The U.S. Department of Defense is looking for additional insight into how to keep better track of contractors’ cybersecurity practices through its Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification process. It has issued a request for proposals designed to end self-certification, a proposal which would require third-party audits.

U.S. federal agencies that heeded President Donald Trump’s push to move operations to the cloud are being reminded that security is paramount. “We want to ensure that in these quick migrations that we’ve done, that we fully understand both the positives as well as some of the assumptions we’ve made,” says Matthew Scholl, chief of the Computer Security Division in the Information Technology Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He and other officials warn that security could be compromised if vendors aren’t appropriately managed.

The U.S. was warned in 2017 that it lacked adequate medical supplies and bed space to deal with a novel corona virus outbreak. The Department of Defense predicted in a report that “the most likely and significant threat is a novel respiratory disease” of a type common around the world.

Carmen Gentile, a longtime conflict reporter who was severely injured while embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2010, writes that the angry protests against the COVID-19 lockdowns in some U.S. states frighten him more than his experiences overseas.