The Biden administration announced it will reactivate a government website that will allow Americans to request free at-home COVID-19 tests at the end of September. […]
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COVID-19
COVID-19 may never leave us entirely, but the White House took official steps last week to ramp down much of the preventative guidance it had put in place while the pandemic was raging in 2020 and 2021. […]
Government Accountability Office (GAO) officials told lawmakers at a House Small Business Committee hearing on March 6 that the Small Business Administration (SBA) still needs to implement key management improvements for COVID-19 relief programs to prevent further fraudulent activity. “Although SBA helped millions of small businesses with its pandemic relief programs, our concerns about [implementation […]
Due to the large number of pandemic fraud-related charges, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) is calling on Congress to take a number of actions that can help Federal agencies to strengthen internal controls and financial and fraud risk management practices. […]
As the Federal government is looking to recover and make sense of the rampant unemployment insurance (UI) fraud seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, experts today told members of Congress that the government is in dire need of a technology overhaul to keep up with fraudulent actors who are leveraging emerging technologies such as AI to steal taxpayer money. […]
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Advisory Council is calling on the agency to invest in technology that supports remote work, according to a new report by the panel’s workforce subcommittee. […]
The Department of Justice (DoJ) announced on Wednesday that it has seized over $1.4 billion in COVID-19 relief funding stolen by criminals since the start of the pandemic, with over $200 million recovered in the past three months. […]
The Biden administration said today it is creating a new Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPR) to lead and coordinate Federal government efforts to prepare for and respond to any future threats similar in scope to the coronavirus pandemic. […]
The Small Business Administration (SBA) Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a new report today estimating that of the $1.2 trillion SBA disbursed through its pandemic assistance loan programs, over $200 billion was potentially fraudulent. […]
With the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) set to end on May 11, the White House assured Americans this week that many major telehealth flexibilities will remain in place, particularly for people who live in rural areas and who struggle to find access to care. […]
As the COVID-19 public health emergency (PHE) is set to end next week on May 11, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky warned that this also means the end of data collection and sharing efforts that many Americans have come to expect from the agency on pandemic-related data. […]
The COVID-19 pandemic allowed the Federal government to speed up its AI data integration tools in a way that would have never been possible if it were not for the “all hands on deck” approach, according to Greg Singleton, chief artificial intelligence officer at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). […]
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) this week announced that it will remove the COVID-19 governmentwide operating status on May 15 – meaning the pandemic will no longer drive how and where Federal employees work. […]
President Joe Biden signed a House bill on Monday that officially ends the COVID-19 national emergency, first enacted by the Trump administration in 2020. The national emergency was originally set to expire on March 1. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is looking for legislative assistance from Congress to ensure that the agency can continue to provide care to veterans via telehealth appointments. […]
The Biden-Harris administration released a three-part proposal on March 2 asking Congress for $1.6 billion to help provide Federal agencies and local governments with more funding to handle pandemic-related fraud claims, modernize identity verification systems, and support victims of identity theft. […]
A group of Republican senators sent a letter this week to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh asking for progress on the government’s efforts to prevent fraudulent COVID-19 funding claims, and to recoup any of the billions of dollars of relief funding estimated to have been stolen by fraudsters. […]
The Biden-Harris administration announced today that it sent a notice to the Federal Register stating that the government will end the COVID-19 emergency on May 11, 2023. […]
From the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health officials understood that using data to gather insights from otherwise inert information across the entire health ecosystem would improve public health outcomes, but raising the value of that data requires a lot of work, according to several public health officials. […]
The Biden Administration has reactivated a government website that will allow Americans to request free Covid-19 tests ahead of what is expected to be an uptick in coronavirus cases this winter. […]
A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) finds that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) spent the majority of its $36.7 billion in COVID-19 relief funding to address three key areas – with digital services and IT efforts being two of them. […]
As the nation prepares to roll into colder weather months amid a still-uncertain picture for the coronavirus, the Federal government has a message for all employees: take a half day off on us, and get a COVID-19 booster shot. […]
Considering the nearly three-year COVID-19 pandemic that has had a chokehold on the United States and exposed vulnerabilities in the nation’s ability to operate digitally, one government watchdog is urging Federal officials to overcome their challenges in how they manage public health data. […]
Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., reintroduced the Chai Suthammanont Remembrance Act for the third time in hopes that the bill designed to protect Federal employees during health emergencies will finally pass the Senate. […]
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is pushing the General Services Administration (GSA) to share data that GSA is in the process of collecting on how Federal agencies are sizing up post-pandemic on-site workspace demand. […]
Amid evolving workplace changes following the worst portion of the COVID-19 pandemic, experts from the General Services Administration (GSA) are encouraging Federal agency leaders to ensure that future workplace change decisions be grounded in agency missions. […]
The Biden administration is ending its free at-home COVID-19 test program this week due to a lack of congressional funding, according to an announcement on the COVID.gov website. […]
The White House’s Safer Federal Workforce Task Force has released new guidance that calls on agencies to relax some COVID-19 protocols by August 22. […]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has announced it is launching an agencywide review in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to modernize and better position the agency for the future of public health. […]
House Government Operations Subcommittee Chairman Gerry Connolly, D-Va., said today he is preparing legislation that aims to reduce the Federal government’s ballooning improper payments rate – which amounted to at least $281 billion in fiscal year 2021 and was greatly exacerbated by fraud in connection with COVID-19 relief programs including unemployment insurance (UI) administered by states whose IT systems were overwhelmed by demand. […]