Outgoing Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) Greg Barbaccia said July 16 that the accomplishment he’s most proud of during his public service is changing how the Federal CIO Council and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) work with agency technology leaders.
Barbaccia announced his departure earlier this month, and his last day in federal service will be Aug. 31. He also serves as the federal chief AI officer and the acting director of the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services.
“What I’m most proud of is flipping the paradigm of OMB putting out policy in a vacuum without understanding the ground truth,” Barbaccia said while speaking at GovExec’s Government Efficiency Summit on July 16 in Washington, D.C. “I think the worst thing we could do is trade policy in a vacuum.”
Barbaccia explained that rather than using the Federal CIO Council as a mechanism for OMB to dictate policy, he used it as a forum to work directly with agency CIOs.
He said the council frequently discusses technology best practices and how to alleviate CIOs’ common pain points.
“I came into the job thinking it was going to be find the bad tech and fix it, or find problems and solve them with technology,” he said. “But everything’s a culture issue. So, kind of changing the way people think and a culture of how do we move forward, all the CIOs, as one federal enterprise.”
Barbaccia pointed to stronger relationships with agency technology leaders as one of the defining features of his tenure.
“Camaraderie creates candor, and candor is the only way you get actual understanding of what people need,” he said. “I work for the agency CIOs. I am here to make your jobs more effective and more efficient. That is my value to the government, not dictating things.”
Looking beyond his departure, Barbaccia said many of the biggest barriers to modernizing government technology can only be addressed by Congress.
He cited outdated statutes governing privacy, paperwork, and information sharing as obstacles to deploying artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies.
“I constantly bemoan – and I’m going to continue to work with the Hill in my private capacity – that the Paperwork Reduction Act and the Privacy Act are 50 years old. This is from before computers,” Barbaccia said. “We have new ways to protect people’s privacy, to protect people’s data, and it just is impossible in the AI age to deploy technology when we’re beholden to a [compliance] regime.”
“We’re forced to operate in the box of compliance to the statutes and legislation,” Barbaccia added. “What we can’t get around is statutory requirements and legislation – like that absolutely has to change.”
Barbaccia has not publicly disclosed where he plans to work after leaving federal service at the end of August.