• Federal wildland firefighters appear a step closer to securing a permanent pay raise. When advancing 2025 spending bills, House and Senate appropriators both included a provision to bump up General Schedule pay rates for the front-line workers. The changes aren’t yet official, but if enacted, wildland firefighters could receive up to a 30% pay boost, or in some cases even higher. The National Federation of Federal Employees, a union that represents wildland firefighters, says it hopes that improvements to housing, mental health and work-life balance will follow.
  (NFFE praises House and Senate appropriators for approving permanent wildland firefighter pay increase - National Federation of Federal Employees )
• Senate leaders are taking a closer look at how the Social Security Administration uses AI. SSA is using over a dozen AI systems to help with its workload. That includes reviewing medical evidence for disability claims, flagging cases where the agency overpays a beneficiary, or identifying possibly fraudulent claims. But Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Ranking Member Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) are asking what SSA is doing to ensure these tools are reliable and accurate. They’re calling on SSA to shed light on how it trains employees on responsible use of AI tools, and how they’re complying with governmentwide AI policies.
  (Wyden, Crapo seek details on AI safeguards in Social Security - Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.))
• The retirement claims backlog increased in July for the second month in a row. Despite receiving almost 500 fewer claims and processing nearly 400 more in July than in June, the Office of Personnel Management's backlog still grew to a total of nearly 15,800. This comes after it had been on a downward trend from February through May. The average claims processing time in July also ticked up slightly to 65 days from 64 days in June.
  (OPM retirement claims backlog continued to grow in July - Federal News Network)
• Agencies have new details on how to design their remote work programs. They should be thoughtful and intentional when implementing remote work options for employees, the Office of Personnel Management says. In new guidance, OPM is clarifying what factors agencies should consider when approving or denying remote work applications. Fully remote work can support recruitment and retention, but there are also cases where OPM says it shouldn’t be used. Senior executives and early-career workers, for instance, might be better off coming into the office at least some of the time.
  (Federal remote work posture should not be one-size-fits-all, OPM says - Federal News Network)

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• The Education Department is facing new pressure to fix its new student aid platform. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Bernie Sanders (D-Ver.) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Mary.) are pressing Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to address potential transparency problems with the recently launched Unified Servicing and Data Solution or USDS system. In a letter to Cardona, the lawmakers say the new platform appears to lack transparency, making it more difficult for borrowers to hold their student loan servicers accountable. Additionally, the lawmakers say USDS also may pose barriers to reporting wrongdoing to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The senators want answers to 13 questions by August 11.
  (Wyden, Senators call for transparency, accountability from new student loan servicing platform - Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.))
• GSA is already seeing dramatic reductions in the time to add new products to its modernized catalog platform. Eight months since launching its new catalog platform for its schedules program, GSA says contractors have shaved a month off of the time it takes to add a new product. Dena McLaughlin, the acting deputy commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service at GSA, says the catalog platform is transforming the back end experience for schedule holders. "Now when you go to add a new product to your catalog, it shows up on GSA Advantage in an average of just 16 days. This is versus 47 days with our legacy systems." McLaughlin says the new catalog platform also enables vendors to remove products on average 28 days faster.
  (GSA industry symposium 2024 - General Services Administration)
• Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks presses Congress to increase support for defense innovation initiatives. Hicks says congressional trust will “need to substantially expand” when it comes to the department’s innovation programs. "We've done nearly 40 hill briefings since last October, averaging about one a week. That is on an initiative that represents 0.059 percent of DoD's budget. That depth of engagement isn't scalable for Congress." Launched last year, Replicator promises to field thousands of autonomous systems by August 2025. The military is already operating Replicator’s autonomous systems in real time across multiple regions worldwide.
  ("Congressional trust will need to substantially expand,” says DepSecDef Hicks about DoD defense innovation programs - Federal News Network)
• The Defense Department has awarded nearly one billion dollars in task orders for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability. There are 75 other task orders in process for award. The Defense Information Systems Agency recently said some of the acquisitions are related to the Pentagon's Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control effort. In December 2022, the Pentagon awarded the JWCC contract to four tech giants – Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Oracle — to modernize cloud at the enterprise level.
  (Nearly $1 billion in JWCC task orders awarded to date - DoD Innovation fact sheet)

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