Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]
Booz Allen Hamilton has won a task order worth up to $1.03 billion to provide services under the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) Program to CDM’s Group D Federal agencies, according to contracting information on the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Federal Procurement Data System. […]
President Trump on Friday nominated James Gfrerer to head IT for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Pending Senate confirmation, Gfrerer will be the VA’s CIO and assistant secretary for information and technology. […]
State-sponsored cyberattacks are the new normal in adversarial international activity, whether on large or small scales. […]
At a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on Wednesday, July 25, to examine findings of the Federal Cybersecurity Risk Determination Report and Action Plan released by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in May, lawmakers and private sector witnesses hailed new legislation as a necessary – but on its own insufficient – step to bring down the security risks of three-quarters of Federal agencies deemed in cyber danger. […]
Disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) can help Federal agencies better utilize their data to improve processes, public and private sector technology officials said during a FedInsider webinar on July 25. […]
The Federal workforce of the future will most likely consist of supervisors, the human workforce, contractors, and a new kind of worker–the digital employee that is equipped to reduce the burden of repetitive, simple tasks on humans. […]
The White House on Monday published a request for information (RFI) for the Government Effectiveness Advanced Research (GEAR) Center that it has proposed to create as part of its government agency reorganization plan released in June. […]
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s information technology and government operations subcommittees held a joint hearing Wednesday to key in on the most salient, persistent, and omnipresent issue in Federal agency IT: cybersecurity. On hand to testify were Federal CIO Suzette Kent, and Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, seeking to illuminate congressional inquirers on Federal agency progress to mitigate the wide range of cyber risks. […]
The Defense Department (DoD) today issued its finalized request for proposals (RFP) for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud contract, formally opening the bidding process for a potential $10 billion enterprise cloud infrastructure. […]
The Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) plan to move a key cybersecurity service to the cloud is in keeping with the push toward cloud computing for many of the Department of Defense’s operations, including those involving classified information. The question at the moment is whether the cloud services DISA wants to tap into are secure enough to handle the job. […]
Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released an interim report today detailing four major challenges and 10 critical actions that it says must be taken in order to stem the growing tide of cybersecurity threats facing the nation and Federal agencies. […]
The Department of Defense (DoD) on Tuesday released a justification and approval (J&A) document that says DoD is expanding the scope of the contract for its Electronic Health Record (EHR) system known as MHS Genesis. The document says that the contract must be expanded to achieve “a single standard baseline solution” with the new Department of Veterans Affairs EHR and also to incorporate the U.S. Coast Guard into the DoD EHR. […]
Congress, in its conference report for the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2019 released earlier this week, is demanding more transparency from the Pentagon regarding the agency’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract. […]
The Department of Defense is taking a more concerted approach to the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) by bringing AI projects under one roof and emphasizing the importance of working with industry and academia. At the same time, DoD is also recognizing that it needs to give ethics a seat at the table. […]
Federal agencies should look to implement more digital services in order to improve citizen satisfaction, an official from Adobe Systems said on a July 24 webinar organized by Adobe and Carahsoft. […]
Today’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (OGR) covered the waterfront on election cybersecurity issues but came up with little that differed much from many of the other election cybersecurity hearings that have happened on the Hill over the last few months. The greatest hits were once again discussed–concerns over involvement in the 2016 election, threats facing the 2018 midterm elections, and how to respond to Russia cyber aggression towards U.S. election infrastructure and technology. […]
If industry and government can successfully collaborate on massive and necessary IT development and regulatory efforts, you may be able to hail a flying car roughly ten years from now in many U.S. urban centers, said government and industry officials at a House Science, Space, and Technology Committee hearing today. […]
The House Homeland Security Committee today voted to recommend two bills, the Advancing Cybersecurity Diagnostics and Mitigation Act and the Department of Homeland Security Chief Data Officer Authorization Act, aimed at strengthening and solidifying IT operations of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and to guard against evolving cybersecurity threats. […]
In the push to keep Federal IT systems secure, cybersecurity teams find themselves overloaded with information and tools and would like to see automation help them turn information into actionable intelligence, IT and industry leaders said during a FedInsider webinar on July 19. […]
After the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2019 cleared a major hurdle late yesterday with the release of a conference report that reconciles differences between House and Senate versions of the bills, techies across the Federal government are finding that IT modernization and innovation amendments for the Pentagon fared well in the legislation. […]
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2019 took a big step toward passage with the release of the conference report late yesterday that unifies House and Senate NDAA legislation and places in sharp focus concerns about growing cyber and electronic warfare threats and ways that the United States should address them. […]
Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report today finding that three-quarters of major Federal agencies maintain incomplete, untimely, inaccurate, or poor-quality spending data, and that around half of them are not even implementing required data standards in the first place. […]
In 2016, criminals stole $1.6 billion from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) by using false identities to claim fraudulent tax refunds, according to IRS estimates. In a report released today, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) zeroes in on IRS’ authentication efforts as a way to reduce fraud and save tax payer dollars, and offers 11 recommendations for IRS consideration. […]
Support for S. 2593, the Secure Elections Act of 2018, is growing in the Senate as four more legislators signed on as cosponsors late last week. […]
During a General Services Administration (GSA) webinar on July 18, officials explained why Federal agencies should use GSA tools to move to the cloud, how agencies can utilize IT Schedule 70 to move to the cloud, and how to meet FedRAMP requirements. […]
The Department of Justice (DoJ) said Thursday it was putting in place a new policy governing disclosure by DoJ and other Federal agencies of “foreign influence operations” being conducted in the United States. The agency said the new policy “provides guideposts for Department action to expose and thereby counter foreign influence threats, consistent with the fundamental principle that the Department always must seek to act in ways that are politically neutral, compliant with the First Amendment and designed to maintain the public trust.” […]
As the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY2019 makes its way through the House-Senate conference process, Senate Republicans today agreed to drop their ban on China-based communications equipment maker ZTE in favor of the House’s more lenient version of that measure. […]