While Congress has made some headway in recent years to modernize the way the national legislature takes advantage of technology, maintaining a bipartisan focus on modernization goals is the necessary ingredient to making further progress, current and former Capitol Hill officials said during a November 9 Partnership for Public Service online event. […]

vaccine

The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) – the largest union for Federal employees – is pushing for Federal workers to have the same extended deadline as Federal government contractors to receive their COVID-19 vaccine. […]

The U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Bureau for Resilience and Food Security is looking for feedback for a planned climate adaption support activity that will provide a suite of services and products to USAID Missions, Washington, D.C. Operating Units, and partners to support adaption mainstreaming, programming, and scaling to effect change. […]

supply chain

The Department of Transportation has been tasked with seeking private sector input to create standardized data exchange requirements for goods movement in the transportation supply chain, according to a White House announcement of administration plans to fund ports and waterways improvements aimed at improving supply chain resiliency. […]

TMF

Federal agency CIOs agreed during a November 9 panel discussion at ACT-IAC’s Imagine Nation conference that the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) is a vital source of funding for IT modernization and cybersecurity projects, and said they want more of it from Congress. […]

Cloud

With an international focus on climate change after the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference, Department of Energy (DoE) CIO Ann Dunkin said today that data center consolidation is helping to reduce the agency’s carbon footprint, and pointed to the further use of scalable cloud-native apps as the next step in that campaign. […]

Insider threat cybersecurity

Palo Alto Networks recently issued a report detailing a targeted attack campaign that leveraged leased infrastructure in the U.S. to scan hundreds of vulnerable organizations, which compromised at least nine global entities in the technology, defense, healthcare, energy, and education sectors. […]

VA
CX Customer experience -min

Federal CIO Clare Martorana urged government technology leaders this week to take a page from the “Undercover Boss” television program and discover first-hand the experiences and viewpoints of their customers in order to better understand where government needs to make improvements in how citizens best interact with government services. […]

GPS

The Department of Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) have made progress in validating data received from Federal agencies, but both of the agencies need to improve how that data is reported online, according to the Government Accountability Office. […]

cybersecurity

The zero trust journey can present several challenges for organizations, with funding being just one of them, but Steven Hernandez, chief information security officer at the Department of Education, said the biggest hurdle he sees with zero trust comes down to cultural challenges. […]

The Biden administration’s Cybersecurity Executive Order (Cyber EO) issued in May 2021 marks the Federal government’s most determined effort yet to not only propose – but also to enforce through sustained government-wide action – the kinds of fundamental changes needed to advance civilian agency cybersecurity, defeat sophisticated attacks on government networks, and in the process, take a giant leap forward in the cause of IT modernization. […]

The Justice Department said today it has arrested one alleged perpetrator and charged another for their participation in the REvil-enabled supply chain ransomware attack against American software firm Kaseya that impacted several hundred businesses this summer. […]

FCC

The Federal Communications Commission announced today that it will commit more than $421 million in the latest round of funding for the Emergency Connectivity Fund (ECF), bringing total program commitments to over $3.05 billion and 10 million students connected. […]

Congressional backers of another big shot of funding for the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) are not ready to take no for an answer. After a proposed $1 billion of additional funding for TMF was stripped late last month from House Democrats’ committee-level proposals for the Build Back Better Act, a new amendment to the legislation offered by Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., would add $250 million of TMF funding as part of a larger $500 million proposal to advance IT modernization programs. […]

DoD Pentagon Military

Bipartisan legislation introduced last week directs the Department of Defense (DoD) to make its datasets publicly and easily accessible via a strategic pilot program in order to advance software and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities beyond the Pentagon. […]

Cyber America Connected Internet of things

After more than two months of angling and dealmaking, the House of Representatives voted to approve the $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act – also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework – on November 5, sending the bill along with its $2 billion in cyber funding and $65 billion in broadband appropriations to President Biden’s desk for final approval. […]

government contract procurement spending-min

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has pushed back the timeline for awards under its $10 billion contract for small business IT hardware, software, and managed services, and now expects to make awards in August 2022. […]

census
DHS

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) recently released the National System for Geospatial Intelligence (NSG) Enterprise Commercial GEOINT Strategy 2021-2025, calling on the larger GEOINT community to leverage more commercial technologies and methods to help the enterprise move faster and grow stronger. […]

Richard Grabowski, acting program manager for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program, explained at a November 4 event organized by FCW that new memoranda of understanding (MOA) that the program has been signing with Federal agencies are a key component to enabling better cyber threat hunting by CISA across agency networks. […]

White House

The House of Representatives is expected to hold votes on its fiscal year (FY) 2022 reconciliation package – known as the Build Back Better Act (BBB) – as well as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act – or the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework (BIF) – today after the House Rules Committee finalized a rule for debate on the now $1.75 trillion “soft” infrastructure legislation late on Nov. 4. […]

Categories