The Senate will debate the National Defense Authorization Act when it comes back from its recess. One of the difficult choices the Defense Department faces, no matter what kind of budget they get from Congress, is support services for war fighters. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh is talking about the kinds of support programs his branch will cut because they can’t afford them any more. But cuts may not be the only thing facing troops and veterans who need those support services. Phillip Carter is senior fellow, counsel and director of the Military, Veterans, and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security.

A five-year wait may be in store for your retirement plan and you might not know it. As some federal employees think about their health insurance choices for open season, others aren’t involved in the FEHBP at all and don’t intend to start. Federal News Radio Senior Correspondent Mike Causey says some feds who make that choice sometimes get bad news long after they can do anything about it except quit retirement.

An end to filibusters will clear the way for a quick confirmation on new appointees from President Barack Obama. That’s the argument Senate Democrats made during last week’s vote. But changes to filibuster laws might not be the kick the government needs to get working again.

Most people have four days off work ahead of them for the Thanksgiving holiday. You have access to some special fun that not everyone can enjoy.

The Marine Corps’ Agile Bloodhound program is supposed to be the pipeline to push information from collection by drones to the warfighter in the battlefield. Over the past decade, the amount of battlefield intelligence data the military collects via unmanned aerial systems and other platforms has exploded. But the military hasn’t developed all of the processes it needs to turn that data into real-time, actionable information for small units of warfighters on the ground. John Moniz manages the program at the Office of Naval Research. He tells Federal News Radio’s Jared Serbu about some emerging IT capabilities that offer the promise of delivering vital real-time data that Marines have never had on the battlefield before.

Governing the online access of federal, state and local law enforcement officials to specific data is both possible and beneficial. A two-year effort at the Justice Department is demonstrating that. The back-end attribute exchange provides a standard way for different organizations to safely and securely share data. Mike Kennedy is the executive for assured interoperability for the Program Manager of the Information Sharing Environment. He tells Federal News Radio’s Executive Editor Jason Miller in part one of their interview about the recent DoJ initiative to test out the back-end attribute exchange.