Mar 2026

Although his official position of Chief Data Officer had not yet been formally announced, Gavin Kliger is copied on an email between the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, the undersecretary for research and engineering of the Department of Defense about a potential agreement for Anthropic usage at the agency.

An appeals court blocked a ruling by a judge that would have compelled Elon Musk and other senior officials at USAID to testify under oath, finding that the lower court had “abused its discretion” in ordering the testimony.

Akash Bobba leaves role at OPM

Judge Royce Lambeth rules that USAGM administrator Kari Lake had violated both the Constitution and the statutes governing the agency. He declared all of Lake’s actions as null and void after she took over leadership of the agency.

Ahmad Sandid starts as Design Engineer at NDS.

In the wake of DOGE’s cuts last year in CISA, cybersecurity individuals in private industry express alarm at the lack of outreach and communication from the agency compared to last year, especially since the war with Iran will likely result in cyberattacks.

Union officials and former staffers directly blamed the DOGE-driven Reduction in Force (RIF) and agency-wide reorganization last year for the State Department’s chaotic response in evacuating Americans trapped in the Middle East due to the war with Iran. The State Department denied the layoffs have had any effect on agency readiness.

The Inspector General for the EPA releases a report faulting the agency for firing too much of its workforce so that it is unable to handle the growing backlog of grants. The Trump administration countered that there should be a complementary reduction in grants to match, but that has not happened so far.

A federal judge rules that USAGM must reinstate by Monday all of the 1,042 employees who had been put on indefinite administrative leave as a prelude to eliminating the agency, declaring Kari Lake’s actions to destroy the agency as “arbitrary and capricious.”

As the Trump administration has struggled to find options to reopen the Strait of Hormuz after it started hostilities against Iran, theree are reports that the State Department had eliminated all staff from the Bureau of Energy Resources who would have been able to predict the problems. Key staffers who maintained communications and diplomatic relationships with oil companies in the region were also let go. Furthermore, departments that would have researched and debated the effects of the Iran invasion in the Department of Energy, Treasury and State have been eliminated or were sidelined from the decision to go to war.

Continuing on a Trump Administration plan to consolidate and centralize HR for all federal agencies within OPM, Scott Kupor announces a new “Federal HR 2.0” pilot program with several agencies. Under the new shared services model, OPM will take over roles like performance management, onboarding, payroll, workforce planning, recruitment and hiring from agency staff. This is presented as a move for greater efficiency, but it would also give OPM the centralized power to fire staff and eliminate departments that DOGE wanted. The pilot for this new program will start in Fiscal Year 2027 (October).

DOGE files an appeal to the US Supreme Court against lower court orders that DOGE was required to comply with legal discovery in a case about whether DOGE is subject to FOIA requests. The agency continues to maintain that its work is considered Presidential Records (which would delay disclosure for decades).

Luis Bizarro and Aldous Waites start at NDS.

Matt Luby promoted at DOI