Smarter Gov Tech, Stronger MerITocracy
EHR

In a new report, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that the agency’s first deployment site for its Electronic Health Records Modernization (EHRM) program lacks access to critical EHR metrics, and said that puts the hospital’s accreditation status at risk. […]

The Federal government’s Global Food Security Strategy (GFSS) is falling short on information sharing regarding each participating agency’s current or planned spending for the whole-of-government initiative, and could use a shared database to make spending information more readily accessible, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said. […]

Computers cloud connected-min

The Department of Energy (DoE) on June 1  earned the distinction of running the fastest supercomputer in the world after that designation was announced for the agency’s Frontier supercomputer system at the International Supercomputing Conference 2022 in Germany. […]

EHR

The Senate late last week approved legislation that aims to increase the transparency of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Electronic Health Records Modernization (EHRM) program through regular reporting requirements. The Senate’s vote sends the bill to President Biden’s desk for a final signature. […]

A new report from the Inspector General (IG) of the Small Business Administration (SBA) finds that the agency did not have clearly defined roles in its organizational structure to manage and handle potentially fraudulent Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans authorized by Congress in 2020. […]

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has announced the official launch of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (or ARPA-H), which will sit within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as an independent entity. […]

Government grant funding technology writ large has made strides in modernizing to improve how funding is acquired, but there are still some state and local agencies that need to catch up, officials said this week. […]

As Federal agencies are looking to modernize and undergo enterprise-wide digital transformations, leaders at the Army’s Enterprise Cloud Management Office and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) are pointing to changing organizational culture and “having the right conversation” first. […]

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced it received a whopping $2.8 billion of requests for the remaining $1.5 billion of funding under the agency’s Emergency Connectivity Fund (ECF) program, which aims to close the “homework gap” for students that don’t have access to reliable broadband service and devices. […]

The Department of Energy (DoE) plans to issue $40 million in funding for research and training in science, technology, education, and math (STEM) areas for historically underrepresented groups, the agency announced on May 25. […]

IRS

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a new report that its Fiscal Year 2021 audit found information system control problems at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that increase the risk of unauthorized access to financial and sensitive taxpayer data and disruption of critical operations. […]

FDIC
supply chain
cybersecurity

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said today it is “encouraged” by quick Federal agency responses to its May 18 emergency directive to patch or unplug several vulnerable VMware products from agency networks, but did not provide any hard figures on whether agencies met CISA’s May 24 deadline to take action. […]

Customer experience CX-min

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has updated its Medicare.gov website, creating an optimized customer experience (CX) and making it easier for millions of Americans to find providers and health and drug coverage plans. […]

CDC

The Department of Justice (DoJ) has revised its policies on enforcement of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) which will help make sure that good-faith hackers are not breaking the law when they work to uncover vulnerabilities on government networks. […]

Treasury

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has identified four additional priority recommendations for the Department of the Treasury as of May 2022, including recommendations on improving cybersecurity and modernizing the U.S. financial regulatory system. […]

IRS

While the IRS complied with COVID-19 relief legislation to give tax breaks to employers who provided paid sick and family leave and retained employees, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a new report that the tax agency could benefit from strengthening its compliance plans for those tax provisions. […]

Cybersecurity

Recently MeriTalk sat down with Monzy Merza, vice president of cybersecurity go-to-market at Databricks, a data and artificial intelligence (AI) company that offers the first and only lakehouse platform in the cloud. Merza chatted about the implications and opportunities with M-21-31 and offered insights for successfully meeting its mandates. […]

CISA

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) today issued an emergency directive to Federal government civilian branch agencies running several VMware products to apply updates to those, or remove them from agency networks until updates can be made. […]

electric grid

The Department of Energy (DoE) has begun to gather feedback on a $2.5 billion investment to build out new power transmission infrastructure across the country using funds approved by Congress in bipartisan infrastructure legislation. […]

Federal money spending government

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a new report laying out how the Federal government could save billions in spending and improve the efficiency of its programs and activities – with up to $21 billion of projected benefits for 2022 and beyond. […]

contract acquisition CFO

The General Services Administration (GSA) has updated its request for proposals (RFPs) for its Polaris small business-focused governmentwide acquisition contract (GWAC) vehicle, and is looking for industry feedback on the changes before reopening the RFPs. […]

The Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) Program – for several years a bedrock asset in the government’s bid to improve Federal agency cybersecurity – is having a decisive impact in furthering agency work on requirements of the Biden administration’s year-old Cybersecurity Executive Order (EO), new research findings from MeriTalk shows. Long before the 2021 Cyber […]

The United States on May 12 signed onto an expanded version of the Budapest Convention that governs international cooperation against cyber crime, and that in its expanded form will allow for easier collection of cross-border electronic evidence. […]

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