Defense Department
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One of the longest-running conflicts the Pentagon deals with is the fight over employee performance management. The National Security Personnel System only lasted a couple of years before Congress voted it out of existence. Now the Defense Department is taking another shot at employee performance management. Pete Randazzo is Local 1690 Union President for the National Federation of Federal Employees. Randazzo was co-lead for a Performance Management Design Team that offered recommendations to the Pentagon. He explained his team's work on In Depth with Francis Rose.
August 28, 2014 -
The Defense Department has a plan to get its supply chain management issues off of the Government Accountability Office's high risk list, but progress has been very slow. The Army has a plan to speed things up.
August 28, 2014 -
Lawmaker asks National Security Director James Clapper to take action against the tax- delinquents and inform them that their potentially harmful financial behaviors put the nation's security at risk.
August 27, 2014 -
United States operations in Iraq and Syria today put the U.S. in an unusual position. By fighting one opponent, the U.S. military is indirectly benefitting another nation it considers an adversary. That is one example of the fluidity of war fighting in the 21st century. Adm. James Stavridis is Dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. He helped lead a task force on Creative Disruption for the Center for a New American Security. A paper on that task force looks at the disconnect between industry and DoD right now -- and on In Depth with Francis Rose, Admiral Stavridis said there are several answers.
August 27, 2014 -
Elana Broitman will soon leave the Defense Department as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manufacturing & Industrial Base Policy. Andre Gudger -- Director of the Office of Small Business Programs -- will take over her role on an acting basis until Secretary Broitman's position is filled. On In Depth with Francis Rose, Broitman said the companies she's worked with in the past year have shown her (and the department) they can do amazing things.
August 26, 2014 -
After more than a year of planning, the Defense Department issues the final solicitation for a commercial software to replace its AHLTA program. The Pentagon expects to make a single award for the contract that could be worth $11 billion over its lifetime.
August 26, 2014 -
The percentage of Defense Department contract dollars the Pentagon awards via competitive bids has been falling every year since 2008. And its self-imposed goals for contract competition have been missed every year since then. Now Frank Kendall, the undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, issues a set of orders to Pentagon leaders. Federal News Radio's DoD reporter Jared Serbu joined Tom Temin on the Federal Drive with details. Read Jared's related article.
August 26, 2014 -
The Defense Department's acquisition chief outlined a series of changes intended to bolster competition for DoD contracts on Friday, lamenting the fact that the Pentagon has missed its competition goals every year since the goals were created.
August 25, 2014 -
The Pentagon broke a couple of federal laws when it swapped Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban leaders, according to the Government Accountability Office. Edda Emmanuelli Perez, managing associate general counsel at GAO, joined Tom Temin on the Federal Drive to discuss the origin of the investigation.
August 25, 2014 -
The Defense Information Systems Agency will begin to shake up its organizational chart in significant ways beginning on Oct. 1. But officials, so far, are reluctant to discuss the details.
August 25, 2014 -
The indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity award will converge the heterogeneous IT architectures aboard Navy ships - all 630 of them - into a single, standards based architecture.
August 21, 2014 -
The Defense Information Systems Agency, which serves as the broker between Defense Department components and commercial providers of cloud computing services, says the certification standards it set for commercial providers may be too arduous for vendors. DoD also launched five pilots to test the use of commercial cloud providers and is reassessing how it develops cloud requirements.
August 21, 2014 -
The National Security Agency closed down an office dedicated to mobility, because devices and apps have become part of the fabric of everything the agency does. But NSA, like all agencies, still must figure out how to secure mobile devices using derived credentials.
August 21, 2014 -
The Navy awarded blanket purchase agreements to 17 small businesses, which they hope will take care of most DoD's conference planning needs for the next three years.
August 20, 2014 -
Katherine Hammack, assistant secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment, says shrinking forces won't be enough to match sequestration-level budgets.
August 19, 2014