Bill Zielinski GSA IT Category Acquisitions FAS assistant commissioner

Bill Zielinski has been tapped to replace Kay Ely and will serve as the acting assistant commissioner of the IT Category (ITC) for the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service (FAS), a GSA official confirmed to MeriTalk today. […]

employee misconduct caution tape

The Government Accountability Office released a report Wednesday that says the Federal government needs to provide more reliable data on employee misconduct, and suggested that Federal managers need better training to ensure that inappropriate employee behavior is dealt with appropriately. […]

Ajit Pai, FCC Commisioner

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai today defended his year-long public insistence that the FCC was the victim of a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack which impacted its electronic comment filing system during the agency’s net neutrality rulemaking proceeding last year, but admitted to having his own doubts about the cause of the system problem. […]

Lisa Murkowski

While members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee today appeared to be generally positive toward the nomination of Lane Genatowski to be the director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) at the Department of Energy, they also had some sharp questions for the nominee over his stated support for President Trumps’ plan to get rid of the organization.   […]

Look at that plane taking off at an airport.

Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., has requested that the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division investigate “whether the uses of facial recognition technology – as currently utilized – by law enforcement agencies are in violation of civil rights protections.”  In a letter to assistant attorney general John Gore yesterday, Cleaver noted the potential benefits of facial […]

Kay Ely, assistant commissioner for the Office of Information Technology Category in the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) with the General Services Administration (GSA), will move to a task force to merge OPM and GSA operations and will subsequently retire, a GSA official confirmed to MeriTalk. Ely has served across the Federal government with the Office […]

Robert Bohn, cloud computing program manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), said today that NIST is collaborating with IEEE to create standards that would allow for interoperability between different cloud environments that currently do not exchange data freely. […]

Ajit Pai

In advance of his appearance before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee scheduled for tomorrow, four House Democrats hammered Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai over statements he made in 2017 that the FCC was a victim of a distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attack which impacted its electronic comment filing system during the agency’s net neutrality rulemaking proceeding last year. […]

White House

The White House said President Trump has signed into law the NIST Small Business Cybersecurity Act, S. 770, which directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to provide resources to small businesses to help them implement NIST’s voluntary cybersecurity framework. […]

VA

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) technology budget is vast. At just over $4 billion, it exceeds most Federal agencies’ technology budgets, and in some cases, dwarfs entire operational budgets. […]

Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., is pressing major electric utility companies for details about whether and when their systems have been penetrated by Russian-affiliated hackers, and at the same time is querying several Federal agencies about what they are doing to help utilities recognize and prevent attempts to break into their networks and control systems. […]

White House

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are collecting industry feedback to create a “catalog of standardized metrics” for Federal commercial cloud service level agreements, according to a DISA request for information. The RFI notes that “an inter-agency working group is developing a catalog of metrics that […]

The Federal Communications Commission said this week it is seeking public comment through Sept. 10 on its annual report to determine whether “advanced telecommunications capability”–typically referred to as broadband service–is being deployed “to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion.”  […]

The Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Deputy CIO Guy Cavallo and CTO Sanjay Gupta said today at the FCW Cybersecurity Summit that their agency’s unorthodox approach to the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) Program is yielding a ton of practical benefits, even though it required a bit of a departure from CDM’s initial guidelines. Now, SBA is providing a new potential model for other agencies – many struggling with the first of CDM’s four phases – to use when considering how to achieve the outcomes the program intends. […]

The U.S. Cyber Command (Cybercom) and the National Security Agency have joined the effort to protect the integrity of this year’s midterm elections, which are occurring under the shadow of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election and warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies that 2018 is seeing more of the same. […]

Federal CIO Suzette Kent said today at the FCW Cybersecurity Summit that continuous dialogue and attention on cybersecurity priorities are working to move the Federal government collectively in the right direction at a time when the need for unified effort is paramount. […]

Carol Harris, director for information technology acquisition management issues at the Government Accountability Office (GAO), will take over the FITARA-related responsibilities of Dave Powner–GAO’s departing director of IT issues–while Nick Marinos, director of cybersecurity and information management at GAO, will pick up Powner’s responsibilities on Census issues, GAO confirmed to MeriTalk.   […]

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Monday convened a conference call with the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) and the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) regarding cybersecurity and ongoing threats to the 2018 midterm elections. […]

Charles Phalen, director of the National Background Investigations Bureau (NBIB), said today at an event hosted by NextGov and Equifax that he supports a proposal in the President’s government reform and reorganization plan to move NBIB “in its entirety from the Office of Personnel Management into the Department of Defense.” […]

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