Defense Department
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Although the governmentwide hiring freeze President Donald Trump ordered last week was mainly meant to shrink the federal workforce through gradual, voluntary attrition, it could result in an untold number of unexpected dismissals for Defense workers in charge of repairing and "resetting" military equipment.
February 01, 2017 -
President Trump on Friday ordered the Pentagon to immediately set about the work of figuring out how much money the Defense Department will need to overcome what military leaders have said are serious readiness problems brought on by years of political deadlock over the federal budget.
January 30, 2017 -
The House Armed Services Committee’s top Democrat said Thursday that he plans to reintroduce legislation that would allow the Defense Department to conduct a new round of base realignments and closures (BRAC).
January 27, 2017 -
Thus far, President Donald Trump’s promise to reduce the size of the federal workforce only involves attrition, not layoffs. But if things escalate to actual reductions in force, Pentagon employees with poor performance ratings will be the first to go.
January 26, 2017 -
Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis is the only member of the Trump administration's Defense team to be nominated, yet alone undergo a confirmation hearing.
January 24, 2017 -
When Army officials decided to launch the service’s first-ever bug bounty, one of the key questions they wanted to answer was whether sensitive personnel records were vulnerable to theft by hackers via the Army’s public-facing websites. As it turns out, the answer was yes.
January 24, 2017 -
While the federal government as a whole has made major progress toward getting its books in audit-ready condition over the past two decades, the Defense Department remains the single biggest impediment, the Government Accountability Office said last week in its annual report on the federal government’s financial statements.
January 24, 2017 -
The Defense Department has spent well over a decade and tens of billions of dollars to buy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems with the hope that they would help the military adopt modern, automated business processes and pave the way to financial auditability. But a strikingly small number of DoD financial managers think the systems have done anything to make their jobs easier.
January 20, 2017 -
Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) is urging a handful of large agencies to quickly move forward in their efforts to roll out the DATA Act by the May 2017 deadline.
January 18, 2017 -
Frank Kendall, the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, used his final public remarks as Pentagon acquisition chief Tuesday to argue that DoD has made significant, demonstrable progress in improving outcomes from its procurement system, and that if Congress wants to help, it should largely stay out of the way.
January 18, 2017 -
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Monday became the first senior political leader to sketch out a detailed vision for what Defense budgets might look like under a Republican-controlled government.
January 17, 2017 -
The Defense Department is adopting a new reporting system to ensure program and project cost data is more efficient for both the department and for industry partners.
January 15, 2017 -
Just hours after the conclusion of James Mattis' confirmation hearing to be the next secretary of Defense, a broad bipartisan majority of 81 senators voted Thursday to make an exception from the seven-year cooling off period for military officers and allow him to become the department's top civilian leader.
January 13, 2017 -
Congress’ two defense policy committees were set to meet Thursday to consider whether retired Gen. James Mattis should be the next secretary of Defense, something both houses of Congress will have to approve since his confirmation would require the suspension of a federal law that demands military officers be out of uniform for seven years before they become the military’s civilian boss.
January 12, 2017 -
Terry Halvorsen, who has been the Defense Department’s chief information officer since the summer of 2014, said Wednesday that he will retire from government service on Feb. 28, but that the department's current IT policies and priorities are unlikely to undergo significant changes during the transition to a new administration.
January 12, 2017