payment information before they go out the door by expanding tools like the existing Do Not Pay system.

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, also unveiled an anti-fraud legislative package, bundling several existing proposals, this week.

Warrant requirements for searching Americans’ data

Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., introduced legislation on Thursday that would require the government to obtain a warrant before conducting searches of U.S. citizens’ personal data, as well as provide Americans with a “right of action” to sue if their Fourth Amendment protections are violated. The bill aims to address gray areas and controversial surveillance practices where existing law allows the government to access Americans’ data without judicial permission.

The measure, the Surveillance Accountability Act, would mandate that the government “not access any data, metadata, or personal information held by a third party, including financial services providers, telecommunication service providers, internet service providers, cloud storage companies, or data brokers, without a valid warrant, regardless of whether the third party consents or cooperates.”

It includes a list of exceptions, including for plain view searches, verification of government-issued photo IDs and the collection and review of publicly available data. These exceptions, however, would not extend to biometric data obtained through facial recognition systems or to vehicle metadata collected from license plate readers.

In a press release, Massie said “warrantless searches are unconstitutional, and this does not change when the data the government seeks is in digital formats or held by a third party.”

Three-year extension of FISA 702

House Republicans rolled out a new measure on Thursday to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for an additional three years. The bill includes minimal reforms to the controversial surveillance measure but does not require the FBI to obtain a warrant before conducting searches of U.S. citizens’ data collected through the program.

The proposed 702 reauthorization, which is set to expire on April 30 after Congress passed a 10-day extension of the program last week, does include several new oversight provisions.

The statute lets intelligence agencies compel internet service providers to furnish communications of foreigners located abroad without a warrant. But the process can also collect U.S. person communications if they are in contact with a foreign target, raising Fourth Amendment concerns when the contents of those U.S. person calls, text messages and emails are subsequently searched.

The measure would direct the attorney general to issue new procedures around congressional access to the proceedings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and also require monthly audits of the FBI’s 702-related searches of Americans’ data by a civil liberties protection officer within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

It would also expand criminal penalties for abuse of Americans’ collected data, including prohibiting government personnel from targeting U.S. citizens through the program. The Government Accountability Office would also be mandated to audit targeting procedures and report its findings to Congress.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., also introduced a clean reauthorization bill in the upper chamber that would extend Section 702 for an additional three years that does not include any of the oversight reforms included in the House proposal.

Transparency standards for AI-generated content

Rep. Valerie Foushee, D-N.C., introduced legislation on Friday that would direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology “to facilitate and inform the development of technical standards and guidelines relating to the identification of content created by generative artificial intelligence” — including digital watermarking and fingerprinting for audio or visual content generated by AI.

The measure, co-sponsored by Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., and Republican Delegate James Moylan of Guam, would also require NIST to assist content providers with labeling content that has been modified at all through the use of AI.

“Deepfakes and AI-generated audio and visual content poses major risks to consumers, our elections, and public trust,” Foushee said in a statement. “Clear labeling and transparency of this content must be required so Americans can distinguish what images, audio, and videos are artificially generated.”

Congressional commission to review economic impacts of AI

House lawmakers introduced a measure on Monday to help prepare for the coming impact of broad artificial intelligence adoption on the U.S. economy by establishing a bipartisan, bicameral commission to develop policy recommendations for Congress.

The bill, from Reps. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., and Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., would direct this commission to “evaluate workforce development, education systems, federal AI adoption, and strategies to strengthen U.S. competitiveness in emerging technologies.”

The House measure is a companion to legislation introduced in the upper chamber last month by Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D.

“Artificial intelligence will reshape every sector of our economy, and Congress has a responsibility to prepare for those changes,” Obernolte said in a statement. “This legislation brings together experts and lawmakers to develop clear, actionable recommendations to strengthen our workforce, support American workers, and ensure the United States continues to lead the world in innovation.”

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House lawmakers introduce quantum initiative reauthorization

Alexandra Kelley — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:07:00 -0400

House lawmakers introduced their version of the National Quantum Initiative Reauthorization Act on Thursday, which focuses on developing and advancing quantum information sciences and technology applications.

Led by Rep. Randy Weber, R-Texas, and cosponsored by Reps. Brian Babin, R-Texas, and Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., the bill’s agenda is coordinated through the National Science and Technology Council’s Subcommittee on Quantum Information Science, which steers federal agencies to identify use cases for quantum information technologies as well as hurdles to development and scaling.

The bill also reinstates the National Quantum Advisory Committee, a provision included in the original NQIA as well as in the Senate version of the reauthorization. It also supports the creation of international and private sector partnerships.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology would be tasked to help set standards for new QIST technologies under the House text. Some of these standards are related to the deployment of post-quantum cryptography, and the bill also directs the NIST head to conduct an analysis that can promote the deployment of post-quantum cryptography standards –– a subject that is omitted from a draft QIST executive order that has yet to be formally debuted.

A markup of the House NQIA is scheduled for April 29.

The Senate introduced its version of the reauthorization early in the year, led by Sens. Todd Young, R-Ind., and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. The bill passed out of committee following an April 14 markup, where seven amendments were added to the text. It will now go to the Senate floor for a vote.

As with the Senate version, industry’s reaction primarily focuses on how the NQIA Reauthorization legislation will help quantum technology innovations make it from the lab to market.

Matt Cimaglia, the founder and managing partner of Quantum Coast Capital, told Nextgov/FCW that the focus needs to be on how QIST systems are applied and secured, as well as how institutions prepare for their impact.

“What stands out about the House’s approach to the National Quantum Initiative Act is the recognition that quantum technology is becoming part of our national infrastructure,” Cimaglia said. “If we approach this thoughtfully, quantum technology won’t be something we react to. It will be something we’re ready to use.”

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NIST is giving fingerprint examiners better tools for a messy job

John Breeden II — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:21:00 -0400

Americans have spent generations watching detectives in dark trenchcoats pore over complex crime scenes in movies and on television. They examine the room, snap photos and break out the familiar blue powder to dust for fingerprints. The ritual is so familiar that it can seem almost automatic.

What those scenes rarely capture is how much effort goes into making fingerprint examination more accurate, more consistent and easier to teach. That quieter work is exactly what the National Institute of Standards and Technology is trying to strengthen.

NIST recently released two resources aimed at helping forensic fingerprint examiners do their jobs better. One is a fully annotated version of NIST’s Special Database 302, a collection of roughly 10,000 latent fingerprint images. The other is what NIST calls OpenLQM, newly created open-source software that helps assess the quality of latent fingerprints and sort them according to how much useful detail they contain. NIST says the two releases are meant to improve forensic fingerprint examination, which remains an important part of many criminal investigations.

Fingerprint analysis is one of those forensic tools that many people assume was perfected long ago. In reality, examiners often work with partial, smudged or otherwise imperfect prints recovered from real-world objects. Training people to evaluate those prints well takes experience, repetition and good examples. It also increasingly requires better ways to train software systems that can assist human examiners without replacing them.

NIST says the newly completed dataset will help train both human examiners and machine learning algorithms to distinguish important features and weigh their value as evidence.

The most vivid part of the NIST fingerprint accuracy project is how ordinary the source material really was. As NIST computer scientist Greg Fiumara explained, “The prints are from people we recruited to come in and do things like write a note, pick up a circuit board, handle a dollar bill, that sort of thing. Then we recovered the prints they left behind using different methods that crime scene investigators commonly use.”

So the new collection is not made up of idealized prints from a textbook. They are the kinds of latent impressions that people leave behind all the time while moving through everyday life.

That realism has been part of the project from the beginning. When NIST first released SD 302 in 2019, it described the database as a set of latent fingerprints left on everyday items by a few hundred volunteers in a lab setting, with other personal information stripped away. The point was not to create a neat archive of perfect examples, but to give researchers and examiners a more realistic way to measure accuracy and test methods against the kinds of prints they actually encounter.

What is new now is that the entire collection has been annotated. Those annotations mark details about fingerprint quality, including regions where ridge patterns are clear, smudged or incomplete.

NIST says those markings make the dataset much more valuable as a teaching tool because they show both humans and algorithms what to look for and what to avoid when evaluating a print. The annotations add structure and interpretive guidance to a dataset that already had broad global use. NIST says more than 1,000 research organizations in more than 90 countries have downloaded the collection since its initial release.

The second part of the project is just as practical. OpenLQM gives examiners a way to score the quality of a latent print on a scale from zero to 100. And it can run as a standard executable or be embedded inside another program or application for maximum portability. The new software can help investigators sort through large volumes of prints and focus their attention first on the ones most likely to contain useful identifying details.

As Fiumara put it, “you give OpenLQM a fingerprint and it returns a number from zero to 100 that is an assessment of the print’s quality.” NIST says the software was adapted from a tool once limited to U.S. law enforcement. It is now being made openly available in a form that can run on Mac, Windows or Linux.

Since the software is open-source and available for anyone to download, NIST is not just improving a government tool for internal use; it’s pushing better forensic resources into the wider scientific and practitioner community. The agency’s biometrics resources page now lists both Special Database 302 and OpenLQM among its available forensic databases and software tools, reinforcing the point that this is part of a broader effort to build reproducible, shareable infrastructure around forensic biometrics.

What makes the fingerprint accuracy project especially useful is that it focuses on the less glamorous side of forensic work. Instead of chasing some dramatic new breakthrough, NIST is improving the underlying tools that fingerprint examiners rely on every day. Better data, clearer annotations and a faster way to assess print quality may not look dramatic from the outside, but they can make difficult work more consistent and efficient.

That is what gives this release its value. It strengthens one of forensic science’s oldest disciplines without pretending to reinvent it. Human judgment still matters, and fingerprint work will probably always involve a measure of skill and interpretation.

So all those movies and TV shows with investigators (still wearing stylish black trenchcoats) dusting for prints will still be accurate — at least for now. But with better training material and advanced tools, that work can become more consistent and easier to teach while also producing more trustworthy results.

John Breeden II is an award-winning journalist and reviewer with over 20 years of experience covering technology. He is the CEO of the Tech Writers Bureau, a group that creates technological thought leadership content for organizations of all sizes. Twitter: @LabGuys

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Commerce goes direct to hyperscalers with $4.1B cloud pact

Nick Wakeman — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 13:52:00 -0400

The Commerce Department is planning a 10-year, $4.1 billion blanket purchase agreement for cloud computing capabilities and only the big hyperscalers need apply.

In a Sam.gov notice posted Thurday, the department said the BPA will only be open to native hyperscale cloud services providers.

The department said it is going with a direct to CSP strategy because of the “highly specialized technical requirements, including massive compute elasticity (25,000+ concurrent vCPUs), proprietary 100+ tbps (terabits per second) global backbones, and specific hardware density for AI/ML, and weather modeling.”

Given those requirements, Commerce decided that only “original equipment manufacturers acting as cloud service providers” will be eligible for award. The inclusion of the OEM language effectively locks out resellers and systems integrators from competing as primes.

Commerce is using the General Services Administration’s eBuy portal to create the BPA, so any bidders will need to hold a GSA Schedule for cloud services.

The Sam.gov notice does not ask for any comments or responses. Commerce said the posting was to give notice of its cloud strategy.

In many ways, Commerce is following a strategy similar to the Defense Department and its Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability vehicle with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Oracle and Google Cloud.

JWCC was awarded in December 2022 and has a $9 billion ceiling. It runs through June 2028.

According to GovTribe data, 185 task orders have been awarded under JWCC. AWS has captured 77 of those, followed by Microsoft with 75. Oracle has won 19 task orders and Google follows with 14.

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White House accuses China of ‘deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns’ to steal US AI models

Edward Graham and David DiMolfetta — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:40:00 -0400

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on Thursday accused China and other foreign entities of engaging in “deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill U.S. frontier AI systems,” and said that the Trump administration will be taking steps to safeguard domestic artificial intelligence products.

In a memo sent to federal agencies, the White House office warned that these distillation campaigns — in which a deluge of requests are sent to an AI model in order to train a knockoff version of it — are allowing bad actors to steal proprietary information from U.S. companies.

“Models developed from surreptitious, unauthorized distillation campaigns like this do not replicate the full performance of the original,” the memo said. “They do, however, enable foreign actors to release products that appear to perform comparably on select benchmarks at a fraction of the cost.”

Anthropic in February accused three Chinese-based AI companies — DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and MiniMax — of overwhelming its Claude model with 16 million exchanges from roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts.

Those allegations came the same month that OpenAI sent a letter to members of the House China Select Committee that said, in part, that it had seen evidence “indicative of ongoing attempts by DeepSeek to distill frontier models of OpenAI and other US frontier labs, including through new, obfuscated methods.”

Thursday’s memo does not cite any specific companies engaged in distillation campaigns against U.S. AI firms. But OSTP Director Michael Kratsios said in an X post that “these foreign entities are using tens of thousands of proxies and jailbreaking techniques in coordinated campaigns to systematically extract American breakthroughs.”

OSTP told agencies that the Trump administration will be taking a series of steps to expand engagement with U.S. companies and crack down on foreign-based distillation campaigns.

These include sharing more information with the private sector about attempts to conduct large-scale distillation attacks, enabling companies “to better coordinate against such attacks;” partnering with firms to develop a set of best practices to counter these campaigns; and looking at developing new steps to hold foreign actors accountable for their actions.

The memo said these actions are consistent with the White House’s AI Action Plan, which was released in July 2025 and emphasizes the importance of “preventing our adversaries from free-riding on our innovation and investment.”

The White House’s warning about China-based distillation campaigns is the latest salvo in the U.S. and China’s ongoing competition to lead the global AI race. It also comes as major American AI firms have rolled out what they say are advanced AI models that have exquisite cybersecurity capabilities that could cause national security risks if they fall into the wrong hands.

Retired Gen. Paul Nakasone, who led the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, said the administration may consider export controls, diplomatic protests and tailored technology restrictions as potential responses to the distillation efforts.

“And we’re going to be very, very careful about how we’re going to share that [AI technology] with a series of different partners,” he said, speaking at a Wednesday roundtable with reporters in Nashville when asked about the campaigns. Nakasone now leads Vanderbilt University’s Institute of National Security.

Given China’s increasingly bellicose tone toward Taiwan, and the potential for preemptive actions against the U.S. in advance of a full-scale invasion of that country, lawmakers have also been worried about how technology advances will ultimately benefit Beijing. Through China’s military-civil fusion strategy, the country has moved to enhance its military strength by removing barriers with its commercial sector.

President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet next month in Beijing for a summit to discuss a host of issues, including export controls on semiconductors and IP theft.

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IRS lacks transparent plans to leverage tech in the face of staffing cuts, GAO and employees say

Natalie Alms — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:16:00 -0400

The IRS is banking on using technology to do more with fewer employees. But staff inside the IRS say that how the agency will do that — considering that its own IT shop has lost personnel — is still unclear, and Congress’ watchdog says that the IRS still isn’t being transparent about its long-term tech plans.

The IRS continues to rely on some systems that date back to the 1960s. It’s been trying to modernize them for decades, and was using some of the money from the Inflation Reduction Act to do so under the Biden administration. Congress has since clawed back most of that funding, and the remainder is set to run out in fiscal year 2028.

A few months after President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office, the IRS paused its modernization work to re-evaluate its strategy. IRS leadership said they wanted to rely more on generative artificial intelligence to convert legacy code into modern programming languages, and the agency set a goal to finish most of its tech modernization efforts within two years.

Over a year later, the IRS still hasn’t provided the Government Accountability Office with details on its new modernization plan, said David Hinchman, director of IT and cybersecurity at GAO, during a recent roundtable on the IRS.

“Recent changes to IRS' long-term plans have also cast uncertainty over what the agency's modernized end state will look like,” said Hinchman, explaining that the IRS has published “very little” on its new approach.

That’s despite the fact that technological progress is a lynchpin in the IRS’ bigger, overall strategy. After already pushing out over 28,000 employees since Trump took office, the tax agency is aiming to shed more staff and use technology to make up the difference, it said in its recent budget request.

“Without modernization, the IRS would be unable to sustain performance with a reduced headcount,” the budget request said.

Compounding the lack of transparency is a pause in strategic workforce planning, said Hinchman, which would help ensure that the IRS has the right workforce to get the job done.

The IRS didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The IRS hasn’t spared its IT shop from the workforce upheaval that has taken place over the last year. The IRS lost over 2,600 IT employees between January 25 and December 18 of last year, a 31% reduction, according to the National Taxpayer Advocate’s 2025 report.

The IRS also moved over 1,000 IT staff to the office of the chief operating officer last winter, and transferred some of those to jobs helping with filing season, along with human resources specialists.

Agency IT leadership recently told staff that the agency plans to hire 175 IT employees, a tech employee at the agency said.

Even so, IRS leadership isn’t sharing much information internally on the agency’s current plan for its technology, a second tech employee told Nextgov/FCW. Detailed IT strategic plans used to be available within the agency, they said. What’s now available is very abstract.

“It’s hilarious,” they said of the claim that the IRS can use tech to make up for fewer employees.

Using technology to do more with less might be possible in the long run, but “not right now,” the first IT employee told Nextgov/FCW. “We are so short-staffed.”

Despite the staffing shortages, the IRS is planning to capitalize on updates to the online accounts it offers for taxpayers to give Americans access to more self-service options.

The agency is also building a single interface for customer service representatives to allow them to see data about taxpayers that’s currently stored in disparate systems in one centralized place. The IRS thinks this will cut down on call times by speeding up the work of those manning the phone lines. The agency has been trying to build this system since the second Obama administration.

The IRS has also long been working to modernize its core system for individual tax account data, called the individual master file.

The tax agency did put its long-awaited new processing engine for the system into production last year, it said, but more work needs to be done. The effort is one of the most complex modernization efforts in the federal government, and the individual master file touches hundreds of other IRS applications.

“They are shoving AI at us and they think that with that, things can be converted super quickly,” the first employee said of efforts to modernize legacy systems. “But they don’t have the right tools for us yet.”

Frank Bisignano — the head of the Social Security Administration who is also helming a new chief executive officer role at the IRS — told senators earlier this month that data and AI are helping the tax agency with enforcement, even as it’s lost staff and is set to lose more under the Trump administration’s recent budget request.

But GAO reported recently that the agency is facing a skills shortage that could hamper its ability to roll out AI, including systems to prioritize audits.

Among the things that aren’t clear to Congress’ watchdog are how the IRS’ new plans relate to its old strategy to modernize, as well as how and if certain endeavors are continuing, said Hinchman. This isn’t the first time that watchdogs have dinged the IRS for a lack of IT planning.

Leadership under the new administration has altered at least some efforts started during the Biden years. The IRS launched an initiative to digitize paper with funding from the Inflation Reduction Act in 2023 by developing an in-house system. Last spring, leadership directed the IRS to stop working on the project, despite spending $61 million on it already, and shifted to a new approach using contractors, according to a watchdog report.

The IRS also shuttered the Direct File program, launched in 2024 to help certain eligible Americans file their taxes with the government online for free.

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Autonomous weapons will be ‘key and essential part’ of warfare, Joint Chiefs chair says

David DiMolfetta — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:35:00 -0400

NASHVILLE — Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine said Thursday that autonomous weapons are going to be a “key and essential part of everything we do” when asked about how such tools would fit into the future of warfare.

Speaking during a fireside chat at Vanderbilt University’s Asness Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats, Caine said “we are doing a lot of thinking about this in the joint force right now” on how autonomous tech would be applied to areas like drones and command-and-control operations.

His remarks signal that the U.S. military is keen on crafting plans to further adopt artificial intelligence tools and other evolving technologies that would automate national security decisions made in the Defense Department.

“Probably everybody in this room uses some flavor of a [large language model] every single day,” he said, adding the same can’t be said for staff in the halls of the Pentagon. “So, we have to really normalize this and become early adopters.”

The remarks come as observers weigh tensions between the Pentagon and Anthropic, which recently unveiled a powerful frontier AI model, Mythos Preview, that was held back from public release over cybersecurity risks, paired with a new initiative to study its effects on global networks.

Intelligence community units have expressed interest in Mythos, Nextgov/FCW previously reported. The NSA, a component of the DOD, has been granted access to it, Axios reported Sunday.

Earlier this year, Anthropic declined to ease restrictions against its tools being used for domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons for Pentagon use, triggering a “supply chain risk” designation from the Defense Department and a White House order that all federal agencies phase out their uses of Anthropic tools.

The company has legally challenged the move, and a federal judge issued a temporary injunction on the designation and ban in late March. The government has said it intends to appeal the injunction.

This week, President Donald Trump said in a CNBC interview that the company is “shaping up” and can “be of great use” in the future, a sign that tensions between Anthropic and the government may be easing up.

The use of AI in military operations often draws scrutiny because it can speed up battlefield decisions while blurring human accountability, and it can raise doubts about whether such systems would reliably comply with the laws of war. Lawmakers have asked the Pentagon if AI systems were used in a deadly strike on a school in Iran that occurred in the opening hours of the U.S.-Israel war against Tehran.

Caine also said U.S. government agencies need to be “better buyers” for the private sector. “We have to write better contracts,” he said, elaborating that current acquisition frameworks are slowing contract workflows.

Contracts should be structured so risk is shared between buyers and sellers with the goal of bringing better outcomes for servicemembers, he added.

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GSA announces latest cohort of Presidential Innovation Fellows

Edward Graham — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:47:00 -0400

The General Services Administration on Thursday announced its 2026 cohort of Presidential Innovation Fellows, with the hand-picked technology experts set to be embedded within 10 different federal agencies.

In a release announcing the latest PIF class, GSA said the 17 technologists selected for the program include experts from leading U.S. companies and highlight the agency’s focus “on hiring top technology talent to deliver on key Administration and priority projects.”

The fellows will now spend a yearlong tour of duty at one of the 10 federal agencies selected to participate in this year’s PIF program, including the:

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
Department of Energy
Department of State
Department of Veterans Affairs
Executive Office of the President
National Institute of Standards and Technology
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
U.S. Coast Guard

To participate in the PIF program, agencies submit project proposals to GSA detailing the issue areas they would like fellows to address, including outlining whether those focuses are “problems of critical agency and/or national priority,” and detailing a “clear line to positive impact, benefit, or customer experience for the public.” GSA then chooses the fellows and details them to some of the agencies.

“We are driving President [Donald] Trump’s mandate to deliver the most skilled technology workforce in the history of the U.S. government,” GSA Administrator Edward Forst said in a statement. “To achieve high-impact work that advances Administration priorities, we are embedding strong technical leaders who can perform with discipline and speed, filling critical skills gaps across our partner agencies and preparing them to meet the demands of the future.”

GSA said PIF fellows will provide guidance and support for projects designed to enhance public services and customer experience, including helping with implementation of the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act, developing artificial intelligence tools to help speed up permitting for new infrastructure projects and helping to establish “an AI-ready Department of Veterans Affairs workforce and executing concrete AI and automation initiatives that improve veteran care delivery.”

The PIF program was first launched in 2012 during the Obama administration and was later codified by President Barack Obama in an August 2015 executive order. The fellowship operates as a part of GSA’s Technology Transformation Services.

“This class of PIFs represents the highest standard of technical talent in the federal government,” Greg Barbaccia, federal chief information officer and acting TTF director, said in a statement. “Their advanced expertise will advise our partner agencies on how they can best scale, secure, and transform the technologies that power our government.”

Since the start of the second Trump administration, the president — aided by the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency — has slashed the federal workforce, including eliminating GSA’s 18F consulting office that helped agencies with their technology needs. The U.S. Digital Service, which was founded the same year as 18F and helps agencies modernize their systems, has also been rebranded as the U.S. DOGE Service.

Almost 20,000 technology, data and telecommunications employees left their jobs in 2025 following Trump’s return to the Oval Office, according to government data previously analyzed by Nextgov/FCW.

Despite this government upheaval, the administration has placed an emphasis on hiring technologists and modernizing agency services, including loosening degree requirements to prioritize skills and experience. The White House also launched the U.S. Tech Force in December to help the government recruit AI talent.

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Andrew Vanjani becomes CIO for USCIS

Natalie Alms — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:56:00 -0400

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which oversees lawful immigration from within the Department of Homeland Security, has a new chief information officer.

Andrew Vanjani took over the position on Tuesday, he posted on his LinkedIn. Vanjani has previously worked within the General Services Administration, for the state of Maryland and mostly recently at the Organization of American States.

The agency’s last CIO listed on its website, Bill McElhaney, left the agency last May, according to his LinkedIn. He had been the CIO since 2018.

Vanjani wrote in his LinkedIn post that he will be focused on leveraging emerging technology to combat fraud risks and designing future-ready infrastructure in his new role.

The agency has been focused on using technology to reduce its backlog of immigration applications and improve efficiency for years, including via electronic case processing. It’s also been working to modernize its IT infrastructure.

“We are incredibly pleased that Andrew Vanjani has joined USCIS as the new Chief Information Officer,” USCIS spokesman Zach Kahler said in a statement. “He shares the director’s vision of using advanced technology to create more efficient government and to protect the American people.”

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Trump nominates third VA CIO since the start of his administration

Edward Graham — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:42:00 -0400

President Donald Trump on Tuesday nominated Gary Shatswell to serve as the next chief information officer and assistant secretary for information and technology for the Department of Veterans Affairs, the third such candidate the White House has put forth to serve in the Senate-confirmed role.

Shatswell’s nomination comes roughly nine months after Trump withdrew former nominee Ryan Cote from consideration for the dual-hatted position. Cote, who served as the Transportation Department’s CIO during the first Trump administration, was initially picked by Trump to serve in the role last July, although the president retracted the nomination just weeks later.

Alan Boehme, who served as chief technology officer at H&M Group and held other executive leadership roles in the private sector, was similarly picked by Trump last June to serve as VA’s IT chief. His nomination was also withdrawn by the president at the end of that month.

Unlike the previous nominees, Shatswell is a current agency employee, having served as senior advisor to VA Secretary Doug Collins since December.

In a Dec. 2 LinkedIn post, Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence — who has been performing the duties of the dual IT role in lieu of a permanent official — announced Shatswell’s swearing in as a senior advisor and said he “has a proven record of driving strategic transformation, improving operational performance, and leading high-performing technology organizations.”

Prior to joining VA, Shatswell held a variety of tech leadership roles across private industry. From August 2021 to November 2025, he served as Group CIO at Unilever Prestige. On his LinkedIn page, Shatswell said he was the division’s first CIO and “established centralized IT capabilities while advising brand leadership across the portfolio.”

Before holding that position, Shatswell also served as CIO at Paula's Choice Skincare, vice president of IT at Sur La Table and CIO at Sizzling Platter.

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Plankey withdraws nomination to lead CISA

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:01:00 -0400

Sean Plankey, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, has withdrawn himself from consideration for the role a year after being nominated, he confirmed to Nextgov/FCW.

“After thirteen months since my initial nomination, it has become clear the Senate will not confirm me,” he said in a statement sent to the White House that he confirmed. Politico first reported his withdrawal and the statement.

“While I humbly request the removal of my nomination, I wholeheartedly support President Trump’s upcoming nomination for CISA and look forward to the continued success of the United States of America,” it adds.

Plankey held an advisory role in the U.S. Coast Guard throughout much of the confirmation process, but was caught up in issues concerning Coast Guard cutter contracts with Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., who had put a hold on his nomination at the end of last year.

Plankey left the Coast Guard last month, which he said was intended to show Scott that he’s no longer involved in those contracts, Nextgov/FCW first reported.

Even after Plankey’s departure, it wasn’t clear that Scott had changed his mind on the CISA nomination, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

Plankey was first nominated last March, and his nomination was reupped in January after he remained unconfirmed through 2025.

The move is the latest setback for the cyber agency, which has lost around a third of its workforce since Trump returned to office. Nick Andersen has been leading the agency in an acting capacity after its previous acting leader, Madhu Gottumukkala, left in February amid a series of leadership incidents during his tenure.

It’s not clear who will be nominated to lead the cyberdefense agency now. CISA and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“This is an important position and I sincerely hope it has permanent leadership soon. If there is any hope that we can rebuild CISA after it has been decimated by the Trump administration, a qualified professional must be nominated and confirmed swiftly,” Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the lead Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said in a statement. “Our nation faces real threats from retaliation by Iran and to our critical infrastructure, additionally there’s a crucial need for CISA to help secure our federal elections this year.”

Rep. Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., the panel’s chairman, also said "I am sad to hear that he has withdrawn.”

“We are at a pivotal time as America faces heightened cyber threats, and I’ve continued to say that CISA needs a Senate-confirmed director to steer the ship," Garbarino said in a statement. "I thank Sean for his work over the last year and for his DHS service. I look forward to working with the administration when a new nominee is put forward, and I hope this is a quick process given how long CISA has been without confirmed leadership. The Senate needs to do its job.”

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include statements from Reps. Andrew Garbarino and Bennie Thompson.

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‘Faster and more disruptive’ tech underscores need to revamp the Fed's operations, its governor says

Edward Graham — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 15:19:00 -0400

Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller called for an overhaul of the central bank’s operations on Tuesday, saying that external factors like new technologies and the need for modernization necessitate a push to streamline the 12 regional reserve banks’ business functions.

Speaking at a Brookings Institution event, Waller said core operations like human resources, IT oversight and procurement, and vendor management “are increasingly platform-based, technology-driven and scale-intensive,” adding that “these functions are not delivered better or more efficiently with geographic dispersion.”

These types of operations are currently overseen by each of the reserve banks individually. Waller said that the Fed needs to revamp this model because “the external environment has changed.” This decentralized oversight approach, he added, conflicts with “faster and more disruptive” technologies.

“Artificial Intelligence is a coming storm that threatens to alter — and I believe, improve — all organizations,” Waller said. “The pace of technological change today means that the Fed does not have the time to sit back and ruminate about changes for months and years on end. If we are going to ride this wave and not be drowned by it, we need greater agility to capture efficiencies and manage risk, such as cybersecurity, and incorporating AI into our system processes.”

The Fed has already operationalized some AI capabilities to improve its systems. In a February speech on its AI use, Waller said the 12 regional banks were “moving toward a Federal Reserve System-first approach — with shared standards and infrastructure, while preserving decentralization where it matters most, particularly for monetary policy and economic research.” He added that “AI is a case study of what this approach looks like in practice.”

Waller — who is the Fed governor responsible for reserve bank oversight — outlined two models for overhauling these core business functions. The first approach, Waller said, would focus on “standardization within centralized system leadership.”

Under this model, “ the current physical footprint of the Reserve Banks remains largely intact, but each major support function — IT, HR, finance, procurement, vendor, management facilities — is placed under a single senior leader who runs that function within a reserve bank for the entire system.”

The second approach, Waller said, “goes further” and “adds physical consolidation across key functions, or placing stuff in low-cost, appropriate-talent cities.”

In this proposed scenario, he said “some reserve banks may face lower levels of employment in the future,” and added that “I believe we will need to rethink the physical footprint of the reserve banks going forward.”

Waller’s remarks came the same day that Kevin Warsh, President Donald Trump's nominee to lead the Fed, testified before the Senate Banking Committee and said he believed that greater AI adoption across the U.S. workforce will ultimately help to boost the economy.

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Microsoft to test third-party AI models for incorporation in its security offerings

Alexandra Kelley — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:11:00 -0400

Microsoft will be evaluating third-party artificial intelligence systems to pair with its network monitoring to see if powerful AI models can meet its internal cybersecurity benchmarking standards.

In a Wednesday announcement, Microsoft detailed plans to partner with other members of the AI industry to eventually integrate its products into the company’s security platforms to defend against external, AI-driven threats.

“Recent advances in AI model capabilities are changing how vulnerabilities are discovered and exploited,” Microsoft Security Chief Architect and Corporate Vice President Ales Holecek said in a blog post. “We are accelerating this work and partnering with the industry to use leading models, paired with our platforms and expertise, to turn AI-driven discovery into protection at scale.”

The announcement follows Anthropic’s debut of its ultra-powerful Claude Mythos Preview AI model earlier this month and the associated Project Glasswing, through which companies like Microsoft have been granted access to Mythos to test the system’s vulnerability discovery capabilities. Microsoft confirmed in its blog post that it is working with Mythos and other companies to coordinate a defensive response to the model’s discoveries.

Leveraging its own open-source model, CTI-REALM, Microsoft is testing models like Mythos to monitor its digital network security. Microsoft said it will focus on using the models for continuous network vulnerability scans, reducing attack exposure and building new solutions designed to help customers use advanced AI for security needs. That review will also include select open-source code bases.

Each of these three implementation areas incorporates existing Microsoft solutions, such as Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Security Exposure Management and the company’s Security Development Lifecycle framework to support effective AI model testing and implementation.

Microsoft will also be updating the Security Exposure Management solution to offer greater visibility and guidance into threat identification through a new component called Secure Now, along with next steps for customers to take to be proactive about securing their systems.

“While models are powerful on their own, without prioritization and context, large volumes of results can overwhelm development teams,” the blog post reads. “These new solutions are designed to pair model output with the context and security solutions needed for enterprises to drive security effectiveness at scale.”

Microsoft also said that it will continue to share updates as the testing process gets underway. In June, the company is expected to debut a new multi-modal security scanner powered by AI to leverage multiple types of data to detect sophisticated threats.

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Cyber Command carried out over 8,000 missions in 2025, director says

David DiMolfetta — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:54:00 -0400

U.S. Cyber Command, the digital combatant command tasked with defending the nation’s cyberspace and supporting other military components’ offensive and defensive operations, carried out over 8,000 missions in 2025, its new director said Tuesday.

Gen. Josh Rudd, recently confirmed to lead Cyber Command and the NSA in a dual-hatted capacity, told lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee that he expects that number to increase through the remainder of 2026. He testified alongside Katie Sutton, the assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy.

The 2025 total is a 25% increase compared to 2024, Rudd added. The figures, which he did not elaborate on, help to underscore how cyber elements are becoming more ingrained into military activities.

The Trump administration has sought to highlight the command’s involvement in its broader military missions. Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has acknowledged Cyber Command’s role in operations that targeted Iranian nuclear facilities and the ousting of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela. More recently, the command has played a role in Iran war efforts.

“Our participation in Operation Absolute Resolve and Operation Epic Fury are prime examples of this integration in action,” said Rudd, referring to Venezuela and Iran, respectively.

Cyber Command often conducts “hunt forward” operations, defensive missions designed to identify, mitigate and learn from foreign cyber threats that target allied host nation networks.

Sutton, in her testimony, said her office is working on a new cyber strategy expected for release this summer.

“We’re taking all of those and really making it an integrated approach that’s going to be a very bold transformation of how we think about cyberspace,” she said, describing how the Defense Department is drawing on previous national security strategies to inform the crafting of this new framework.

The department last released a cyber strategy in 2023.

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US needs to flesh out strategy to counter China’s robotics advances, lawmakers say

Edward Graham — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:08:00 -0400

Even as more advanced artificial intelligence capabilities drive greater progress in the field of robotics, lawmakers said on Tuesday that the U.S. still needs to develop a more effective strategy to counter China’s dominance in developing these technologies.

Although robots have been around for decades — primarily in manufacturing and to assist with other human-led tasks, such as medical procedures — these more powerful AI-infused machines can operate with greater autonomy. But even as the U.S. maintains its lead over China when it comes to global AI dominance, Congress and industry experts are concerned that America is ceding the robotics lead to Beijing.

During a House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Research and Technology hearing, lawmakers and private sector representatives drew a contrast between fast-paced AI advances, and the development of actual, machine-based robots.

Michael Robbins, CEO of the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International, said, “we are entering an era of embodied AI — or physical AI — where AI is the brain and robotics is the body,” warning the panel that “today, America may still be winning the race to build the brains, but we are losing the race to build and deploy the bodies.”

Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich. — the subcommittee’s top Democrat — echoed his comments, also noting that “America is home to the best and brightest AI scientists who are developing the brains,” but that “when robots are made in the U.S., they're often assembled with Chinese parts.”

China has increasingly touted its robotics progress, most recently by holding a race in which one of its humanoid machines beat the human half-marathon world record time. Beijing’s military-civil fusion strategy also means that its private sector advances directly benefit its military ambitions, posing a national security threat to the U.S.

But China’s dominance in robotics also extends to the supply chains necessary for American companies to develop their own robots, Stevens noted. The country’s massive control of rare earth minerals and other components needed for developing robots and other advanced technologies, for instance, raises significant concerns about how best to decouple U.S. manufacturers from the Chinese market.

Jeff Burnstein, president of the A3 Association for Advancing Automation, said he wasn’t sure if banning Chinese-made robots — one potential way to drive domestic progress in the development of robotics — was a good idea because “right now, we do need those rare earth magnets here in the U.S., and I worry about, if we start a war over robotics, that we could lose some of those components that are vital to our goals.”

Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., who chairs the House panel, said the U.S. needs to adopt a national robotics strategy to counter China’s ambitions and also embolden domestic manufacturing and workforce adoption of robots. He noted that China and some U.S. allies, like South Korea and Japan, already have their own strategies, and added that, “there's such an obvious linkage between a robotics strategy and our national economy and national security.”

Obernolte, alongside Reps. Jennifer McClellan, D-Va., and Bob Latta, R-Ohio, introduced a measure in February seeking to establish a commission to evaluate and drive U.S. leadership in robotics.

Some agencies, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, have already been experimenting with using robots, although the benefits actually provided by these machines have been mixed. Still, lawmakers and officials see a need to further expand uses of these technologies in both the public and private sectors, despite widespread adoption likely being a few years away.

Politico reported in December that Trump administration officials, including Commerce Department Secretary Howard Lutnick, were holding meetings with leaders from the robotics industry to discuss ways of turbocharging development of the advanced machines.

The White House’s AI Action Plan, released in July 2025, also included a section on supporting the development of next-generation manufacturing — a proposal that, Obernolte said, “notes the importance of this intersection between AI and robotics.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., the ranking member of the full House Science, Space and Technology Committee, said, however, that the single robotics-based recommendation in the action plan is not enough.

“While individual science agencies continue to make investments in robotics, there’s no coherent strategy for U.S. leadership,” Lofgren said, adding that “we can and still must lead in the field of robotics, but to achieve that goal, we need a concerted national effort to support innovation across the full robotics system.”

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Transportation celebrates air traffic control modernization, asks lawmakers for more funding

Natalie Alms — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 17:20:00 -0400

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy celebrated progress on the effort to modernize the U.S. air traffic control system on Tuesday, a year after rolling out a plan to do so, reminding Congress that he wants more money to finish the job.

A few workstreams are a “little behind,” but “for the most part, we’re on track to have this project completed before President [Donald] Trump leaves office,” Duffy said at a Transportation event celebrating the approximate one-year mark of the push to overhaul the air traffic control system within four years with new core infrastructure across automation, communication, surveillance and facilities.

“Congress should have faith in this DOT, in this FAA, because we are building, and we’re building now,” said Duffy, repeatedly emphasizing that his agency needs more funding to move the system from the analog world to the digital one. Congress put $12.5 billion toward the effort in Republicans’ ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ last summer, but Duffy has said that the plan will cost over $31 billion.

The government has been trying to modernize the U.S. national airspace system since 2003, with little success. That effort, called the Next Generation Air Transportation System, or NextGen, was billed as a sweeping overhaul, but it yielded “only a fraction of the expected benefits” before the program’s office was shut down last year, according to DOT’s watchdog.

Bryan Bedford, head of the Federal Aviation Administration, told senators at a hearing last December that he was presented with a 680-page document last summer after he was confirmed, which he and Duffy decided to “scrap,” he said, “because it represented more of the same.”

Transportation tapped Peraton as the prime integrator for the new plan, focused on the air traffic control system and not the entire national airspace system, late last year.

The department said Tuesday that it has so far replaced almost 50% of the copper wires — which date back to the 1960s — within the air traffic telecommunication system.

Duffy also touted work done to install digital voice switches on radios at 40 locations nationwide, updating systems from a switchboard-like tool to a digital one.

DOT has also set up new surface awareness systems at 54 airports to help track planes and vehicles at airports, and it has transitioned 17 air traffic control towers to electronic flight strips — a digital solution to keep track of flights rather than using paper.

By the end of 2028, the department is aiming to update thousands of radios and network connections, hundreds of radars and more. Duffy has also emphasized the potential role of artificial intelligence when it comes to improving flight management.

Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, emphasized Tuesday that the technology advances being discussed are “not competition for the controller workforce.”

“What we bring to the table cannot be replicated,” he said. “It’s not a trade-off of controllers or equipment. It’s how we support controllers that are doing the job day in and day out.”

The FAA is modernizing at the same time as it’s trying to hire video game players as air traffic controllers at the agency, which has had staffing issues for years.

The modernization push is one of three pillars the FAA reorganized itself around earlier this year, alongside people and safety. Aviation safety has been in the spotlight since a midair collision near Ronald Reagan National Airport of an Army Black Hawk helicopter and a commercial flight last year killed 67 people.

In 2023, the FAA evaluated all its air traffic control systems after an outage of one system caused a shutdown of national airspace for about two hours while the over 30-year-old system was fixed. The outage caused over 1,300 flight cancellations.

Of 138 systems evaluated at the time by the FAA, half were deemed either unsustainable or potentially unsustainable, despite their critical impacts on the safety and efficiency of national airspace, according to the Government Accountability Office.

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OMB seeks details from agencies on their commercial buying, or lack thereof

Ross Wilkers — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:00:00 -0400

The Office of Management and Budget wants details from agencies on how they are complying with President Trump’s 2025 executive order calling for them to prioritize commercially available products and services in acquisitions.

Efforts to shift agencies in that direction date back almost three decades, including the signing of the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994 that requires agencies to give a preference to commercial offerings. Trump’s executive order sought to reinforce the policies outlined in FASA and further promote commercial acquisitions.

In a memo to agencies sent Friday, OMB Director Russ Vought writes that they have until May 4 to report every non-commercial contract award from April 2025 through September 2025. For any award exceeding $10 million, agencies must explain why they acquired a non-commercial offering and what they plan to do for the contract’s next option period.

Vought wrote that during the government’s 2024 fiscal year, more than two-thirds of total contract spend — as reported to the Federal Procurement Data System — was for non-commercial products and services. FPDS is the since-discontinued database that housed information on non-classified contract obligations across government.

That estimate includes $130 billion in what Vought called “non-commercial contracting for common services, such as professional support services, information technology and telecom services, and operation of facilities” that was acquired through cost-reimbursement contracts.

OMB is also putting in place a new consultation process for agencies if they plan a non-commercial buy, but sign-off from the agency’s political appointee responsible for acquisition is required before an agency can even go to OMB.

According to the memo, this means the agency’s chief acquisition officer must approve the request of the senior procurement executive to set up a non-commercial contract.

Those requests must include details on the contract’s duration and size, any market research efforts that informed the decision, whether the contract will be competed, cost analysis information, and other details on the requirements.

Requests must also include an “affirmative statement” from the agency’s political appointee overseeing acquisition that they support the career official’s determination to create a non-commercial contract.

Each agency has a policy official serving as a competition advocate, whose responsibilities include the promotion and advocacy of commercial acquisitions. As part of their reports to OMB due May 4, agencies must confirm whether that person is “at a level now lower than the head of the contracting activity or deputy (Senior Procurement Executive).”

OMB’s memo also details how the competition advocate is also responsible for making recommendations to SPE officials on maximizing commercial purchases, as well as working with the agency’s small business director on lowering barriers to entry for commercial providers and new entrants.

Competition advocates also work with the Procurement Committee on E-Government to review and improve data collection protocols, plus support the SPE in developing annual process reports for submission to OMB.

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House FY27 VA funding bill allocates $3.4B for EHR rollout

Edward Graham — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:47:00 -0400

The House Appropriations Committee advanced a fiscal year 2027 funding package on Tuesday that includes billions of dollars for the continued rollout of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ new electronic health record system, although lawmakers once again made a portion of the money contingent on VA meeting certain performance and oversight requirements.

The agency’s effort to modernize its legacy health record system has long been stymied by cost overruns, technical issues and patient safety concerns. VA initially signed a $10 billion contract — later revised to over $16 billion — with Cerner in May 2018 to modernize its EHR system. Oracle later acquired Cerner in 2022 and rebranded the new unit as Oracle Health. A recent cost projection provided to Congress estimated the modernization project’s total price tag at around $37 billion.

VA paused most deployments of the modernized EHR system in April 2023 to address the safety and usability issues associated with the new software. At that time, the agency had only rolled out the system at five medical facilities. VA subsequently conducted a joint rollout of the Oracle Health EHR system with the Pentagon in March 2024 at a healthcare site in North Chicago.

Under current VA Secretary Doug Collins, the agency has moved to restart EHR system deployments and aggressively ramp up go-lives while addressing underlying issues that previously slowed the program. Earlier this month, VA rolled out the new software at four Michigan-based medical facilities, and the agency plans to implement the system at nine more sites in 2026.

Tuesday’s markup of the FY27 Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies bill came after the Trump administration released its governmentwide budget request earlier this month. VA proposed allocating $4.2 billion for the modernization project’s continued rollout.

The House panel’s funding bill, which was passed through the committee by a voice vote, would provide $3.4 billion for VA’s continuing EHR modernization project, with the funds “to remain available until September 30, 2029.” That is the same amount that Congress allocated for the EHR modernization project in FY26.

The allocated funds, however, would be contingent upon VA submitting quarterly reports to the House and Senate Appropriations panels “detailing obligations, expenditures, and deployment implementation by facility, including any changes from the deployment plan or schedule.”

Additionally, 25% of the total funds for the EHR modernization program would also be withheld until July 1, 2027, at which time they would only be disbursed if the agency provides both the House and Senate committees with additional information on the project’s progress.

That includes an updated life-cycle cost estimate as well as a site-by-site deployment schedule for medical facilities awaiting implementation of the new system. VA would also be required to show that the six medical facilities that received the EHR system prior to the end of the operational pause are meeting specific performance metrics, and provide “an updated projection of Federal VA staffing levels, contract support, and other relevant activities required, and the resources required to fund those activities.”

VA’s FY26 budget allocated $3.4 billion for the EHR modernization program, although Congress included a similar provision in that measure withholding 30% of the funds until this July, contingent upon the agency providing similar figures and information to lawmakers.

Rep. Sanford Bishop, D-Ga., said during the panel’s markup that Congress “must continue close oversight of the electronic health record modernization effort.”

“This bill includes a funding fence and reporting requirements, which I believe are steps in the right direction, but we still need far greater confidence in execution, patient safety and value for the taxpayer,” he added.

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GSA and OPM will soon share the same headquarters

Sean Michael Newhouse — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:50:00 -0400

The leaders of the General Services Administration and Office of Personnel Management on Monday announced that their agencies will co-locate in the same renovated Washington, D.C., headquarters building beginning in December 2028 as part of the Trump administration’s initiative to reduce the amount of real estate that the federal government occupies.

“This is bigger than a relocation. This is a blueprint,” said GSA Administrator Edward Forst at a press conference. “It's a blueprint for a government that takes responsibility, that works collaboratively and delivers results. At GSA that's our mission, and today we're going to lead by example.”

In July, GSA staffers will temporarily move caddy corner from their current location into OPM’s Theodore Roosevelt Federal Building while the GSA headquarters is renovated. When that overhaul is complete, both agency workforces will move into the refurbished GSA building. OPM’s current headquarters will then be sold or otherwise disposed of.

OPM Director Scott Kupor on Monday said he was excited by the prospect of the federal government’s HR and real estate agencies more easily collaborating.

“We will be very tightly packed for the next couple of years, but it's going to be great,” he said. “The buzz in that building is going to be amazing, like it's never been.”

Forst said that there is not yet an expected price for the GSA renovation, as officials are still completing preliminary plans and design estimates. He added that nearly 40% of the current GSA headquarters is uninhabitable.

GSA officials said that Congress will need to approve the renovation plans but that there is funding available to take initial steps.

Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who has backed the Trump administration’s efforts to sell underutilized federal buildings, said at Monday’s announcement that co-locating GSA and OPM could serve as a model governmentwide.

“I'm so grateful that we see this type of collaboration, especially when it comes to GSA and OPM. They're not telling others to do what they are unwilling to do themselves,” she said. “So they are leading the way through this collaboration, through the combination of their two spaces.”

During Trump’s first term, there was an abandoned attempt to combine GSA and OPM into one agency. While the two agencies are set to share the same building, Kupor said that there are no plans to merge the two organizations.

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Former FBI official proposes terror designations for ransomware hackers targeting hospitals

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:03:00 -0400

A former FBI cyber chief is calling for the U.S. government to consider applying terrorism designations to ransomware actors who target hospitals and other critical, life-safety infrastructure, arguing a Bush-era terror financing authority could be applied beyond its traditional uses.

In testimony set to be delivered Tuesday before the House Homeland Security Committee, Cynthia Kaiser — who served as deputy assistant director in the FBI’s Cyber Division from 2022 to 2025 and is now a senior vice president at Halcyon’s Ransomware Research Center — also urged officials to examine whether prosecutors could pursue homicide charges under federal felony murder standards in cases where ransomware attacks on health facilities result in documented patient deaths.

Ransomware, malicious software that holds a victim’s systems or data hostage and demands payment in exchange for restoring access, costs U.S. victims tens of millions of dollars every year. Ransom hackers often target hospitals because disruptions can create urgent pressure to restore operations and therefore increase the likelihood victims will pay.

“When a ransomware gang encrypts a hospital’s systems and demands payment under threat of continued system lockout — knowing that patients are being diverted, that dialysis is being delayed, that surgery schedules are being canceled — I believe a serious legal argument exists that this conduct falls within those definitions [of terrorism],” says Kaiser’s written testimony, which was given to Nextgov/FCW ahead of the hearing.

“At minimum, it merits a formal, deliberate analysis by the Departments of State, Justice, and Treasury, who collectively hold designation authority under Executive Order 13224,” she adds, referring to the post-9/11 order that empowers agencies to crack down on foreign entities that commit, or pose a significant risk of committing, acts of terrorism.

The proposal is significant because, if implemented, it would broaden the use of counterterrorism tools against cybercrime, and it underscores a shift toward treating the most harmful ransomware attacks as national security threats.

Terrorism labels could give the government access to a broader set of tools than traditional cybercrime prosecutions, including the ability to freeze assets, restrict financial transactions and pursue charges against those who provide material support to designated actors, even when they operate overseas.

The label also means U.S. spy agencies could increase intelligence collection targeting the ransomware actors and their networks, and nations may face “significant diplomatic consequences” for harboring individuals involved in such cyberattacks, Kaiser adds.

Congress would likely play a central role in clarifying or expanding the legal framework for such designations, though recent administration actions — including the National Cyber Strategy and a related executive order on cybercrime — could also shape how those authorities are applied.

The proposal also suggests lawmakers consider whether the 2002 Terrorism Risk Insurance Act could help ensure hospitals get insurance coverage for cyber damages under such designations.

“The goal is not to punish victims. It is to ensure that the most dangerous actors in the ransomware ecosystem face consequences proportionate to the harm they cause,” the testimony reads.

In arguing for murder and manslaughter charges when such attacks cause death, Kaiser says the number of patient deaths caused by ransomware is higher today compared to documented evidence from previous years and that the “true number of lives lost to this crime is almost certainly in the hundreds.”

Under federal law, prosecutors can pursue murder charges when a death occurs during certain dangerous felonies, even without intent to kill, though it’s not typically applied to cyber offenses.

“Federal prosecutors should be empowered — and encouraged — to evaluate whether homicide charges are appropriate in cases where ransomware actors targeted hospitals, where deaths resulted, and where the actors demonstrated clear foreknowledge that their actions endangered life,” the testimony says.

The pace of ransom intrusions on healthcare institutions has not slowed. A ransomware attack on the University of Mississippi Medical Center in February forced clinics across the state to shut down and surgeries to be canceled.

In 2024, a major ransomware attack on Change Healthcare disrupted critical healthcare systems nationwide and highlighted how such incidents can easily create negative downstream impacts on other components of the U.S. medical supply chain.

The U.S. has previously worked with international partners to take a harder line on ransom payments, though expert views remain split. Some argue payments should be banned because they fuel further cybercrime, while others say not paying could leave victims, including hospitals, with few options to quickly restore critical systems.

“The FBI and its federal partners are doing everything they can with the authorities they currently have,” Kaiser says. “I know this from the years I spent working alongside those agents. But the worst of the worst — those targeting healthcare, those who have caused documented deaths, those operating with impunity under the protection of hostile foreign governments — deserve to face consequences that match the gravity of what they have done.”

“These hackers are counting on us to respond with incremental measures,” she adds. “I urge you to prove them wrong.”

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AI capabilities are needed to counter drone threats, senator says

Edward Graham — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:37:00 -0400

With foreign adversaries increasingly relying on stockpiles of unmanned drones to strengthen their military capabilities, one senator argued Monday that the U.S. needs to quickly adopt new artificial intelligence capabilities to counter these growing threats.

Speaking on a panel hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Neb., said “we all have a better understanding of how warfare has changed” as a result of drone use in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the two nations have launched hundreds of thousands of drones at one another, while also using the systems to counter some of the attacks. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in January that roughly 80% of the country’s attacks against Russian forces were carried out by drones.

Fischer — who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee — said the use of these drones “highlights for us the need to be able to defend with drones as well.”

With adversaries like China and Russia experimenting with giving drones more autonomy to attack targets without human involvement, the U.S. is similarly looking to advance its AI-infused weapons capabilities. All of this is occurring as Beijing and Washington, in particular, push to outcompete one another in the global AI arms race.

The ongoing U.S.-Israel war against Iran has also been punctuated by frequent drone attacks, with Tehran launching deadly strikes against U.S. forces and neighboring nations.

Greater AI adoption can help to counter these threats, Fischer said.

“When you see a swarm of drones coming in, AI can identify what maybe the pattern is there, and then allow our drones to identify that pattern and how they should respond to it,” she said.

Last year, the Pentagon launched the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, or DAWG, to quickly develop and deploy autonomous drones. President Donald Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2027 budget, which was released earlier this month, requested $54.6 billion for the unit — a figure that would represent a significant increase to its previous $225 million budget.

Fischer said embracing AI-powered drones to counter other autonomous systems is “going to have to happen very, very quickly, and if we aren't ready for the future, we're in trouble.”

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The government is buying AI faster than it is assigning authority

Arthur D. Sidney — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:17:00 -0400

The federal government is spending a great deal of time talking about responsible AI. It should spend more time deciding who gets to stop it.

That is not a rhetorical point. It is a practical one.

A great deal of federal AI governance still turns on familiar language: fairness, transparency, explainability, risk management, accountability. Those concepts matter. But they do not answer the harder operational question that agencies are already facing as they test, buy and deploy AI-enabled tools: who, exactly, has the authority to pause, question, override, or suspend a system when conditions change?

That gap matters because government does not encounter risk at the level of principles. It encounters risk at the point of use.

A model may pass legal review. It may satisfy procurement requirements. It may come with documentation, guardrails, vendor assurances and internal approvals. But the real test comes later, when a tool is being relied upon in a benefits workflow, an enforcement setting, a contracting environment, or a high-speed operational process and someone begins to suspect that the system is being used outside the assumptions that justified its approval.

At that point, a policy framework is not enough. An agency needs clearly assigned authority.

That means at least three things.

First, agencies need explicit override rights inside the organization. Someone should be able to halt or narrow the use of a system without having to navigate an internal maze of legal, procurement, technical and managerial reviews after the risk has already materialized.

Second, agencies need auditable decision trails. If government cannot reconstruct who approved a system, what limits were attached to that approval, what changed over time and who chose to continue relying on the tool, then accountability becomes largely performative.

Third, federal procurement needs to be treated as a governance instrument, not just a purchasing function. Contracts determine whether agencies retain access to meaningful logs, change notices, testing information, intervention rights and usable explanations. If those terms are weak, the government may be buying functionality while surrendering control.

This is one reason current federal AI debates can feel oddly incomplete. They often ask whether a tool is safe enough, accurate enough, or compliant enough to field. They spend less time asking whether the institution has built the internal authority structure necessary to govern reliance once the tool is live.

That is a serious omission.

Government does not need more elegant statements of principle nearly as much as it needs clearer lines of authority. Agencies are already under pressure to modernize, automate and demonstrate results. That pressure is not going away. But speed without decision control is not modernization. It is exposure.

Federal AI governance will become credible when agencies can answer a simple question before deployment, not after failure: when this system starts to drift, misfire, or exceed its intended role, who has the power to stop it?

Until that question is answered, the government is not really governing AI.

It is buying it.

Arthur D. Sidney is an attorney and public policy strategist, former congressional chief of staff and advisor on technology governance, public sector oversight and institutional accountability.

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Senators demand OPM withdraw plan to access feds’ medical records

Erich Wagner — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:00:00 -0400

A group of 16 Democratic senators on Monday called on the Office of Personnel Management to withdraw its plan to collect claims-level health data from federal workers and retirees, expressing “grave concern” that the measure would violate the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and basic tenets of doctor-patient confidentiality.

Last December, OPM published an information collection request in the Federal Register that would require insurers who participate in the Federal Employee Health Benefits and Postal Service Health Benefits programs to provide monthly reports with identifiable health data on their enrollees, prompting unease from both health ethicists and health care providers alike. The notice would require the collection of medical visits, prescriptions and treatment data, and fails to task insurance carriers with redacting personally identifiable information.

In a letter to OPM Director Scott Kupor on Monday, more than dozen senators, led by Sens. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Mark Warner, D-Va., demanded the agency rescind its request, arguing that the agency’s general “oversight” rationale is insufficient, given the extraordinary nature of OPM’s request.

“Such sweeping access to personal health information would violate the core principles of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which was enacted to strictly regulate how protected health information can be disclosed to ensure that patient data is shared only for limited, clearly defined purposes,” they wrote. “Mass, centralized access to identifiable medical records absent individualized consent, clear necessity or narrowly tailored legal authority undermines those protections and lacks a valid statutory basis.”

And, following more than a year of attempts by the Trump administration to cut the federal workforce with terminations and incentivized resignations and retirements, the lawmakers said claims-level data could be used to further target employees and their families.

“Since January 2025, federal employees have been pushed into early retirement, illegally fired, demonized, seen their civil service protections weakened, and more,” they wrote. “This proposal is another step in the stated goal of traumatizing the federal workforce, this time by requiring the most sensitive health information about federal employees and their families to be shared with OPM. We are deeply concerned this information will be used in employment actions, including actions related to hiring, suitability determinations, appeals, reductions in force, disability accommodation requests, labor-management relations and performance reviews.”

In a statement this month, American Federation of Government Employees National President Everett Kelley noted claims-level data could allow the administration to continue its crusade against transgender Americans.

“Legal experts have already noted that this data could be used to discipline or target workers who are not complying with the administration’s political directives,” he said. “It could be used to identify employees who have sought care that this administration has made a specific target of its policy agenda, including reproductive health care and gender-affirming treatment. And it would be held by an agency that, in 2015, suffered one of the largest federal data breaches in American history, compromising the personal records of roughly 22 million people.”

Last week, Rep. Robert Garcia, D-.Calif., the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Reform Committee, along with some Maryland and Virginia Democrats sent their own letter to Kupor and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought demanding OPM halt its efforts to collect federal workers and retirees’ health care data, noting that the lack of published safeguards on the data raise additional concerns in light of the 2015 hack and alleged disclosures to the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency.

“Last year, OPM reportedly allowed a server of unknown nature and origin to be added to its network and access sensitive government data,” the House lawmakers wrote. “A few months, later, DOGE employees inside OPM reportedly sent highly sensitive electronic files to internet protocol addresses outside of the federal government, potentially allowing private actors or adversarial governments to access sensitive data. By collecting data currently held by 65 insurance carriers into one database, expanding OPM’s access to employee data to include detailed personal health information would significantly heighten the risk of misuse, unauthorized disclosure, or exploitation by bad actors.”

Rather than including the detailed list of questions with which lawmakers typically conclude their letters to agencies, Monday’s letter ends with a simple plea to reverse course.

“For these reasons, we strongly urge you to cease any further consideration of this proposal,” the senators wrote. “Our federal employees work every day to serve the American people and deserve to have their health data protected. Protecting patient privacy is not a bureaucratic obstacle, but a cornerstone of ethical medicine, legal compliance, and public trust.”

OPM declined to comment for this story.

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FAA sets records in effort to hire gamers as air traffic controllers

Edward Graham — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:00:00 -0400

The Federal Aviation Administration has broken recruitment numbers in its push to hire gamers to be among its next crop of air traffic controllers, according to the Transportation Department.

Transportation — which oversees the FAA — launched an ad campaign on April 10 targeting video gamers, saying in a press release that the effort “aims to reach young adults who possess useful skills that are transferable to a career in air traffic control.”

A YouTube video associated with the campaign begins with the Xbox One logo before breaking into snippets from Twitch streams and then a montage of air traffic controllers and planes, telling viewers to “level up” and apply for positions beginning at midnight on April 17.

The FAA launched a similar “level up” campaign in 2021 that was also focused on hiring 18- to 30-year-old gamers to be air traffic controllers.

“With only about 25 percent of controllers holding a traditional college degree, this effort is focused on reaching talented young people pursuing alternative career paths, many of whom are active in gaming,” Transportation said in a press release. “Feedback from controller exit interviews reinforces this, with several controllers pointing to gaming as an influence on their ability to think quickly, stay focused, and manage complexity.”

During an appearance at the Semafor World Economy event on Friday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said the department had already received 6,000 applicants since the application portal opened. As of Saturday, applications were no longer being accepted.

Duffy called the hiring push “wildly successful,” and said that “we’ve had a flood of young people coming in that want to be air traffic controllers.”

In a subsequent Facebook video shared on Duffy’s account on Saturday, the department said that it had received 12,350 applications, “more than double the previous record.” Of these applicants, 10,779 were identified as being qualified for air traffic controller roles.

The job call, which led to a posting for an “Air Traffic Control Specialist - Trainee” role, said “no prior air traffic experience is required,” and that potential hires would begin with training at the FAA Academy.

Transportation said there are almost 11,000 current air traffic controllers, “with more than 4,000 trainees in the pipeline.” But new hires are needed to meet rising demands and to replace personnel leaving the workforce.

A January Government Accountability Office report found that the total number of air traffic controllers has decreased by roughly 6% over the past decade, even as the number of flights relying on these personnel has increased by 10%.

The effort to attract young applicants with non-traditional backgrounds comes amid a broader governmentwide push to fill critical job vacancies — particularly those in cybersecurity or technology areas — by expanding hiring criteria.

The Office of Personnel Management issued new standards for technology employees last week that no longer include degree requirements, part of an effort to prioritize job aptitude over educational background.

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GSA No. 2 talks ‘million hours challenge,’ scaling agency AI efforts

Frank Konkel — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 11:26:00 -0400

The General Services Administration is working to save and automate one million hours of workload across the agency as part of its Eliminate, Optimize and Automate — or EOA — playbook.

GSA Deputy Administrator Michael Lynch said the effort aims to use artificial intelligence and intelligent automation to handle “repetitive, manual workflows,” allowing its workforce to redirect their time toward serving customer agencies, improving procurement outcomes and pursuing other mission-critical services. Early into 2026, Lynch said the agency is almost halfway toward achieving its moonshot goal.

“We have about 400,000 hours that are currently identified of ways that we can — not replace people — but remove that non-high-value added time and replace it by putting people on more high-value opportunities within the agency,” Lynch said April 14 at the OpenText Government Summit in Washington, D.C. “And that really goes to address some of the workforce challenges we’ve had.”

Lynch added that GSA, like most agencies across government, lost headcount over the past year, but he asserted the leaner setup hasn’t slowed operations.

In 2025, the agency took on a centralized role in federal acquisition and led a massive overhaul of the process; became a key cog in the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan through the launch of USAI.gov; and negotiated more than two dozen deals with tech companies, saving partner agencies more than $1 billion on software through its OneGov program, according to Lynch.

Still, the agency is looking at more ways to drive innovation, foster collaboration and develop future leaders within its ranks — while tackling some of the agency’s toughest problems.

Called GSA Labs, the new program seeks a few dozen high-performing early-to-mid-career employees within the agency who will be placed into small, cross-functional teams with executive sponsorship to tackle those problems.

“We did a call to action for all of our senior leaders to say, ‘What are the problems that exist within automation technology, workflows and things that you want to dedicate resources to, that you just don't have the staff to do it?’” Lynch said. “And then we put out a call to our workforce to say, ‘Hey, if you’re kind of mid-career talent, would you be interested in doing a second job in addition to your day job — not a second pay job — but you know, be part of this program?’”

Lynch said the response was “amazing,” totaling more than 300 internal applicants who were narrowed to an initial cohort of 30 GSA staff to address five problem statements with a goal of “trying to create interoperable systems and processes."

He noted GSA Labs’ work is largely internal now, but “could be a scalable program in the future.”

“We have 30 individuals from GSA that are going to be almost our internal McKinsey consulting group that’s going to come in and help us solve these problems in partnership with leaders,” Lynch said. “And then the hope would be that further develops our workforce, develops great outcomes for our agency. And then where the program goes in year two and beyond is a bit up in the air.”

Maturation of OneGov

Far from a one-hit wonder, Lynch said to expect a maturation of GSA’s OneGov effort, which netted more than two dozen discounted deals for agencies from AI and tech software firms, including Google Public Sector, Adobe, Salesforce, Elastic, Oracle, Uber, IBM, Docusign, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, OpenAI, Anthropic and Box.

Some of those were relatively short-term deals, and GSA is using feedback from industry and agencies to inform how that program evolves into “longer-term, scalable programs and engagements that are mutually beneficial for both the federal government as well as our industry partners.”

“Over the next six to nine months, you’ll see a lot more announcements around how those OneGov deals have matured,” Lynch said.

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