Federal chief information officers from every Cabinet agency, large agency and a select few small agencies made a trip to the White House over the last month to provide a 30-minute brain dump to the Trump administration.

Multiple sources say Chris Liddell, the assistant to the president for strategic initiatives, and Matt Lira, the special assistant to the president for innovation policy and initiatives, brought in CIOs one after another to get a handle on priorities, challenges and opportunities in each agency and governmentwide.

Sources say the mostly one-sided conversation let the CIOs expand and explain in more detail their one-page-or-so State of Federal IT the Obama administration left for the new technology executives.

“It was a good conversation,” said one CIO, who participated in the conversation and asked for anonymity in order to talk to the press. “I thought it was encouraging that someone coming into government without a lot of government experience wanted to learn what we were doing. There were no action items that came out of it. It was just opening their eyes to just how big and complex our jobs are.”

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Agencies, generally speaking, have little idea what it costs to provide technology or human resources or acquisition or financial management services to the rest of the agency.

Yes, most know how many employees and contractors work in those areas and what they cost. But few have ever developed an accurate cost model that includes the cost of the building or electricity or air conditioning or the guards that protect the building.

One of the main reasons the competitive sourcing effort under Circular A-76 struggled during the administration of President George W. Bush was the inability — or unwillingness — for agencies to truly figure out the costs of these back-office services. And when they did, contractors claimed the figures were way out of whack.

The Food and Drug Administration may have just broken the code around cost allocation and recovery for IT services.

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The last time the General Services Administration asked agencies to transition to a new telecommunications contract, it took 33 months longer than expected and cost the government an extra $395 million.

With its new telecommunications effort, called Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) under the NS2020 program, GSA promised to learn from its mistakes with Networx by listening more to its agency customers and industry partners and simplifying the entire effort.

But with less than three years until the expected transition date of May 2020, at least one major agency is uncertain if there is enough time to move to EIS.

Beth Killoran, the Department of Health and Human Services chief information officer, said she submitted the HHS Transition plan to GSA in October and is concerned about meeting the program’s timetable.

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In the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law on Jan. 4, among the requirements Congress gave the National Institute of Standards and Technology is one that on the surface seems simple, but could be the missing piece to a long-standing cybersecurity challenge.

Lawmakers instructed NIST “to evaluate the effectiveness and sufficiency of, and challenges to, federal agencies’ implementation of standards and guidelines developed under this section and policies and standards promulgated under section 11331 of title 40, United States Code.”

Basically, Congress is telling NIST to take a deep dive into how agencies understand and use the special publications and Federal Information Processing Standards for cybersecurity that it produces.

Charles Romine, the director of NIST’s IT lab, said at the recent Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board (ISPAB) meeting in Washington that NIST will look for gaps in its techniques for providing security and identify deficiencies that NIST or other agencies find in its standards.

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The federal financial management community quietly saw one of the most well-respected civilian experts move to the not-for-profit sector. Karen Lee, who spent the last seven years in the Office of Management and Budget’s Office of Federal Financial Management, joined the Universal Service Administrative Company as a vice president for rural healthcare.

USAC says it’s dedicated to achieving universal service for phone and accessible, affordable, and pervasive high-speed connectivity. The organization administers the Universal Service Fund from the Federal Communication Commission, where almost $10 billion annually goes to the companies and institutions that make universal service possible.

The Rural Health Care program says it supports health care facilities in bringing world-class medical care to rural areas through increased connectivity. USAC says the RHC provides up to $400 million annually in reduced rates for broadband and telecom services.

Lee said in an email to Federal News Radio that in her new role, she will “be focused on providing that connectivity to rural health care providers (hospitals, doctors, clinics).”

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Homeland Security Department officials hailed the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program in August 2013 when it and the General Services Administration awarded the $6 billion contract as a network security program that would provide a “standard measure of protection across government within three years.”

Here we are nearly four years later and CDM is a lot harder than initially thought and most agencies remain in Phase 1 of the program. The challenges can be traced to a host of reasons, from poor agency planning because they didn’t know all the devices and end-points on their networks, to a contract vehicle that wasn’t flexible enough, to bid protests that have delayed nearly every award.

But before anyone calls CDM a failure or even a lost opportunity, GSA and DHS deserve a ton of credit for doing something few agencies publicly do — recognize the deficiencies of their program and developing a plan to fix them going forward.

Jim Piche, the homeland sector director at GSA’s FEDSIM, said March 23 GSA and DHS are developing a new contracting approach to CDM that will try to address many of the shortfalls of the original blanket purchase agreement (BPA).

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Federal agency spending on cloud computing is expected to take a dip in fiscal 2017, but rebound heading into 2018 and increase through 2021.

Shawn McCarthy, research director for IDC Government Insights, said public cloud services will account for about half of the $2.15 billion spending in 2017. By 2021, agency spending on public cloud is projected to increase to $1.9 billion out of the $3.3 billion.

These figures are great for companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM and a host of other cloud infrastructure and platform-as-a-service providers. But the real opportunities lie in how federal agencies can turn their investments in cloud into a digital transformation.

“You could make the argument that everything is going toward hybrid as more and more solutions are moved to the cloud, the systems become more interconnected,” McCarthy said in an interview with Federal News Radio. “As this happens, the application programming interfaces (APIs), shared data bases and other similar technologies become more important in how you build a system and they are becoming increasingly interconnected.”

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Momentum is building for a new cybersecurity agency in the Homeland Security Department. The idea initially proposed by Rep. Mike McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, received some crucial support on March 22 when two former federal cyber executives threw their weight behind the idea.

“I think that taking National Protections and Programs Directorate (NPPD) out of being a headquarters function, which it is clearly not, and making it into a line agency within DHS along with the other functions DHS has and prioritizing that makes a great deal of sense,” said Michael Daniel, former cybersecurity coordinator for President Barack Obama and now president of the Cyber Threat Alliance. “I think continuing the holistic focus on our critical infrastructure and federal civilian agencies also makes a great deal of sense, and that would put DHS on a more solid foundation to partner with the Defense Department and the Justice department in doing their mission.”

But maybe the roots of the change that’s needed to improve federal cybersecurity already have started to sprout.

Retired Gen. Keith Alexander, the former head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, said while he agreed with the idea to create a new cyber agency at DHS, lawmakers should go further.

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It’s been more than a year since the Department of Housing and Urban Development released the last, and what may be the most significant, contract for its IT modernization effort called the HUD Enterprise Architecture Transformation (HEAT).

The systems integration contract, which some estimate could be worth $40 million to $50 million — a major contract for a small agency like HUD — came out in February under the National Institute of Health’s CIO-SP3 governmentwide acquisition contract. Hewlett-Packard Services submitted a pre-award protest in September after initial discussions. HUD took corrective action and then the agency went radio silent. The program started almost 18 months ago when HUD issued the draft RFP in December 2015.

Under the solicitation, HUD is looking for services such as end-user support, disaster recovery integration and understanding how systems are integrated more broadly.

Vendors involved in the bidding for the contract have heard very little from the agency except for three requests for price extensions.

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There is little question across the federal community about the value of agency inspectors general. The amount of money they cost is minimal compared to the amount of money they help agencies save year after year.

Then why is there a growing concern that auditors and investigators are being overwhelmed by hotline calls, data and the sheer number of potential cases of waste, fraud and abuse?

Part of the reason for this challenge are administrations that fail to put actions behind their words. The administrations of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and many others have talked about the importance of supporting the federal IG community, but they have not adequately made sure each agency’s IG office was well-resourced. Then, in turn, Congress chose not to send more resources to IGs because the president didn’t request it.

“There is no connection between the size of a department and the size of an IG’s office,” said Anthony Adkinson, the Energy Department’s assistant special agent in charge, during a panel discussion at the Nuix Government Thought Leadership conference in Washington on March 7. “At Energy, we have 100,000 employees and only 62 investigators. It doesn’t scale. We don’t have an investigator at every site at Energy. There is an organizational disconnect between what’s expected and what IGs can do. We more than pay for ourselves, but the scope of what we are faced with is not workable and almost nonsensical.”

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