As the Trump administration prepares to unleash Federal civilian agency reorganization plans that will leave many of them significantly smaller in size and more focused on accomplishing administration aims, the House Oversight and Reform Committee is lining up a panel of former Federal chief information officers (CIOs) for a hearing next week to dig into how to further improve government efficiency through IT modernization.
The hearing before the House Oversight Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation is titled “Unlocking Government Efficiency Through IT Modernization” and is set for April 29 at 2 p.m.
Witnesses announced for the hearing thus far include three well-known Federal IT leaders:
- Former Federal CIO Suzette Kent, who held that title from 2018 to 2020 and now runs Kent Advisory Services;
- Former Deputy Federal CIO Maria Roat, who held the title from 2018 to 2020 after serving as CIO at the Small Business Administration, and who now heads MA Roat Consulting; and
- Former Deputy Federal CIO Margaret “Margie” Graves, who held that title from 2016 to 2019 and who is now a senior fellow with the IBM Center for The Business of Government, and a fellow at the National Academy of Public Administration
While it’s not clear what lines of questioning subcommittee members may pursue, it’s a fair bet that those themes will touch on the Trump administration’s drive to promote enterprise-wide technologies for government.
One notable development in that push emerged earlier this month when the General Services Administration (GSA) and Google announced an agreement to offer Google Workplace to Federal agencies at a significant discount through September.
“Google will now approach the Federal government as one unified customer – and President Trump’s GSA is working hard on this collaboration to turn that recognition into real savings to secure lower prices for best-in-class technology across all Federal agencies,” said GSA Acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian when the agreement was announced.
“By working closely with industry leaders like Google, we will continue to lower the cost of IT while providing improved experiences for the American taxpayers and the Federal government,” Ehikian pledged.
“This agreement marks a milestone in GSA’s ongoing initiatives to lower IT costs, enhance IT acquisition efficiency, optimize collaboration tools, and strengthen cybersecurity across agencies,” said GSA Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) Commissioner Josh Gruenbaum.
In remarks last month at a Workday event in Washington, D.C., Kent issued a call for the Federal government to focus on enterprise-wide systems as the “North Star” for guiding future improvements to government workforce management technologies and service improvements.
She said it’s past time for the government to seriously pursue an enterprise approach to IT and service offerings for workforce management, versus approaches that are siloed in individual agencies. “Here’s the question,” Kent said, “when we have … the same requirements, and we have an employee workforce that needs to think as an enterprise, why do we keep doing everything individually and in silos?”
Additionally, in a separate address earlier this month at an ACT-IAC event, Kent emphasized that upskilling the Federal workforce is a “foundational linchpin” to the government’s strategy to move toward the adoption of more advanced and automation-driven technologies.
“Our workforce is the core of every one of the missions that that happens in government,” she said. “Our government is aspiring to have a leaner Federal workforce and reduce dependence on contractors.”
“They want to maximize the value of some of these commercial off-the-shelf, hardened platforms – platforms that globally can be used across many different agencies for common purposes,” she continued.
Kent said there has been “repeated focus” on the widescale enterprise use of automation, AI, and data, adding, “When you stack all those together, if you don’t talk about the last piece of the puzzle, which is the workforce that knows what to do with all that stuff, and knows how to behave in that environment, you’re not going to achieve those other things.”