The Monday meeting with OpenAI’s Anna Makanju focused on artificial intelligence’s impact on global development, the release stated. Topics included “advancing progress in key sectors like global health and food security, preventing the misuse of AI, and strengthening information integrity and resilience in USAID partner countries.” 

The announcement comes as several federal agencies, including NASA and the Department of Homeland Security, experiment with OpenAI’s technology. USAID is also prioritizing looking at artificial intelligence use cases and is in the midst of developing a playbook for AI in global development. 

“Administrator Power and Vice President Makanju also discussed USAID’s commitment to localization, and the potential for generative AI and other AI tools to support burden reduction for USAID implementing partners – in particular, burdens that disproportionately impact local organizations,” the agency said.

Meanwhile, OpenAI appears to be continuing to look for ways to work with U.S. federal agencies. Makanju, for her part, has previously said that government use of OpenAI tools is a goal for the company. At a conference hosted by the Semafor in April, she said she was “bullish” on government use of the technology because of its role in providing services to people. 

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The platform is built on the customer relationship management software company’s existing Einstein 1 platform and includes features to transcribe calls for contact center workers and assist caseworkers with generating reports and documenting information.

“This is the kind of work that requires a lot of expertise and there’s never enough people to handle it,” Casey Coleman, senior vice president of global government solutions at Salesforce, told FedScoop in an interview on the sidelines of the company’s conference in Washington. 

Coleman said the system will cut down administrative time for government employees and “leave the experts to do the job of really interacting with people and making sure that the answer is provided to them.”

The announcement came during the company’s “World Tour D.C.” event, which included panels with multiple government customers from agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Internal Revenue Service. 

Other software companies — such as IBM and Microsoft — have also announced new AI tools for government in recent months, as interest in the technology continues to grow in the public sector. Meanwhile, the Biden administration is working to create guidance for procurement of those tools. The Office of Management and Budget is planning action on federal procurement of AI later this year and released a request for information on that work.

Coleman said interest in AI from public sector partners has “spiked up,” particularly for uses related to administrative work and things that can be tested quickly.

“Every conversation we have with public sector customers, or prospective customers, includes AI to some degree,” Coleman said. “Everyone is thinking about it — everyone is looking for use cases to test it on.”

Also on Wednesday, Salesforce announced that its Field Service, Privacy Center and Security Center tools are authorized for FedRAMP’s “high” impact level and the Department of Defense’s “Impact Level 5,” which means they’re cleared to be used with the government’s most sensitive unclassified data. GovSlack also achieved FedRAMP “high” authorization in February. 

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“In the last year, we have updated our strategic plan to focus on making sure that everyone understands our alignment with the mission itself. It’s not just about compliance. It’s not just about following the law. Yes, it is about following the law. But it’s not just about that,” USAID CIO Jason Gray said during a panel Tuesday at Google Cloud’s annual tech conference Next. “It’s about making sure that we’re supporting the missions and enabling and empowering them.”

USAID’s IT strategic plan, which runs from 2024 through 2028, is built around five pillars: “creating a culture of data- and insights-based decision making; delivering agile, secure, and resilient IT platforms; building worldwide skills and capacity; establishing pragmatic governance; and driving high operational performance.”

Gray said USAID’s journey to adopt cloud has been “critical” in better connecting tech to mission in recent years, namely by making it easier to connect and collaborate in austere environments around the world where USAID is called to deliver aid.

“Some of the areas and countries that we operate in, even getting power, reliable power is a massive challenge,” he said, adding that there are also “bandwidth concerns or severe latency.”

When Gray joined USAID as CIO in 2022, the agency was already well on its way to adopting cloud and had an existing partnership with Google Cloud — one that he credits as key in fostering communication and collaboration across international lines while taking care of the basic security requirements.

“Being able to collaborate across the world in real-time through the document management [tool], the security … is absolutely critical, as well,” Gray said. “And knowing that you are encrypting data in use, in transit, at rest” has been critical “because we’re complying, yes, we’re securing things but also enabling our end users to communicate with the implementing partners in the areas that we operate in.”

USAID was recognized in February by Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., ranking member on the House Oversight Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation, as the only federal agency to receive an A grade on the latest FITARA scorecard.

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The latest round of grading awarded one A, 10 Bs, 10 Cs, and three Ds to federal agencies, Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., announced at a roundtable discussion on Capitol Hill. While the grades were generally a decline from the last iteration of the scorecard, Connolly said that starting at a “lower base” was expected with the addition of a new category. “The object here is to move up.”

Carol Harris, director of the Government Accountability Office’s IT and Cybersecurity team, who was also at the roundtable, similarly attributed the decline to the cloud category.

“A large part of this decrease in the grades was driven by the cloud computing category, because it is brand new, and it’s something that we’ve not had a focus on relative to the scorecard,” Harris said.

The FITARA scorecard is a measure of agency progress in meeting requirements of the 2024 Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act that has over time added other technology priorities for agencies. In addition to cloud, the new scorecard also changed existing metrics related to a 2017 law, added a new category grading IT risk assessment progress, and installed a progress tracker.

“I think it’s important the scorecard be a dynamic scorecard,” Connolly said in an interview with FedScoop after the roundtable. He added: “The goal isn’t, let’s have brand new, shiny IT. It’s to make sure that our functions and operations are better serving the American people and that they’re protected.”

Harris also underscored the accomplishments of the scorecard, citing $4.7 billion in savings as a result of closing roughly 4,000 data centers and $27.2 billion in savings as the result of eliminating duplicative systems across government.

“So, tremendous accomplishments all coming out of FITARA and the implementation of FITARA,” she said.

The Thursday roundtable featured agency representatives from the Office of Personnel Management, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. USAID was the only agency to get an A.

Updated scorecard

Among the changes, the new scorecard updated the existing category for Modernizing Government Technology to reflect whether agencies have an account dedicated to IT that “satisfies the spirit of” the Modernizing Government Technology Act, which became law in 2017.

Under that metric, each agency must have a dedicated funding stream for government IT that’s controlled by the CIO and provides at least three years of flexible spending, Connolly said at the roundtable.

The transparency and risk management category has also evolved into a new CIO investment evaluation category, Connolly said in written remarks ahead of the roundtable. That category will grade how recently each agency’s IT Dashboard “CIO Evaluation History” data feed reflects new risk assessments for major IT investments, he said.

The 17th scorecard also added a progress tracker, which Connolly said Democrats on the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation worked on with the GAO to create. Connolly is the ranking member of that subcommittee.

“This section will provide transparency into metrics that aren’t being regularly updated or do not lend themselves to grading across agencies,” Connolly said, adding the data “still merits congressional attention, and we want to capture it with this tool.”

The progress tracker also allows stakeholders to keep tabs on categories the subcommittee has retired for the scorecard.

The release of a new scorecard has in the past been a hearing, but Connolly indicated the Republican majority declined to take the issue up. 

At the start of the meeting, Connolly said he was “disappointed” that “some of the Republican majority had turned their backs on FITARA.” He later noted that by “the difference of two votes, this would be called a hearing instead of a meeting.”

FITARA scorecard grades in September were also announced with a roundtable and not a hearing.

“FITARA is a law concerning federal IT management and acquisition,” a House Committee on Oversight and Accountability spokesperson said in a statement to FedScoop. South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace’s “subcommittee has held a dozen hearings in the past year concerning not only federal information technology management and acquisition, but also pressing issues surrounding artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity. These hearings have been a critical vehicle for substantive oversight and the development of significant legislation.”

This story was updated Feb. 2, 2024, with comments from a House Committee on Oversight and Accountability spokesperson.

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With an annual spend of more than $100 billion on IT products, the federal government is falling short on the consistent tracking of its software licenses, leading to missed opportunities for cost reductions, the GAO found. And though there are federal initiatives in place to “better position agencies to maximize cost savings when purchasing software licenses,” the GAO noted that “selected agencies have not fully determined over- or under-purchasing of their five most widely used software licenses.”

The GAO’s study looked at software licenses purchased by the 24 Chief Financial Officers Act agencies, finding that 10 vendors made up the majority of the most widely used licenses. For fiscal year 2021, Microsoft held by far the largest share of vendors organized by the highest amounts paid (31.3%), followed by Adobe (10.43%) and Salesforce (8.7%).

While the GAO was able to identify and analyze vendors based on government spend, it was “unclear which products under those licenses are most widely used because of agencies’ inconsistent and incomplete data,” the report noted. “For example, multiple software products may be bundled into a single license with a vendor, and agencies may not have usage data for each product individually.”

“Without better data, agencies also don’t know whether they have the right number of licenses for their needs,” the report continued.

For their recommendations, the GAO focused on nine agencies based on the size of their IT budgets and then zeroed in on the five most widely used licenses within those agencies. The selected agencies were the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, State and Veterans Affairs, as well as the Office of Personnel Management, Social Security Administration and USAID.

The recommendations centered most on better and more consistent inventory tracking to ensure that agencies didn’t double-dip on software license purchases and were in a better position to take advantage of cost-saving opportunities. There should be more concerted efforts to compare prices, the GAO stated.

HUD did not say whether it agreed or disagreed with the GAO’s recommendations, while the other eight agencies said in responses that they did.

Congress in 2023 attempted to rein in duplicative software across the government with the Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets Act, which aimed to consolidate federal software purchasing and give agencies greater ability to push back on restrictive software licensing. However, after passing the House in July, the bill never moved in the Senate.

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USAID and State’s public notice, posted Friday in the Federal Register, requests information on the barriers and opportunities presented by AI, focusing specifically on responsible usage, AI policy and protections and public engagement with AI governance and risks. A USAID official said in an interview with FedScoop that the agency is thinking about “equitable access” to tools that “may exacerbate gaps that we already see in the world.”

This request for information is one step toward the agency’s sole requirement in President Joe Biden’s AI executive order: USAID has one year to “promote safe, responsible and right’s-affirming development and deployment of AI abroad” through an AI in Global Development Playbook, according to the order’s text. 

The USAID official told FedScoop that the playbook is “really going to outline some principles, some guidelines and really best practices that are accounting for both the social, technical, economic, human rights and security conditions that are going to be impacted by artificial intelligence — specifically not just beyond the U.S. borders, but in countries that USAID works in, which I have to say aren’t always the countries that people are paying attention to.”

Much of the agency’s use of AI has been in continuing the advancement of global development, including a current partnership with Duke University that is focused on authoritarianism and the closing of civic space that allows support organizations, members of the media and others to respond to “growing restrictions on democratic freedoms of association, assembly and expression.”

“We’re equally focused on the potential of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and how they can both accelerate and erode development progress,” the USAID official said. “What that means for us is just this balance of mitigation of risk and understanding that harm. This is largely something that’s important for us to learn and understand. … In some countries, you’re finding folks going all in, because they’re seeing that learning AI tools and learning how to build AI tools and how to use AI tools, in some ways, that is the way that they’re going to leapfrog in this global economy and in this rapidly changing economy.”

The USAID official stated that the agency has been using AI “for years” and is trying to harness the technology with the agency’s mission in mind. Internally, USAID is looking to minimize time on tasks that do not directly correlate with “high-value tasks.” 

“We’re at an agency that is quite literally trying to solve the world’s most pressing challenges,” the official said. “There will never be enough people, enough hours or enough money to do that. So these types of tools like artificial intelligence can help us be more targeted in our approach. If some tasks can be a bit more automated, that’s great, and certainly making sure that we mitigate the risk by putting human eyes on the final products to make sure that it has integrity, that the datasets we’re working on have integrity.”

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