A dozen tech-sector trade groups today urged House and Senate leaders from both major parties to include in coronavirus relief legislation President Biden’s proposal for $9 billion of new funding for the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) that lends money out to Federal agencies to undertake IT modernization efforts. […]
The 117th Congress is finalizing its lineup of new leadership for House committees and subcommittees. Although some committee leadership remains the same, here are the names to pay attention to in the Federal IT world. […]
By Fiscal Year 2026, every contractor seeking to do business with the Department of Defense (DoD) will be required to have at least a Level 1 Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), Katie Arrington, the Pentagon’s CISO for acquisition and sustainment, said Feb. 3. […]
Strengthening cloud service capabilities over the past year has been an important step for Federal agencies to both deal with pandemic-era network service demands, and bolster cybersecurity by meeting requirements of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program while using cloud services. […]
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has scheduled a hearing for Feb. 9 at 9:15 a.m. EST on President Biden’s nomination of Neera Tanden to become Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). […]
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s decision to call at least a temporary halt to the activities of 42 defense-related advisory boards includes some of the better-known advisory bodies that have advised DoD leadership in recent years, including the Defense Innovation Board and the Defense Policy Board. […]
The House Committee on Homeland Security today designated cybersecurity as a key priority for the committee in the 117th Congress, and specifically noted the Russian-backed hack of thousands of government and private sector networks via a compromise of SolarWinds Orion products. […]
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued a Special Publication (SP) to help organizations protect sensitive information on different electronic systems from state-sponsored hacking. […]
As part of its quest to modernize IT capabilities across the State Department, the agency is looking for contractors to support its Cloud Program Management Office (CPMO). […]
Kombucha tea is moving off of Whole Foods shelves and into the U.S. Army’s research and development labs. […]
Digital workflow software provider ServiceNow is working with state and foreign governments to help speed up their coronavirus vaccination efforts, and is targeting Federal government organizations for the same services as they roll out more aggressive steps to boost vaccination rates. […]
Jeff Bezos is stepping down as Amazon’s chief executive officer, and will transition to the executive chairman role in the third quarter of 2021. Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, will take over as the chief executive of Amazon at that time. […]
The Senate voted today 57 to 43 to approve the nomination of Alejandro Mayorkas to head the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). […]
The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously voted today to advance the President Biden’s nominee for Veterans Affairs (VA) Secretary Denis McDonough to a full-Senate confirmation vote. […]
In the first legislative step toward paving the way for easier passage of President Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., introduced the text of a joint 2021 budget resolution on Feb. 1. […]
In a letter to Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, nominee for secretary of commerce, Republican Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Ben Sasse, R-Neb., requested that the Department of Commerce keep the pressure on Chinese telecommunications company, Huawei, during the Biden administration. […]
The Department of Defense’s (DoD) Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) with Army Contracting Command has awarded the Indiana Innovation Institute (IN3) an Other Transaction Agreement (OTA) to build an online marketplace to “develop, design, and implement AI capabilities.” […]
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is stepping up its social media game by launching an Instagram account, giving its followers an inside look at DNI Avril Haines’ workday. […]
Taking steps to improve performance planning could help the Department of Energy (DOE) transfer technologies from the agency to private companies, and avoid barriers that can hinder tech transfer, the Federal government’s chief watchdog agency said. […]
Federal technology leaders offered an upbeat assessment on the climate for innovation in government operations on the inaugural episode of MeriTV, which launched last week to provide news and insight on today’s mission-critical IT challenges. […]
Throughout the pandemic, large government contractors like General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) have played a significant role in partnering with government agencies to “keep the lights on” while simultaneously advancing their critical missions. […]
The Department of Defense (DoD) suggested in a recent communication to Congress that it may consider moving on from its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract with Microsoft should the lengthy court battle over the contract drag on much longer. […]
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced that its first bug bounty program has “proved the value of the secure hardware architectures developed under [DARPA’s] System Security Integration Through Hardware and Firmware (SSITH) program while pinpointing critical areas to further harden defenses.” […]
Ian Wallace has joined the State Department to serve as a senior advisor for the Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues (S/CCI). Wallace tweeted that his new role will focus on cyber capacity building. […]
Agencies are facing a growing backlog of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and the agencies facing the most requests have started notifying the public, according to a report by the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS). […]
The call for fresh investments in several major Federal IT areas featured in the new “Resilient, Keeping your WITS – Workforce, Innovation, Technology, Security – About You” report relies in part on survey data gathered from 300 Federal IT leaders in late 2020 as part of the project to identify how the Federal government can improve resilience as the country emerges from the coronavirus pandemic. […]
General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) said today it is adding Amazon Web Services (AWS) offerings to the lineup available through GDIT’s milCloud 2.0 contract, one of the key pillars of the Defense Department’s (DoD) enterprise cloud environment. […]
The Defense Counterintelligence Security Agency (DCSA) is looking for a contractor that can support the Defense Department’s (DoD) Insider Threat Management Analysis Center (DITMAC) System of Systems (DSoS) Program Management Office (PMO) in implementing technical activities to enable DSoS to function as authorized by DITMAC. […]
The call for fresh investments in several major Federal IT areas featured in the new “Resilient, Keeping your WITS – Workforce, Innovation, Technology, Security – About You” report relies in part on survey data gathered from 300 Federal IT leaders in late 2020 as part of the project to identify how the Federal government can improve resilience as the country emerges from the coronavirus pandemic. […]
The Department of Defense (DoD) saw a sharp increase in acquisition spending in 2020, more than doubling its 2019 spending in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to an annual report by the Defense Pricing and Contracting Agency (DPC). […]