Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., on Feb. 11 reintroduced the Chai Suthammanont Remembrance Act, a bill which is designed to protect Federal employees who must return to the workplace from COVID-19 by requiring government agencies to publish safety plans to guide their return. […]

The Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP) employees have a new fashion accessory to wear to work – a contact-tracing device that utilizes 4G cellular data with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. […]

The COVID-19 pandemic forced government agencies to innovate much more rapidly with their IT systems, and now Federal leaders are planning how to continue that momentum beyond the pandemic. […]

The Department of Defense’s (DoD) Defense Industrial Base (DIB) entered the COVID-19 pandemic in a “weakened state” and received a “C” rating on its overall health and readiness score, according to a recent report. […]

A dozen tech-sector trade groups today urged House and Senate leaders from both major parties to include in coronavirus relief legislation President Biden’s proposal for $9 billion of new funding for the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) that lends money out to Federal agencies to undertake IT modernization efforts. […]

Digital workflow software provider ServiceNow is working with state and foreign governments to help speed up their coronavirus vaccination efforts, and is targeting Federal government organizations for the same services as they roll out more aggressive steps to boost vaccination rates. […]

Agencies are facing a growing backlog of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and the agencies facing the most requests have started notifying the public, according to a report by the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS). […]

The Department of Defense (DoD) saw a sharp increase in acquisition spending in 2020, more than doubling its 2019 spending in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to an annual report by the Defense Pricing and Contracting Agency (DPC). […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the increased adoption of telehealth services, but that positive development for technology-delivered services comes with both benefits and community equity challenges, Federal leaders said this week. […]

The Office of Management and Budget told Federal agencies in a Jan. 24 memo that Federal workplaces should run at no more than 25 percent of occupancy while the coronavirus is running at high rates. […]

The Biden Administration has gone to work on stopping the spread of the COVID-19 virus through executive orders (EO) that will enhance data collection capabilities among relevant industries and establish a national testing strategy that includes a contact tracing element. […]

Despite the coronavirus pandemic and the unprecedented move to remote work caused by the public health crisis, Federal employee satisfaction is up, according to preliminary results from the 2020 OPM Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. […]

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is conducting market research to find sources for COVID-19 data modeling, according to a Jan. 19 sources sought notice on Beta.SAM.gov. […]

Within hours of the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the new administration began issuing marching orders to rein in the COVID-19 pandemic, including an executive order (EO) to mandate face coverings on all Federal property, and other directives to ensure that its national strategy for the COVID-19 response has a data-driven approach. […]

During the nine months of the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve asked a hundred variations of that question to people whose professional lives near the tip of the technology spear put them in good positions to predict the future and get as many good answers back. At the dawn of a more hopeful 2021, here’s a look at how the Federal work-scape may play out in the longer term, courtesy of three veteran technologists.  […]

The Alliance for Digital Innovation (ADI), a Washington-based trade group known for its advocacy for Federal government IT modernization, released a new set of recommendations Dec. 17 for the Biden administration and incoming Congress to improve Federal tech capabilities by learning from some of the lessons of the government’s rapid turn to telework during the coronavirus pandemic. […]

The Department of Health and Human Services’ Indian Health Service (IHS) is seeking a cloud-based video conferencing solution for its expanding telehealth program. […]

With the first batch of COVID-19 vaccines making their way across the country, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued guidelines for keeping cold storage facilities safe from cyberthreat actors. […]

Senior executives with Google Cloud emphasized at their first Public Sector Summit on Dec. 8 the work that the company has been doing with a variety of public sector organizations during the coronavirus pandemic, and one emerging silver lining to the health crisis: a big leap forward in IT modernization that will help government and academia during the recovery. […]

While larger Federal government agencies had the resources necessary to facilitate a shift to large-scale telework earlier this year, some smaller agencies had a more difficult time mounting similar efforts, a State Department official said at a Dec. 9 AFCEA Bethesda webinar. […]

President-elect Joe Biden said today he will nominate California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The nomination will be subject to Senate confirmation. Becerra is a former member of Congress and would become the first Latino to head HHS. […]

Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, is leading a bipartisan group of 49 members of Congress urging Senate and House leadership to include in end-of-year legislation language to make permanent Medicare telehealth expansions that were enacted earlier this year. […]

As the coronavirus pandemic hits the nine-month mark in December – and infection rates soar across the United States – telework remains mostly in place for most of the Federal government workforce whose jobs can be done offsite. […]

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), working in collaboration with the Defense Innovation Unit, is seeing promising early results for pre-symptomatic detection of COVID-19 among personnel. […]

The Defense Department (DoD) is putting in place additional workplace restrictions for the Pentagon Reservation area over the Thanksgiving weekend – effective at 5:00 a.m. EST on Nov. 26 – due to the increased spike COVID-19 cases in the National Capital Region. […]

President-Elect Joe Biden this week urged Congress to approve a COVID-19 stimulus bill similar to the HEROES Act approved by the House earlier this year, but didn’t get into further specifics about what he’d like to see in future relief legislation. […]

The Treasury Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) said in a new information memorandum that IT Acquisition, and Project Management and Cyber Threats, remain from the previous year as two of five management and performance challenges for the agency. […]

In a recent post on Beta.Sam.gov, the CDC said it is looking to partner with organizations to form a cloud-based platform to create a centralized hub for COVID-19 testing. […]

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is seeking innovative basic or applied research concepts to detect airborne SARS-CoV-2 pathogens. […]

The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) is delaying the implementation timeline for certain provisions of the 21st Century Cures Act in order to offer more flexibility for healthcare providers dealing with COVID-19, according to a notice set to be published in the Federal Register today. […]