Democratic senators from Maryland and Virginia penned a letter to Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Acting Director Russell Vought and Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Acting Director Michael Rigas urging them to clarify Federal agency reopening plans to continue maximum telework, and arguing that it’s “unsafe” to bring employees back to the office. […]
As part of the President’s Management Agenda (PMA), the State Department has undertaken efforts to modernize the Department’s IT portfolio. In its July update, the State Department announced that it has met all PMA milestones for Q1 and Q2 of this year, and is on track to meet its Q3 milestones. […]
The Department of the Interior (DOI) is facing challenges in implementing the CARES Act, along with IT, financial and programmatic issues during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the agency’s inspector general. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is seeking robotics process automation (RPA) to reduce its electronic health record (EHR) backlog, reduce manual tasks, and increase the traceability of VA’s program. […]
The Department of Education wants to improve student privacy and cybersecurity at institutions of higher education, and listed engaging those institutions as a goal over the next year in its July 2020 President’s Management Agenda update. […]
The cyber agency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is looking to fix 75 percent of Federal agencies critical network vulnerabilities within 30 days of their discovery, according to a goal in the July 2020 update to the President’s Management Agenda […]
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. […]
Members of the House Committee on Financial Services and witnesses at a July 8 hearing weighed the public health benefits of digital contact tracing to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 against the data privacy concerns of access to personal information. […]
The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and Related Agencies has approved a $158.3 billion appropriations bill for fiscal year 2021. […]
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released its final Data Strategy – on the heels of its final Cloud Strategy – to most effectively accelerate data use across the agency. […]
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released its final cloud and data strategies and “establishes a new mindset or modernizing NOAA’s IT environment.” […]
Federal cybersecurity officials working on the policy and operations fronts agreed this week that better collection of data about vulnerabilities is key to fostering improved network defenses. […]
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a strategy today intended to “strengthen and unify industrial control systems (ICS) cybersecurity for a more aligned, proactive, and collaborative approach to protect the essential services Americans use every day.” […]
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) released a solicitation request for IT support for an existing data center and a new disaster recovery center. […]
FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said today he believes Congress should take action to make broadband service affordable for tens of millions of Americans with low incomes and those who have been left unemployed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. […]
On July 2, Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., introduced bipartisan legislation to accelerate emerging technology adoption by Federal agencies and expand upon the AI in Government Act which codifies an AI Center of Excellence (CoE) within the General Services Administration (GSA). […]
California’s landmark data privacy law, which went into effect in January and gives consumers greater access and control over their personal information, will now be enforced, according to the state’s attorney general. […]
DHS is accepting quotations in response to the request through July 10. […]
At the Department of Defense (DoD), emphasizing a zero-trust security model is helping the agency overcome common security mishaps, Director of Defense Research and Engineering for Modernization Mark Lewis shared. […]
The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) debuted Chapter 2 of the CISA Cyber Essentials Toolkit which centers around how organization staff and the users can exercise good cyber posture. […]
A group of prominent U.S.-based universities announced their support for the bicameral, bipartisan National AI Research Resource Task Force Act. […]
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has had to move quickly to support American staff abroad during the COVID-19 pandemic. […]
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been far-reaching within the Federal government – not only requiring agencies to shift services online, but also to enable employees to work from home en masse. […]
As the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) continues its “extensive, transparent, data-driven, measured and deliberate approach” to reopening its regional and National Capital Region offices, a spokesperson confirmed to MeriTalk that political leadership has returned to on-site work. […]
The National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) launched a new initiative on June 23 to advise state, local, and Federal governments on protecting electoral integrity and enhancing voter participation. […]
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues and many agencies maintain telework status, outgoing Federal CIO Suzette Kent called the current moment a “marker of a new era” in IT modernization and digital capabilities. […]
Charles Chen, director of the AI and Emerging Technology Office at the Department of State, said at the June 30 AI in Action webcast that data lakes are “certainly essential for the success of machine learning and AI.” […]
For the Department of the Interior’s (DoI) journey of moving to a completely cloud-centric organization, maintaining cyber posture and developing the workforce is key to the strategy. […]
Both Small Business Administration (SBA) CTO Sanjay Gupta and Eddie Tejeda, Director of Cloud.Gov at the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Technology Transformation Services (TTS) organization, agreed this week that a solid cloud foundation can enable future IT modernization or other technical transformation. […]
The ability to generate new value through collaborative sharing and analysis of ever-growing data streams represents one of the holy grails of IT modernization. Now that government and private organizations are investing in the requisite infrastructure to make the data-driven future possible, what are the remaining challenges? […]