Tech Force program makes its first official hire

The hiring initiative is designed to recruit temporary tech talent, with a focus on early-career employees.

• The Trump administration’s Tech Force program has made its first official hire. Yasmin Maksutova will be joining the Office of Personnel Management as an IT specialist in data management. Agencies are expected to onboard many more Tech Force recruits in the coming weeks. The hiring initiative is designed to recruit temporary tech talent, with a focus on early-career employees.
• The Defense Health Agency will begin transitioning TRICARE systems to a new login platform known as myAuth. Beginning this spring, TRICARE-related platforms will transition to myAuth on a rolling basis through the end of fiscal 2026. Defense Department officials said DS Logon will remain available until it is fully retired on Sept. 30, 2026. TRICARE beneficiaries will receive official notifications about the transition from DoD and the Defense Health Agency. Officials urged users to ensure their contact information in the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System is up to date. For additional assistance during the transition, beneficiaries are advised to contact the Defense Manpower Data Center.
• Postmaster General David Steiner is outlining his vision for the Postal Service, which is set to run out of cash at the start of next year. Steiner said at an industry conference that USPS is focused on improving on-time delivery. The agency saw persistent delays in recent years after overhauling its delivery network as part of a decade-long plan to cut costs and increase revenue. Among its requests, USPS is asking Congress to increase its borrowing limit.
• The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said water, power and other critical infrastructure organizations need to plan for cyber outages. CISA’s new CI Fortify campaign urges critical infrastructure groups to plan for isolating their key networks from the outside world to prevent cyber attacks. CISA unveiled the campaign this week, calling attention to the potential for a geopolitical crisis to spill over into the cyber arena. In addition to severing internet connections, CISA said organizations should also have a recovery plan to keep critical services running through a major cyber incident. CISA is already evaluating several critical infrastructure organizations as part of the Fortify campaign.
• The Army recently brought together top technology executives for its second artificial intelligence tabletop exercise aimed at accelerating adoption of agentic AI for cyber defense. The event included leaders from companies like Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, alongside Army and Defense Department officials. The exercise simulated a future Indo-Pacific crisis where adversaries used AI to launch continuous cyberattacks against Army networks faster than human defenders could respond. This scenario tasked participants with tackling two key challenges: developing agentic AI tools to strengthen cyber defenses and addressing vulnerabilities stemming from fragmented networks, legacy systems and uneven modernization. The effort builds on a 2025 exercise that launched Project ARIA, which is already delivering AI capabilities across three projects.
• Federal employees will be dressing to the nines tonight for the 25th annual Service to America Medals. Better known as the Sammies, this year’s awards program will recognize four new honorees, as well as reflect on winners over the last 25 years. The Partnership for Public Service, which runs the awards program, said it’s continuing to recognize exceptional federal employees, despite low interest from agencies this year. The Sammies ceremony will be held this evening in downtown D.C. It also comes in the middle of Public Service Recognition Week, an annual celebration of public servants at all levels of government.
• The National Institute of Standards and Technology has inked new agreements to evaluate frontier artificial intelligence models for national security risks before they’re released. NIST’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation announced agreements with Google DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI on Tuesday. NIST said they will facilitate pre-deployment evaluations and research to assess frontier AI capabilities and advance the state of AI security. The partnerships build on agreements made under the Biden administration with some AI companies in 2024.
• The State Department is finalizing layoffs for hundreds of employees who have been on paid administrative leave for nearly a year. The department told more than 200 Foreign Service employees and about 30 civil service employees that they have been officially separated from their jobs after receiving reduction-in-force notices last summer. The State Department tried to remove them last December, but it was blocked by a federal judge and Congress. Lawmakers put a three-month pause on layoffs governmentwide as part of the stopgap spending bill that ended last year’s shutdown. The department has laid off more than 1,300 total employees under the Trump administration

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