The Small Business Administration (SBA) appointed Steve Kucharski as acting chief information officer (CIO) last month, a knowledgeable source confirmed to MeriTalk. […]
The Army National Guard has awarded a $267 million contract to General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) to support the guard’s cybersecurity and IT infrastructure, GDIT announced on August 4. […]
Department of Education (DoE) Chief Information Officer (CIO) Jason Gray is preparing to leave the agency – possible for other technology pastures within the Federal government. […]
While the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Office of Connected Care’s digital divide program has successfully been providing patients with video-capable devices for video-based virtual care for the past two years, an Office of Inspector General (OIG) report has found that less than half of patients that the agency issued video devices to ended up completing VA Video Connect (VVC) appointments. […]
Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., Cory Booker, D-N.J., John Boozman, R-Ark., and John Thune, R-S.D., introduced legislation on August 4 that would create commodities-type regulation of some digital assets. […]
Reps. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., and Peter Welch, D-Vt., have joined with Sens. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., to introduce the Proper Leadership to Align Networks (PLAN) for Broadband Act, which calls on President Biden to develop a national broadband strategy. […]
Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., introduced legislation on August 4 that aims to strengthen the cybersecurity posture of small businesses by providing funding to Small Business Development Centers that will help businesses with security. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has named Dr. David Massaro as the “functional champion” and acting senior medical advisor for the agency’s Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) program. […]
The Federal government must take action to promote stronger research practices that will help ensure the reliability of its scientific research, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a new report. […]
President Biden has nominated Rob Shriver to become deputy director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). […]
Nate Fick, President Biden’s nominee to serve as the ambassador at large to lead the State Department’s Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy (CDP), laid out his initial priorities for the newly established bureau during an August 3 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on his nomination. […]
Cloud security provider Zscaler said this week that its Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) service received Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High Authority to Operate (ATO) from the FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB). […]
Through the President’s Management Agenda Vision, the administration has put a spotlight on customer service in Federal government agencies. Fortunately, as agencies modernize their information technology (IT), they can employ technological solutions such as artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to transform the customer experience. […]
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, has proposed establishing a new health data agency to improve access to impartial and objective public health data, with the payoff of bolstering infectious disease intelligence and preparedness. […]
Gerald Caron, chief information officer (CIO) and assistant inspector general (IG) for information technology at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said this week that sustainability and continuous authentication are two of the keys to creating a robust identity and access management (IAM) strategy as part of how Federal agencies move to comply with President Biden’s 2021 cybersecurity executive order that requires migration to zero trust security architectures. […]
The Chips and Science Act approved by the House and Senate last week – and expected to be signed by President Biden next week – has generated a lot of headline news on the chips side of the legislation, including $52 billion of government funding to incentivize semiconductor makers to build new plants in the United States. […]
Angelica Phaneuf, Chief Information Security Officer at the Army Software Factory, explained some of the steps that her organization has been taking to meet the needs of zero trust security mandates at an August 2 event entitled Securing Identity in a Zero Trust Environment and hosted by Federal News Network. […]
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee approved by voice vote on August 3 two cybersecurity bills whose next stop is consideration by the full Senate. […]
The Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) today announced over $26 million of new project funding to the Department of Labor (DoL), AmeriCorps, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). […]
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee approved by voice vote on August 3 the Advancing Government Innovation with Leading-Edge (AGILE) Procurement Act of 2022, which aims to make simpler Federal government processes for buying technology products and services. […]
A new report from the Partnership for Public Service finds that the workforce attrition rate across all Federal government agencies rose to 6.1 percent for the 2021 fiscal year, up from the 5.5 percent attrition rate in FY2020. […]
The Senate on August 2 voted to approve a bill that addresses conflicts of interest within the Federal contracting community. […]
The focus on Federal agency cybersecurity scores in the 14th edition of the FITARA Scorecard released last week – and the lack of enough data from the government to allow the House Oversight and Reform Committee to get a good fix on how agencies performed on cybersecurity during the first half of 2022 – caught the eyes of private sector technology executives who said the government needs to do more to help agencies boost security. […]
Jay Ribeiro, the chief information security officer (CISO) at the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, plans to step down on August 26 after serving in the post since September 2018. […]
Federal agencies are hard at work developing strategies to overcome data challenges and ensure they’re meeting critical mission needs, Federal data experts from the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said during the Databricks Data and AI Summit 2022 in late June. […]
In a recent MeriTV “IT In Depth” episode, Robert Costello, Chief Information Officer at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Bill Wright, Splunk’s Director of Public Sector Affairs, said new event logging requirements pose a series of complicated tests for Federal IT managers. The mandates stem from the August 2021 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memo M-21-31, which outlines a four-tier system for logging events and describes logs on Federal information systems as “invaluable” in fighting cyber threats. […]
New legislation filed in the Senate today would prevent any future attempts to undertake wholesale reclassifications of Federal civil servants and replace them with political appointees without the consent of Congress. […]
David Shive, the chief information officer (CIO) at the General Services Administration (GSA), apologized to the vendor community today for the agency’s challenges in transitioning to a new online identification system for the Federal government’s awards process. […]
The General Services Administration (GSA) on July 29 put out a request for information seeking market research that will help the agency move forward with its Ascend Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) to simplify and standardize the way that Federal government agencies buy cloud products and services. […]
Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., have introduced new legislation that would reauthorize the National Computer Forensics Institute (NCFI), which provides cybercrime training to state and local law enforcement agencies. […]