M ark Orndorff, a long-time and well-respected cybersecurity executive, is calling it a government career on Jan. 31.

Orndorff confirmed that he is retiring after about 36 years in government, both as a civilian and an Army officer.

Orndorff, whose title recently changed to risk management executive under the Defense Information Systems Agency reorganization, spent much of his career focused on cybersecurity challenges.

He was the mission assurance executive and designated accrediting authority for the last 16 months. In that role, he managed the development and implementation of the Defense Department information assurance and network operations capabilities to ensure the Pentagon could securely operate the Global Information Grid.

Orndorff’s bio is filled with cybersecurity accomplishments, including developing and maintaining Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs), DoD’s NetOps and IA training program and creating DoD’s NetOps and Computer Network Defense Service Provider (CNDSP) certification program.

It’s unclear at this time who will replace Orndorff.

While DISA is losing a key executive, two former leaders were lured back into government.

Bev Godwin retired from the General Services Administration in May only to be come back as a senior advisor to the State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs.

Godwin, who tweeted out the news of her return to government, wrote on her LinkedIn page that she will be “connecting people with policy; taking advantage of the rapidly evolving information space and leveraging the potential of digital tools” at the bureau.

A former GSA co-worker, Kelly Olson returns to government as well, coming back to GSA in the Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies (OSCIT) as a senior innovation adviser.

“In this role, I will be an advisor and strategist for open innovation methods, such as prize competitions, challenges, ideation and crowdsourcing,” Olson wrote in an email to her co-workers at Government Executive Media Group and Defense One, which was obtained by Federal News Radio. “I will also serve as the program director for Challenge.gov, the centerpiece of the President’s Strategy for American Innovation and winner of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Innovations in American Government Award. I will work in close collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) to lead the strategic expansion and increase visibility of this platform across the federal government to help agencies save resources and re-imagine the way they use open innovation to engage and serve citizens.”

Olson’s return also coincides with GSA Administrator Dan Tangherlini naming Phaedra Chrousos as the associate administrator of OCSIT. Chrousos, who joined GSA in 2014 as its first chief customer officer — CCO, I guess — replaces Dave McClure, who left government in June.

One more interesting personnel note, David Bray, the chief information officer of the Federal Communications Commission, is taking advantage of an awesome opportunity.

Bray, who is not really leaving government but using his personal time, has been named a 2015 Eisenhower Fellow. In that capacity, Bray will travel for about five weeks to Taiwan and Australia, where he will meet with industry and government leaders about cyber strategies for the Internet of Everything.

This fellowship is not a sabbatical or something he’s doing for or on behalf of the FCC, but using vacation leave to take advantage of a fascinating opportunity.

Bray said in addition to the fellowship, he also will serve as a visiting associate on cybersecurity and culture at the University of Oxford and term- member for the Council on Foreign Relations.

“It will be an instance my role as ‘digital diplomat’ transcends interagency endeavors to truly international ones,” he said by email.

L ike all good action movies, agencies are rebooting (pun intended) their telecommunications contracts.

While movies such as Batman, Superman and Spider-Man keep bringing on new actors to play the masked superheroes, agencies are looking at their telecom services and wondering what new — or old actors — are out there to give their telecommunications services a little more pizzazz.

Remember — I know I didn’t — it’s been almost eight years since the General Services Administration awarded the huge next generation telecommunications contract, Networx to five carriers.

GSA has made it clear the follow-on to Networx, called Network Services 2020, will live up to its name with most agencies not completely migrating to the new contract for another five years.

In the meantime, the telecommunications landscape continues to evolve.

“We are talking to a lot of customers about what next big things are and what to expect on the next contracts,” said Jeff Mohan, executive director of GSA programs for AT&T, in an interview with Federal News Radio.

The Agriculture Department is trying to get ahead of the pack. It issued a request for information in November asking for insights from vendors into its networks as it decides how best to move to the major contract under NS2020, the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS).

“The department is planning to overhaul its enterprisewide telecommunications network by creating the Universal Telecommunications Network (UTN) 2020 in order to modernize the infrastructure and keep up with ever increasing demands for services and bandwidth,” USDA wrote in the RFI, which was due Dec. 5. “Key to the UTN 2020 will be consolidation and streamlining of services and equipment, and the incorporation of enterprise technologies and solutions.”

USDA plans to begin the transition as soon as the EIS contract is ready for use.

“In order to do a technology refresh or take advantage of changing technology, they have to do a new fair opportunity and I think USDA’s RFI is one of the first ones that I expect to see,” said Lisa Crawford Bruch, CenturyLink’s vice president of sales and marketing, in an interview with Federal News Radio. “I know there are others that are being discussed where agencies are going to take advantage of Networx contract to get upgrade to technology or to the way they buy services overall. From the agency’s perspective, they are always looking out over the longest haul and where ultimately they need to go.”

GSA has given industry some dates to look forward to for the roll out of EIS.

GSA expects to issue the draft request for proposals for EIS in February, the final solicitation in late fiscal 2015 and make awards in late 2016.

Vendors said GSA already is planning a three-year extension for Networx since both Universal and Enterprise expire in early 2017 — giving agencies about three years to transition from one contract to the other. It took agencies almost six years to move to Networx from the FTS-2001 contract, so three years is optimistic on GSA’s part for sure.

“GSA’s intent is to do the transition to the new contract more quickly,” Mohan said. “The major driver is planning for the next contractor, but there are some agencies made awards under Networx and said until some date certain they will use the contract, while others said until Networx expires. So some agencies have a date certain that they have to do something about their current contracts under Networx. They can extend it and do other things without wholesale procurement.”

CenturyLink’s Crawford Bruch said there are a lot of lessons learned that GSA, agencies and providers should heed as they prepare for this next transition.

“GSA and agencies need to take good advantage of the opportunity to start planning now for what their evolutionary service delivery model would look like as they provide services to the citizen,” she said. “From a historical point of view, every one of the predecessor programs needed to be extended. So, rather than wait to come up against the brick wall and have to do something at the last minute, GSA is getting the extension done up front and that give agencies more planning time to figure out their migration plans for the new contract. It also will help to have a period of overlap that is sufficiently long so there is not this race to get off the old contract, and there is plenty of time for agency planning so they can craft the next generation statement of work.”

In the meantime, agencies still are looking for new services under Networx. GSA said agencies issued 13 statements of work in 2014 under the two contracts.

“It’s not unheard of for agencies to go back and revisit a fair opportunity decision,” said Bill Lewis, Networx program manager in an email to Federal News Radio. “But, it’s more common to revisit decisions because a new technology or new requirement has emerged. In the past few months, we’ve seen requirements dealing with expansion of enterprise networks, new technologies like infrastructure as a service and voice over IP (VoIP).”

GSA said on its Networx website that agencies spent $1.53 billion on telecommunications services last year with the biggest area being network based IP virtual private networks (46 percent and $703.7 million).

Crawford Bruch said CenturyLink has seen demand for Ethernet services and unified communications under Networx, while managed security services also has been popular.

O ne thing that wasn’t included in the IT budget passback was any details on how agencies should implement the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA). It became law in December when Congress approved and President Barack Obama signed the Defense Authorization bill into law.

But that doesn’t mean the Office of Management and Budget isn’t thinking about it.

In fact, sources confirmed the Chief Information Officer’s Council held a meeting last week to discuss the bill and ensure there is consistent implementation across the government.

Sources, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the planning meeting, said overall there is a good feeling among the CIO Council about the law.

One source said at least inside OMB’s E-Gov office, there clearly is an understanding of the challenge in rolling out the requirements under FITARA, specifically around CIO authorities.

The source said OMB recognizes FITARA’s success doesn’t just depend on the CIO community, but acquisition, human resources, financial management and, maybe most importantly, the deputy secretaries.

Another source said agencies with a single CIO will have an easier time implementing the law as compared to those departments with CIOs across multiple bureaus.

“With bureaus, I would think there is a likely desire to say in this implementation, let’s get ourselves to a baseline of operations,” one CIO said.

The first source said agency reaction so far to FITARA is mixed. Some are more excited than others, but OMB’s overall goal is to make sure there isn’t fragmentation of how the government implements the law.

The likely path OMB will take in implementing FITARA, though sources wouldn’t confirm if the recent discussions with the CIO Council addressed these issues, is through implementation guidance and possibly appealing to the President’s Management Council.

Sources also confirmed OMB is reaching out to former federal executives and other experts for advice on the best way to implement the bill.

The key to FITARA’s implementation will OMB’s leadership and Congressional oversight.

With the bill’s main author, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), no longer leading the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, it’s unclear how much attention Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), the new chairman, or Rep. William Hurd (R-Texas), the chairman of the IT subcommittee, will pay to FITARA.

F orgive me for being a little late this year, but I finally got some insights into the annual game of keep-away the White House likes to play with the press around the budget passback. In my case, my goal for the past decade has been to scrounge and rummage around the IT community for details on technology policy changes that will be part of the President’s budget request coming in a few weeks.

Over the previous few years, the IT passback has been, well, underwhelming to say the least. The federal chief information officer at the Office of Management and Budget stopped using the IT passback to introduce new policy priorities a few years ago. The policy document became more of a reiteration of what’s expected over the next year around cybersecurity or shared services or open data.

But I have good news, the IT passback is back! Well, sort of.

Multiple sources in the federal technology community confirmed the while the IT passback was mostly humdrum, there was one significant policy decision.

By Oct. 1, OMB is instructing agencies to set up their own digital services group modeled after those at the General Services Administration under 18F and the Veterans Affairs Department.

Multiple federal officials, all of whom requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the IT passback, confirmed OMB is requiring agencies to spend a percentage of their IT budget on their new digital services office. Sources say each agency’s percentage is different based on their overall IT budget.

“The interesting thing about it that I very much like is it seems the vast majority of money should be spent on hiring people and not on contracting,” said one federal CIO. “The other guidance that came out said senior management needs to approve any spending that isn’t to be used for salaries.”

Agencies must give the White House an implementation plan by the end of February and have been meeting with the E-Government and IT office in January to discuss the requirements.

Sources also confirmed that the digital services group should report to the agency’s deputy secretary.

Several sources said that’s a mild concern as agencies need to be careful how they set up the digital services group. If the CIO is the lead for the group, then reporting to the deputy secretary is fine. But if the group is set up outside the CIO’s control or management, then OMB is bifurcating the oversight of IT projects.

The fact that OMB is mandating a digital services group at every agency isn’t so surprising. In my November interview with Mike Dickerson, the deputy CIO and head of the U.S. Digital Services office in OMB and Lisa Schlosser, the acting federal CIO, it was clear where this effort was heading.

But the fact is OMB is telling agencies to get it done by Oct. 1 and invest a certain amount of money into the effort is huge.

In the November interview, Schlosser said, “We do have a governmentwide strategy that integrates all of these moving parts into one comprehensive strategy. The vision is to have this centralized capability of a digital services team that can come in and help agencies, and to a degree, train agencies on modern Dev/Ops practices and start to embed those through the normal e-government practices in the way the agencies operate from everything to funding to developing to implementing to measuring.”

While the idea seems to have support, some federal CIOs say there are some concerns about the concept.

The CIOs pointed out was where they are going to find the money to hire these people. And some executives questioned whether the government could even attract and find enough people with the right skillsets to hire.

“Think big issue with this, and I do love the idea, is where are we going to find the people I think they want us to hire? We’ve had trouble attracting them to government already,” another federal CIO said. “The idea that we are all going to market at the same time is going to force us to think creatively about whether these people based on D.C. or not. It’s still going to be a challenge.”

The CIO said OMB’s support and how hard they push it to the other non-CIO communities, including the deputy secretaries, is key to making the digital government services group succeed.

An OMB spokesman said they do not comment on the passback.

The perfect job just came open for someone who wants 435 bosses, all of which have local control over their technology.

Yes, you guessed it, the House of Representatives is looking for a CIO. The winning candidate would be responsible for the operations of the House’s information and communications systems.

You would have a 200-person staff to meeting the needs of the House and protecting its systems and data.

Applications are due Jan. 18.

S mall businesses are getting some long-waited good news from the Small Business Administration.

SBA issued a proposed rule Dec. 29, nearly a year after Congress passed the fiscal 2013 Defense Authorization bill changing certain provisions in the Small Business Act.

Among the most important updates is the provision letting joint ventures between two or more small firms bid as a small business.

“SBA proposes to remove the restriction on the type of contract for which small businesses may joint venture without being affiliated for size determination purposes. SBA is proposing this change for several reasons. First, this proposed change would encourage more small business joint venturing, in furtherance of the governmentwide goals for small business participation in federal contracting,” the proposal stated. “Second, this change would respond to results from the Small Business Teaming Pilot Program indicating more small business opportunities and greater success on small contracts than on large contracts. Third, this change would better align with the new provisions of the NDAA governing the limitations on subcontracting, which allow a small business prime contractor to subcontract to as many similarly situated subcontractors as desired.”

SBA also clarifies how it will calculate whether a small firm remains small year over year.

“SBA proposes to clarify that receipts include all income, and the only exclusions from income are the ones specifically listed” in Section 121.104 of the Small Business Act, such as net capital gains or losses, taxes collected for and remitted to a taxing authority if included in gross or total income and amounts collected by services such as travel or real estate agents.

SBA stated, “It was always SBA’s intent to include all income, except for the listed exclusions; however, SBA has found that some business concerns misinterpreted the current definition of receipts to exclude passive income. SBA’s proposed change clarifies the intent to include all income, including passive income, in the calculation of receipts.”

A huge chunk of the rule focuses on small business subcontracting changes.

Among the biggest change is a shift in how agencies are to calculate the percentage of work required to be performed by a prime contractor.

SBA says it wants to change to the “concept of limiting a percentage of the award amount to be spent on subcontractors. The goal is the same: to ensure that a certain amount of work is performed by a prime contractor small business concern (SBC) that qualified for a small business program set-aside procurement due to its socioeconomic program status.”

SBA also proposes to limit the percentage of the award that could be performed by a large business.

“SBA has concerns about the practical application of a regulation that would require only a certain percentage of contract awards to be either retained by the prime contractor, or spent on a similarly situated entity. SBA’s concern is that an approach that limits its review solely to the first tier of the contracting process (agreements between the prime contractor and its direct subcontractors) could be fraught with abuse,” the notice stated. “For example, if small business A is awarded a $500,000 small business set-aside service contract and subcontracts $450,000 of the work to small business B, if the limitation of subcontracting requirements apply only to the first tier, then the government’s review would be complete. Small businesses A and B clearly meet the 50 percent rule. However, if small business B could further subcontract all of its $450,000 to a large business with impunity, then SBA believes that the intent of the subcontracting limitation requirements would be circumvented and small businesses would not be properly protected. In such a case, a large business would have performed $450,000 of a $500,000 contract (or 90 percent) of a contract that was set-aside exclusively for small business. In SBA’s view, a large business that ultimately performs 90 percent of a small business set-aside contract unduly benefits from a contract intended to be performed by small business. SBA believes that the intent of the changes in the NDAA were to ensure that contracts awarded, and the benefits of those contracts, flow to the proper beneficiaries.”

Comments on the proposed rule are due by Feb. 27.

The Homeland Security Department is thinking beyond continuous monitoring and the Director of National Intelligence wants help forecasting cyber attack vectors.

These are two interesting cybersecurity-related requests for information that may have been overlooked in December, but due dates for responses are coming soon.

Let’s start with the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity’s (IARPA) RFI for its CAUSE program.

Through the Cyber-attack Automated Unconventional Sensor Environment (CAUSE), IARPA wants vendors to develop software that will forecast methods and detect emerging phenomena to help cyber defenders against potential attack paths.

“The CAUSE Program aims to develop and validate unconventional multi- disciplined sensor technology (e.g., actor behavior models, black market sales) that will forecast cyber-attacks and complement existing advanced intrusion detection capabilities,” the notice in FedBizOpps.gov stated. “Anticipated innovations include: methods to manage and extract huge amounts of streaming and batch data, the application and introduction of new and existing features from other disciplines to the cyber domain, and the development of models to generate probabilistic warnings for future cyber events. Successful proposers will combine cutting-edge research with the ability to develop robust forecasting capabilities from multiple sensors not typically used in the cyber domain.”

IARPA says the program will include unclassified and classified research activities, and it expects the teams working on the program to be multi- disciplinary, consisting of computer scientists, data scientists, social and behavior scientists, mathematicians and statisticians, and other cyber and computer experts.

IARPA is holding an industry day Jan. 21, in Washington in anticipation of a new solicitation. Deadline to register for the industry day is Jan. 14.

DHS, meanwhile, issued an RFI for its EASE program, which is a concept focused on automated and dynamic cyber defense capabilities.

DHS wants vendors to view the Enterprise Automated Security Environment (EASE) concept through three paths: Cyberspace, cyber-relevant time and critical infrastructure.

DHS says this RFI will be one of several coming over the next year or so.

“Recognizing current security practices are insufficient to prevent successful attacks, respond to attacks and remain resilient during attacks, DHS first promulgated ‘the idea of a healthy, resilient — and fundamentally more secure — cyber ecosystem of the future. In this cyber ecosystem, cyber participants, including cyber devices, are able to work together in near-real time to anticipate and prevent cyber attacks, limit the spread of attacks across participating devices, minimize the consequences of attacks and recover to a trusted state,'” the RFI stated. “DHS recognizes that achieving this level of advancement and coordination cannot be accomplished in a single step by any single party, but requires an evolutionary, federated approach with extensive community collaboration involving all stakeholders.”

Among the operational goals for EASE are to:

• Enable the automated execution of cyberspace defense activities in cyber- relevant time where possible;
• Expand the availability of integrated and interoperable cyberspace defense tools, tool suites and data as well as defensive best practices;
• Device actionable metrics to measure the effectiveness of cyberspace defense activities and quickly provide actionable feedback;
• Share the design and specifications of the modular, plug-and-play environment with private sector, state, local and tribal governments for their voluntary use in protecting their networks.

DHS says it plans a series of workshops in 2015 and plans to develop a broad agency announcement (BAA) or request for proposal for the EASE concept and cyber defense capabilities.

The deadline to respond is Feb. 3.

And speaking of DHS cyber, the Office of Personnel Management re-approved the Schedule A hiring authority for 1,000 cyber positions at DHS.

In the Dec. 30 Federal Register notice, OPM says DHS has until Dec. 31, 2015, to use this authority to hire experts in cyber risk and strategic analysis, incident handling and malware/vulnerability analysis, program management, distributed control systems security, cyber incident response, cyber exercise facilitation and management, cyber vulnerability detection and assessment, network and systems engineering, enterprise architecture, intelligence analysis, investigation, investigative analysis and cyber-related infrastructure interdependency analysis requiring unique qualifications currently not established by OPM. The employees will come in at GS-9-to-15 levels.

OPM gave DHS a similar authority in 2009 for three years. Former DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said in 2012 the agency brought in 600 new cyber experts.

T here have been a couple of interesting tidbits I learned over the last month about the chief information officer’s community.

Dawn Leaf quietly moved from deputy CIO to CIO as the Labor Department uncoupled the position from Office of the Assistant Secretary for Administration and Management.

For much of the last decade — if not longer — the assistant secretary, currently Michael Kerr, wore the CIO, the chief privacy officer and chief human capital officer hats.

Leaf became Labor’s deputy CIO in November 2012, but has really been the leader of the agency’s technology modernization effort for the last two years.

In so many ways, separating out the CIO’s role from the assistant secretary’s role was much needed. It was well known that over the last six years, if not longer, that the deputy CIO of Labor ran the IT shop, and even under former CIO Patrick Pizzella, his deputy really handled much of the day-to-day operations.

Another interesting change to the CIO role happened recently at the Commerce Department.

replaced Simon Szykman in June — we know that. But what many didn’t know about Cooper’s decision to come back to government for a third time is instead of coming in to Commerce as a career official, Cooper came in as a political appointee under the Schedule C, which does not need Senate confirmation.

Only a handful of CIOs are political appointees under Schedule C — the departments of Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs are most prominent. But Commerce has never been a political position, so it’s interesting why White House or agency officials decided to “upgrade” the position.

The Treasury Department made its CIO position political about a decade ago, but turned it back into a career one soon after.

The Defense Department’s CIO position used to be Senate confirmed, but the Pentagon removed that designation in 2010 when then Secretary Robert Gates removed the assistant secretary of Defense for networks and Information Integration (NII) designation.

For Cooper, this would be his second politically appointed role. He was the DHS CIO from 2003 to 2005.

The Environmental Protection Agency, another one of those with a Senate- confirmed CIO, remains stuck in a holding pattern.

President Barack Obama nominated Ann Dunkin in January 2014, meaning EPA has been without a permanent CIO for more than 18 months.

Dunkin has been serving in one of those “senior adviser” roles since August, meaning she is doing some of the work as the CIO, but doesn’t hold the title and thus is limited to how much influence she can have.

The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works held her nomination hearing in April and approved her nomination in July. But on Dec. 17, the Senate sent back the nomination to the White House under part of the Senate rules that returns nominations that were neither confirmed nor rejected during the session. Obama will need to re-nominate Dunkin during the 114th Congress.

Along with Dunkin, the White House will have to resubmit Russell Deyo to be the nominee to be the next DHS undersecretary for management under the same rule.

I nside the Reporter’s Notebook is celebrating its third year and thanks to our dedicated readers and sources of information. So far we have more than 3,700 subscribers to our email alerts. Sign up for the alerts here so you can be the first to know the buzz, strongly sourced gossip and the people on the move in the IT, acquisition and Defense communities.

In 2014, the most popular Inside the Reporter’s Notebook posts were:

1. Sept. 8 notebook featuring the lead story of Labor and the General Services Administration spending tens of millions of dollars to buy back financial management systems from GCE, which went bankrupt.
2. The Aug. 8 edition highlighted turnover among several large agencies, including the Veterans Affairs Department, GSA and DHS.
3. It was a little surprising that the June 20 edition came in third place, as it highlighted a CFO Council management alert on the DATA Act and change to the A-11 Circular.
4. The May 9 edition gave us our first look inside GSA’s 18F office and some of its projects.
5. The April 28 notebook was one of my favorites as it gave us a glimpse of how vendors can sometimes get under the skin of some federal agencies.
6. The March 14 version was the first of many highlighting the long year the Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiative (FSSI) had trying to get the Office Supplies 3 program off the ground.
7. In the Feb. 28 edition, I first reported the beginning of the CIO carousel at DHS’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement directorate as well as the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s continued delays with its now-terminated HUDNet program.
8. The continued mystery of what DoD’s plans were with commercial cloud pushed the Dec. 1 edition into the top 10.
9. Cloud cybersecurity and the Office of Management and Budget’s continued use of “effectiveness” made the June 6 edition one of the more popular notebooks in 2014.
10. A comment from then-DoD CIO Teri Takai about DoD’s path toward cloud security caused some interesting discussions for the March 28 edition. In the end, DoD is following the Federal Risk Authorization and Management Program (FedRAMP), but with some additional requirements.

So now on to the real news…

Inside the Reporter’s Notebook is a biweekly dispatch of news and information you may have missed or that slipped through the cracks at conferences, hearings and other events. This is not a column or commentary — it’s news tidbits, strongly-sourced buzz, and other items of interest that have happened or are happening in the federal IT and acquisition communities. As always, we encourage you to submit ideas, suggestions and, of course, news to Jason via email. Be the first to know when a new Inside the Reporter’s Notebook is posted. Sign up today for our new Reporter’s Notebook email alert.

Six years of waiting, cyber bills abound

It would be nice to think that Congress finally got off its “you know what” to pass five cybersecurity bills over the last week because they finally realized their importance and necessity. Or maybe lawmakers finally moved on cyber because the White House signaled over the summer its acceptance that smaller may be better. All five of these bills, however, signal a long-coming and much needed change to how agencies defend their computer networks and hire the people to do that critical work so why complain how Congress got there and let’s celebrate the fact that after six years, they finally did.

Read more.

Time for OFPP to weigh in on use of reverse auctions

An interesting bid protest decision flew under the radar that signals yet another challenge to FedBid, the reverse auction contractor.

By the way, it’s growing ever more doubtful that FedBid will receive any “punishment” for its role in the Veterans Affairs contracting scandal involving Susan Taylor.

An expert source on how suspension and debarment says vendors, generally speaking, can’t be punished for alleged crimes of the past if they have made changes in the present. So the government tends not to go after companies with S&D if there is no evidence of an existing threat to agencies procurement actions.

A recent search on the System for Award Management (SAM) doesn’t list FedBid in the excluded parties list.

Read More.

Justice’s API release signals bigger win for open source

The Justice Department’s first foray into the open data world with the launch of two APIs is noteworthy. But the underlying reason why DoJ could release the software code is really the story here.

First, the APIs, or application programming interfaces, that Justice released are codes for Web developers to build mobile apps and other software more easily to find press releases and job openings.

Nothing ground breaking in terms of APIs.

Skip Bailey, a former chief information officer at the DoJ’s Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said the APIs are part of how Justice is moving to open source platform, Drupal. And that, he said, is the big accomplishment.

Read More.

DLA gives out gold stars to suppliers

Forty vendors now have a leg up in bidding on contracts with the Defense Logistics Agency.

DLA became the second major Defense Department agency or service to publicly announce its superior supplier list.

DoD officially launched the program in June when the Navy announced the results of its pilot program highlighting nine vendors. The idea of a superior supplier program first came from the Better Buying Power version 2.0.

The Navy plans to reward the nine companies by inviting them to examine their existing Navy contracts and propose how best to eliminate bureaucratic processes that add cost and reduce profit.

DLA’s list is much larger, 40 total companies, who were given ratings of gold, silver and bronze.

Read More.