U.S. service members transitioning out of the military will now be able to access ChatGPT Plus for a year under a new offer from OpenAI that’s aimed at helping them with their job hunt. The new offer, announced Monday ahead of Veterans Day, is available to service members who are within 12 months of separation or retirement, and any veteran within their first year of leaving service. Katrina Mulligan, OpenAI for Government’s head of national security partnerships, said on a call with reporters ahead of the announcement. “We know that nearly 70% of veterans say finding employment is their biggest challenge, and we want to make that transition a little bit easier by providing support that’s available anytime.” Mulligan said the idea for the offer started with OpenAI’s own veteran employees who used the platform for their own career navigation. “They urged us to make these tools available to others going through the same experience, and we were really glad to support it,” she said.Through the new offer, eligible service members and veterans are able to access ChatGPT Plus — which is typically a $20 per month subscription, and boasts faster response time as well as priority access to new features — as well as some personalized content for veterans. That includes a “getting started” video targeted toward veterans, and over 100 example chats that Mulligan said were developed by veterans based on real tasks during a transition. The offer is not a direct partnership with the U.S. government via the Department of Veterans Affairs or Department of Defense — which the Trump administration calls the Department of War — but such collaboration isn’t out of the question.
The Department of Energy officially installed Dawn Zimmer as its chief information officer Friday, putting a pause — for now — on the revolving door at the agency’s IT leadership office. According to an internal email obtained by FedScoop, Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced that Zimmer had been named Energy’s permanent CIO. Her appointment comes after the installation — and subsequent departures — of two other permanent CIOs during the Trump administration. Zimmer joined Energy in 2024 as principal deputy CIO and has been serving as the acting IT chief between the appointments of permanent officials throughout this year. She was acting CIO before SpaceX engineer Ryan Riedel was named to the role and briefly took over in an acting capacity again when he left after one month. Days later, Google and Twitter alum Ross Graber was named CIO, but he left after less than two months in the role. That has left the agency without a permanent official since the end of April. Wright said in the email that “Dawn will continue her stellar oversight of the Department’s information technology and cybersecurity initiatives, ensuring that our systems are secure, efficient, and innovative.”
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U.S. service members transitioning out of the military will now be able to access ChatGPT Plus for a year under a new offer from OpenAI that’s aimed at helping them with their job hunt. The new offer, announced Monday ahead of Veterans Day, is available to service members who are within 12 months of separation or retirement, and any veteran within their first year of leaving service. Katrina Mulligan, OpenAI for Government’s head of national security partnerships, said on a call with reporters ahead of the announcement. “We know that nearly 70% of veterans say finding employment is their biggest challenge, and we want to make that transition a little bit easier by providing support that’s available anytime.” Mulligan said the idea for the offer started with OpenAI’s own veteran employees who used the platform for their own career navigation. “They urged us to make these tools available to others going through the same experience, and we were really glad to support it,” she said.Through the new offer, eligible service members and veterans are able to access ChatGPT Plus — which is typically a $20 per month subscription, and boasts faster response time as well as priority access to new features — as well as some personalized content for veterans. That includes a “getting started” video targeted toward veterans, and over 100 example chats that Mulligan said were developed by veterans based on real tasks during a transition. The offer is not a direct partnership with the U.S. government via the Department of Veterans Affairs or Department of Defense — which the Trump administration calls the Department of War — but such collaboration isn’t out of the question.
The Department of Energy officially installed Dawn Zimmer as its chief information officer Friday, putting a pause — for now — on the revolving door at the agency’s IT leadership office. According to an internal email obtained by FedScoop, Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced that Zimmer had been named Energy’s permanent CIO. Her appointment comes after the installation — and subsequent departures — of two other permanent CIOs during the Trump administration. Zimmer joined Energy in 2024 as principal deputy CIO and has been serving as the acting IT chief between the appointments of permanent officials throughout this year. She was acting CIO before SpaceX engineer Ryan Riedel was named to the role and briefly took over in an acting capacity again when he left after one month. Days later, Google and Twitter alum Ross Graber was named CIO, but he left after less than two months in the role. That has left the agency without a permanent official since the end of April. Wright said in the email that “Dawn will continue her stellar oversight of the Department’s information technology and cybersecurity initiatives, ensuring that our systems are secure, efficient, and innovative.”
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Calls for government action grow louder amid recent cloud outages
The Daily Scoop Podcast
5 minutes 14 seconds
6 days ago
Calls for government action grow louder amid recent cloud outages
When a pair of high-profile internet outages took down large chunks of the internet last month, the events briefly brought hundreds of organizations to a near-halt and prevented millions of users from accessing core services for everyday business needs. From Starbucks to crypto exchanges to the messaging app Signal, the outages rippled across nearly every sector, shining a spotlight onto the country’s — and even the government’s — reliance on a mere handful of cloud service providers. In the wake of those incidents, watchdog groups are calling on federal regulators to scrutinize the role that massive cloud companies like Amazon and Microsoft play in owning and maintaining much of our collective backend IT infrastructure. Meanwhile, technology and cybersecurity experts point out that, because of financial and business realities, there are very few alternatives to the large companies that now dominate the market. The Amazon Web Services outage began Oct. 19 and lasted into Oct. 20. According to Amazon’s post-mortem, a single software bug in DynamoDB — the system that manages website addresses, along with efforts to repair it — caused all services in the Northern Virginia region that relied on the tool to go down for 15 hours. Just over a week later, Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform experienced an outage impacting several of its services. According to Microsoft, an “inadvertent tenant configuration change” occurred in Azure Front Door, the company’s content delivery network. The outages exposed just how fragile the country’s digital infrastructure is and showed the risks of letting a few companies hold so much power. As a result, some groups are urging federal regulators to address the issue.
Federal agencies would be required to report artificial intelligence-related layoffs to the Department of Labor under a new bill from a bipartisan pair of senators. The AI-Related Job Impacts Clarity Act from Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., calls on agencies and major companies to deliver quarterly reports to DOL on the impact AI has on their workforces, detailing job cuts and displacements. Hawley said in a press release“Artificial intelligence is already replacing American workers, and experts project AI could drive unemployment up to 10-20% in the next five years. The American people need to have an accurate understanding of how AI is affecting our workforce, so we can ensure that AI works for the people, not the other way around.” The bill would also require agencies and companies to report hirings that can be “substantially” credited to AI, as well as the number of individuals they are retraining because of AI. There’s also a callout to keep track of open positions an agency or company decided not to fill because of automation.
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If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
The Daily Scoop Podcast
U.S. service members transitioning out of the military will now be able to access ChatGPT Plus for a year under a new offer from OpenAI that’s aimed at helping them with their job hunt. The new offer, announced Monday ahead of Veterans Day, is available to service members who are within 12 months of separation or retirement, and any veteran within their first year of leaving service. Katrina Mulligan, OpenAI for Government’s head of national security partnerships, said on a call with reporters ahead of the announcement. “We know that nearly 70% of veterans say finding employment is their biggest challenge, and we want to make that transition a little bit easier by providing support that’s available anytime.” Mulligan said the idea for the offer started with OpenAI’s own veteran employees who used the platform for their own career navigation. “They urged us to make these tools available to others going through the same experience, and we were really glad to support it,” she said.Through the new offer, eligible service members and veterans are able to access ChatGPT Plus — which is typically a $20 per month subscription, and boasts faster response time as well as priority access to new features — as well as some personalized content for veterans. That includes a “getting started” video targeted toward veterans, and over 100 example chats that Mulligan said were developed by veterans based on real tasks during a transition. The offer is not a direct partnership with the U.S. government via the Department of Veterans Affairs or Department of Defense — which the Trump administration calls the Department of War — but such collaboration isn’t out of the question.
The Department of Energy officially installed Dawn Zimmer as its chief information officer Friday, putting a pause — for now — on the revolving door at the agency’s IT leadership office. According to an internal email obtained by FedScoop, Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced that Zimmer had been named Energy’s permanent CIO. Her appointment comes after the installation — and subsequent departures — of two other permanent CIOs during the Trump administration. Zimmer joined Energy in 2024 as principal deputy CIO and has been serving as the acting IT chief between the appointments of permanent officials throughout this year. She was acting CIO before SpaceX engineer Ryan Riedel was named to the role and briefly took over in an acting capacity again when he left after one month. Days later, Google and Twitter alum Ross Graber was named CIO, but he left after less than two months in the role. That has left the agency without a permanent official since the end of April. Wright said in the email that “Dawn will continue her stellar oversight of the Department’s information technology and cybersecurity initiatives, ensuring that our systems are secure, efficient, and innovative.”
The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon.
If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
