The biggest surprise that came from my exclusive interview with Emily Murphy, the General Services Administration’s administrator, last week wasn’t her comfort talking about the Public Building Service and leases, or her recognition that 2017 was a tough year for the agency, or even the fact she said she would seriously look at making the schedules program more transparent to non-contract holders — one of my soapbox issues for the last decade.

Rather, it was about a procurement item where I figured after spending the last decade watching Murphy’s actions on Capitol Hill and listening to her speak on occasion at industry events, I knew where she stood—generally speaking, of course.

Then I asked a simple question: “What preconceived notions about GSA generally that, maybe, weren’t right, or were proven wrong?”

Without hesitation Murphy said the Transactional Data Reporting (TDR) initiative — a hot bed of concern and angst for industry for much of the past few years.

“I came in with a stronger preconceived notion that perhaps it was something we just wanted to roll back,” Murphy said. “I came in and saw a lot of the value of it, but I also realized that rolling it back in-and-of itself creates a burden for the very businesses we are trying to help. We are trying to move toward an e-invoicing system instead. So rather than doubling down on the burden, we are trying to work with them and partner going forward so we reach the results both industry and government want to, which is a good honest exchange of data and information.”

If you aren’t familiar with TDR and wondering what’s the big surprise, let me catch you up a little.

GSA developed the TDR initiative to replace the dreaded commercial sales requirement and its corresponding price reduction clause in June 2016.

The Commercial Sales Practices regulation requires contractors to disclose to GSA details of any discounts vendors offer to commercial customers for similar products and services. The Price Reduction Clause requires contractors to monitor their pricing over the life of the contract and provide the government with the same price reductions that they give to commercial customers.

The PRC has been at the center of most of government contracting-based False Claims Act whistleblower cases and settlements over the past decade. For much of the past decade, vendors have called on GSA to change the PRC because it doesn’t match up with how agencies buy or how contractors sell anymore.

Instead under TDR, vendors are providing information generated when the government purchases goods or services. It includes specific details such as descriptions, part numbers, quantities and prices paid for the items purchased.

Initially, GSA made TDR mandatory for all new schedule holders and any vendor who renewed their schedule contracts.

But in August, GSA made TDR voluntary, in part because of  vendor concerns and the Trump administration’s desire to address regulatory burden across all agencies.

Larry Allen, president of Allen Federal Business Partners and a federal acquisition expert, said Murphy was correct not to just get rid of TDR because it would leave those companies that are taking part in the pilot facing a great deal of uncertainty.

Allen said GSA expected TDR to replace the need for vendors to provide commercial pricing data, but that’s not what’s happening on a broad scale.

“I just talked to a company last week whose contracting officer at the end of the TDR review asked them for commercial sales data even though they should’ve been trained that this is not necessary anymore,” Allen said. “I don’t see TDR ever moving past this small cadre of companies unless GSA succeeds in getting contracting officers stop asking for commercial sales data.”

It’s not a matter of training by GSA, but more of the old adage, “old habits are hard to break.”

GSA has been holding in person and online training sessions for the past year, including another one on Feb. 21.  The 90-minute webinar will feature a live demonstration of TDR for both vendors and users, and include questions and answers.

Murphy, who often heard vendor concerns when she was on the staffs of the House Small Business Committee and House Armed Services Committee, said she is trying to engage with industry as administrator to better understand their perspectives about the potential and real burdens.

“I think the better question is how do we make sure the government gets the data it needs to make the right decisions without unduly burdening our vendor community?” she said. “I hope to closely with the Office of Management and Budget and other agencies on e-invoicing. I think we are expected the Federal Acquisition Regulations Council to move forward with some e-invoicing rules in the future, and then seeing how do we transition from where we are to where we want to be in a way that takes in mind the burdens we are creating but also does give us the data we need to make responsible decisions.”

Murphy said the e-commerce portal provision in the 2018 Defense Authorization Act takes this idea of ensuring the government gets the best commercial prices a step further.

“That’s taking the idea that if our customers don’t know they are selling to the government, is there a way that we can have dynamic pricing competitions take place so we are getting the same prices the private sector is paying but we are doing so in a way that reduces the burden on them?” she said. “It’s an opportunity Congress has given us and it will require a lot of collaboration between Congress, OMB, GSA and our customer agencies as well as our industry partners.”

GSA and OMB  held an industry day in January to learn more about how to implement the provision.

Allen said the e-invoicing idea is interesting because it’s a more pragmatic way to capture data.

“Contracting programs like Alliant or NASA SEWP can provide specific price analysis information because the Alliant team, for example, touches every invoice,” he said. “Right now GSA touches hardly any schedule invoices or purchase order so I think where Emily is going is if it’s an e-invoice, it’s just as easy to send a copy to GSA as it is to send real live one to the Army. GSA sees invoices as providing the information about what was bought and the prices paid as a way to develop the price analysis for better customer use.”

Allen said e-invoicing may not meet all of GSA’s needs as it continues to try to replace the price reduction clause, but it will get them closer than TDR ever did.

In the meantime, Allen said vendors should be wary of TDR because of the risk that auditors still are tied to the old way of oversight where they expect to see specific data under the commercial services practices and price reduction clause.

“TDR world not provide classic sales data, but provides enough commercial sales information to make your contracting officer happy that they are awarding a task order or purchase order at fair and reasonable place,” he said. “But there is no FAR or GSAR standard of ‘enough.’ And since there is no standard, ‘enough’ varies from contracting officer to contracting officer, and that is a part of the concern for vendors.”

Murphy didn’t offer any timeline of when a draft rule or specifics about how e-invoicing could work, but the fact she understands and wants to improve the processes is an important first step.

Read more of the Reporter’s Notebook.

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Did the federal acquisition website called FAITAS suffer a cyber incident? Are thousands of contracting officers and contracting officer representatives’ (COR) data at risk?

The government isn’t offering any details of what’s going on, so I pulled out my reporter’s notebook (pun intended) and started to do some digging.

Let’s look at what we know for sure and you, the reader, can decide whether there is something more than meets the eye.

Fact 1: The Federal Acquisition Institute Training Application System (FAITAS) has been down for “unscheduled maintenance” only for civilian agencies for more than a month.

So if you have a .gov email address, you are out of luck.

But if you have a .mil email address, all is well and you can use the site to get training.

Fact 2: There is no timetable for FAITAS to come back online for civilian agencies. In the frequently asked questions on the FAITAS website, GSA seems to insinuate that the site will be down through February as it states, “If you are maintaining a certification and your continuous learning period is NOT due to expire before the end of February 2018, your request may not be processed, as priority will be granted to users with certifications whose CL Periods are ending within this timeframe.”

Fact 3: The Army, which runs the site governmentwide, and the General Services Administration, which runs the Federal Acquisition Institute (FAI), are not saying much about what’s going on.

An Army Cyber Command spokesman offered this comment:

“Some Army Web services are currently not available due to maintenance and implementation of security upgrades. We are working as quickly as possible to complete the required upgrades and restore website access. Apart from that, I can’t offer greater specificity or detail.”

A GSA spokeswoman offered me a similar statement:

“The Federal Acquisition Institute Training Application System (FAITAS) is currently unavailable from the public domain; however the system remains open through the .mil network. The Federal Acquisition Institute is posting updates on FAITAS to FAI.gov and GSA has put several temporary solutions in place to ensure critical tasks can proceed until access to FAITAS is fully restored. Acquisition professionals should work through their agency career manager to address any critical needs.”

Fact 4: Civilian agency contracting officers and CORs are not necessarily feeling the impact of FAITAS being down, but the longer it’s down, the more people the outage will impact. Acquisition workers use FAITAS to sign up for training courses so they can keep their certifications and warrants up-to-date.

As one government acquisition professional told me, “The civilian government acquisition community is paralyzed from taking advantage of what FAITAS offers: Getting certifications, renewing certifications and the whole professionalization of the acquisition community is on hold. They are trying to do work around, but really FAITAS is the single source to get that done.”

The source, who requested anonymity because they didn’t get permission to talk to the media, said the work arounds GSA is offering include taking free classes at the Treasury Acquisition Institute or other government and private sector sources aren’t always at the level that more advanced acquisition workers need.

“You have to take so many hours to renew certification before the end of the expiration date of your certification. I think it’s around 40 hours,” he said. “So you need to take several different acquisition courses to make sure you are up to speed. If you don’t make sure the certifications are still viable, you lose it.”

For this acquisition professional, that is only part of the problem.

And then this brings us to the circumstantial part of the discussion.

The inferred evidence of what’s going with FAITAS easily leads us down the path of this being a cyber incident.

The lack of specific communication from the Army and GSA insinuate that there is something more going on than just “unscheduled maintenance” and “upgrades,” especially since FAITAS has been down for more than a month. IT experts say replacing hardware or upgrading software shouldn’t take this long, and if it was a technology problem, not a cyber problem, then why wouldn’t the Army and GSA be more forthcoming?

“Unplanned maintenance suggests they are hiding the truth — was it a critical security vulnerability that had to be fixed? Say so, but it takes a month to fix it? If it was a serious security breach, say so and tell us if Personally Identifiable Information was stolen, and, if so, what, how much and what are you going to do about it?” said the government acquisition worker. “Why is it taking so long to get it fixed? Why is there no target date for availability? Could some hacker have stolen the profiles of certified contracting professionals and use that for illegal purposes by acting, for example, as a contracting officer and gain access to other sensitive information? One can imagine lots of dangerous scenarios, beyond delayed training and certifications. It’s a Wizard of Oz moment when you’re not supposed to look at that man behind the screen. The silence about this is deafening and surprising it is being tolerated.”

And remember, federal law and policy requires agencies to report to the Office of Management and Budget and Congress all major cyber incidents within seven days of it being discovered. Emails to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee asking about FAITAS were not returned. Other sources say OMB was not aware of any major cyber incidents at FAI.

At the same time, multiple sources in and out of government say FAITAS suffered some sort of cyber problem. Let me clear here, no one knows if it was a hack or just a critical vulnerability that the IT folks found and needed to close immediately. Sources say GSA and the Army are being “extremely tight lipped” about what’s really going on.

Even internal emails obtained by Federal News Radio do not offer any further insights, just the “unscheduled maintenance” rationale or that it’s a “systemwide outage.”

One cyber expert who is not familiar with FAITAS specifically, but is an government cyber expert more generally, said one theory is the site was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDOS) or other type of attack and the Army is whitelisting .mil address because they have an IP range for DoD and can confirm where visitors are coming from. But they are less certain about where the civilian agency employees are coming from because they don’t those IP addresses to whitelist.

Another cyber expert surmised if the FAITAS front end is just a common user interface and the back-end systems are split into two—one for the Defense Department and one for the civilian agencies. If  the civilian side had a cyber vulnerability that the Army is working to close, but not the .mil side could be a reason why DoD acquisition workers are unaffected by these problems.

The vendor that runs FAITAS, ASM Research, which is an Accenture subsidiary, referred all questions to GSA.

So that’s everything we know about FAITAS. All signs point to the fact the site is dealing with something more than “unscheduled maintenance.” If it was a cyber incident, the tens of thousands of contracting officer and contracting officer representatives deserve to know what happened and what is GSA and the Army doing to protect their data.

If the problem actually just a hardware or software problem, then the Army and GSA need to be more forthcoming and explain what’s going on.

If there is one thing agencies struggle to learn, getting ahead of the story is always better than being behind it.

Read more of the Reporter’s Notebook.

The General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Service had a tumultuous run over the last 20 months. Over the course of its existence, TTS is on its third commissioner, has been brought under the Federal Acquisition Service and has seen an increasing amount of personnel turnover.

It looks as if 2018 will continue to be a volatile year for TTS.

Joanne Collins Smee, the deputy commissioner of FAS and the director of TTS, announced last week at an all-hands meeting that the organization will go through a reorganization focused on how to better serve the Trump administration’s IT modernization effort.

Sources who attended the meeting said Smee detailed an aggressive timeline to bring the centers of excellence effort and the 18F digital services organization closer together. The administration announced the CoE initiative in December as part of its IT modernization rollout.

GSA issued a requests for quotes across all five of the CoE areas —cloud adoption, IT infrastructure optimization, customer experience, service delivery and analytics and contact center — toward the end of 2017 to hire vendors to provide implementation planning services.

TTS’s  new request for quotes went out to a limited number of vendors to provide “strategic planning consulting services to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of an integrated TTS and CoE organization,” according to the RFQ, which a vendor source read to Federal News Radio.

The 12-page RFQ, released Jan. 29, is worth only about $150,000, so it falls under the Simplified Acquisition Threshold.

“It’s a really short turn around,” said one industry source, who is familiar with the RFQ. “They are trying to get ideas about how take all these resources in TTS and refocus them to deliver across these five areas of CoEs. The CoEs want to do the same things that have been going on for years. I think this goes back to TTS trying to staff the CoEs and no one volunteering to be on them so GSA asking now how do you staff these organizations?”

Under the solicitation, TTS wants a vendor to provide organizational design services, which includes hiring and implementation plans for bringing the CoE effort and 18F closer.

One source familiar with the RFQ doubted TTS can get all of this work under the RFQ done in four weeks or for $150,000.

Multiple emails to GSA seeking comment on the changes coming to TTS and a copy of the RFQ were not returned.

Sources say Smee is focused on the first CoE pilot at the Agriculture Department, and is seeking how best to take 18F resources and apply them to those challenges.

“Joanne said she wants to build up 18F, but likely it will be the technical expertise for the CoEs,” a source said. “It’s hard to say if they will bring in contractor or feds under term hires. Joanne made a comment about wanting to have 50 new technologists on board in the next few months. I’m not sure if she understands how government hiring. She also made comments about hiring business development folks. The reality is the federal process will hold up a lot of things that she wants to move forward on so she probably will end up staffing with contractors once she sees the challenges of hiring.”

TTS was under the governmentwide hiring freeze in the first part of 2017, and then it continued, even unofficially, until new leadership came on board for most of the rest of 2017. A source said many offices in TTS are behind in their hiring so there will be a big rush to fill open positions, which also could complicate Smee’s plans.

Sources also say GSA is expected to make the awards for Phase 1 of the CoE effort this week. The acquisition strategy detailed at the industry day in December said GSA would make awards by the end of January so they are delayed by about a week.

Sources also say GSA also named at least the initial lead managers of the CoEs:

Simchah Bogin will head up the customer experience center of excellence;

Jay Huie will lead the cloud adoption center;

Dan Pomeroy will be in charge of the IT infrastructure optimization effort;

Amira Boland and Phil Ashlock are co-leaders of the data services analytics;

Meghan Daly will be in charge of the contact center effort.

Phase 2 of the CoE initiative, which will focus on implementation of IT modernization efforts still is on tap for the June or July timeframe.

Read more of the Reporter’s Notebook.

The White House finally named a new federal chief information officer on Jan. 19 after a year of waiting. Suzette Kent comes to the government with little or no background in the public sector and no clear information technology background, according to her LinkedIn profile.

And that may be a good thing in many regards. But at the same time, she has a steep learning curve of acronyms, the sometimes archaic procurement rules, and, of course, a 535-person board of directors, whose opinions change like the wind.

Federal News Radio asked those who came before Kent at the Office of Management and Budget for some insights, advice and words of wisdom as she takes on this new role. Here is some of what they told us:

WFED: Based on your experience what were some of the areas that you saw as your biggest learning curves when you became federal CIO?  How did you shorten the timeframe to learn what you needed to know?

Mike Howell, former deputy CIO and now senior director for the Institute for Innovation and Special Projects at the Industry Advisory Council-American Council for Technology:

“Learning how to function effectively in the nexus of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government (including the Government Accountability Office), interact with White House leaders, offices, and governance bodies (e.g. National Security Council and Office of Science and Technology Policy), engage with OMB components (budget and resource management office program leaders), bridge technology and mission program communities, and engage agencies (including senior leaders, mission programs, and support function – CIOs, CAOs, CFOs and CHCOs), and the private sector. It is like trying to conduct a REALLY large orchestra of people who have not played together before to perform a complex, difficult piece of music.”

Tony Scott, former Federal CIO and currently the CEO of the Tony Scott Group:

“Fortunately [former OMB deputy CIO] Lisa Schlosser had put together a great primer on what OMB does, what the role of the CIO is, how we are organized and the current stuff we were working on. I got that a few weeks before I started and had a chance to bone up and understand a lot of that stuff. Then along with that primer came a bunch of question so even before I started I had a great start. I’m sure [current deputy CIO] Margie [Graves] has done same thing and will be helpful for Suzette coming in.

The stuff I was unprepared for was testifying before Congress. I had talked at board meetings, before audit committee, and at public meetings, but I didn’t come into the job with an understanding of being able to tell lawmakers ‘here’s what these things are and how they work.’ This was a case where OMB staff did a tremendous job with fake trial runs where you get asked tough and tricky questions. That prep was super helpful, and a learning that is unique to these kinds of roles.”

Tim Young, former OMB deputy CIO and currently a principal with Deloitte Digital:

“Understand how to influence change by using the budget process – both budget formulation and budget execution. While OMB controls budget formulation, Congress controls the enactment and you have to work with congressional appropriations committees before and during management reform agenda implementation. Even the most thoughtful strategies can fail without sufficient resources and authorization.”

Steve VanRoekel, former federal CIO:

“Exercise patience and focus understanding that things move a bit slower than the private sector. We showed that you can be successful and accomplish many things – like the U.S. Digital Service, the Presidential Innovation Fellows, PortfolioStat, our Open Data orders, our work on cloud computing and other reforms – but it takes a much different approach than the private sector.”

WFED: What’s the best advice you received about being federal CIO from others in or out of government?

Mark Forman, former administrator for e-government and currently global head, vice president and general manager, Public Sector, Unisys:

“You’re not doing your job until a secretary calls the OMB Director to get you fired for driving the agency too hard to change.”

Karen Evans, former administrator for e-government and currently head of the U.S. Cyber challenge:

“To reach out to both and industry/departments and agencies but especially oversight with Congress and listen.”

Tim Young:

“Focus on ‘getting it right’ vs. ‘being right.’ Some of your management reform initiatives will fall short of their objectives. Even the best-planned ideas can fail to achieve their envisioned outcomes. Acknowledge this along the journey, move on, and pay-it-forward instead of trying to salvage a futile political victory.

Implement reforms ‘with’ the agencies, not ‘to’ them. Some mandates will be required in the form of Executive Orders, budget guidance and policy memoranda, but first utilize the power of collaboration and transparency to build the trust and buy-in needed for enduring enterprise change.”

Mike Howell:

“Make time to consult, strategize, think and plan – don’t let the multitude of urgent, daily crises consume all of your capacity.”

Steve VanRoekel:

“The best advice I received was really about building great relationships from the start. If you fight or belittle the career staff or bring political views into your meetings with Congress, you will get very little done. Having empathy for the amazing women and men in the Federal service, inspiring them to bring their best to their work in service of the American people and going along on the journey with them is always a winning strategy.”

WFED: What was your biggest frustration about being federal CIO? What’s the biggest challenge you saw to being federal CIO?

Lisa Schlosser, former OMB deputy CIO and now an instructor at Georgetown University:

“The lack of real understanding of the business value of technology, and the difficulty in getting support for the modernization of systems and acquisition processes.”

Mark Forman:

“It was very frustrating when agency CFOs went around OMB to Congress to undercut administration strategy and shared services initiatives. Biggest challenge is too many players have legal authority putting them ‘in charge.’”

Tony Scott:

“My biggest frustration was the arcane set of rules that sometimes you feel imposed on you. Two specific ones were the inability to easily get unsolicited proposals and the Paperwork Reduction Act. In the private sector, you live and breathe every day on the supply community that you are involved with coming up with unsolicited ideas and you encourage them to get to know organization and put on their creative thinking caps. In the federal government because of the procurement process, it’s just not a vibrant process. In fact it’s hardly exercised at all, and when it is, it’s not a very well done process. Because of that we are missing out on tons of innovations. If we could figure out a way to reform that area, I think it would be hugely valuable, and it would turn on the creativity of those who serve the federal government.”

Karen Evans:

“Trying to move fast!! Ensuring the budget resources aligned with the implementation plans and measuring and demonstrating success.”

Tim Young:

“Deviating from status quo takes time and will always be met by some resistance. Recognize that someone (or a group of people) established status quo and getting them to adopt a new initiative or program takes time and substantial energy. Effectively navigating the federal bureaucracy requires focus, resilience, and purpose.”

Read more of the Reporter’s Notebook.

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Here’s an interesting trivia question for all you acquisition lovers in the government: How many rules did the Federal Acquisition Regulations Council finalize during the first year of the Trump administration?

Give it some thought. Did the FAR Council make any changes from Jan. 20 to Dec. 31, 2017?

The answer is: the FAR Council issued one final rule for the entire year.

It was the decision to reverse a previous FAR rule to implement the fair pay and safe workplace executive order.

Besides that, dozens of other proposed rules were basically on hold. Now some changes occured at the agency level, but those too were few and far between.

David Berteau, the president and CEO of the Professional Services Council, said the lack of changes to the FAR and even the FAR supplements at the agency level is both good and bad.

It’s good because contracting officers and contracting officer representatives don’t need to worry about learning and applying changes.

But at the same time, it’s bad because needed changes are taking so long to happen.

A perfect example of that is the General Services Administration’s long-awaited final rule letting agency customers develop task orders under the schedules program to include other direct costs (ODCs) or order level materials (OLMs).

Industry and agencies alike have been pushing GSA to change its rules to let costs not specifically identified in the contract, such as specialized tool or test equipment, computer services or travel, but are important for the final delivery of the product or service, be allowed on schedule contracts. For example, currently under the schedules program, an agency could buy a router for their network through a time-and-materials type of contract, but if the router needed another piece of software to work appropriately, it couldn’t be included in that task order.

Roger Waldron, president of the Coalition for Government Procurement, wrote that this change is a significant step forward for the schedules.

“Customer agencies and multiple-award schedule contractors now have even greater flexibility to seek, compete, award and perform commercial-based solutions to meet agency mission requirements,” Waldron wrote in a release. “The result drives increased opportunities, competition and access to innovation from the commercial marketplace through the MAS program, reducing unnecessary contract duplication.”

Alan Thomas, the commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, said in a release that the final OLM rule marks another step forward in GSA’s continued efforts to modernize and transform the schedules.

“The addition of OLMs is good for government, industry and taxpayers. This much-needed important new acquisition tool provides our agency customers and industry partners with a streamlined, value-based solution that helps them meet their mission needs while saving time and money,” Thomas said. “GSA looks forward to continuing to work with our agency and industry partners through implementation to ensure a seamless transition.”

Nearly everyone is celebrating this change, but it took 17 months from proposal to completion, and it received only four comments. The final rule is basically the same as the proposed rule.

So this brings us back to the question, why, when there is near universal frustration with the federal acquisition system, are changes that would improve it taking so long?

Berteau said one obvious reason is the Trump administration’s new requirements to measure regulatory burden of a proposed rule.

“Agencies are testing out how well they can get analysis through the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in OMB,” he said. “I don’t know how much of a delay is not having a good process to measure the burden and cost benefit analysis. The predisposition of executive order is ‘don’t issue a new regulation even if they are regulations that agencies do want to put out.’”

As agencies have to develop new analytical processes and work with OIRA on how to document the burden, Berteau said that slowed down nearly every rule. And, no one on the outside has any visibility into those processes and how long they now take.

Neomi Rao, the administrator of OIRA, said on Friday that fiscal 2017 was a “banner year for regulatory reform.” Through the implementation of the “two-for-one” executive order, OIRA says agencies saved more than $8 billion in regulatory costs, or more than $570 million per year. In addition, Rao said agencies withdrew more than 15,000 planned rules.

While it may be easy to argue against some of those 15,000 planned rules, it’s more difficult to make the case against many of the procurement rules.

If you look at the semi-annual regulatory agenda the FAR Council issued on Jan. 12, among the 16 rules in the final stage, some are badly needed to improve the acquisition process. These include set-asides under multiple award contracts, effective communication between industry and government, task and delivery order protests and clarifications of requirements to justify sole source 8(a) contracts.

Berteau said the Trump administration’s review of regulations also gave some agencies such as the Defense Department the de facto approval not to implement provisions of the 2016 and 2017 Defense authorization bills.

He said the rule to implement limited use of lowest price, technically acceptable (LPTA) is one example of how DoD seems to be slow-rolling a provision in the law it may not agree with wholeheartedly.

“I can’t tell you DoD is deliberately not implementing that rule, but the net effect is that is what they are doing,” he said.

Berteau also is concerned that the lack of final rules is creating a backlog of sorts that will impact contracting officers and program folks alike. He said this is especially concerning around the Defense FAR supplement.

“We think DoD has a plan to roll out four proposed or final or interim rules per month,” he said. “That will be difficult for industry to comment on as it will be difficult for DoD to process those comments. We are still waiting for  rules from the 2017 NDAA around performance contract payments and settling undefinitized contract actions.”

Michael Fischetti, the executive director of the National Contract Management Association (NCMA), said there is good and bad to the delay in the rulemaking process.

“Contracting officers certainly would notice and so would contractors, as there is a lot of money for contract writing systems that automatically update. Over the last 12 months, nothing has changed with procurement even though people are not satisfied,” he said. “But at the same time, maybe the lack of new rules is a good opportunity for a pause to reflect on what is the right approach. Many times housekeeping does need to happen, but maybe more communication, more adoption of industry best practices and a review of socio-economic goals need to be looked at, and we need to figure out how to improve those areas.”

Fischetti added this dissatisfaction may be leading to the increased use of other transaction authorities (OTAs) by DoD and soon several civilian agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the Federal Aviation Administration.

In short, OTAs let agencies go around the FAR and award “contracts” for prototypes or samples. Many times, the agency then can convert those “contracts” into long-term deals without any competition or oversight from auditors.

“OTAs are not a solution. There is a reason for the FAR and many people believe the FAR isn’t a problem. OTAs have  been around for a long time, and now it’s the du jour solution,” he said. “Many times there are  a lot of solutions looking for a problem to solve or solution that doesn’t support the problem. It’s about the quality of the workforce, people and leadership. It’s not that the government doesn’t need to be clean up on the regulations and make things more easily understandable, but the move away from the FAR is not a good thing.”

And this brings us back full circle — when there are necessary changes that aren’t made, agencies will find work-arounds and that’s not always a good thing for government and industry.

Read more of the Reporter’s Notebook.

A Bush administration veteran is returning to his roots. The Homeland Security Department is losing another IT executive. The comings and goings in the federal IT and acquisition communities never stop.

Jeff Koch, who worked at the Labor Department and at the Office of Management and Budget during the George W. Bush administration, is returning to Labor as the deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Office of Administration and Management.

Sources say Koch will start this week and will focus on performance management areas such as improving services to citizens.

Sources say there is still a lot to be determined about Koch’s role, but it’s part of Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta’s plan to bring back political appointees with government experience.

Koch will work for Bryan Slater, the assistant secretary for administration and management and another Bush administration veteran. Slater previously worked at the Small Business Administration and the White House in the mid-2000s.

Labor still has several top political positions unfilled, including the deputy secretary, the assistant secretary for policy, the director of the Office of Public Engagement and the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Koch started his executive branch career at Labor as the associate chief information officer working on among other things the Benefits.gov e-government initiative.

He then moved to OMB as an e-government portfolio manager, where he focused on the government-to-government projects such as e-payroll, e-travel and the electronic official personnel file (eOPF).

Since the end of the Bush administration, Koch worked for several government contractors including IBM and YRCI.

Over at DHS, Jeff Eisensmith, the chief information security officer, announced he is retiring after more than 32 years in government.

Multiple sources confirm that Eisensmith’s last day will be at the end of April.

A DHS spokesman said they had no personnel announcements at this time.

Eisensmith has been CISO for five years and previously worked in a similar role for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement directorate from 2007 to 2012.

He began his federal career in 1985 with the FBI and took a stint in industry working for BAE Systems.

During his time as CISO, Eisensmith led DHS’ return to respectability in the cybersecurity community.

After repeated internal cyber struggles in the mid-2000s, DHS turned the corner with new CIO leadership and Eisensmith complimented those efforts by implementing, among other things, a new cybersecurity maturity model that focuses on risk management.

In the Reporter’s Notebook earlier this month, we told you Mike Hermus, the DHS chief technology officer, is leaving March 2. We know now that Kevin Wince will be the acting DHS CTO. Wince has been executive director for enterprise architecture since June. He came over to DHS from the General Services Administration, where he was the chief enterprise architect.

Sources confirmed that DHS plans to fill the CTO role as quickly as possible.

Finally, Paul Grassi, one of the last employees in the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) and a senior standards and technology adviser at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, saw his term appointment end and headed to the private sector.

Grassi left NIST in January to join Easy Dynamics, a small business in the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) program. Easy Dynamics is a women-owned small business focused on application development and cloud computing.

NIST announced in 2016 that it was shifting NSTIC to the Trusted Identities Group so Grassi being one of the last NSTIC employees is not altogether surprising.

He said the future of the NSTIC pilots and initiatives is not 100 percent clear and that is something to watch over the next year or so.

Read more of the Reporter’s Notebook.

Agriculture Department Secretary Sonny Perdue has laid out a new vision for his department called, OneUSDA.

“We are one family working together to serve the American people. And if we are to fulfill our mission — to make USDA the most effective, most efficient, most customer focused department in the entire federal government — we must function as one single team,” Perdue wrote to about 100,000 employees during the first week of 2018.

But Perdue’s words are ringing hollow to many USDA employees after he decided to make what some call arbitrary changes to the agency’s much admired and recognized telework program.

USDA’s new policy requires employees to be in the office four days a week, letting them telework only one day per pay period. The old policy allowed almost unlimited telework and was a key piece of the agency’s initiatives around work-life balance and reducing its real estate footprint.

For many USDA employees, the change flies in the face of creating OneUSDA, and Perdue’s focus on family and efficiency.

“USDA [is] cutting down on telework for all employees — Wow!! Talk about using a hand-grenade to remove a hang-nail,” wrote one USDA employee to Federal News Radio. “This story reeks of poor government decision process. Instead of using data and analysis to get to root causes, just hammer the entire department with severe reduction in telework, so they alienate the staff and eliminate any possible real estate savings from desk sharing or hoteling.”

Federal News Radio heard from more than a half dozen employees worried about the changes to the telework policy.

“People are complaining about suddenly, without warning, having to find pre-school and post-school baby sitters, changing (if possible) trade-off arrangements with spouses, finding car pools and the costs of commuting,” wrote another employee. “Many feel dismissed and ambushed, and are looking for jobs elsewhere.”

Source: OPM 2016 Telework Report to Congress

While these and other employees are ringing the alarm bells, the fact is Perdue is well within his right as the secretary to make the changes to the telework policy. He is not forbidding telework, but limiting its usage. And to be clear, telework is not a right, it’s a privilege.

“The appropriateness of the amount of telework suitable for eligible employees is ultimately a determination reserved for supervisors and managers. Decisions as to frequency of telework participation is determined by the nature of the position, duties and responsibilities, supervisory relationship, and mission criteria,” the new policy states. “When telework is used to address space availability restrictions, such as in the use of hoteling or desk sharing, a mission area, agency or staff office head may approve telework exceeding 2 days a pay period on a case-by-case basis. When telework is used to ensure mission functions continue to be performed during a wide range of emergencies, including localized acts of nature, accidents, and technological or attack-related emergencies, a mission area, agency or staff office head may approve telework exceeding two days a pay period on a case-by-case basis.”

One USDA official, who requested anonymity because they didn’t get permission to speak to the press, said while they see the benefits and drawbacks of telework, Secretary Perdue initiated a major reorganization effort that the old concepts of mission and success are changing for many people.

“I can make the argument that it doesn’t matter where you work, but I also can make the argument that in-person teams matter, especially when you are reorganizing the agency,” the official said. “At times it feels like we are so accommodating that we don’t get anything done because we shy away from making a tough call because someone will not like it or not feel included. At times it feels like pendulum has gone too far where there is too much carrot and not enough stick. Maybe this is too much stick and not enough carrot, but we are being asked to increase the focus of driving mission and on customers. That is hard work. This doesn’t happen successfully in the federal government if the boss isn’t saying this is what we want to do and drives hard toward that goal. Usually in the federal government things start to fail when they get hard.”

A USDA spokesman said in an email to Federal News Radio the decision to change the telework policy comes from feedback from employees reflecting longstanding concerns about the previous policy.

“This went to mission area human capital officers and agency heads, who circulated it internally through their program staff. It was also submitted to the national unions for their comments,” the spokesman said. “USDA’s telework policy is designed to be responsible to the taxpayers and responsive to the customers who depend on our services. It is also respectful of our fellow employees who come to work each day.”

Some changes may be drastically different

The change that Perdue is leading isn’t easy and the old adage that “change is hard” definitely applies. Perdue seems to recognize that change management is necessary in his message to employees from early January.

“So every change we detail today and in the weeks and months ahead is to make us function as one single team. I will be forthright with you. Some of these changes may be drastically different than the old way of doing things, and that’s OK.” Perdue wrote to staff. “All of them point to our first strategic goal: to ensure our programs are delivered efficiently, effectively and with integrity.”

The problem for several employees and unions representing workers is the change is being done to, instead of done with, employees.

Jeff Streiffer, the immediate past secretary treasurer and spokesperson for the American Federation of Government Employees Local 1106, said the motivation behind the policy change is unclear.

“We were involved in the consultation process for local and national AFGE as well as some of the other national labor unions representatives,” he said an interview. “When USDA rolled out its draft telework rewrite to the national AFGE about 2-to-4 weeks ago, we made comments on the idea of reducing the number of telework days to four per pay period or twice a week. We advised them it was too restrictive and not warranted. We received a response that they disagreed and that’s all the response really said. So when the final revision rolled out, it was more restrictive than four days.”

Streiffer said AFGE now is investigating whether USDA violated the National Consultation Rights statute under the Federal Labor Relations Authority.

“We didn’t have notice that they were going that far with the new policy. If their intent was two days then it was a bad faith bait-and-switch,” he said.

Streiffer said he couldn’t go in to any further details about possible legal action against USDA.

Stan Painter, chairman for AFGE national joint council of food inspection locals and a USDA employee for 32 years, said the new policy is a step backward.

“There was no communication. It was like this was it take it or leave it, and it came across as a dictatorial decision and just enough to leave telework in place,” he said. “There are managers that I deal with that telework all the time and they are more responsive when they telework than when they were in the office. When they were in the office it was from this time to another time. But when they telework I could get a hold of them more easily.”

Another USDA employee who works as a reasonable accommodation coordinator, said they had heard about a month ago of a rumored change.

“Since telework can be a reasonable accommodation employees request, I heard my business was about to boom,” the employee said. “Everyone who wants more than one day a week can get it if they can come up with any disability. It’s not that hard to be qualified as someone with disability. The American with Disabilities Act 2008 amendments made it easier to qualify if you have a have medical condition that substantially limits major life activity. But substantial has been gutted so if you have back or leg impairments, that counts. So many people have bad backs or bad knees and we need to take commutes in consideration when we look at reasonable accommodation, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.”

The employee added, whether or not someone needs reasonable accommodation, reducing the number of telework days to no more than one per week is a major disruption for a lot of people.

Award-winning telework program

The decision to reduce the number of telework days leaves current and former USDA officials confused even further considering the agency has been a model for public and private sector companies.

Forbes named USDA to its top 500 places to work in 2015, in part because of its telework policy.

“When I was at USDA, we were dealing with 16 different organizations with 3,000 different physical office space locations across the country. Our goal was to tie telework to reductions in offices that were not utilized or less utilized. USDA was trying to think strategically how to tie telework to important objectives so it will be interesting to see how they accomplish this transition,” said Mika Cross, a federal workplace expert who helped shape USDA’s workplace policies under the former administration and is now at a different agency. “The push was to empower supervisors to make decisions about their team. They should be able to determine what works for their team based on the job and mission. We really worked hard across the government not to implement a one-size-fits-all approach for telework. The goal was to empower the supervisors and leaders to make decisions based on job suitability and performance, and employee suitability.”

Cross said the change in telework also will impact transit subsidies, office supplies and morale.

Additionally, USDA has saved millions of dollars over the past five years because of telework.

“In a time where the government is being asked to think and act more like a business, telework/remote and flexible work offers agencies a strategic, competitive edge on retaining and engaging top performers who we must be able to keep around in order to deliver the most important services to the American public whom we serve,” she said. “All the best private companies/organizations understand that workplace policies like telework are a win/win for both the organization and its employees.”

Streiffer said in his San Francisco office of USDA’s general counsel he’s worried that changing the telework policy could push good people out the door.

“We have highly trained and normally highly paid white-collar professionals like attorneys who trade a more lucrative private sector career to go in to public service because we believe we can have a better work-life balance,” he said. “When those are scaled back, then we lose the ability to attract and retain the type of people who can excel type of services to public.”

The Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey also proves out that telework is a win-win for both employees and management.

The Office of Personnel Management reported in its 2017 Telework Report to Congress that the 2016 FEVS data shows that employees felt teleworkers were held more accountable, had better engagement, retention and were encouraged to be innovative.

Others are concerned by cutting telework as a perk, its USDA and the administration’s way of reducing the workforce through attrition instead of buyouts or more harsh tactics like layoffs.

One federal official said USDA and other agencies who may want to use this tactic should be careful because many times the best people are the ones that end up leaving.

“There is a sense that change is happening to feds and not with feds. If you remember the American public and agencies were asked to give suggestions to reorganize the government, and no one ever heard back about those plans and their suggestions. Agencies never closed the feedback loop,” the official said. “With something like that you have a responsibility to close that loop. In any agency you have no idea what was put forth and what wasn’t unless you were working directly on the reorganization plans.”

AFGE’s Painter said USDA should’ve taken a more measured approach to this change.

“They should’ve run a pilot and done a study and talked about customer and workers’ satisfaction after completing a pilot,” AFGE’s Painter said. “Then they could’ve looked at what they needed to do. But that wasn’t the case. They just said this is it.”

Read more of the Reporter’s Notebook.

The standing-room audience of government contractors and federal employees at the General Services Administration’s headquarters building on Jan. 9 were left with more questions than answers during the government’s first day-long listening sessions about how to implement Section 846 of the 2018 Defense Authorization bill—otherwise known as the Amazon amendment.

Congress tasked GSA and the Office of Management and Budget to set up a pilot e-commerce marketplace for commercial items using more than one portal over the next three years. GSA used this first meeting to begin Phase 1 of  the effort to develop an implementation plan and come up with recommendations on what laws and policies need changing or updating to make this initiative come together.

As an ironic aside to this discussion that shows just how difficult this task will be, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) introduced legislation on Jan. 9 that would put a bit of a wrench in this effort.

The BuyAmerican.gov Act would require new guidance from OMB, the Commerce Department, the Federal Acquisition Regulations Council and others on how to make assessments on whether to waive the Buy American Act, and then GSA would develop a website to post publicly all waivers.

The Buy American Act, the Trade Agreements Act, the Berry Amendment, the Small Business Act and several others are up for discussion on what wouldn’t be required as part of these new e-commerce portals.

While the legislation is far from becoming law, the fact that Portman has bi-partisan support for the bill is a sign that some in Congress are paying attention to these acquisition laws and regulations, potentially making it more difficult for Congress to waive them for e-commerce initiative.

Let’s return to the listening session. GSA and OMB made it clear from the beginning, they were there to ask questions, listen to industry experts and gather information, and not to answer questions.

This left the audience with even more questions than answers.

As one of those members of the audience—kudos to GSA and OMB for opening up the event to the press—there were several questions and interesting items that emerged during the discussion.

Here are my two takeaways from the discussion:

Scorched earth approach will not work

The two executive representing programs under the Javits-Wagner-O’Day (JWOD) Act, such as Ability One and other procurement programs for people with disabilities, came out swinging the current laws and regulations as a reminder to OMB and GSA. Todd Tiahrt, a lobbyist for the National Association for the Employment of People who are Blind, repeated on several occasions that through “software algorithms” the portal could ensure they are meeting the laws and policies of the land.

“Buying online is an interesting concept, but should the government ignore current laws? I say purchasing can be convenient and comply with the laws,” Tiahrt, a former Republican congressman from Kansas. “What relief is necessary? The existing commercial systems are not subject to the FAR or JWOD or trade agreements, but the statutes should not be waived. Taxpayer dollars come with rules and accountability that is demanded by the public.”

He also talked quite a bit about online portals delivering “marijuana cookies and wine to our soldiers,” but the ridiculousness of that argument is a discussion for another time.

But Tiahrt seemed to miss the point of the discussion. Congress wants GSA and OMB to make recommendations on acquisition laws or policies need to be updated, changed or waived in order to make buying of commercial products better, faster and cheaper.

So making the argument that the statues are “the laws of the land and need to be followed” came off as out of touch and a bit misguided, given what Phase 1 of the initiative is about.

Kevin Lynch, president and CEO of National Industries for the Blind (NIB), took a more pragmatic approach to the discussion.

“There are reasons why these laws exist, for good policy reasons. When GSA closed its depots, they didn’t get rid of policies,” he said. “We updated our products by making our delivery models more efficient. We modified our processes and systems to deliver more effective services.”

Lynch said there is existing technology to help marketplace vendors comply with the Ability One mandate, and GSA is showing how it could work through its GSA Advantage portal.

“GSA also uses a remediation tool that is very effective to increase program compliance,” he said. “We’ve learned through past experiences of implementing new purchasing systems that it requires new training and education throughout the entire sector of users.”

Still, too often, Lynch went back to the reason why the policies and laws are in place as a reason why change should be measured and tightly controlled.

Tiahrt and Lynch need to offer more concrete reasons to keep the JWOD mandates in place beyond the “it’s the law” argument. As we’ve seen time and again with small business socioeconomic programs and others, that line of reasoning hardly ever works.

What is the goal of Section 846?

Several panelists pushed GSA and OMB to determine and make public the goal of this entire effort. Raj Sharma, CEO and Co-Founder of Censeo Consulting and founder of the Public Spend Forum, said the lack of clarity in the legislation means GSA and OMB must come up with the goals of the program.

“What does competition mean or pricing mean? Is it by the unit or total spend or what? We need to be clear about the problem statement and the outcomes we hope to achieve and that will drive the overall strategy and processes you must cover and compliance requirements that need to be addressed,” he said. “We need to be clear about what we mean about e-commerce portals too. Do we mean e-procurement or e-auction or e-markets? In some ways, the government has adopted ecommerce through things like GSA Advantage or reverse auction sites.”

He added the private sector has defined these concepts very differently. Sharma said with e-marketplaces, vendors can easily ramp on and ramp off, while e-procurement sites include more flexibilities to manage the needs of users.

These definitions are important as the commercial marketplaces come with a wide assortment of challenges.

Jean Edwards, director of business development and program capture at Dell-EMC federal sales, said some commercial online marketplaces use a “pay-to-play” model to push certain companies to the top of searches.

“This should not be a condition for the federal government,” she said. “By allowing this structure to prevail would have two effects. It would limit the range of products, services and prices especially around small businesses because it favors large businesses who are able to support the pay-to-play toll. Second, existing online marketplaces that provide IT require IT solutions that utilize only the marketplace portals around cloud solutions so when cloud is part of IT solution, it excludes other providers. That limits competition for price and access. Vendor must be able to define products and services they choose to make available through the portal.”

House lawmakers make it clear that their goal is to get more competition through the marketplace to lower costs.

Alan Chvotkin, the senior vice president and general counsel for the Professional Services Council, an industry association, said if competition is the overarching goal, then multiple portals need to be part of the effort.

“Then the question of what is competition within the portal. As a portal provider, if only one vendor product is available depending on whether your business model is that of an aggregator or not. I think it’s important to think about the definition in that context and make it clear that competition would be around and among the portals,” he said.

Roger Waldron, president of the Coalition for Government Procurement, another industry association, put a finer point on the need for defining the program’s goals particularly around competition.

“Is it a shopping mall? Or is it more interactive where government is seeking a quote based on dollar size of order? That’s the rub,” he said. “Some portal providers you may be going directly to them to buy something, depending on the nature of the contract. If portal providers want to hand-off to a third party to make the sale, then the question is whether sellers compete in some manner or form? I don’t know many commercial platforms that do the back and forth for sellers. I think you can do that on FedBid and GSA E-Buy, but that’s not within the context of this portal discussion.”

This is why Sharma’s recommendation to define the goals of the effort at the beginning is so important.

Read more of the Reporter’s Notebook.

Dedicated career federal employees have held all of the government management positions at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for more than a year. Some like Lesley Field, the acting Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) administrator, have been in this temporary position many times over the last decade so she knows the drill and does a good job.

The good news is there is some light beginning to break through. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee approved the nomination of Margaret Weichert to be the deputy director of management at OMB on Jan. 8 by voice vote. Now the full Senate must confirm Weichert to end more than a year without a DDM.

Once Weichert is in place, observers expect the White House to fill out positions fairly quickly.

One name that has emerged as a leading candidate for the OFPP administrator is Moshe Schwartz, an analyst focusing on the Defense Department for the Congressional Research Service (CRS). Sources say the White House is vetting Schwartz, who most recently was part of the professional staff of the Section 809 panel, which is developing recommendations on changes to DoD acquisition policies and regulations.

Schwartz would be an interesting pick for OFPP administrator. According to his LinkedIn profile, Schwartz has never worked in acquisition and only studied it at the CRS and the Government Accountability Office. He’s worked at CRS since 2008, and at GAO before that starting in 2004.

This doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be a good OFPP administrator. One of the best OFPP administrators in the last 15 years was Dan Gordon, who spent his career at GAO before moving to OMB.

If Schwartz is indeed nominated and confirmed by the Senate, how will he bring that extensive knowledge of the military and its acquisition processes to the entire government. While the Federal Acquisition Regulations are the ceiling above every agency, the assortment of rooms for DoD are much broader than anywhere else in government and that could mean a steeper learning curve for him.

The good news is Schwartz will have one of the best staffs in government working at OFPP, and who are used to bringing much less qualified leaders up to speed.

Schwartz has a law degree from Yeshiva University in New York, New York, and a Master’s in public policy from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

While it’s unclear if Schwartz will be nominated, there are several other changes in the federal IT community that are happening.

The Homeland Security Department is losing two technology experts.

Jeanne Etzel, who most recently has been senior advisor to the DHS chief information officer and worked in several other roles since 2013, announced her retirement effective Jan. 31. Sources say her last day in the office was Jan. 10.

Etzel, source say, is planning on a real retirement, meaning she is highly unlikely to find her way back to the government as a consultant or by working for a contractor.

Rumors that Etzel was going to retire started back in the fall, but with the turnover in the DHS CIO’s office she stayed on to be acting CIO in the spring and acting deputy CIO in the fall during the transitions.

During her career, Etzel served as FEMA’s CIO and worked in several executive-level positions in private industry, including as CIO and vice president at Capgemini U.S. and as a senior manager at PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Along with Etzel, DHS is losing its chief technology officer. Mike Hermus announced to senior staff last week his last day in the office will be March 2.

Hermus came to DHS in 2015 after spending his career in the private sector. He previously served as chief product and technology officer at House Party Inc., a social marketing platform, as well as CTO at FirstCarbon Solutions, Enverity Corp. and Market XT.

Sources say Hermus, who has been commuting to Washington, D.C. from Connecticut, decided the travel finally was too much and wanted to honestly spend more time with his family.

Hermus’s departure will leave DHS down two senior leaders in the CTO’s office. Rob Palmer, the deputy CTO, left in October.

Sources say one of the reasons why Hermus is sticking around for another six weeks is to help DHS develop a job posting for the position and help with the transition.

Fedscoop first reported Hermus’s decision to leave.

During his tenure as CTO, Hermus grew and developed the CTO’s office. It now has more than 100 staff members that are helping DHS adopt modern IT practices around oversight and delivery.

And speaking of CTOs, the Transportation Department posted for a new one on USAJobs.gov.

“[T]he chief technology officer (CTO) provides technical advice and support to the Department of Transportation’s chief information officer (CIO) on technology innovation. The CTO advances the achievement of the agency’s mission by assisting senior management in recognizing where technology can add value while transforming or supporting program priorities,” the posting states. “The CTO leads the department in a visionary, collaborative and customer-focused manner to leverage technology resources in order to improve business processes, accomplish strategic DoT missions, goals, and program objectives and reduce costs. The CTO initiates and advocates departmentwide system enhancements and changes and promotes the use of information technology and innovative technology solutions to improve the operations, productivity, efficiency, effectiveness and service delivery of the department.”

Applications for the position are due by Jan. 18.

Additionally, Tracee Boxley, the Government Publishing Office CIO, seems to have left the agency. It’s unclear if she retired or took another job in government.

GPO posted the CIO’s position on USAJobs.gov and listed Layton Clay as the acting CIO.

Boxley had been CIO only since October after serving in an acting capacity starting in November of 2015.

Clay has been with GPO since 2004 and has led the Application Management and Development Division since 2015.

Job applications are due Jan. 26.

Read more of the Reporter’s Notebook.

The White House is considering adding one more piece to its IT modernization strategy. The Trump administration is floating a draft executive order focused on, once again, defining the roles and authorities of agency chief information officers.

Federal News Radio has obtained a copy of the draft EO from December, which sources say has been circulated for comment across the federal CIO community.

“Despite multiple legislative mandates, agency chief information officers do not have adequate visibility into, or control over, their agencies’ IT spending, resulting in duplication, waste, and poor service delivery. Enhancing the responsibilities and accountability of agency chief information officers will better position agencies to modernize their IT systems, save taxpayer dollars, reduce cybersecurity risks, and better serve the American people,” the draft EO states.

The EO would cover every CFO Act agency except for the Defense Department.

Why this White House continues to exempt DoD from its IT modernization strategy mandates remains a mystery and is perplexing. The administration did the same thing with the Centers of Excellence initiative.

Yes, DoD is the 800-pound gorilla when it comes to federal IT and has a budget that dwarfs every other department, but it doesn’t mean the Pentagon couldn’t use some outside and independent advice and direction.

Even Congress recognized the need for DoD to add more weight to its CIO. In the 2018 Defense Authorization bill, Congress approved and President Donald Trump signed into law a provision that would make the CIO position presidentially-appointed and Senate-confirmed.

But the decision not to include DoD is a discussion for another time and notebook.

The draft EO didn’t impress any of the former federal IT officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to talk about a pre-decisional document, who have seen the document, with most saying there is little new or different in the White House’s plans than they’ve seen over the past 15 years.

“As an EO, it signals the administration’s intent to watch this area more closely than before, which is good,” said one former federal IT executive. “It will also help OMB and oversight committees focus more on this area.”

Another former CIO said the EO should cover more than just the CFO Act agencies, but those that run high-valued systems and data, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Federal Communications Commission.

“There is interpretation done at those agencies and they ‘pick’ what is useful and what is not,” said one former CIO. “Clinger-Cohen applies but FITARA [Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act] doesn’t. And the oversight will only come from GAO/IG and NOT OMB because they are NOT a covered agency.”

Well-covered ground for CIOs

Overall, the Trump administration is paving over well-known ground and long-standing challenges that previous laws and policies have come up short trying to solve.

The draft EO’s goal is to improve “the management and oversight of federal IT by designating the chief information officer of each covered agency as the primary point of responsibility and accountability for management of IT resources within that agency. The agency chief information officer should be the key strategic advisor to the agency head concerning the use of IT to accomplish the agency’s mission, reduce cybersecurity risks, and improve efficiency,” the draft EO states. “Consistent with statute, the agency chief information officer should play a central role in all annual and multi-year planning, programming, budgeting, acquisition, and oversight processes related to IT. As such, the agency chief information officer should establish an enterprisewide technology roadmap and govern its execution. This requires the latitude to operate across agency component organizations and to drive the enterprisewide consolidation and modernization of the agency’s IT portfolio.”

One former federal IT executive said while putting the CIO in charge of cyber risk is consistent with Federal Information Security Management Act, it is inconsistent with industry trends and best practices.

Emails to the Office of Management and Budget asking for comment on the draft EO were not returned.

The biggest change the EO is proposing is around hiring authorities for IT staff.

“Within 60 days of the date of this order, the head of the Office of Personnel Management shall grant to each covered agency direct hiring authority for IT employees that meet the qualification standards for positions the agency CIO deems critical, enabling the CIO of each covered agency to hire, in an expedited manner, qualified individuals for a period not to exceed four years,” the draft EO states. “An agency may, at any given time, use this authority for not more than 25 percent of its IT workforce. Employees hired using this authority may not be transferred to positions primarily performing non-IT functions.”

OPM gave agencies in November new hiring authorities for positions such as cloud architecture; solutions architecture; and cloud migration from legacy hardware platforms to the cloud. Additionally, the CIO Council held a hiring fair in November to help address the shortage of qualified IT workers.

But this provision in the EO would expand those efforts both in terms of the types of workers and the length of time to use the authorities.

Several former executives say the administration should enforce the existing laws under the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) and the Clinger-Cohen Act instead developing new policies.

“The EO fails to address the true problem plaguing CIO authorities, which is how money is appropriated in the first place,” said one of the former IT executives. “If IT dollars are appropriated directly to program accounts and bypass the CIO, then the CIO will remain nothing but a bystander during strategic agency decisions.”

And this brings back the fact that OMB and Congress have tried many times over the last 15 years to consolidate, boost and amplify CIO authorities, yet the systemic problems continue.

For instance, in 1996 the Clinger-Cohen Act codified the role of the CIO and the 2002 E-Government Act further clarified those requirements.

In August 2011, OMB further addressed CIO authorities, focusing on commodity IT purchasing.

President Barack Obama signed FITARA into law as part of the 2015 NDAA, and former Federal CIO Tony Scott issued implementation guidance in June 2015.

Addressing FITARA shortfalls

Despite these efforts, agency progress with FITARA, particularly with CIO authorities, has been inconsistent. In the latest FITARA scorecard, three agencies, including DoD, received a “F” grade on the CIO authorities section, and 12 CIOs still do not report to the secretary or deputy secretary of their agency.

The draft EO attempts to address many of those FITARA scorecard shortfalls, including requiring the “chief information officer of the covered agency [to report] directly to the agency head or the principal deputy of the agency head.”

The first former IT executive said they would’ve liked to have seen stronger language around CIO budget authority and the elimination of the “principal deputy” language in the reporting relationship.

“That preserves some historically awful relationships in places like DoT,” said the executive. “Also it seems like a missed opportunity to say what things the CIO is responsible for.  For example, is the CIO responsible for cybersecurity. What about the CISO role  within the agency?  Is the CIO responsible for data within the agency? What about the chief data officer?”

Additionally, the draft EO would require the department’s CIO to approve any and all bureau or subcomponent level CIO appointment.

The final two sections of the draft EO focus on IT governance and risk management.

First, the proposed order would require the component or agency CIO to have their performance plans aligned with the enterprisewide technology roadmap and be accountable to the CIO for executing on the strategy.

“[T]he head of each covered agency shall ensure that the chief information officer of the covered agency shall, at minimum, fulfill the role of voting member, and, where appropriate, chair, of any IT investment board of the agency, or any board responsible for setting agencywide IT standards,” the draft document states.

It’s unclear if the White House eventually will finalize the EO, and based on what the current draft, it’s unclear how much it even will help.

Reps. Will Hurd (R-Texas) and Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) may have the best approach of hauling non-IT executives before the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and asking them to explain their agency’s approach to IT management.

Read more of the Reporter’s Notebook.