OMB seeks to once again empower agency CIOs

The Office of Management and Budget is once again trying to empower agency chief information officers around IT buying decisions.

Federal Chief Information Officer Greg Barbaccia told agencies recently that OMB is finalizing an effort to “make sure you have ultimate decision-making authority over all of your agency’s IT acquisitions. We will be requesting contract information from you and to make sure your contracts include appropriate clauses on providing utilization rates and pricing information.”

This new policy or guidance or effort is part of Barbaccia’s priority to improve the culture of agency CIOs.

In a memo to agency CIOs, which Federal News Network obtained, Barbaccia laid out a dozen priorities across three big themes for 2026, with people and culture being at the top of the list. The other themes included compliance and policy and technical projects and modernization.

He also offered what he termed “more abstract thoughts” about technology modernization.

One federal agency technology executive, who requested anonymity in order to talk about the memo, said Barbaccia is offering a more traditional federal CIO perspective.

“This is all evolutionary, not revolutionary. It’s a return to normalcy in many ways,” the executive said. “At the end of the day, 12 priorities is too many. No organization, much less the federal government, will accomplish 12 priorities in a year. I’d rather see a more focused 1-3 priorities that allow each agency to coalesce around with a clear vision and focus for their limited resources.”

Empowering agency CIOs has been a long-standing goal of OMB, dating back to 1996 with the passage of the Clinger-Cohen Act and then in 2003 with the E-Government Act and finally in 2014 with the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA). In between those two laws, OMB signed a memo in August 2011 to further address CIO authorities, focusing on commodity IT purchasing, and then in 2018 President Donald Trump signed an executive order trying to fix long-standing governance challenges and making structural reforms to the position.

Most recently, the Office of Personnel Management made it easier for agencies to reclassify CIO positions so they can hire political appointees or people under Schedule C.

While Barbaccia didn’t explain what steps OMB will be taking to empower CIOs, his memo and priorities offer some insights.

For example, he said he’s grown wary and suspicious about some requirements agencies are putting in solicitations, particularly around eligibility criteria such as certifications and business history.

He said these “inadvertently, or intentionally, box out new entrants. We need to be mindful of that. Please share with your contracting counterparts that they could expect a call from me requiring clarification about how an eligibility requirement directly and specifically impacts the potential success of a project.”

A more collaborative CIO council

In another section of the memo, Barbaccia said he wants to “deepen engagement with major tech vendors.”

This includes establishing regular meetings with senior leadership from key government technology suppliers, creating a unified government CIO perspective to advocate for common agency challenges and align industry support where it matters the most, and supporting changes to the Federal Acquisition Regulation and technology procurement practices that support small businesses competing for government IT contracts.

Both of these priorities are about putting CIOs in a position to oversee how their agency buys technology in a more specific way.

“Our technical acquisition processes still lean too heavily on long narrative descriptions of what we want. That creates ambiguity, slows things down and rewards vendors who are good at writing instead of building,” he said. “I’d like to see more procurements start with a clear, high-level reference architecture. What are the functional components we actually need? Do we need a database, and if so, what kind? Do we need workflow orchestration, identity federation, human review, APIs? The closer we get to describing needs in architecture terms, the closer we get to something that looks like code. And when technical procurement looks more like code, it’s much easier to match real commercial solutions to real needs quickly and accurately.”

Along with empowering CIOs at the agency level, Barbaccia also wants to lift up CIOs as a community.

At the Adobe Government Forum yesterday, he said the CIO Council must be a more collaborative experience. He said agencies operate too often in siloes and he wants them to operate more like one government. He said a lot of the agencies are using the same workflows through similar technologies, but they need to do more to learn from each other.

“My job is to make sure the same mistakes aren’t repeated across the agencies,” he said.

The memo lays that idea out in more detail as part of building “a collaborative CIO culture across government.”

Barbaccia said he wants to promote open, trust-based communication, push for the routine sharing of best practices, lessons learned and early failure insights across agencies. One way he said that will happen is through “technology centers of government leadership,” such as his office, the General Services Administration, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, those hired under the TechForce program and USDS/DOGE.

“I plan to formalize these efforts this year,” he wrote, likely through a new agency CIO advisory forum, which will “create a recurring venue where agency CIOs can present major tech initiatives to a board of seasoned technology, cybersecurity and procurement leaders for constructive review.”

One goal of the forum is to focus on “tightening project planning from procurement through implementation.”

Reimagining the ATO process

Improving cybersecurity is another common theme in Barbaccia’s memo.

He highlighted the continued evolution of the cloud security program known as FedRAMP, as well as the Federal Acquisition Security Council’s goal to accelerate interagency supply chain risk information sharing efforts.

He also wants to re-imagine the authority to operate (ATO) process. He said he wants to “treat ATO reform as a high-priority, comprehensive redesign of how federal systems are authorized to operate, and target an ATO regime that is agile, risk-based and tailored to modern cloud and artificial intelligence environments.”

Along with the ATO process, Barbaccia said he wants to optimize federal enterprise cyber defenses within and across agencies to defend against advanced AI-enabled attacks, drive decisive response actions and enable strategic decisions.

Barbaccia said to achieve those goals, OMB will work with CISA to modernize the continuous diagnostics and mitigation (CDM) program and to “rationalize cybersecurity capability investments and hold agencies accountable for optimizing their cybersecurity capabilities, processes and resources.”

Around AI, OMB is moving into phase 2 of its adoption sprint. Barbaccia said as of Jan. 31, all CFO Act agencies have deployed at least two large language models against two distinct use cases in at least a pilot setting.

“We are preparing to launch phase 2 of the sprint – we will be looking to collect data on roadblocks, best practices, return on investment metrics and opportunities to reduce procurement costs. As with phase 1, we will be looking to work closely with many CXO councils as well as other parts of OMB and GSA.”

Barbaccia said one of his goals is to “leverage AI to improve operational efficiency and automate repetitive and onerous tasks, allowing federal employees to shift to higher value work.”

At the Adobe event, Barbaccia said the administration’s approach to deploy and adopt AI is focused on fixing bad processes.

He said agencies are starting to get AI rolled out through “low-risk use cases” with a goal of getting the tools in the hands of as many people as possible.

In the last week, agencies have posted on their websites their updated AI use case inventories. OMB plans to update its GitHub site with a link to every agency’s use case inventory.

Barbaccia, who has been in his role now for over a year, said all of these priorities are focused on improving the agency’s interaction with citizens and reducing the burden of those communications.

He wants agencies to save the public time while also reducing their own workloads in delivering digital services.

“Consistency across agencies is how we actually move faster, spend less and deliver better outcomes, all without taking unnecessary risk,” he wrote.

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