Federal Chief Information Officer Greg Barbaccia has been appointed to the additional position of Federal chief AI officer as the Trump administration begins work executing on the ambitious agenda laid out in the AI Action Plan released by the White House on July 23.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) – in which the Federal CIO office operates – confirmed to MeriTalk the additional Federal chief AI officer appointment for Barbaccia.
Barbaccia was appointed in January to the Federal CIO position, where he already oversees Federal technology spending, IT policy, and strategic planning for Federal IT investments.
In the additional position of Federal chief AI officer, Barbaccia is likely to take on a central role in helping the Trump administration to operationalize the AI Action Plan – particularly the portions of the plan that mandate accelerated adoption of AI technologies by the Federal government.
“With AI tools in use, the Federal government can serve the public with far greater efficiency and effectiveness,” the action plan says. “Use cases include accelerating slow and often manual internal processes, streamlining public interactions, and many others.”
“Taken together, transformative use of AI can help deliver the highly responsive government the American people expect and deserve,” the plan states.
Chief AI Officer Council’s Coordination Role
The action plan features a list of recommended policy actions to accelerate the government’s use of AI tech, and heading that list is an instruction to formalize the Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer Council (CAIOC) – where Barbaccia would be expected to play the lead role – “as the primary venue for interagency coordination and collaboration on AI adoption.”
The CAIOC, the plan says, will “initiate strategic coordination and collaboration with relevant Federal executive councils, to include: the President’s Management Council, Chief Data Officer Council, Chief Information Officer Council, Interagency Council on Statistical Policy, Chief Human Capital Officer Council, and Federal Privacy Council.”
OMB – with the council as its coordination hub – is also charged with putting into action a lengthy list of action plan policy moves.
One of those is creating “a talent-exchange program designed to allow rapid details of Federal staff to other agencies in need of specialized AI talent (e.g., data scientists and software engineers)” with input from the Office of Personnel Management.
OMB also will lead efforts to “create an AI procurement toolbox managed by the General Services Administration (GSA) … that facilitates uniformity across the Federal enterprise to the greatest extent practicable,” the plan states.
“This system would allow any Federal agency to easily choose among multiple models in a manner compliant with relevant privacy, data governance, and transparency laws,” the plan says. It adds, “agencies should also have ample flexibility to customize models to their own ends, as well as to see a catalog of other agency AI uses (based on OMB’s pre-existing AI Use Case Inventory).”
Further, OMB is instructed to implement an “Advanced Technology Transfer and Capability Sharing Program” with GSA to quickly transfer advanced AI capabilities and use cases between agencies.
OMB will also “mandate that all Federal agencies ensure – to the maximum extent practicable – that all employees whose work could benefit from access to frontier language models have access to, and appropriate training for, such tools.”
OMB also will work to convene “a cohort of agencies with High Impact Service Providers to pilot and increase the use of AI to improve the delivery of services to the public,” the plan says.
Further OMB Action Plan Roles
Less specific to the Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer Council’s coordination role, the action plan also tasks OMB with several other high-profile tasks.
Those include working to remove onerous regulations that hinder AI use. The plan’s specific instruction to OMB is to “work with all Federal agencies to identify, revise, or repeal regulations, rules, memoranda, administrative orders, guidance documents, policy statements, and interagency agreements that unnecessarily hinder AI development or deployment.”
OMB is also instructed to “work with Federal agencies that have AI-related discretionary funding programs to ensure, consistent with applicable law, that they consider a state’s AI regulatory climate when making funding decisions and limit funding if the state’s AI regulatory regimes may hinder the effectiveness of that funding or award.”