Federal News Network's deputy editor, Jared Serbu, speaks one-on-one and in depth with the people responsible for managing the inner workings of the federal government's largest department, and those who know it best.
We spend a lot of time talking and about the federal hiring process and how long it takes. What gets less attention is the onboarding process: all the steps that have to happen once the hiring process is over to get new employees in a position to actually do their jobs.
Previous studies have shown t…
It would be a bad idea for anyone to predict the exact year in which the Defense Department will relieve itself of its status as the only federal department unable to pass a financial audit. But the oversight body closest to the process seems to think there are glimmers of light at the end of what’s…
This episode features two discussions from the 2024 Sea Air Space conference, starting with a focus on sustainment and logistics. Over the past several years, the Navy has been using a sweeping process improvement effort to wring almost a billion dollars in savings out of its supply chains under a p…
Federal News Network has covered the difficulties federal employees and military members have seen when it comes to getting access to health care in Japan. On this edition of the show, we’re going to talk about that – but not just about that. We’re also going to talk about military spouse unemployme…
It’s been a decade of major change for the Military Health System in general, and the Defense Health Agency in particular. From its beginning as primarily a shared services provider, DHA has grown to become the sole operator of all of the military’s hospitals and clinics, the overseer of the TRICARE…
On this edition of On DoD, Jared talks with two leaders from the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR) who are experimenting with technologies like 5G and proliferated low-earth orbit satellites. We'll talk about the massive increase in bandwidth those technologies allow and the improve…
On this edition of On DoD: Up until a year ago, the Office of the Secretary of Defense was a bit of an outlier when it came to IT management and governance. Despite having 19,000 employees, there was no single person in charge of making sure those workers had a decent user experience, and no one in …
Up until this summer, it wasn’t uncommon for Navy IT users, even at the most senior ranks in the Pentagon, to plan part of their mornings around the 10 minutes it took for their computers to boot. But as part of a concerted effort to improve user experience, the service has shown it’s possible to cu…
The Pentagon’s decades-old planning and budgeting process doesn’t have a lot of fans – least of all the people who work within it every day.
The American Society of Military Comptrollers has been surveying the DoD financial management workforce for their views about the planning, programming, budge…
The Pentagon has a new plan to improve technology services inside the actual Pentagon – or big parts of it anyway. The first-ever enterprise IT implementation plan for the Office of the Secretary of Defense promises to take a user-centric approach to improving IT services for the 17 major offices th…
Holly Joers, the program executive officer for Defense Healthcare Management Systems talks with Federal News Network's Jared Serbu and Jason Miller about DoD's ongoing deployment of a new electronic heath record, how the new EHR will work with other federal agencies, and the centrality of data in PE…
The expert commission Congress has tasked with proposing overhauls to DoD's planning and budgeting processes is still a year away from delivering its final report. But the Commission on Planning, Programming, Budgeting, and Execution Reform has already gathered a huge amount of information. In its f…
The Air Force believes it's made significant progress toward improving the cybersecurity of its weapons systems -- both brand new ones, and systems that have been fielded for decades.
On this episode of On DoD, Jared Serbu talks with two leaders from the Air Force's Cyber Resiliency Office for Weap…
A new study by George Mason University's Center for Government Contracting chronicles the ways in which the Defense budgeting process has become increasingly inflexible over the last seven decades, how it's shackled technological innovation in DoD, and what to do about it.
On this episode, co-autho…
No one particularly likes the way the Defense Department andCongress handle the DoD budgeting process. It’s rigid, inflexible, and veryslow. But the PPBE process, as it’s called, has been encoded into the DNA ofthe Defense bureaucracy for more than 60 years, and turning the ship around isgoing to be…
We start this week’s show with an exclusive interview withGabe Camarillo, the undersecretary of the Army, about several new initiativesthe Army’s launching to incorporate small, innovative businesses into its technology ecosystem.
Later in the program, Kenneth McNeill, the National Guard’schief inf…
When the Navy Department set about the process of simplifying its journey to modern software development, officials decided it didn't make much sense to reinvent the wheel. So instead of building a software factory and development pipeline from scratch, they borrowed heavily from the Air Force's Pla…
Maintenance periods for the Navy’s ships and submarines are taking longer than they should. And there are a lot of reasons for that, but one that the Navy’s only recently discovered is that most of the supplies shipyard employees need to do the work aren’t on hand at the time the work’s supposed to …
The Defense Department and its components are now into their fifth year of having their financial statements independently scrutinized by independent auditors. In the first few years, there were some very promising signs that DoD was on the path to eventually earning a clean opinion, as every other…
Just like innumerable other government agencies, the Air Force runs on paper-based forms that have to be filled out manually, and each one takes time. How much? That was a difficult question to answer until the Virginia Air National Guard’s 192nd Wing saw a chance to do things differently. '
Chief …