Both the Departments of Agriculture (USDA) and Commerce are progressing ahead on rural broadband agency priority goals (APG) as a part of the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) with some help from emergency funds in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. […]
The Department of Agriculture (USDA) entered phase one of its reopening plans on June 1 for its offices in the National Capital Region – D.C., Maryland, and Northern Virginia – a spokesperson confirmed to MeriTalk. […]
The CIOs of the Agriculture (USDA) and Transportation (DoT) Departments said today that workforce productivity trends have been stable or improved since both agencies turned to large-scale telework in March to combat spread of COVID-19. […]
The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) has filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims on behalf of five Federal employees who seek to earn hazardous pay bumps of 25 percent due to exposure to the coronavirus while on the job. […]
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report issued today that most of the largest Federal agencies made good progress in meeting goals to close data centers in Fiscal Year 2019, but also recommended that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) take several steps to improve clarity of reporting on data center closures under OMB’s Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) issued in 2016 and modified last year. […]
The General Services Administration’s (GSA) release of Federal website standards in December 2019 was intended to aid agency compliance with the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (IDEA), but Larry Gillick, chief of web and digital strategy at the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Farm Production and Conservation Business Center, raised concerns with unintended consequences of the standards. […]
The Department of Agriculture (USDA) is not regularly assessing the effectiveness and impact of its business centers, a key part of the agency’s reform efforts, and has no plans to do so, the Government Accountability Office reported on Feb. 19. […]
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a request for information (RFI) on Feb. 3 looking to modernize its Office of Ethics and Integrity’s (OEI) ethics filing platform. […]
The Departments of Agriculture (USDA), Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and Energy are the first three agencies to begin paying back Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) grants, representatives from each agency confirmed to MeriTalk. […]
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has hired Francisco Salguero – now deputy CIO at the Department of Agriculture (USDA) – as the FCC’s next CIO, Salguero confirmed on Nov. 20 at ATARC’s Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) event. […]
The Animal and Plant Health Service (APHIS) within the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is proposing to add a new system of records notice to its current inventory of records systems. […]
The Department of Agriculture (USDA) made its first investment under its ReConnect pilot program to support broadband availability, offering $2.85 million to a local service provider in Tennessee, the department announced October 18. […]
More than 20 telecommunications and utility industry groups, as well as state and local government organizations, banded together to urge congressional leaders to continue funding broadband deployment in rural America in FY2020. […]
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has continued its progress toward modernizing IT and data analytics capabilities across the agency in accordance with the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) with a set date of Sept. 30, 2019, to “provide USDA leadership with instant access to key data on program activities and trends.” […]
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is seeking Federal employees to apply for a new program the department is launching to train new CIOs and CISOs. […]
The Department of Agriculture (USDA) has taken implementation of FITARA (Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act) to heart, making it part of performance plans, department policy, and gaining visibility across its IT environment, USDA officials explained July 31 at an ACT-IAC event. […]
Department of Agriculture (USDA) CIO Gary Washington said today that his agency is focusing on boosting its FITARA (Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act) grades by the time the House Oversight and Reform Committee issues its next set of scores – expected in December – and is confident that the agency can accomplish that goal. […]
Gary Washington, CIO at the Department of Agriculture (USDA), spoke enthusiastically today about the agency’s ongoing approach to emerging technologies – including robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain – and said the technologies have the potential to become “a very large part of our future.” […]
The Department of Agriculture (USDA) is seeing strong results from its effort to expand data analytics across the agency, and is meeting targets and exceeding goals on stakeholder buy-in, according to a June 20 update to the agency’s goals under the President’s Management Agenda. […]
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is searching for information on improving its data repository and user interface design. […]
The Technology Modernization Fund’s (TMF) website shows minimal or no spend thus far on the projects for which $89 million of funding has been awarded. […]
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) updated their goals on modernizing its information technology through an action plan that is focusing on customer-focused, evidence-based, and tax-dollar efficient technology. […]
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it would like to offer up to $600 million dollars in loans and grants, through their ReConnect Program, to assist rural areas in building their broadband infrastructure. […]
Agriculture Department CIO Gary Washington laid out his agency’s IT modernization journey today, beginning with USDA’s work as the lighthouse agency for the Centers of Excellence (CoE) initiative, and continuing with the agency’s selection as one of the first three to receive an award under the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF). […]
The U.S. Department of Agriculture today announced the launch of an interactive data tool to display substance abuse data along with other public information, allowing local leaders to “build grassroots strategies to address the opioid epidemic,” the department said in its announcement. […]
Matt Lira, special assistant to the president for innovation, policy, and initiatives at the White House Office of American Innovation, has a unique visualization exercise to help consider how we should address problems in the Federal IT space. […]
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today launched a new webpage highlighting the importance of rural e-connectivity, as well as ways USDA is helping to deploy high-speed broadband infrastructure in rural America. […]
Unifying end-user operations and communications can help Federal agencies provide a consistently higher level of service to both employees and citizens, participants at a July 18 GovExec webinar said. […]
The White House isn’t doing enough to address in a public forum a range of artificial intelligence issues and needs to institute a public process to seek comments on AI-related issues, said a group of six industry groups and more than 80 individuals from academia and the private sector in a July 4 letter to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). […]
When government agencies plan a secure move to the cloud, they should look to existing guidelines and regulations to protect data, and look to established solutions to ease the move, said panelists at an FCW webinar on June 21. […]