Congress has been reluctant to let Defense Department finance officials shift tight dollars from one place to another. Limited reprogramming means procurement accounts get hit harder than program managers would like. One result is that defense contractors are starting to look elsewhere for business. Some of the top contractors say increasing their sales abroad is becoming an attractive business strategy. Kevin Brancato is a senior defense analyst at Bloomberg Government.

The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board was created in 2009 to track spending under the economic stimulus bill. It got a news assignment to oversee the $58 billion the federal government spent to help victims of Superstorm Sandy. That task has proven to be not so simple, in part because of a missing code to tag the money. Kathy Tighe is chairman of the RAT Board.

The Senate is expected to bring up the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) as part of the Defense authorization bill next week. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) is one of the sponsors of the House version of the bill. He tells Executive Editor Jason Miller how FITARA is one part of the cure to the way agencies buy technology.

The National Security Agency says just because information is classified, doesn’t mean authorized users should only be able to handle it when they’re tethered to their desks. As Federal News Radio’s Jared Serbu reports, the agency is looking for ways to access classified information on tablets and smartphones over commercial wireless networks.