August 18, 2025

DISA wants three new Joint Enterprise License Agreements in three years—despite each typically taking 18 months to build. With over $1B in contracts from Microsoft, Cisco, and Adobe on the table, the agency’s betting big on bulk buying to slash duplication and unify terms across DOD.

The Navy is moving away from “optionally manned” vessel designs and prioritizing fully unmanned surface craft, citing reduced costs, fewer complications, and alignment with new requirements such as the Modular Attack Surface Craft. Alongside these hardware efforts, the service is creating dedicated enlisted and officer career paths for unmanned systems, establishing training programs, and planning to integrate unmanned vessels into carrier strike groups as part of its long-term vision.

The W.H.'s interim National Defense Strategy, finalized in March and focused primarily on defending the U.S. homeland rather than prioritizing threats from China or the Indo-Pacific region, is already playing out through increased domestic troop deployments—such as National Guard patrols in cities without local request.

The proposed security clearance reforms in the fiscal 2026 NDAA aim to modernize and streamline the vetting process under Trusted Workforce 2.0—introducing measures like continuous vetting to reduce background check backlogs and identify issues more quickly. These updates offer “quick wins,” but officials acknowledge that more comprehensive changes—such as polygraph reform—are needed.

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The VA has processed over 2.5 million disability and pension claims in FY25—surpassing the previous year’s total—and reduced the claims backlog by 37% since January 20, 2025. This milestone follows an increase in eligibility resulting from the PACT Act and reflects the agency’s accelerated claims processing pace.

The NSF and NVIDIA are jointly funding the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) with a $152M investment—$75M from NSF and $77M from NVIDIA—to develop a fully open, national-scale AI infrastructure under the “Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science (OMAI)” initiative. This effort aims to produce transparent, multimodal AI models, datasets, and tools that accelerate scientific discovery in areas like materials science, biology, and energy.

Six senators have urged POTUS to reconsider his decision to allow U.S. companies to sell advanced AI chips (such as Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308) to China in exchange for a 15% fee, citing concerns about national security implications and possible legal violations. The senators also requested detailed information about the negotiation process, how the fee would be assessed, and how the revenue would be used.

Accenture is set to acquire CyberCX and its 1,400 cybersecurity pros, marking its largest cyber deal yet. With AI-powered platforms and deep ties to government clients, the move aims to shore up defenses across Australia, New Zealand, and beyond.

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