Federal CIO Suzette Kent tops the witness list for the House Government Operations Subcommittee’s June 26 hearing to assess implementation of the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA), and to release the eighth version of the full House Oversight and Reform Committee’s FITARA Scorecard that grades Federal agencies on their progress under the law, MeriTalk has learned. […]

A new update to the Sharing Quality Services cross-agency priority (CAP) goal, released June 20, lays out the timeline for the currently designated quality services management offices (QSMOs), and hints at three more areas for the new, centralized approach to shared services. […]

The June updates from the President’s Management Agenda’s (PMA) CAP Goal Action Plan to Modernize IT to Increase Productivity and Security, released June 20, see all key milestones either completed or on track to be completed by Q4 FY2019, but delays in implementing government-wide tools have impacted asset management security capabilities. […]

The Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB’s) Office of Federal Procurement Policy Deputy Administrator Lesley Field explained how OMB is working on its category management, training procurement officers, and data use modernization to accelerate and sharpen Federal procurement at the Acquisition Innovation CXO Tech Forum today. […]

In light of the increasing ubiquity of data breaches, Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report today recommending that Federal agencies should discontinue knowledge-based verification to strengthen their remote identity proofing processes and that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) should provide guidance in creating alternative identity proofing methods. […]

The Acting Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Russell Vought wrote a letter to Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and eight other members of Congress asking for a two-year delay of a ban that prohibits U.S. government contractors from doing business with Chinese-telecommunications company Huawei, in an effort to give companies more time to comply with the legislation. […]

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released the finalized framework of the Federal Data Strategy, as well as a draft of its year one action plan today, cementing the administration’s approach to data under the President’s Management Agenda and setting out new activities for agencies to complete. […]

Federal Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Grant Schneider said today that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is continually working towards developing standards and accountability for supply chain security and cybersecurity. […]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its 2019 Annual Report on Tuesday, May 21, and while the report names a few current areas with duplicative or inefficient IT efforts, it also points to past IT initiatives as examples of Federal success in achieving cost savings. […]

A new memo released Tuesday, May 22, by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) updates the Federal identity, credentials, and access management (ICAM) policy, encouraging the use of more flexible solutions, supporting pilots for new authenticators, and requiring agencies to create an ICAM team. […]

The Trump administration’s plan to reorganize the Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) ran squarely into bipartisan concerns expressed by House members over a lack of information about the plan to move the agency’s functions to the General Services Administration (GSA) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). […]

Federal agencies have made a slow but sure increase in cloud service investments, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report last week. […]

While Federal agencies are making progress in moving to the cloud, challenges exist in tracking the cost savings benefits of those moves due to a lack of agency-level guidance and confusion about tracking under guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), according to a report released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Monday, May 6. […]

Sens. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., and James Lankford, R-Okla., introduced the Federal Agency Customer Experience (FACE) Act of 2019 on May 1 to improve American customer service experiences when they interact with Federal agencies. […]

The General Services Administration (GSA) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a joint report to Congress today to create a ‘proof of concept’ e-marketplace portal for purchases below $25,000. […]

With the release of the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB’s) new memo on shared services, the General Services Administration is looking to the opportunity to support the whole-of-government approach that the memo supports, said Keith Nakasone, deputy assistance commissioner for IT Acquisition at the Federal Acquisition Service (FAS). […]

With the release of a new memo by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on shared services today, a major revamp of how the Federal government approaches and acquires cybersecurity services, financial management systems, HR systems, and more is underway. […]

A new memo released today by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) revamps the Federal government’s approach to shared services by establishing lead agencies for business support areas, including cybersecurity, and requiring agencies to meet government-wide standards and gain approval to go outside shared services. […]

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is being careful about introducing any kind of unintended bias in its use of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, according to Margie Graves, Deputy CIO at OMB, who said today that Federal agencies should be very judicious about the technologies’ “fit for use.” […]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) on April 17 provided updates on specific recommendations regarding cybersecurity and IT acquisition for the General Services Administration (GSA) and Office of Management and Budget (OMB), respectively. […]

Out of the 24 CFO Act agencies, 13 agencies reported that they had met data center closure goals set by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and a majority met cost savings targets, but no agency with a data center met optimization targets, according to a report released today by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced winners for Part 1 of its Career Compass Challenge, with five white papers selected to win a $5,000 award each. […]

Without a clear governance structure, the implementation of the DATA Act (the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014) has suffered and new guidance might not be reaching agencies, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released last week. […]

The National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) proposed FY2020 budget features $492 million for artificial intelligence (AI) and $106 million for quantum information science (QIS) research and development (R&S) funding, despite the White House’s proposed cuts to overall NSF R&D. […]

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said today that cybersecurity-related spending is due to rise by five percent in FY2020 on a government-wide basis under President Trump’s FY2020 budget proposal. […]

While a Federal government-wide database on fees would require a lot of resources to implement, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) should aim to make more fee data available to the public, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Thursday. […]

Democratic members of Congress from the Washington D.C. area sent a letter to the heads of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) on Tuesday asking when the White House plans to implement the 1.9 percent annual pay raise for Federal civilian workers included in the spending bill passed in February that avoided a further partial government shutdown. […]

In a blog post last week, the General Services Administration (GSA) provided an update on the kind of feedback that it received from the industry for its proposed e-commerce portal. […]

The Consolidated Appropriations Act–the bill negotiated by Democrats and Republicans in Congress that could fully fund several Federal agencies and avert another partial government shutdown–features a variety of funding for IT modernization projects at multiple agencies, according to the joint explanatory statement released with the bill: […]

The Office of Management and Budget issued a memo to Federal agencies Tuesday, pushing them to make sure their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request systems work with the National FOIA Portal. […]