The Government Accountability Office found that the Department of Defense has used human capital authorities for 90 percent of 44,291 DoD civilian personnel hiring actions from fiscal year 2014 to fiscal year 2018. DoD also increased spending on recruitment, retention and relocation bonuses as well as student loan payments for non-military workforce from $13.9M in FY 2014 to $33.7M in FY 2018, GAO said in a report published Thursday.

The government watchdog agency added it found the Pentagon’s Office of Human Capital Initiatives does not evaluate or track the use of such flexibilities on a regular basis and that the lack of monitoring efforts may prevent HCI from identifying any challenges, inconsistencies or areas of improvement.

GAO recommends that the HCI office monitor how DoD utilize civilian hiring authorities granted to the department. The Pentagon spends more than $300B on contracting efforts annually and its acquisition professionals help maximize the department’s buying power, GAO said.

The Customs and Border Protection encountered an outage with its systems that resulted in long lines of international travelers waiting to be cleared at some airports nationwide, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. CBP issued a tweet Friday evening saying the systems were getting back to normal.

“The affected systems are coming back online and travelers are being processed. CBP will continue to monitor the incident. There is no indication the disruption was malicious in nature at this time,” the agency said in the tweet.

CBP said officers used alternative procedures to continue to process passengers on international flights.

The Government Accountability Office found through a study that the U.S. Army lacks personnel and risk assessments for new cyber and electronic warfare units intended to deter foreign threats. The Army intends to accelerate the activation of these units that sometimes initiate without cyber training and equipment modernization, GAO said Thursday.

The service branch is reorganizing its forces with a multi-domain approach and boosted focus on cyber operations by 2028. The accelerated rate of this effort leaves out required assessments of staffing, equipment and training risks, GAO noted.

The lack of these assessments would leave Army leadership unaware of potential future issues. GAO recommends the Army to assess these risks with consideration to the Intelligence, Cyber, Electronic Warfare and Space unit, the 915th Cyber Warfare Support Battalion and other units being activated at accelerated rates.

The U.S. Marine Corps plans to deploy 15,000 Joint Light Tactical Vehicles after the platform has achieved initial operating capability status, Military .com said Thursday.

Manufactured by Oshkosh Defense, JLTV platforms are built to protect warfighters and allow command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capacities during operations. USMC initially planned to field 9,000 vehicles prior to its evaluation of the program. Additionally, the service branch seeks to use the vehicle to replace its High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle fleet.

“We subsequently completed the evaluation and presented the information to the commandant, at which time he concurred with replacing the remainder of the light fleet with JLTVs,” the Marine Corps cited in a statement.

The Air Force Research Laboratory unveiled a 12-week initiative to allow companies to offer space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance offerings to potential customers, National Defense reported Thursday.

The Catalyst Space Accelerator program is seeking to bridge subject matter experts and the U.S. military with eight small businesses to validate if their technologies will address clients’ needs. Additionally, the participants may showcase their services through a demonstration day in September.

KiMar Gartman, a program director at AFRL, said the initiative may help the participants secure contracts, federal grants or transaction authority agreements. AFRL will select the participants through various sources including conventions and social media websites.

“We try to bring in the Army, the Navy [and] other Air Force units that would have interest in the technology,” said Gartman.