A group of 31 House Democrats led by leadership of the House Oversight and Reform Committee asked the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) in an October 28 letter to cease work on implementing President Trump’s executive order that would create a new “Schedule F” classification for policy-involved Federal employees, and make it easier to hire and fire them. […]

Senior House Democrats have introduced legislation to reverse President Trump’s controversial executive order that would create a new “Schedule F” classification for Federal employees in  policy-making positions and make it easier to hire and fire them. […]

Innovation
cloud
telework

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and FBI issued a joint cybersecurity advisory on Oct. 22 to warn operators of state, local, territorial, and tribal (SLTT) government networks that they may be targeted by Russian state-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) actors. […]

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) identified four top management challenges for agency management in Fiscal Year 2021 – including an IT modernization challenge that the OIG indicated can be addressed through a “persuasive vision” and plan that agency IT leaders are gearing up to implement. […]

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Christopher Krebs reiterated late Tuesday that foreign hackers won’t be able to change votes cast in the U.S. elections next month, and debuted a new CISA web page that provides advice about how citizens can deal with attempts to spread misinformation about the elections. […]

Veterans Affairs
Russia hacking hack cyber-min
elections, voting, election security, midterms
Cloud Computing Brainstorm 2019 - Sean Connelly

The head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA’s) TIC Program Office emphasized that the Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) 3.0 initiative aims to create more flexible and efficient ways for Federal agencies to improve security, and said his office is considering a wide range of additional use cases to help agencies implement the framework. […]

Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) Program Manager Kevin Cox said on Oct. 13 that the program office is making progress on one of its key goals for Fiscal Year 2021 – connecting Federal agencies to its second-generation Elasticsearch dashboard. […]

Bob Kolasky, Director of the National Risk Management Center (NRMC) at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), today pronounced state and local election authorities “well positioned” to conduct secure elections next month. […]

TIC Talks

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) 3.0 guidance has taken center stage this year not only as a long-planned policy evolution, but also as a potential life-saver for Federal agencies to employ new use cases applicable to their need to implement wide-ranging and long-lasting telework. […]

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) needs to take further action to spur improvements in aircraft avionics systems in order to meet evolving cybersecurity threats and the trend toward increased connectivity between aircraft and systems, the Government Accountability Office said. […]

Pentagon Military Defense DoD

Federal agencies have made significant progress on open data, but the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has not issued implementation guidance or performance reports under the OPEN Government Data Act, according to a report released today by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). […]

For more than two years, Department of Defense (DoD) fourth estate agencies have undertaken the challenging task of migrating more than 100 data centers to milCloud 2.0. With the Fiscal Year 2020 deadline for that migration having passed on September 30, DoD agencies are focused on making sure their migration to milCloud 2.0 is driving toward outcomes that matter. […]

Treasury

The Treasury Department is asking organizations not to pay off malicious actors to terminate ransomware attacks without carefully considering possible national security threats – and said it may implement penalties for organizations that choose to pay ransom to their attackers. […]

Gerry Connolly
US tech

Federal legislation to help strengthen the cybersecurity of state and local governments through a Department of Homeland Security grant program passed the House of Representatives on Sept. 30 – with impetus for the legislation coming from across the U.S. in the form of numerous ransomware and other attacks in recent years. […]

State Department

The three biggest linchpins for the Department of State’s successful implementation of telework across the enterprise each involve longer-term IT investments that the agency was able to make prior to the coronavirus pandemic, and each of those investments has paid big dividends in agency performance since March. […]

Census 2020 image-min

The 2020 decennial census is breaking new ground in several ways – it is the first census to be conducted primarily online, and it has been supported by the cloud. Alongside those advancements, a Census Bureau official explained last week that the 2020 census will mark the first major implementation of a new privacy regime. […]

White House

Six months into a highly successful make-or-break campaign to put the Federal government workforce on a remote-work footing to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, the hard-won experience of that battle has paved the way for renewed action on broader IT modernization, government and private sector officials said on a recent MeriTalk webinar. […]

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