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• Two more nominations have been announced by President Donald Trump. He named Robert McMahon to be the assistant secretary of defense for logistics and material readiness. McMahon is a retired Air Force general who also directed C-17 Field Operations for the Boeing Company. Trump also picked Raymond Martinez to be the administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. He is currently the head of New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle Commission. (White House)

• The Veterans Affairs Department’s inspector general is creating a specific division to look into VA construction projects. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Ranking Member Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said special attention is necessary. The Government Accountability Office said VA is still struggling to oversee major construction projects and acquisitions. (Federal News Radio)

• A new bill has expanded the DATA Act. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) said she is introducing the Grant Reporting Efficiency and Assistance Transparency (GREAT) Act in the next few weeks. The bill requires grant recipients to use a standardized data structure when reporting information to federal agencies.

• The State Department may be able to save $10 billion through its agency reorganization, according to the deputy secretary. But lawmakers are skeptical. Democrats on the House Foreign Relations Committee want to know how the department plans to save money, reorganize and cut its budget by 32 percent as the White House recommends. (Federal News Radio)

• House lawmakers have gotten fresh promises from the Department of Homeland Security to fix a 15-year-old problem. DHS will move the financial management system for three components back in-house after an unsuccessful attempt to use a federal shared service provider. DHS told lawmakers yesterday the financial system upgrade will be 80 percent complete by October. But that last 20 percent may take until 2021 to finish. DHS is developing a plan to move the hardware and software from the Interior Business Center to its data center. Then DHS will issue a solicitation for a systems integrator to help finish the modernization initiative.

• Before Customs and Border Protection opens new pre-clearance sites at international airports, it should address the thousands of staff vacancies it has. That’s the opinion of the National Treasury Employees Union. CBP needs an additional 2,100 officers and 631 agriculture specialists. Still, DHS is hoping to double the number of foreign passengers who travel through pre-clearance by 2024. (National Treasury Employees Union)

• Four working documents on cloud adoption from the Cloud Center of Excellence are open for industry and federal comment. The interagency group said the documents are a product of conversations cloud evangelists are having about the challenges, mistakes, and benefits of the cloud. They’re designed to help agencies get better at buying and using cloud solutions. (Federal News Radio)

• The Navy may become the next big customer for the Defense Information Systems Agency’s email services. As part of its upcoming re-competition of the massive Next Generation Enterprise Network contract, the Navy said it wants to use DISA’s Defense Enterprise Office Services for email and “productivity services,” breaking those functions apart from its current multibillion-dollar contract with HP. One problem though, DEOS doesn’t exist yet, even after two years of planning. In the short term, Navy officials said they’ll have to continue providing email and other services on their own until they see precisely what DISA offers and how much it costs. (Federal News Radio)

• A senior Justice Department career official is leaving, citing disagreement with the Trump administration. Chuck Rosenberg, the acting administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, will step down Oct. 1. He’d publicly objected when President Donald Trump recently called for rough handling of suspects. Rosenberg has served through both Democratic and Republican administrations. He was a counselor to Attorney General John Ashcroft and chief of staff to former FBI director James Comey. Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch appointed Rosenberg to his current post. (Federal News Radio)

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