GovConJudicata Weekly Debrief (4/4–8)
This week's Weekly Debrief covers space traffic, contractors in Russia, VA's EHR system outage, POLARIS slowing down, DoD and AI/ML, and appeals court reinstates federal employee vaccine mandate.
Space
"Some operators of low Earth orbit satellites are bracing for a storm of debris. Russia’s demonstration of an antisatellite weapon last November, destroying the Cosmos 1408 satellite, created thousands of tracked pieces of debris, and many more too small to be tracked."
Russia
"Lawmakers advanced a bill on Wednesday that would limit the federal government’s contracting with companies that are still operating in Russia amid its war with Ukraine. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, many companies started pulling out of Russia and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., chairwoman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, introduced a bill last month that would force federal contractors to do the same."
VA
"The electronic health record system used to manage patient data for the Defense Department, Coast Guard and a few Veterans Affairs Department medical centers went offline nationwide for almost three hours Wednesday, preventing clinicians from updating and, for a time, accessing medical records."
GSA
"The General Services Administration is taking a timeout on the governmentwide Polaris IT services and solutions contract in order to review whether further changes are needed. Which means the due date for proposals will be extended and companies working on their bids should take a pause themselves until GSA completes that assessment, the agency said in a Sam.gov notice Wednesday. The original submission due date was May 13 prior to that announcement."
Defense
"The Defense Department has been focused on bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning into the decision making process more prominently for some time. AI and ML are key components of DoD’s near-peer competition strategy. To prevail in a conflict, Defense agencies need to make better decisions than their adversaries, and they must make them faster. That means gathering more data and processing that data faster and more efficiently. That’s where sensors and AI/ML come into play, the two stars of this initiative. But what’s talked about far less often is the infrastructure that supports them."
Federal Employee Mandate
"A federal appeals court has reinstated President Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for the federal workforce, overturning a lower court’s nationwide pause that had been in effect since January."
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