Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) is back at the helm of the Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on IT for the 115th session of Congress. This means he again will have his pulpit to try again to address federal legacy technology systems.

Hurd is working on an updated version of the Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act, which the House passed in December, but a $9 billion score by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and a short schedule doomed the bill in the Senate.

Both House and Senate staff members say a fix to the bill to address the CBO score is in the works and could be completed in the coming weeks.

“I look forward to working with Congressman Hurd to achieve passage of the Modernizing Government Technology Act in the 115th Congress. This critical piece of legislation continues to be a priority for me this year,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), ranking member of the subcommittee on Government Operations, in an email to Federal News Radio. “We have been working with industry experts and the Congressional Budget Office to clarify the intent and actual costs of the legislation. However, I hope the new administration will be open to making investments in federal IT modernization, at least, for the sake of cybersecurity.”

A Senate aide said they are evaluating what the best approach is to move the MGT Act forward.

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After spending the last two years as the darling of the White House, the U.S. Digital Service, in its current incarnation, is not long for this world.

The size and reporting structure of the USDS is expected to change in the coming months under the Trump administration.

It seems after two years of calling its own shots, the Trump transition team recognized the need to rein in USDS.

A source with knowledge of the Trump transition team’s planning said USDS in its present form will not persist under the new administration.

The source, who requested anonymity in order to talk about the new administration’s plans, said Trump transition leaders believe an organization like USDS is important and necessary. But the source said the transition team is considering reducing the size of USDS from more than 200 to a few dozen technology experts.

“In its present form of nearly 200 people, it’s just too big and uncontrollable and an organization independent of the technology bureaucracy will not persist,” the source said. “It’s also highly unlikely USDS will be funded as they requested. There is a belief that this group not reporting to the chief information officer of the government is not a successful or appropriate approach.”

The Office of Management and Budget changed the reporting structure of USDS on Dec. 12. An OMB official said making USDS a separate office that reports directly to OMB’s deputy director of management “better reflects the current structure while continuing to foster a close collaboration between the offices within the management team.”

When the Obama administration first created USDS in August 2014, the office reported to the federal chief information officer and Mike Dickerson, the USDS administrator, was a politically appointed deputy CIO.

But over time, multiple sources say Dickerson and federal CIO Tony Scott’s relationship deteriorated. Dickerson would use his relationship with former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Kristie Canegallo to bypass Scott’s oversight.

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As one of his last acts as federal chief information officer, Tony Scott and the CIO Council released the State of Federal IT report Jan. 19. A team of federal IT executives, with the help of two contractors, interviewed 45 federal CIOs and deputy CIOs, and chief information security officers and deputy CISOs as well as other federal IT leaders. The goal was to give the incoming Trump administration a status report on where the government has been and is today with technology, and 11 recommendations for the future.

The report is a fascinating read, both from a historical perspective and from the viewpoint of an administration that built on the work that came before it and took advantage of new technology opportunities to improve the government.

I’ve pulled some of what I think are the most interesting details from the 155-page report — which is well worth reading.

State of Federal IT by the Numbers

43 — The percentage of the more than 4,300 IT projects in 780 major IT investments costing $81.5 billion across the government listed on the Federal IT Dashboard as of September 2016 that were listed as over budget or behind schedule.

80,000 — The number of federal employees who hold the employment classification of “Information Technology Management.” “With the number of retirement-eligible federal employees increasing every day, new talent must be hired into the government in order to handle constantly evolving tools and technologies,” the report stated.

80 — The percentage of key performance indicators (KPIs) that do not appear more than once in agency PortfolioStat reviews. The report stated that this disconnection “has likely impacted the ability of agencies and OMB to benchmark progress in certain policy areas.”

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The rumor mill is hot with potential names for key management positions in government. While the Trump administration is weeks, if not months away from filling many of the most important Office of Management and Budget, General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management jobs, we are starting to hear some rumblings of potential candidates.

Let me start with two hot rumors.

I’m hearing Joshua Steinman could be the next White House cyber czar, replacing Michael Daniel, who served in that role — also known as White House Cyber Coordinator — for four-plus years.

Steinman already is working in the government in some respects. He is a Navy reserve officer and serves as an “official interlocutor between the Department of Defense and Silicon Valley as a member of Defense Innovation Unit-Experimental (DIUX), the DoD ‘embassy’ in Silicon Valley,” according to his LinkedIn page.

He also leads the strategic efforts at ThinAir, which provides enterprise security software at the end-user and data layers.

Trump recently named two other technology appointees. Reed Cordish as the assistant to the President for intragovernmental and technology initiatives, and Gerrit Lansing as deputy assistant to the President and chief digital officer.

Cordish met with eight technology industry associations on Jan. 19, where he talked about the need to continue and even boost federal IT modernization efforts that began a few years ago.

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Remember the year 2000? No, not Y2K, but the hot, must-have technology. Back then you wanted a Gateway computer with a 550MHz chip and a year of AOL for free (that’s America Online, in case you weren’t sure). LG had just put out a phone with a monochrome touch screen that had an address book AND an organizer. And PlayStation 2 had just given gamers something to be excited about because it played CDs and DVDs and could support better resolution.

That year also was the first time the U.S. Access Board issued regulations under Section 508  of the Rehabilitation Act.  Two years before that, in 1998, the board also issued regulations to implement Section 255 of the Communications Act. Both of these regulations would help agencies ensure people with disabilities could use information technology and communications (ICT) equipment such as faxes, copiers and printers in federal offices.

Now  more than 17 years later, the board issued updated regulations just in time for the virtual reality, artificial intelligence and the iPhone 7.

“The way the rule is structured you can see if the technology falls under Section 508 or Section 255,” said Tim Creagan,  a senior accessibility specialist for the U.S. Access Board, in an interview with Federal News Radio. “The scoping chapter tells you how it applies and when, and the technical chapters provide functional performance criteria for hardware, software, documentation, and then we reference standards. All are granular in detail to help the people determine how to make information and communications technology accessible. It is a much more structured approach.” (more…)

In the world of federal government management, the year that was 2016 could be thought of in many ways, such as the important initiatives that stalled out or didn’t get done — like, say, the IT modernization bill.

But Mark Reger, the deputy controller at the Office of Management and Budget, and others prefer to look at the last 12 months in a different way.

Reger called 2016 the year that shared services saw a rebirth.

He said the new governance and oversight structure, the creation of the Unified Shared Services Management (USSM) office and a customer council are key pieces to the long-term health and success of the initiative.

Reger said the evidence is clear. Speaking at the Association of Government Accountants Federal System Summit in Washington on Jan. 13, he pointed to the 35 agencies that have plans in place to move to a shared service provider and more departments are working toward arrangements in the coming year.

He also highlighted how OMB is ramping up for 2017, including naming Lesley Field, the acting administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, as the new shared services policy officer, replacing Dave Mader, who left the administration on Jan. 4 after serving two-plus years as OMB controller.

Additionally, the USSM issued a new concept of operations, released a request for information for software-as-a-service and helped bring together all the payroll providers to agree on standardized payroll requirements.

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The General Services Administration may have just put the first nail in the coffin that eventually will bury the widespread use of lowest-price, technically acceptable (LPTA) contracts for services.

The Government Accountability Office’s decision to deny four protests of GSA’s Alliant 2 contracts for IT services could end up being a landmark ruling that is that first nail.

“Lowest-price technically acceptable has been disfavored among contractors for putting price over innovation. Now we have protesters who in essence claim that cost was only nominally and improperly considered in the Alliant 2 evaluation,” said Barbara Kinosky, managing partner of Centre Law & Consulting LLC. “We have seen DoD move away from LPTA. This is the first major requirement coming out of a civilian agency that is clearly saying, ‘Contractors, we are looking for smart over cheap. Give us the USDA steak, not the convenience store mystery meat.’ I am confident this is a trend we will now see more of since GSA has taken the lead in the technology area where we definitely need to excel.”

The weight of this GAO’s ruling isn’t lost on GSA either.

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The new year always seems to bring a migration of federal employees. January is commonly held as a good time to retire. There are quite a few people on the move to start 2017, so here are some of those retirements and changes in the federal IT and acquisition communities.

Janice Haith, the Navy Department’s deputy chief information officer, will retire on Feb. 3, a Navy spokesman confirmed.

Haith has served in her role since 2010 and has worked for the government for 33 years.

There is no word on who will replace Haith, even on an interim basis.

In addition to being the Navy Department’s deputy CIO, Haith served as the principal deputy/CIO for the Defense Security Service as the director for Intelligence Access for Warfighter Support (Under Secretary of Defense (Intelligence) to oversee development of Defense Intelligence policy for information sharing, foreign disclosure and management of the IT portfolio.

During her time with the Navy’s CIO office, she worked on a variety of programs, including IT modernization and the move to Windows 10, as well as cybersecurity, especially aboard ships.

She also helped lead the effort to consolidate and get rid of duplicative or unnecessary software.

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The federal government’s fourth attempt to create a customer-friendly, usable identity management approach for citizen services is not failing as some have rumored. But Login.gov is teetering on the edge of viability as a large agency customer decided not to participate in its initial launch.

Multiple industry sources confirmed that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) will not to take part in the pilot test that was expected to begin in 2017.

The decision by USCIS comes around the same time as the General Services Administration’s 18F organization started to get some momentum behind the program.

18F awarded Equifax an eight-month, $3.3 million contract with one four-month option to provide online identity proofing and fraud detection. A GSA spokesman confirmed GSA received five proposals and Equifax was found to be the best choice.

“GSA looks forward to continued collaboration with valued private sector partners in making online interactions with the U.S. government simple, efficient and intuitive,” the spokesman said.

Sources say GSA made the award in November.

GSA released the request for quotes in September, pulled it back because of a protest by eventual winner Equifax, and released again in October.

The GSA spokesman offered no further details on how 18F would implement the contract, or if any agency customers have signed on to the project yet.

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Government management never sleeps. Even as the management side of the administration of President-elect Donald Trump still is far from coming together, the Office of Management and Budget isn’t taking it easy awaiting the new political appointees.

OMB issued two significant memos last week — one addressing challenges around agency-vendor communications and the other updating agency requirements for how they respond to breaches of personal information.

These two are among a boatload of memos coming from OMB over the last year.  In fiscal 2017, OMB has issued 12 memos. Over the last 12 months, the administration sent out 31 memos ranging from the mundane, like apportionment requirements for the continuing resolution, to those trying to make major changes, like to how the government buys technology and pays senior executives.

The most recent two follow a long-held pattern by the Obama administration of updating, consolidating and hoping to leave policy in a better place.

In the data breach memo, released Jan. 3, OMB consolidates and updates four other memos and gives agencies six months to update or develop a response plan to a cyber breach involving personally identifiable information (PII).

“The goal here is to organize and take the lessons we’ve learned over the last 10 years,” said Ari Schwartz, a former White House cyber official and now the managing director of cybersecurity services at the Venable law firm. “Over the last 10 years since the breach at the Veterans Affairs Department, we learned a lot and there are things agencies have to do differently now than in the past and hopefully this will last longer than the last memos.”

Among the biggest changes in the PII memo is OMB outlined definitions of a breach versus an incident.

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