Homeland Security helps write the book on how to acquire artificial intelligence

Few departments have more diverse procurement needs than Homeland Security. The agency operates on natural disasters, immigration activity and cybersecurity.

Few departments have more diverse procurement needs than Homeland Security. These days, the agency is operating on all fronts: natural disasters, immigration activity, cybersecurity, you name it. Chief procurement officer Paul Courtney joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin to talk about how procurement operations keep up.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: And it’s a funny time. There’s going to be a change in administration and then there’s the usual congressional delay of regular appropriations. So I wanted to talk about what, aside from all that, your priorities are for operations and procurement in the coming year.

Paul Courtney: Great question, Tom. On the budget front, we know will likely be under continuing resolution for part, if not half the year. So every year has become the normal to get that appropriation later in the fiscal year. It does present a challenge to the current workforce here to department. And Tom, as you probably know, we have about 1500 contracting officers, contract specialists in the department. So our goal in our office really is to help them navigate when we get these appropriations late, make sure the customers get the documents and requirements they need to the contracting officers, work with industry to make sure we have things lined up through our acquisition plan and forecast system, make sure that’s all up to date as we begin each and every fiscal year. This year is no different. We have several priorities working on this year within the department on the procurement front. One is to make sure that we continue to provide the latest tools that our procurement officers need. We are big on the AI side of things here, trying to continue to move that forward. And if I could, Tom, talk about a couple of the initiatives that we’re working on. One on the AI front.

Tom Temin: Sure.

Paul Courtney: I always consider DHS to be a leader in the procurement space. In this case, OMB reached out to us and NASA to cochair their newly-formed Chief AI Officer, AI Procurement Working Group. So us and NASA are leading this group for government wide. So again, this is a big deal I feel for not just DHS but the whole government. So the working group really is first focused on assessing existing policies, directives and governance processes, really to identify those gaps as they pertain to AI-specific considerations in the procurement process, which continues to be a bigger and bigger deal. But they’re now developing some resources for the whole entire federal acquisition community. So federally is a big deal for us. And then in the department specifically, one of the big things we have going on this year is we just launched about two weeks ago what we’re calling our Capsule Initiative. Similar back to 2015 when we launched the Procurement Innovation Lab, this is just a new tool to help our procurement workforce and the entire acquisition workforce manage, in this case, nine FAR-based authorities. So Capsule stands for Champions for Turn of Procurement to Secure the Homeland. We love our acronyms in the government. So the bottom line is we have some non-FAR-based authorities in the department and some other agencies have them as well. And we want to make sure our workforce know what the authorities are when they use them and how to use them. So we’ve used them for a number of years, but I don’t think we’re using as much as we can throughout the department. One such authority, for example, is called the Commercial Solutions Opening Pilot Program, or CSOP. Again, this is authority we kind of can reach out and get the nontraditional government. Nongovernment, traditional companies that don’t like doing business with a federal adult do business with the federal government very often but helps us contain that cutting edge technology we wouldn’t be able to have otherwise. Right now, we have a few companies that use it on a regular basis, but we really think there’s a bigger need throughout the department. So we created this team to develop training, the trainer workforce, and also really to just make sure our staff know how to use these authorities and use them appropriately as we go forward. So there’s a couple of big initiatives we have. The last thing I’ll mentioned is a strategic plan we created a couple of years ago and actually it runs out this fiscal year. So we are looking at creating a new plan going forward for the next four years, five years. About a month ago, we met with all the heads of contracting, nine throughout the department. We had an off-site. We kind of really talked about what are their priorities and how can we feed their priorities into our priorities. And there are some consistent themes that at No. 1, this has been for years. We want to help our requirement owners to be able to develop their requirements and get them to us. Like and that sounds simple but I’ve throughout my career I’ve always heard we ever got the statement of work, but it needs a lot of work. So we want to have that as one of our priorities going forward. How do we help the program managers, program staff to help define the requirements in a sufficient way, working with industry to make sure that we get the tools and services we need to support our mission.

Tom Temin: Wow.

Paul Courtney: So these things, Tom, that we’re working on.

Tom Temin: That’s quite a bit. We’re speaking with Paul Courtney. He’s the chief procurement officer at Homeland Security. And I want to get back to the idea. Is there a sense that AI, artificial intelligence can in some way improve the procurement process?

Paul Courtney: Most definitely. I think a couple of thoughts on that. Again, I don’t think the department’s alone on these thoughts. One is we’ve been using some forms of AI for a number of years. And most of them do those paths that take a lot of time, take a lot of effort, but really doesn’t use a lot of brainpower like doing some. For instance, I’ll give you an example. For market research, if you want to go out and look at within the internet for information about specific requirements we’re trying to do. It could take a long time to do the search, pull it all together and have that market research report, for lack of a better term, done. Well, you can use artificial intelligence to go find that information and bring it back to you. It still needs to be validated by human. So it doesn’t take away that part. But those types of things I think are extremely useful for our procurement workforce and, again, the entire acquisition workforce. Along with that, we like to use tools that other agencies have created. There’s the determination responsibility bot that the Army has created. DORA is the name of it. This helps again. It does. The hard work of pulling the documents together doesn’t take a lot of brainpower, but it takes a lot of work to pull documents together to make that determination. At in the day it needs to be, again, a real live human making the determination. But if you can have the stuff at your fingertips, I think it makes our life a lot easier. Recently, we had a demonstration by our CIO’s office, who has a phenomenal group of cyber professionals working in all things AI. We had a demo and all the tools that are out there at our fingertips of our department employees to use. I mentioned one ChatGPT and not endorsing any of them. But just those generative AI tools that are out there now can also help our requirement or develop the requirements. Like it’s amazing what the demo that we had by our professionals in the CIO organization that can open the eyes of a lot of our procurement professionals in what’s in the realm of possibility. Lots of excitement about it. But again, we want to make sure that the person who’s going to be signing the contract or the person who’s sending us the requirement actually is heavily involved. It is not just doing well. I have this generative AI to do all the work, and I’ll just send it over and send it to industry and everything’s done. It’s actually not that easy, but I really think it’s a game changer for us in the procurement workspace going forward.

Tom Temin: Yeah. So you’re going to be spending a lot of time this coming number of months in depth on that sounds like?

Paul Courtney: Yes, Tom. That is true. We have one thing that the CIO shop has also done is they created an AI Corps. They’ve hired 30, 40 people who from private industry who are experts in the AI area. And one of those folks are embedded with us right now who are heavily relying on him and what he’s doing. One thing looking at supply chain, the procurement impacts of supply chain, looking at AI use cases within procurement. Again, it’s great collaborative efforts we have within the department working with our CIO colleagues on all things AI. So definitely very excited about this. Again, I think this is a big deal. They’ll get a lot of big changes in the procurement workspace over time. But I think this is one of those game-changing moments.

Tom Temin: And let’s talk briefly about the non-FAR-based authorities. Would OTA, for example, be part of that? Does DHS have OTA authority?

Paul Courtney: Good question. So when I mentioned the Capsule on what they’re doing. One is the CSOP I mentioned. One is a Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer program. We have those authorities and we did have OTA authority for prototyping other things until the end of fiscal year 24. And we have a lapse currently. We’re working with our policy shops and with the Hill to get their authority back. So as we get it back, we’ll make sure that our program office know. But currently, we did have a momentary, hopefully momentary lapse of our OTA authority. Again, I think it’s one of those tools that our science and technology uses. Our office uses that extensively throughout the department. So there’s definitely something we want to have within the department to use. But currently, we do not have OTA authority. We do have some legacy OTA authority for some of the airports and other things. But I’m strictly talking about for prototyping and those types of things.

Tom Temin: It sounds as if, for your office, the delay in final appropriations is less of an impact than it is for the components who might be launching new programs. For example, say there might be a new screening gambit that the TSA would do or something, but they can’t do that under continuing resolution authority. They have to wait until the funds are there for new programs. Fair way to put it?

Paul Courtney: That is definitely a fair way to put it. Yeah again, this is it’s become almost every single year. I can’t even remember the last time we had appropriations on October 1st. So it does cause program delays for new programs. They obviously have to wait until we get the appropriation before they start for the year. You cannot start a new program under a CR. Correct.

Tom Temin: And what will you tell, say, the new secretary and the new politicals when they arrive? What will they need to know about what you’re doing?

Paul Courtney: So we did have the landing teams for the new administration have landed. And we have a couple hundred RFI requests for information so far that we’re working on. We’re excited to let them know all the hard work that our staff have done over the years. And just to put some love throwing out stats for FY 24, the department award, about $26 billion in goods and services and a little over 60,000 transactions. So it’s a monumental amount of work. I mentioned before the 1500 procurement staff working in the department, the larger acquisition staff is about 15 or 16,000 employees. So there is a large contingency of the 240, 250,000 employees in the department that are part of that acquisition workforce. So great things, whether it’s making sure we meet all the small business goals, which we’ve done for six years in a row now with A’s and A-pluses. This past year, we exceeded every single goal we were given one of the one of the few top five agencies to do that. So always excited to talk about all the great work our staff has done and will continue to do going forward in the new fiscal year.

Tom Temin: And can you use I maybe to answer those couple of hundreds RFIs from the landing teams?

Paul Courtney: Like great question. We actually got on this past Saturday. So we are working harder right now. So as you can imagine the deadlines are coming fast and furious. But again, it’s an opportunity for us to share all the great work that we have done and all the great work we are doing and all the great work we will do. So exciting times, definitely.

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