Vote today for the 2025 FedScoop 50 awards.

Cast your vote!

Trump administration launches online public deregulation form

The public can now submit ideas for deregulating government through an online form, the General Services Administration announced Wednesday.

GSA and the Office of Management and Budget launched the form through Regulations.gov, a website that provides public access to regulatory materials and aims to increase rulemaking participation while improving federal efficiency and effectiveness. 

A GSA press release states that the online form “seeks taxpayer’s ideas to cut stifling federal regulations.”

“Most Americans have become used to a government that is weaponized against them, with regulations being a favored tool to do so. Today, we’re changing that by empowering the people to use their Constitutional petition clause power to fight back and President Trump’s administration is here to listen and fix it,” Jeff Clark, the acting administrator of OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, said in the release.

The release instructs individuals to focus on explaining a rule or regulation’s original purpose and context, along with why the rule should be rescinded or canceled. Reasoning can include that a regulation conflicts with the law or constitution, costs outweigh the benefits, a rule is no longer relevant or a regulation “unexpectedly creates problems for businesses.”

The form asks individuals to enter what agency or agencies implemented the regulation, which parts of the regulation should be rescinded, the background for the regulation being rescinded and more. 

GSA states that the Trump administration has made ending “harmful and business-stifling regulations a priority,” adding that the form affords members of the public “who are most affected by unnecessary, unlawful or unduly burdensome regulations, the opportunity to have their voices heard in the deregulatory process.”

Submissions will be reviewed and analyzed by the administration to “understand opportunities.”

“Overregulation stifles innovation and hurts small businesses. President Trump’s GSA is here to help change that,” Stephen Ehikian, GSA’s acting administrator, said in the release.

OSTP taps policy scholar Dean Ball as AI, emerging tech advisor

Dean Ball, a policy scholar with a focus on the intersection of history, political theory, policy and technology, is joining the Trump administration as a senior policy advisor on artificial intelligence and emerging technology, he announced Tuesday on the social media platform X.

Ball said in his post of joining the Office of Science and Technology Policy: “It is a thrill and honor to serve my country in this role and work alongside the tremendous team [OSTP Director Michael Kratsios] has built.”

He comes to OSTP from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where he has served as a research fellow for the past year.

Ball is also the author of an AI-focused blog called Hyperdimensional, in which he has defended the AI Safety Institute and commented on the Trump administration’s terminations of probationary employees. 

“Because probationary employees are disproportionately likely to be young and focused on more recent government priorities (like AI), the move had unintended consequences,” Ball wrote. “While the memo was a disruption for many federal agencies, it would have been an existential threat to the [USASI], virtually all of whose staff are probationary employees.”

In another post, Ball says that he is interested in AI being built at the “very same time the Republican party and Donald Trump in particular, seek to advance theories of a ‘unitary executive’ — the notion that the president exercises the powers granted to him by the Constitution and Congress absolutely. By the end of President Trump’s term, that may be more possible than anyone ever imagined.”

Ball currently serves as a board member at the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, which is a New York-based think tank “inspired by Alexander Hamilton’s life and work,” according to its website.

His past experience includes serving as a senior program manager for Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, an executive director for the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, and the director of the Adam Smith Society at the Manhattan Institute.

Trump EOs aim to overhaul federal procurement, contracting systems

President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders Tuesday to revamp the federal procurement and contracting processes, part of the administration’s sweeping takedown of government regulations.

The procurement order takes aim at the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which the White House says has evolved “into an excessive and overcomplicated regulatory framework and resulting in an onerous bureaucracy.”

To “create the most agile, effective, and efficient procurement system possible,” Trump’s EO calls for the removal of “undue barriers” and “unnecessary regulations” in procurement. As part of that approach, the order says the “FAR should contain only provisions required by statute or essential to sound procurement, and any FAR provisions that do not advance these objectives should be removed.”

The order calls for the head of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, members of the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council, and senior agency acquisition and procurement officials to coordinate on aligning the FAR with the order’s instructions within 180 days.

Every agency with procurement authority is directed to designate a senior acquisition or procurement official for the FAR realignment within 15 days, and within 20 days, the Office of Management and Budget director must issue a memo with implementation guidance. The OFPP administrator is charged with overseeing the sunsetting of various FAR provisions.

Kevin Rhodes, OMB senior advisor, said in a statement that the FAR overhaul “will reduce more than 40 years of bureaucratic buildup that will unleash our procurement system with generational change and results.”

The contracting order is a bit lighter on details, simply calling for agencies to buy commercially available products and services with the elimination of “unnecessary and imprudent expenditures of taxpayer dollars” in mind.

Within 60 days, agency contracting officers will be asked to review “all open agency solicitations, pre-solicitation notices, solicitation notices, award notices, and sole source notices for non-commercial products or services, such as highly specialized, Government-unique systems, custom-developed products or services, or research and development requirements where the agency has not identified a satisfactory commercial option.” Market research and price analysis should be included as rationale for purchases.

A month after purchase applications are received, agencies’ senior procurement executives will be tasked with assessing proposals’ compliance with the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act, and deliver recommendations to “advance the solicitation of commercial products or services where those products or services would be sufficient to serve the applicable procurement needs.”

Procurement executives would then be required to deliver a report to the OMB director within 120 days of the EO, “detailing the agency’s compliance with FASA and its progress toward implementing” the White House’s policies.

Trump orders tech modernization push for environmental permitting

The Trump administration issued an executive order Tuesday directing federal agencies to maximize the use of technology in environmental review and permit processes for infrastructure development projects.

President Donald Trump’s executive order aims to streamline processing time for projects, ensure legal departments in agencies have technology to provide enhanced defense of challenged environmental documents and permit decisions, reduce duplicative data submissions and more. 

Federal agencies and executive departments “shall make maximum use of technology in environmental review and permitting processes for infrastructure projects of all kinds, such as roads, bridges, mines, factories, power plants and others,” the order states.

It also calls for the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to create a plan for technology use in permitting.

“The government does not properly leverage technology to effectively and efficiently evaluate environmental permits, causing significant delay to important infrastructure projects that impact our economic well-being,” the directive states. “This will now change.”

The CEQ coordinates and consults with agencies, provides guidance for National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) implementation to “ensure timely environmental review and permitting processes across the government,” and advises the president on environmental quality policies. 

Under the order, the council has 45 days to pull together a plan for modernizing technology in permitting and environmental review processes for infrastructure development. That plan is required to include an initial data and tech standard for permit applications and reviews under NEPA “and other applicable permits and authorizations.”

The chairman’s plan must list minimal functional requirements for an agency’s NEPA and permitting-related software systems that incorporate automation to expedite low-level reviews, data-driven document structure, and data collection and reporting to “minimize timeline uncertainty for environmental reviews.” 

The plan should also provide a roadmap for creating an interagency permitting and environmental review data system that consists of interconnected agency systems and shared services. This must include “iterative development of new platforms, tools and capabilities, key investments and decision points for consolidating digital infrastructure and resulting outcomes for environmental review and permitting.”

Additionally, the CEQ chairman must establish and lead an interagency Permitting Innovation Center (PIC) that will facilitate agency adoption of prototype software for permitting, including case management systems, application submission and tracking portals, data exchange between agency systems and more. 

Stephen Ehikian, General Services Administration administrator, is called on to provide support for the establishment of the PIC through the agency’s Technology Transformation Services, which just went through another round of workforce reductions.

Federal agencies aren’t working together to fight consumer scams, GAO says

The federal government has no overarching strategy to counter scams, a new watchdog report found, leaving consumers vulnerable to the kinds of digital crimes that have surged in recent years.

According to the Government Accountability Office’s findings, there’s not only no federal strategy to combat tech-fueled cons — there also isn’t a governmentwide estimate of how much money has been lost to that type of fraud, or even a common definition for what constitutes a scam.

What has bubbled up in place of a comprehensive, coordinated scam-fighting operation is a patchwork system spread across agencies, including the FBI, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission.

In conducting a performance audit that began in October 2023 and wrapped up this month, the GAO spoke with the FBI, the CFPB, the FTC and 10 other agencies that currently pursue scam-countering activities. 

“In this regard, each agency has its own mandate and authority, with each largely pursuing independent activities related to countering scams,” the GAO wrote. “Several agencies formally and informally coordinate their efforts with other agencies and consumer and other associations, including when providing consumer education or by sharing consumer-complaint information. However, these efforts are not coordinated across all the agencies we identified on a formal, government-wide basis.”

The GAO’s reporting found that payment methods are essentially an umbrella for all sorts of digital scams that plague consumers, mentioning specifically the lengths scammers go to trick consumers out of money via peer-to-peer apps, electronic payments via bank accounts and through cryptocurrency exchanges. 

FBI officials acknowledged to the watchdog that cyber-enabled fraud is a global problem that merits a coordinated, worldwide response. The bureau told the GAO that it does organize efforts to combat schemes of that kind, but its resources are limited and there is not a “formalized mechanism to deconflict …  collaborate, coordinate, leverage assets, and share respective resources among investigations.”

Beyond the FBI’s work targeting cyber-enabled fraud, the FTC, Treasury Department and White House are also engaged in strategies to take on scams. But according to the GAO, those strategies merely address activities related to scams, rather than focus specifically on scams. 

Data collection is another challenge facing the CFPB, FBI and FTC, which all “receive, compile, and report on consumer complaints pertaining to issues including internet-related crime and scams” on their own. Because agencies have such a siloed approach, there’s no uniform way in which data is collected, meaning agencies aren’t able to put an exact number on scam complaints, relying instead on estimates. The FBI approximated that in 2023, it received roughly 589,400 scam-related complaints, totaling losses of over $10 billion.

The GAO believes many of those issues could be mitigated with a governmentwide strategy — and some agency officials appeared to be on board with that approach. The FTC said a strategy like that “could help overcome those jurisdictional barriers,” assuming “significant resources” are devoted to it, as well as a focus on criminal and civil law enforcement. 

The watchdog delivered six recommendations to the FBI, six to the CFPB and six to the FTC. The topline recommendation would put the FBI director in charge of the governmentwide effort to counter scams, carving out strategic roles for the heads of the CFPB, FTC, Treasury and other agencies. Other recommendations center on collaborative data collection and analysis, reporting mechanisms, and the creation of metrics to gauge the effectiveness of anti-scam efforts.

“Undertaking these types of activities would help ensure an effective federal response to a significant risk to consumers from a type of crime that is growing in scope and sophistication,” the GAO said.

From Silos to Seamless: How an integrated security layer can prepare government for AI-era applications

As government agencies continue to expand their reliance on cloud computing to modernize essential services, enhance citizen experiences, and adopt the latest innovations, they are confronting a new set of application development challenges.

While the evolution of virtualization and software containers paved the way for enterprises to run their IT operations in the cloud, their applications and associated dependencies continue to function largely as they traditionally have in enterprise data centers.

Headshot of Anish Patel, Cloudflare
Anish Patel is the federal director of sales at Cloudflare.

Today, however, computing workloads are not only more distributed but increasingly hyper-automated. The problem is that traditional enterprise architectures and security models are increasingly ill-equipped to protect distributed data and applications in a highly decentralized, hyper-automated decision-making environment.

The Internet experience: From analog to digital to Internet-native

Consider how Internet applications have evolved over the past two decades. Initial applications driving the Internet were primarily about converting analog content, such as documents and images, into digital content. Then, as social networks and mobile devices became more prevalent, the Internet enabled organizations and users to create and provide new digital-native experiences. This required developing an entirely new generation of applications, as well as security models, to protect the data used by those applications. Similarly, cloud computing began as a way for enterprises to store and process vastly more information on an as-needed basis without worrying anymore about buying servers and infrastructure.

What’s changing is how AI, hyper-automation, and real-time decision-making place new performance and security demands on even relatively modern applications. This transformation will require building a new generation of native applications designed to work elastically across multiple distributed environments. These applications will need the requisite connectivity and security features to facilitate split-second, high-velocity, hyper-automated decision-making without compromising agency options or security.

They will also require a different approach to security — one where enterprise networking, cybersecurity, and application development teams will need to work more closely together on platforms that facilitate these new technology advances with security policies that touch all edges of the Internet. Put a different way, enterprise IT and security leaders will need to operate and develop applications differently to move from “silos to seamless.” So, how do we get there?

Building an integrated security cloud: Fitting into your world

People will accept security controls that seamlessly fit into their workflow, and organizations will allow access, as long as they know their data is safe. Making the translation between the two requires an understanding of some foundational realities:

  1. Enterprise IT operations will continue to rely on a variety of public, controlled, and private cloud environments and the users need to have the option to connect with those environments without disrupting security.
  2. Building and deploying secure applications that deliver native Internet experiences in real time means thinking not just about a unified security policy, but also about networking — connectivity, encryption, latency.
  3. The end user will always push the boundaries of agency services; however, pausing innovation erodes trust in the government.

The way to ensure security in these distributed environments is by creating a unified security cloud that integrates into your world while operating as an abstracted layer — a protective boundary right at the edge of the Internet — between agencies’ various IT operating environments and the Internet itself.

An integrated security cloud provides a unified platform for managing security, connectivity, and application performance across multiple cloud environments. By abstracting away the complexities of individual cloud platforms — be it AWS, Azure, Google, a software-as-a-service (SaaS), or even their on-prem data center — agencies can enforce consistent security policies, reduce latency, and improve user experiences. This approach offers several key benefits:

Getting started: A journey, not a destination

The journey to an integrated security cloud begins with assessing an agency’s existing IT environments and identifying key security gaps. It’s also important to understand network performance gaps, particularly getting to and from the Internet. In a highly distributed environment, low latency matters — and will matter even more in the future as workloads become more automated.

Often, it’s hard to predict the next stop on the journey, especially as tech innovation is accelerating

Agencies should consider getting guidance from partners like Cloudflare, known for working agnostically with the broad universe of security providers — and which already has established working relationships with most federal agencies to provide Internet network services and API protections.

Cloudflare, one of the world’s largest and most interconnected networks that serves and protects 20% of all Internet traffic, currently helps agencies deliver secure Internet-connected services via 46 FedRAMP-approved Point of Presence (POP) locations all across the globe. Cloudflare also allows government agencies to distribute and protect critical infrastructure and applications, simplify and secure application access for their employees and contractors, and enhance citizen services with modern digital experiences.

Cloudflare already plays a central role in protecting agencies’ domain name Internet access, making it possible to provide added post-quantum cybersecurity protection. Because Cloudflare already serves as a shield for data exposed to the Internet, it gives agencies added protection even as they work on modernizing their applications.

One step that agencies should seriously consider focusing on now is the looming threat to current encryption practices from the emergence of quantum computing, which could render existing encryption algorithms obsolete, exposing data stolen today to widespread abuse in the coming decade. Today, 97% of the sites that use post-quantum cryptography encryption already do so via Cloudflare.

The shift to distributed cloud environments has created new security challenges for government agencies. Building an integrated security cloud offers a path to resilient and responsive government services in the cloud era. By simplifying security management, reducing latency, and improving user experiences, agencies can unlock the full potential of current and next-gen Internet services while ensuring the protection of critical data and systems.

Learn how Cloudflare for Government can protect agency employees and improve citizen services.

IRS’s top IT official leaving the tax agency this month

The Internal Revenue Service’s chief information officer is leaving the tax agency this month, the latest in an increasingly long line of veteran IT leaders exiting the government amid President Donald Trump’s gutting of the federal workforce.

Rajiv Uppal told IT staffers in a Monday email, obtained by FedScoop, that he had “decided to depart” the tax agency, and that his last day will be April 28. Kaschit Pandya, the agency’s chief technology officer, will take over as acting CIO “while leadership finalizes long-term plans for the role,” Uppal wrote.

“It’s been an honor to serve as your Chief Information Officer for two filing seasons, and I’m tremendously proud of the work we’ve done together to modernize how we deliver, support mission outcomes and navigate change,” Uppal said in the email.

A Treasury Department spokesperson said in a statement to FedScoop that “Secretary [Scott] Bessent is committed to ensuring that efficiency is realized while providing that collections, privacy, and customer service the American people deserve. Staff restructuring is crucial to this effort. The long-time career CTO will become the IRS’s new CIO, who is a highly skilled engineer and will help drive technical decisions to serve American taxpayers.”

Uppal started as the IRS’s CIO in January 2024 after previously leading the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Office of Information Technology and serving as a digital services expert in the U.S. Digital Service during the first two years of Trump’s first term.

The IRS has faced near-constant turmoil since Trump took office again. In February, the agency laid off roughly 7,000 probationary workers, and is reportedly considering cuts that would trim its 90,000-person staff in half. In late March, 50 IT executives were placed on administrative leave. Elon Musk’s DOGE also eliminated the IRS’s Transformation and Strategy Office, according to a former agency IT executive. Treasury officials have made the case that the IRS workforce reductions are centered on “non-technical” staffers in leadership roles. 

The CIO position across federal agencies has also seen drastic upheaval following the change in administrations. The Energy Department, the Small Business Administration, and the Social Security Administration are all on to their second Trump-era CIOs. The Treasury Department also recently elevated its deputy CIO to the acting CIO role.

Most agency CIO positions have historically been designated as “career reserved,” a classification denoting impartiality. But the Trump administration has moved to reclassify the CIO position so that all individuals in those roles are considered “general” employees. 

The change in classification, spelled out in a February memo from the Office of Personnel Management, would likely transform CIOs into more inherently political positions. The OPM memo argues that top agency IT officials have increasingly conducted policy-based work, citing artificial intelligence and cybersecurity specifically. The document also makes the case that reclassifying the position could help increase the potential talent pool for CIOs. 

“To be sure, like many policy-determining and policy-advocating jobs throughout the government, agency CIO roles require a baseline of technical knowledge necessary to understand broader issues and make decisions for the agency,” the memo said. “But a modern agency CIO is not a mere engineer, scientist or technocrat. He does not spend his days writing complex lines of code, setting up secure networks, or performing other ‘highly technical’ tasks. Instead, he crafts and effectuates policy, and sets and deploys his budget, based on his Administration’s priorities.”

Former federal CIOs have mixed feelings about the classification change, telling FedScoop that there are merits to both approaches, though politicization of the role is a concern.

Prior to joining the federal government in 2016, Uppal spent nearly three decades in the private sector in a variety of software and project development roles, including executive positions with IBM, Revionics and Retail Optimization.

Former IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said at the time of Uppal’s hiring that his “expertise inside the government, coupled with his work in the private sector, provides a unique skill set that will complement our strong Information Technology team at the IRS. His background and skills will help the agency continue advancing in the IT arena during this critical period as we continue using Inflation Reduction Act funding to help taxpayers and the nation.”

Nextgov first reported the news of Uppal’s resignation, as well as the departures of acting deputy CIOs Darnita Trower and Eric Markow. Trower posted on LinkedIn that she’s leaving the federal government in May for a new private-sector role. 

GSA touts new procurement automation tool

The CODY bot, a tool used to streamline procurement processes at the General Services Administration, is now ready for use across the federal landscape after three years of buildout.

CODY aggregates prerequisite data into a checklist, according to GSA officials familiar with the tool, enabling staffers to see if a vendor has met all representation requirements — ensuring there is no active federal debt against a vendor, and no exclusionary or responsibility cautions to trigger notifications.

The agency primarily tracks how many hours the bot saves in a year rather than the costs saved, according to one of the officials. GSA Administrator Stephen Ehikian posted on X that the bot’s completion resulted in the cancellation of a $423,000 contract.

“President Trump’s GSA is at the forefront of leveraging technology for government to produce tools that boost productivity and our employee’s potential,” Ehikian said in a statement to FedScoop.

The bot was built in-house, an agency official said. Work began on CODY — a nod to the Irish origins of the name meaning “helpful one” — in 2022.

GSA is sharing the automation code for CODY with other agencies that use Robotic Process Automation programs and “similar RPA technology,” sources familiar with the project said. 

Automation software from UiPath that mimics actions that an individual would perform on a computer was used to help build CODY, a GSA official said. Another agency source said that the CODY team built the tool — in part — within side applications like Python, Adobe and some Google scripting.

“All of those combined to make one process that is, on the surface, automation,” one of the officials said. “It’s a bot, what everybody commonly refers to as a roboto or a bot. But in the background, there’s lots of different technologies that are going into it.”

Another official said that from an acquisition perspective, the CODY bot is an automation tool that doesn’t need to be tailored by different agencies just for use. Everyone in acquisition across the government is able to get the same benefit from the tool as is, regardless of the system used within an agency. 

“Some of our automations are very system specific and would need to be tailored for another agency to use some of them quite substantially,” the official said. “But CODY is the perfect example of an automation that everyone is doing it exactly the same way across acquisition in the federal government.”

Sources familiar with the project confirmed that the tool was first showcased during GSA’s first Friday demo day, a new internal demonstration program at the agency where offices can show how they’re using software and technology. 

The inaugural demo day followed an announcement from Technology Transformation Services Director Thomas Shedd that TTS would face a 50% reduction in staff. 

The Washington Post reported that Shedd said during a meeting that he needed “wins to defend,” with DOGE representatives on the lookout for notable achievements. 

Before demo days were announced, Shedd said the GSA would only take on work that was statutorily required and aligned with Trump administration priorities. 
Last week, GSA announced internally that there would be more staff cuts to TTS, including to the Office of Regulatory and Oversight Systems program.

DOGE staffer given green light by judge to access Treasury systems

One of Elon Musk’s DOGE surrogates has a pathway to accessing the sensitive data of millions of Americans housed in Treasury Department systems, a federal judge ruled late Friday.

Judge Jeannette A. Vargas of the District Court for the Southern District of New York partially dissolved a preliminary injunction that barred Ryan Wunderly, a DOGE liaison to Treasury, from gaining access to Bureau of Fiscal Services payment systems. 

The initial lawsuit from a group of 19 Democratic state attorneys general argued that granting Wunderly that access violated the Privacy Act and section 208 of the E-Government Act of 2002, which requires federal agencies to conduct privacy impact assessments for use of new or changed technologies involving personally identifiable information.

The PII of any American who has ever transacted with the federal government is stored in BFS systems, including names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, birth places, home addresses, telephone numbers, email addresses, and bank account information.

The state AGs also argued that Treasury’s actions in approving DOGE access to these systems were “arbitrary and capricious,” a claim Vargas said the plaintiffs had “established a likelihood of success.”

But Vargas, who initially placed a hold on DOGE’s BFS permissions two months ago — writing at the time that the Trump administration’s approach was “chaotic and haphazard” — said in Friday’s order that the statutory claims under the Administrative Procedure Act were unlikely to succeed.

“It is certainly not arbitrary and capricious for the Treasury Department to determine that Wunderly should not have greater restrictions placed upon him than are imposed upon any other Treasury employee with access to BFS payment systems,” Vargas wrote. 

Going forward, Wunderly will be allowed by the court to access BFS systems after he undergoes “the proper training” that other Treasury employees with comparable permissions are subjected to. The DOGE staffer will also be required to submit a financial disclosure form. 

DOGE’s access to BFS systems has been the subject of multiple lawsuits, beginning with challenges tied to the granting of full access — rather than read-only access — to Musk associates Marko Elez and Thomas H. Krause, Jr. in the first days of the Trump administration.

Wunderly eventually took the place of Elez — who was briefly in hot water over racist social media posts — at Treasury. A court filing showed that a DOGE staffer had violated Treasury security policies by improperly sharing sensitive personal information outside the agency. 

The Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office have said they are auditing DOGE access to the BFS payment systems.

Democrats raise questions about Secret Service’s anti-drone work at DC airport

A pair of House Democrats are sounding the alarm about the U.S. Secret Service’s use of counter-drone technology, which recently triggered air traffic control system alerts at the Washington National Airport. 

Democratic Reps. Rick Larsen of Washington and Bennie Thompson of Mississippi are demanding more information about the use of the technology and raising concerns about whether the Department of Homeland Security component is following proper procedures.

In a Monday letter sent to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, the lawmakers pointed to alerts produced by the Traffic Collision Avoidance System last month. These alerts made erroneous recommendations to several commercial and Coast Guard aircraft, Larsen and Thompson say. And according to analysis conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration, the alerts were produced by Secret Service anti-drone technology at a nearby Defense Department location. 

The confusion comes after the deadly crash between a commercial airline and an Army helicopter at DCA airport earlier this year, which resulted in dozens of deaths. 

While DHS has launched an investigation, the Democratic congressmen say the counter-drone technology deployed by the DOD was operating outside existing notifications — and that the Secret Service did not share required notifications with the FAA.  

“These erroneous alerts caused confusion among flight crews in one of the most complex airspaces in the country, introducing an unnecessary safety risk that potentially endangered hundreds of American lives,” wrote Larsen, ranking member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and Thompson, ranking member of the chamber’s Homeland Security Committee. “At such a tenuous time for U.S. aviation, this blatant disregard for long-standing safety protocols is entirely unacceptable.”

“The flying public cannot afford for these safety issues to continue and certainly should not be collateral damage due to your Departments’ inability to coordinate effectively,” they continued. “It is our expectation that your Departments work together to determine all contributing factors to these incidents and develop a plan to prevent similar incidents from happening again at DCA or any other U.S. airport.”

The lawmakers are demanding a briefing and written answers to a series of questions.