The Federal government and other entities are adjusting to and planning for the impact of the spreading COVID-19 coronavirus. Here’s a quick look at some of the top developments of interest to the Federal IT community: […]

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on March 18 waived gift rules for its Rural Health Care (RHC) and E-Rate programs to allow broadband service providers to support telehealth and remote learning capabilities during the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak. […]

A group of eight senators including all four from Virginia and Maryland asked the Trump administration in a March 19 letter to direct Federal departments and agencies to make publicly available their continuity of operations plans (COOP) in light of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. […]

Nathan McGuirt started working in the cloud about ten years ago. Now, a senior solutions architect at Amazon Web Services, McGuirt can testify that a lot in the space has changed. […]

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is requesting $45.8 billion in Fiscal Year 2020 emergency funds to support the government-wide response to the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, including updates to agency IT to support telework and improve cybersecurity. […]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released a bulletin note from the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) on cybersecurity risks increasing with remotely accessible telework networks. […]

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on March 19 issued a list of 16 sectors – including information technology – that it considers essential during Federal, state, and local government responses to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. […]

The White House said on March 18 that President Trump intends to nominate Russell Vought to be Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). […]

The Professional Services Council (PSC), a trade group representing the Federal contractor community, today called on the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to issue “clear and comprehensive government-wide guidance” to provide maximum telework flexibilities for contactors. […]

Thanks to COVID-19, most of us are now working from home – or otherwise isolating to take care of on-prem mission-critical functions.  In this new world order, managing anxiety and stress has become just as important as taking care of the normal workloads. […]

As more Federal employees transition to telework to combat the spread of COVID-19 coronavirus, agencies are facing massive network strains. At the Department of Energy (DOE), they are considering staggering work schedules to spread out network traffic.  […]

More than 50 Congressional representatives agreed to a March 18 letter in support of remote voting addressed to House leadership, however, not all representatives physically signed the letter due to concerns about the coronavirus. […]

As Federal agencies increasingly move to telework due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Federal IT leaders across the government agreed that communication is a key building block for successful teleworking. The panelists specifically zeroed in on the importance of maintaining a strong cybersecurity posture even as employees begin to conduct work on their own network and potentially expose the agency to more cyberattacks. […]

In a letter to Federal CTO Michael Kratsios, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., questioned the Federal government’s plan to use American’s smartphone location data to fight COVID-19. […]

The U.S. Army is seeing success in implementing machine learning (ML)— evidenced by improved classification of previously unknown data by 20 percent— and is developing a workforce culture where artificial intelligence (AI) adoption is possible. […]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is building a 5G Spectrum Sharing Test Bed to measure how well 5G, Wi-Fi, GPS, and military radar can operate without interfering with each other, the agency announced in a March 18 press release. […]

Dimitri Kusnezov, deputy undersecretary for artificial intelligence (AI) and technology at the Department of Energy (DoE), revealed that the department relies on data workflows to make high-risk and mission critical decisions. […]

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., along with 56 other House members, pressed ahead today with a demand to President Trump for an executive order mandating telework for all eligible Federal employees and contractors. […]

Attorney General William Barr on March 16 ordered U.S. Attorney’s Offices to prioritize detection and prosecution of coronavirus-related fraud. […]

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) and 10 private sector and academia technology partners are collaborating on the Securing Telehealth Remote Patient Monitoring Ecosystem Project. […]

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) needs to better consider information collected on non-citizen family members apprehended at the southwestern U.S. border and develop unique identifiers to be shared across DHS component agency data systems to better link family members together,  government watchdog said. […]

As more healthcare providers pivot to telehealth appointments to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 coronavirus, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will let providers use tech that may not be compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to communicate with patients. […]

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) told Federal agencies in a March 17 memo  to “maximize telework across the nation for the Federal workforce” due to the COVID-19 coronavirus, marking a significant shift from previous guidance which had included that mandate only for the Federal workforce in the National Capital Region surrounding Washington, D.C. […]

Despite some progress on its enterprise wide cloud strategy, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) struggles with legacy IT that prevents it from collecting billions in tax revenue, according to the Treasury Department Inspector General (IG). […]

A follow-up audit by the Department of Defense (DoD) Office of Inspector General (OIG) on corrective actions taken by DoD regarding its Cyber Red Team found that it did not consistently mitigate or include unmitigated vulnerabilities identified in the prior audit or during this audit. […]

In September 2019, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released its Zero Trust Architecture draft, setting the tone for the future of Federal cybersecurity and a move toward enterprise-wide zero trust implementation. […]

The Department of Defense (DoD) released the third of four planned Request for Prototype Proposals (RPP) relating to 5G technology development. […]

Dale Cabaniss on March 17 submitted her resignation as director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), a position she held since only last September, according to a knowledgeable source and news reports. […]

The Federal government and other entities are adjusting to and planning for the impact of the spreading COVID-19 coronavirus. […]

With the release of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission report, there has been much discussion about the future of cyber policy. A key component of the Trump administration’s current cyber policy, however, has been obscured from Congress for months, until recently. […]