Senate bill gives $375M in funding to new FBI HQ

• The new FBI headquarters slated to be built in Greenbelt, Maryland, would see $375 million in fiscal 2025 under the Senate spending bill passed out of the Appropriations Committee yesterday. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) secured the funding and support from the full committee in the Financial Services and General Government bill. This funding comes after House appropriators in June pushed back on GSA’s plan to invest $3.5 billion in the new headquarters. Thousands of federal employees would be impacted by the relocation of the headquarters from the dilapidated J. Edgar Hoover building in D.C. GSA selected Greenbelt last November, which it said would provide the best transportation access to FBI employees.
  ( Full Committee Markup of Energy and Water Development; Defense; Labor, Health, and Human Services; and Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Acts - Senate Appropriations Committee)
• The General Services Administration is investing $30 million to make federal buildings more sustainable. As part of that funding, GSA and the Energy Department issued a request for information yesterday to identify emerging and sustainable technologies for everything from deep energy retrofits to all-electric buildings and all-electric vehicle fleets to net-zero operations. GSA said it will pilot selected technologies in its Center for Emerging Building Technologies or in Energy's Demonstrating Efficient Solutions in Buildings program, or a combination of these initiatives. RFI submissions are due by September 13.
  (GSA, Energy seek innovative clean energy and decarbonization technologies for testing in federal buildings - GSA)
• The Thrift Savings Plan made huge improvements posting all positive returns for the month of July. This comes after posting negatives returns from the I Fund and the S Fund in June. The S fund posted the highest return and saw a massive jump from -0.10% to 6.23%, while the I fund climbed up from -1.62% to 2.86% in July. The C fund continues to post the highest year-to-date return at 16.67%, and an 11.09% return over the last 12 months. All Lifecycle funds posted positive returns in July.
  (TSP bounces back with all positive returns in July - Federal News Network)
• The Defense Department Office of Inspector General will evaluate how effective the Defense Innovation Unit and the military branches were when selecting the tools and technologies for the Replicator initiative to meet the Indo-Pacific Command’s operational needs. DoD kicked off the Replicator initiative last year in an effort to quickly field thousands of uncrewed systems by August 2025. The Pentagon secured about $500 million in fiscal 2024 for the Replicator, but a recent report from the Congressional Research Service indicated that there is not enough information on the initiative, which might raise doubts about whether DoD has adequately analyzed the program in terms of capabilities and costs.
  (DoD IG to evaluate Pentagon’s Replicator initiative - DOD OIG)

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• The Senate Appropriations Committee passed its version of the 2025 defense spending bill. Senate appropriators want to boost defense spending by 3.3% in fiscal 2025. The decision to increase defense spending beyond 1% will open up a budget fight with the House, which has adhered to the spending limits set by the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act. The Senate appropriators’ bill is now moving to the Senate floor for consideration, but lawmakers won’t take it up until they are back in town from a month-long summer recess.
  (Senate Approps advances defense spending bill, blowing past budget caps - Federal News Network)
• Senate appropriators are warming back up to the Technology Modernization Fund. In its version of the Financial Services and General Government 2025 spending bill, lawmakers included $25 million for the TMF. This comes after the Senate not only zeroed out the TMF in this year, but rescinded 100 million dollars from it. The House version of the 2025 FSGG bill also provided no new funding for the TMF. The Biden administration asked for $75 million in its budget request. Earlier this week, the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee approved a bill to extend the TMF through 2030.
  (Full committee markup of 2025 spending bills - Senate Appropriations Committee)
• The IRS Whistleblower Office is on the cusp of making it easier to submit potential claims. Over the next year, the office will launch a digital submission portal for whistleblower claims. This modernization effort is part of how the IRS collects information to identify non-compliance and reduce the tax gap. In 2023 alone, the IRS said it paid almost $90 million dollars in awards based on whistleblower information. The Whistleblower Office received almost 17,000 award claims, an increase of 44% compared to the average of the prior four years. Since 2007, the IRS has paid over $1.2 billion in awards based on the successful collection of $7 billion from non-compliant taxpayers.
  (IRS Whistleblower Office celebrates National Whistleblower Day; over $7 billion in collected proceeds thanks to whistleblowers - IRS)
• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has named Lisa Einstein as its first-ever chief artificial intelligence officer. Einstein has already been leading CISA's AI work as a senior advisor at the agency. She also served as executive director of CISA’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee. Einstein said AI can help improve cybersecurity, but that developers should prioritize safety, security and trustworthiness when building AI tools. The White House has tasked CISA with evaluating the use of AI in critical infrastructure, and assessing how it can be leveraged to improve cybersecurity tools.
  (CISA names first chief artificial intelligence officer - CISA )

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