Department of Defense Education Activity

Uh, and so grew up in the Army from '72 to about 1981 when my dad retired from the Army, but we stayed in Korea and still had that Army lifestyle going there.

So the, being a student at the Department of Defense Education school, Seoul American Elementary School, Seoul American High School, uh, had the, uh, experience of friends PCSing in, PCSing out.

Growing up, moving around, even though we're still in Korea, we definitely moved from place to place in different neighborhoods until we ended up in Texas for a couple years when my dad went to seminary, and then we ended up in California, where I graduated high school and joined the Army afterwards.

What part of California did you graduate high school?

That's my, not necessarily my end goal, but that's what I wanna get to pretty quickly after graduating.

And I wanna get into the, uh, DoDEA system, which is the military schools like I went to, and I wanna move back overseas and teach at a, at a high school like the one I went to.

Interesting.

Wow.

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Today, we dive into the new DoDEA ban that forces contractors to rethink every model they use.

The law, Section fifteen thirty-two of the FY twenty twenty-six NDAA, prohibits any contractor from using AI developed by DeepSeek or High Flyer during DoDEA contract performance.

So if a company runs a DeepSeek model on its own servers, does the ban still apply?

Yes.

The statute names only DeepSeek and High Flyer.

Qwen, GLM, Kimi, MiniMax are not listed.

But I've heard Alibaba and Baidu were added to a DoDEA list.

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Today's story is about how pharmacies with DoDEA contracts must now meet CMMC level two requirements for controlled unclassified information.

Exactly.

If a pharmacy receives or generates controlled unclassified information, or CUI, for a Department of Defense contract, the CMMC program applies.

Right.

HIPAA protects electronic protected health information, or EPHI.

But the DoDEA's CUI program is a separate independent set of rules.

And that distinction matters because the rules are different.

You know, especially think about me.

I worked at Department of Defense Education Activity.

That's for those who don't know, that's the school system that our federal employees, military dependents go to school at online.

Certain locations, but mostly abroad.

Well, just the optics of it, Ben, are a little bit, uh, frightening, uh, I'll use that word.

Because there's been pronouncements to all the DoD schools, uh, uh, DO- the DoD education, uh, agencies, DoDEA as you mentioned, uh, that's what they're called.

And I've worked with these folks.

They're terrific.

These are professional educators across the board.

They hire teachers that are really kind of fascinating in terms of their culture because these are teachers that want to travel the world, uh, and teach young kids that are military service members, uh, dependents.

Uh, my wife and I moved 24 times in my 38 years of service to the military, so we had a mixed bag of DoDEA schools and private schools and public schools in the United States.

But our kids mostly grew up in Germany, uh, so they were almost exclusively in DoD school.

I mean, do they still have baggers at the commissary where people help to bag your groceries?

Yeah, it's still just underpaid teens or sometimes it's substitutes from DoDEA schools or I should say DoEA now because that was a recent change.

Wait, when you say underpaid, are you getting tips or are you actually getting the paycheck from the commissary? I was never one.

I've just had friends and substitute teachers like kind of complain about it a little bit.

And I loved Belgium.

But did you go to a Dodd school or did you go to an international school?

I went to a DoDEA school called Brussels American School.

It was very small.