Army budgets promise to be lean for many years to come. But the Army Corps of Engineers has quietly controlled costs for a long time using value engineering. It’s a cost-cutting technique outlined in Circular 131.

The Office of Federal Procurement Policy recently updated the guidance for the first time in 20 years. Jeffery Hooghouse is chief value officer at the Army Corps of Engineers.

Speech-recognition technology is undergoing a sort of renaissance. One system that the Defense Department uses can locate, identify and translate information in at least 15 languages. And it does it in real time. The software is Byblos. Raytheon BBN Technologies makes it. Chief scientist John Makhoul explains how it works.

What happens when a big contract goes to a company which then splits in two? The losing bidder protests. That’s what happened when NASA handed a $1.7 billion contract to SAIC for spaceflight services. Procurement attorney Joe Petrillo, of Petrillo & Powell, has more.

As agencies rush towards cloud computing, cybersecurity concerns temper their excitement. SafeGov, an industry organization, releases a white paper detailing specific steps that the federal CIO Council and the White House can take to move toward integration of all its cloud initiatives.

Karen Evans is a co-author of the report and a former Office of Management and Budget administrator for e-government and IT. She tells Executive Editor Jason Miller how to bring all the moving pieces together, so that government ends up with secure cloud services.

The chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee says he’s been assured that the full Senate will soon take up a massive omnibus bill that veterans groups say is the most sweeping update to veterans benefits in modern memory. More from Federal News Radio’s DoD reporter, Jared Serbu.