A Senate Republican wants to track computer usage of agency teleworkers; What Deputy Defense Secretary Hicks is prioritizing during the presidential transition

Federal agencies would be required to track and report computer usage for teleworking employees under new legislation from a Senate Republican. The Requiring Effective Management and Oversight of Teleworking Employees (REMOTE) Act, from Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, would charge executive department heads with enacting policies that record the login activity and network traffic of teleworkers’ government computers. Managers of teleworking staffers would be required to “periodically review” the traffic generated by those workers and collect a variety of relevant data, including average number of daily logins and average daily duration of the connection to the applicable computer network. Ernst said in a statement: “While DOGE stands ready to clean house, I will be leading the fight in the Senate to disrupt the business-as-usual bureaucrats who spent the last four years out of office.”

Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks is poised to complete her tenure at the Pentagon under the Biden administration — and she’s been in direct contact with officials on President-elect Donald Trump’s Agency Review Team preparing for the upcoming transition, according to her top public affairs advisor Eric Pahon. In responses to questions from DefenseScoop last week, Pahon discussed Hicks’ plans and priorities for her final days helping steer the Defense Department’s major technology programs. He shared that QUOTE “her priorities today remain the same as they have been since her first day in office: Foremost, in support of the secretary and president, she is maintaining her focus on ensuring that DOD can outpace strategic competitors like the [People’s Republic of China] by fielding more combat-credible capabilities at greater speed and scale, continually iterating on novel operational concepts, distributing and hardening our force posture, and leveraging our unparalleled ability to generate innovation with and through America’s private sector.”

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