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Cost Estimating NewsBrief: February 21, 2025
GSA Issues Deviations to Federal Acquisition Regulations
(Executive Gov) The General Services Administration has released two deviations to the Federal Acquisition Regulations, or FAR, and procurement practices to implement three recent executive orders, including the Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity EO. GSA said Tuesday the deviations to the FAR will allow federal contracting officers to modify existing contracts and solicitations without imposing penalties on the contract holder or the government. “These actions are the first steps in transforming the FAR into a sensible, common sense guideline to ensure that the federal government is working with industry as an attractive partner for business,” said Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service at GSA and a 2025 Wash100 awardee. Read More
Lawmakers press Hegseth about cost, morale, readiness impact of border operations
(Federal News Network) Democratic lawmakers are pressing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about the rising costs of the Pentagon’s immigration-related operations and their implications on the military’s readiness and morale. “DoD’s support for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been expensive for American taxpayers, with some DoD expenses costing over three times more than when DHS performs the same function, while also posing “an unacceptable risk” to units’ readiness,” Sens. Elizabeth Warren, (D-Mass.), and Mazie Hirono, (D-Hawaii), told Hegseth in a letter. Read More
Understanding the Relationship Between Changes to Federal Fiscal Policy and Near-Term Real GDP Growth: Working Paper 2025-01
(Congressional Budget Office) We introduce two measures which highlight the relationship between changes in federal fiscal policy and economic growth. First, we conduct a growth decomposition exercise to compute the short-run direct effects of changes in policy on real GDP growth, which we call the Federal Fiscal Impulse (FFI). Second, we build on this measure to develop the Federal Fiscal Impulse Index (FFII) which interprets changes in the components of fiscal policy relative to the growth rate of real GDP over recent history. Finally, we project these measures through 2026 using CBO’s June 2024 baseline and discuss the measures’ benefits and limitations. Read More
Like human brains, large language models reason about diverse data in a general way
(Science Daily) While early language models could only process text, contemporary large language models now perform highly diverse tasks on different types of data. For instance, LLMs can understand many languages, generate computer code, solve math problems, or answer questions about images and audio. MIT researchers probed the inner workings of LLMs to better understand how they process such assorted data, and found evidence that they share some similarities with the human brain. Neuroscientists believe the human brain has a “semantic hub” in the anterior temporal lobe that integrates semantic information from various modalities, like visual data and tactile inputs. Read More
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