Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va. – one of the prime movers behind congressional approval of $1 billion of new funding for the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) earlier this year –
emphasized the crucial impact that money will have on modernizing Federal agency networks and improving government cybersecurity and citizen service in keynote remarks at MeriTalk’s TMF Forward virtual event on Dec. 16. […]

The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee voted Dec. 15 to approve the White House’s nomination of Alan Davidson to head the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Association (NTIA). […]

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said Dec. 14 that there has been no confirmed compromise of any Federal agencies as a result of the Log4j vulnerability. But CISA reiterated it has added the vulnerability to its catalog of known vulnerabilities over the weekend, giving agencies two weeks to remediate and mitigate any potential harm. […]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is sustaining a protest by Microsoft after the company complained that the National Security Agency (NSA) improperly evaluated proposals for cloud services in support of NSA’s classified and unclassified computing requirements when it awarded a contract to Amazon Web Services (AWS). […]

The U.S. Army plans to advance its use of digital night vision technology (DNVT) to boost its members’ situational awareness and decision-making abilities, and the branch is looking towards industry to help make it happen. […]

The Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Dec. 14 meeting yielded a host of rulemaking actions when it comes to hot button topics for the commission, including E-Rate broadband bidding, emergency alerts, and robocalls. […]

The Senate passed the conferenced version of the fiscal year (FY) 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) today, sending the $768 billion defense spending bill to President Biden’s desk for his signature. The annual defense spending bill has now been passed 61 years in a row. […]

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted today to advance the Federal Secure Cloud Improvement and Jobs Act of 2021, sending the bill to the full Senate for consideration. […]

The Department of Justice said that Ron Bewtra, who has served as the agency’s chief technology officer since 2015, will be leaving the agency later this month. […]

The Department of Defense’s (DoD) cloud strategy is ever-changing but with the termination of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud services contract earlier this year, the DoD has developed a more “agile” failure mindset – recognizing that it’s okay to fail, but also important to do so quickly, a Pentagon official said. […]

RegScale, a Tysons Corner, Va.-based provider of compliance automation technologies for highly regulated government and business organizations, officially launched operations on November 30 with $1.5 million of new funding. […]

The Senate on Dec. 14 voted to invoke cloture on the conferenced version of the fiscal year (FY) 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), setting up a final vote on Wednesday for the $768 billion defense spending bill. […]

Federal agencies in the Security, Suitability, and Credentialing Performance Accountability Council (PAC) Principals have made progress in implementing the Trusted Workforce 2.0 framework, however further work remains, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). […]

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced today that it is launching a new edition of its Hack DHS program – a bug bounty program started in 2019 – to identify potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities within certain DHS systems. […]

The Biden administration’s Cybersecurity Cybersecurity Executive Order issued in May 2021 has put a greater emphasis on cybersecurity at the Federal level – which is especially important after numerous high-profile ransomware and software supply chain attacks came to light earlier in the year – but many Federal cyber leaders say the Cyber EO only addresses a fraction of today’s cybersecurity challenges. […]

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has again extended the Schedule A hiring authority that allows Federal agencies to temporarily hire personnel to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Dec. 10 OPM memo. […]

The Department of Defense (DoD) has awarded artificial intelligence (AI) application software company C3 AI a $500 million contract to deliver products and services for AI-enabled modeling and simulation, C3 AI announced Dec. 9. […]

The United States is partnering with Australia, Denmark, and Norway on an export controls and human rights initiative over the next year to prevent the proliferation of software and other technologies that enable human rights abuses. […]

The White House’s new executive order that aims to improve the ease and effectiveness of how citizens interact with the government touches most of the larger Federal civilian government agencies, and takes specific aim at agencies that provide 35 types of service that the order defines as “high impact” for citizens based on volume and types of services delivered. […]

President Biden released an executive order (EO) today with requirements for 17 different Federal agencies to make customer experience (CX) improvements across 36 areas. The order as a whole broadly focuses on ways Federal government agencies can create more seamless interactions with the public, Federal officials said on a press call explaining the White House directive. […]

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., expressed “serious concerns” regarding wide-scale government telework in a Dec. 8 letter to leadership at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Office of Personnel Management, and the General Services Administration. […]

The Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) U.S. Digital Service (USDS) and the General Services Administration’s (GSA) 18F program must coordinate more consistently on developing agency guidance to eliminate overlap or duplication of guidance or conflicting guidance, according to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. […]

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a statement on Dec. 11 with guidance for organizations to protect themselves against the “log4j” critical vulnerability that surfaced over the weekend. […]

President Biden today issued an executive order that broadly supports new efforts by the government to improve the quality of citizen interactions with the government, and requires17 Federal agencies to make customer experience (CX) improvements in 36 areas ranging from accessing retirement benefits to renewing travel passports. […]

An all-female panel of Federal agency leaders acknowledged on Dec. 9 that while women have made a significant gain in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) occupations, they continue to face challenges. […]

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is in the process of working through a long list of network security fixes recommended by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) earlier this year, but doesn’t expect to get done with addressing all of those until the end of 2022. […]

While a good bit of the focus on the conferenced version of the fiscal year (FY) 2022 National Defense Authorization Act has centered around the lack of incident reporting and other legislative items that were cut from the bill, the defense spending bill that passed the House of Representatives last week continues to retain a variety of important cybersecurity and tech-related provisions. […]

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) held its inaugural Cybersecurity Advisory Committee meeting Dec. 10, focusing heavily on how CISA and the committee can increase the Federal and national cybersecurity workforce. […]

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) held its first Cybersecurity Advisory Committee meeting today, in which agency officials laid out their expectations for the committee and called for actionable cyber recommendations from committee members that CISA can implement. […]

Advances in digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) hold great promise to boost economic prosperity, but academic leaders warned this week that the technologies also are reshaping growth and distributional dynamics in ways that can increase economic inequality. […]