My father, a proud Naval Academy graduate, served two tours in Vietnam, flying A-4s off aircraft carriers. He raised me with a strong sense of patriotism, a commitment to service, and a belief in community - a community that includes everyone: rich and poor, black and white, gay and straight, left and right, young and old, Jews, Muslims, Christians, and everyone in between.
Ministers have handed firms 6m in contracts to help devise plans to build a network of new NHS clinics using private capital, despite fears the move could turn into a PFI-style disaster. The Department of Health and Social Care has awarded contracts worth 3m each to the management consultants Deloitte and the lawyers Addleshaw Goddard. They are advising the DHSC on whether to use public-private partnerships (PPPs) to help build dozens of the promised neighbourhood health centres in England.
Combined with the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, there's renewed pressure for government to operate more like the private sector. In theory, that might sound reasonable. But in practice, the comparison is not only unhelpful; it's often misleading. It ignores the fundamental difference between the two sectors: government missions are defined by mandates, not markets. To meet current mandates, the government and its industry partners need to reevaluate and redefine their partnerships.
The remarks were made at the second White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence Education meeting and were accompanied by pledges from government agencies and the private sector to advance AI education, as mandated by the order. "We are here today to talk about our future in the most real sense imaginable: how America's children can be prepared to build our country tomorrow with the cutting edge tools of today," White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios said during the meeting.
Twenty years ago this August, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. More than 1,300 lives were lost. It destroyed homes, displaced families, and overwhelmed many of the institutions that undergird civil society. It was also a wake-up call that reshaped how the country responds to natural disasters. Over the past two decades, we've made real progress. Government agencies, nonprofits, businesses, and community organizations have built stronger systems to prepare before disaster strikes.
At the time, the FBI recognized there was a significant need to shift their hiring practices to really focus on people with cyber skill sets, because it wasn't just about cybercrime, but also terrorism, counter intelligence and criminal investigations. We needed agents who had more of a technical discipline to help with that.
