• Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn plans to introduce a new package of bills this week, called the DOGE Acts. One bill would require agencies to report to Congress on the impacts of expanded telework and remote work for federal employees. Another bill in the package would freeze federal hiring and salaries for one year. The legislation aligns with the goals of the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” an external team led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy that promises to drastically cut government spending. Blackburn said her bills are aimed at holding the federal government more accountable.
  (DOGE Acts - Federal News Network )
• House and Senate lawmakers are authorizing a pay raise of 14.5% for junior enlisted service members at the E-4 level and below, and a 4.5% basic pay increase for all other service members. This is one of several provisions in the 2025 National Defense Authorization bill that legislators on the House and Senate Armed Services Committee reached an agreement on late Saturday night. The appropriators still need to approve the funding for the pay raise to take effect. Along with the pay raise authorization, lawmakers also agreed to changes to basic house allowance and cost of living calculation methods and to removing the 5-year time limitation on civilian employees serving in a competitive position overseas.
  (2025 NDAA summary - House Armed Services Committee)
• The Defense Department releases a classified strategy for countering drones. The new strategy aims to create a unified and comprehensive approach across the Defense Department to countering drones. The document builds on a number of high-level DoD initiatives, including the Joint Counter-Small UAS office and the Replicator initiative. The strategy lays out five lines of efforts the department will focus on, including ensuring counter-drone measures are integrated into doctrine, training, organizational structure and policy. The strategy comes as the Pentagon grapples with drone incursions both overseas and at home.
  (DoD releases classified strategy for countering drones - Federal News Network )
• There may be opportunities to expand skills-based hiring, shared certificates and early-career recruitment in the coming years. Though the efforts of the Biden administration’s President’s Management Agenda are coming to a close, administration officials pointed to promising signs of an improving federal hiring process. Earlier this year, the Biden administration announced plans to move one section of the federal workforce to skills-based assessments. But in the next administration, that effort could be expanded even further, according to OPM Acting Director Rob Shriver.
  (OPM’s Shriver sees skills-based assessments, shared certificates as federal hiring strategies ripe for expansion - Federal News Network )

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• Two senators are looking to reign in the outsized influence tech giants such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon have over the cloud computing and artificial intelligence defense contracting space. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Republican Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri introduced a bill that requires the Defense Department to ensure there is a “competitive award process” when procuring cloud computing, data infrastructure and AI models. If passed, the bill would also require the Defense Department to ensure that it maintains exclusive rights to access and use of all government data. The bill comes at a time when the Pentagon is pouring billions of dollars into AI and cloud services.
  (Lawmakers look to reign in Big Tech’s influence in AI, cloud procurement - Federal News Network)
• A long-time GSA technology executive has moved to the private sector. Bo Berlas, GSA's chief information security officer for the last five-plus years, left federal service to join the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS) as its CISO. He started in his new role on Dec. 5. Berlas had been with GSA for more than 22 years starting as a senior IT security specialist. At CSBS, which is the national organization of financial regulators, Berlas will oversee the organization’s information security strategy and the protection of its digital assets. He will be responsible for fostering a strong security culture and for building a technology platform that enables the states to securely collaborate in an ever-evolving landscape.
  (GSA's CISO Berlas moves to the private sector - Conference of State Bank Supervisors)
• The National Institute of Standards and Technology is out with new advice on how to adopt a zero trust cybersecurity architecture. NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence released the draft practice guide, Implementing a Zero Trust Architecture, last week. The center worked with 24 companies to demonstrate end-to-end zero trust architectures. Federal agencies have been upgrading their cyber defenses to adopt the zero trust approach for the last three years. Comments on NIST’s practice guide are due by Jan. 31.
  (NIST guidance on implementing a zero trust architecture - NIST)
• U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services continues to grow its workforce. USCIS now employs 22,500 staff, the most at any point in its history. That’s a far cry from 2020, when USCIS’s bleak financial picture led to a hiring freeze and its workforce dipped below 19,000 employees. USCIS Director Ur Jaddou said innovative hiring strategies have helped the agency bounce back. And she told the House Judiciary Committee last week that USCIS’s new fee rule will help keep pace with high demand for immigration processing.
  (Jaddou testimony - House Judiciary Committee)

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