TMF investments to the Departments of Education, Commerce and State total just under $50 million. 

The State Department received two investments: $18.2 million to increase diplomacy through generative AI and $13.1 million to transition its identity and access management systems to a zero-trust architecture model.

The AI investment is intended to “empower its widely dispersed team members to work more efficiently and improve access to enhanced information resources,” including diplomatic cables, media summaries and reports. On the zero trust investment, State said it is planning to expedite the creation of a comprehensive consolidated identity trust system, as well as centralizing workflows for the onboarding and offboarding process.

Clare Martorana, the federal CIO and TMF board chair, said in a statement that she’s “thrilled to see our catalytic funding stream powering the use of AI and improving security at the State Department.” 

State recently announced a chatbot for internal uses and revised its public AI use case inventory to remove nine items from the agency website. Additionally, the agency has started to encourage its workforce to use generative AI tools like ChatGPT. 

The Department of Education, meanwhile, is using a $5.9 million allocation to assist the Federal Student Aid office on a new StudentAid.gov feature called “My Activity” to centralize documents and data to track activities and status updates. The FSA is anticipating “a reduction in wait times and the need for customer care inquiries,” per the GSA release. 

Education also recently announced an RFI for cloud computing capabilities for the FSA office, a follow-on contract for its Next Generation Cloud. 

Finally, the Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will put its $12 million TMF investment toward modernizing weather.gov through a redesign to “enhance information accessibility” and “establish a sustainable, mobile-first infrastructure.” NOAA reported plans to integrate translation capabilities for underserved communities’ benefit. 

The release noted that NOAA’s associated application programming interface “faces challenges, causing disruptions in accessing dependable weather information for the American public.”

Martorana said she was “equally excited about the TMF’s two other critical investments — with students getting more modern access to manage their education journeys and the public gaining access to life-saving weather information in an accessible manner for all.”

These investments come after a second appropriations package to fund the government for fiscal year 2024 threatened to claw back $100 million from the TMF. Both the GSA and the Office of Management and Budget have faced challenges in convincing lawmakers to meet funding levels proposed by the Biden administration.

Martorana recently called on Congress to fund the TMF, pointing to the funding vehicle as a way to improve service delivery for the public across the government.

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The Tech Diplomacy Academy, which launched Tuesday, is an online platform centered on teaching its enrollees about the science and engineering behind emerging technology, how those technologies are being commercialized, and the foreign policy risks and opportunities for those innovations, Michelle Giuda, the CEO of the nonprofit and nonpartisan Krach Institute and former assistant secretary of state, told FedScoop. 

As the first adopter, the State Department will use that platform as an educational resource for its officials.

“The Krach Institute’s gift of educational licenses for their new Tech Diplomacy Academy will provide our public diplomacy and cyber and digital technology professionals access to cutting-edge training,” Elizabeth M. Allen, State’s undersecretary for public diplomacy, said in a written statement provided to FedScoop.

Allen underscored the importance of technology in global affairs, noting that “tech diplomacy is a central foreign policy priority” and that mastery of tech diplomacy “is critical for the State Department workforce to keep the United States on the leading edge.”

The establishment of the academy comes as understanding technology has become even more important in foreign affairs. Giuda said technological threats have only grown with things like generative AI, advanced semiconductors, 6G, and Iranian drones, and State Department leaders have highlighted the need to upskill diplomats.

“What we’re doing with the Tech Diplomacy Academy is empowering U.S. and allied government, business, tech, and then citizen leaders, so that they can compete and win in this rapidly changing technology landscape and rapidly changing and contested geopolitical landscape,” Giuda said.

Having the State Department as the first organization to adopt a new program is also something of a full-circle moment for the Krach Institute, which was founded by former State Department officials. 

The institute was co-founded in 2021 by Keith Krach, former chairman and CEO of Docusign and former undersecretary of state for economic growth, and Mung Chiang, now president of Purdue University and a former science and technology adviser to the secretary of state. 

While working at the State Department during the Trump administration, Giuda said that she, Krach and Chiang worked together to engineer the Clean Network, an alliance of countries and telecommunications companies, and in the process engineered new methods they called “tech diplomacy.”

“We’ve got this proven model now for how we work together with U.S. and allied governments, with corporations — not just in the U.S., but across all of those allied partners — in order to secure a critical tech sector, and so the founding of the Krach Institute was meant to continue that work,” Giuda said.

The Krach Institute’s “North Star” is to ensure that “technology advances freedom” and the Tech Diplomacy Academy advances that, she said.

The first curriculum the academy is offering is called the Tech Primer Series and focuses on fundamentals of critical emerging technologies, according to a release provided to FedScoop ahead of the announcement. 

Officials at the State Department using the new platform will be able to take the courses provided by the academy on demand as their busy schedules allow, Giuda said. Courses are roughly one hour long and are composed of 10 six-minute modules. The initial curriculum has about 20 courses, and upon completion, the enrollee will receive a certificate, Giuda said.

The No. 1 metric for the success of the program will be whether the academy is providing value and new information to U.S. diplomats, she said. 

While the State Department is the first, more partnerships within the government are part of the vision for the academy. Ultimately, Giuda said “the goal is for the entire USG to be learning on this platform.” 

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In total, the department removed nine items from its website — several of which appeared to be identical use cases listed under two different agencies — and changed the bureau for a handful of the remaining items. The State Department didn’t provide a response to FedScoop’s requests for comment on why those uses were removed or changed.

The deletions came roughly a week after the Office of Management and Budget released draft guidance for 2024 inventories that says, among many other requirements, that agencies “must not remove retired or decommissioned use cases that were included in prior inventories, but instead mark them as no longer in use.” OMB has previously stated that agencies “are responsible for maintaining the accuracy of their inventories.”

AI use case inventories — which are public, annual disclosures first required by a Trump-era executive order — have so far lacked consistency. Other agencies have also made changes to their inventories outside the annual schedule, including the Department of Transportation and the Department of Homeland Security. OMB’s recent draft guidance and memo on AI governance seek to enhance and expand what is reported in those disclosures.

OMB declined to comment on the removals or whether it’s given agencies guidance on deleting items in their current inventories.

Notably, the department removed a use case titled “forecasting,” which was a pilot using statistical models to forecast outcomes that the agency told FedScoop last year it had shuttered. The description for the use case stated that it had been “applied to COVID cases as well as violent events in relation to tweets.” 

Several of the other deleted State Department uses were related to media and digital content. 

For example, the agency removed the disclosure of a “Facebook Ad Test Optimization System” that it said was used to collect media clips from around the world, a “Global Audience Segmentation Framework” it reported using to analyze “media clips reports” from embassy public affairs sections, and a “Machine-Learning Assisted Measurement and Evaluation of Public Outreach” that it said was used for “collecting, analyzing, and summarizing the global digital content footprint of the Department.” 

State also removed its disclosure of “Behavioral Analytics for Online Surveys Test (Makor Analytics),” which the agency said was a pilot that “aims to provide additional information beyond self-reported data that reflects sentiment analysis in the country of interest.” That use case had been listed under the Bureau of Information Resource Management and the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Both references were removed.

Two of the removed items had been listed under two agencies but had only one disclosure removed: an AI tool for “identifying similar terms and phrases based off a root word” and a use for “optical character recognition and natural language processing on Department cables.”

Another removed use was for a “Verified Imagery Pilot Project” by the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. That pilot tested “how the use of a technology service, Sealr, could verify the delivery of foreign assistance to conflict-affected areas where neither” the department nor its “implementing partner could go.”

While the use case inventory was trimmed down, the department also appears to be adding uses of AI to its operations. State Chief Information Officer Kelly Fletcher recently announced that the department was launching an internal AI chatbot to help with things like translation after staff requested such a tool. 

Rebecca Heilweil and Caroline Nihill contributed to this report.

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Kelly Fletcher, State’s chief information officer, said during a speech Tuesday at Palo Alto Networks’s Public Sector Ignite event that the creation of a generative AI chatbot is something that the agency’s workforce is asking for as publicly available tools like ChatGPT become more popular.

“The thing I hear most that people want is, they want a chatbot,” Fletcher said. “We’re gonna let people experiment, we’re gonna see what they use it for and then we are gonna move to building things that are more custom fit for State.”

Fletcher provided examples of how the gen AI tool could help with translation needs, including the loading of a 30-page document written in Russian into a model and asking for a summary in English, and inputting public information from other countries — such as regional news — into systems and receiving an English summary.

In addition to improving user experience and increasing productivity “dramatically,” Fletcher said that having this tool — a pilot effort led by the Office of Management Strategy and Solutions Center for Analytics and the Bureau of Information Resource Management — could enhance cybersecurity, since employees would be using the chatbot on the agency’s secured network.

“We can load public information into publicly available chatbots, get a summary, get some hints, get started. But I want to do that with data that’s unclassified but specific to the State Department, where it wouldn’t be appropriate for it to get hoovered up into the world,” Fletcher said. “What I don’t want is State Department data leaving the State Department environment.”

Separately, in its AI use case inventory, the agency noted that the Bureau of Information Resource Management is “planning to incorporate” a virtual agent or chatbot — provided by ServiceNow as part of its platform as a service — into existing applications to offer users support and connect users with data requests.

The agency declined to comment further on Fletcher’s speech.

This story was updated April 4, 2024, after State corrected the bureau in its AI use case inventory that is planning to incorporate a virtual agent or chatbot. The update also included newly provided information regarding the bureaus piloting the new chatbot.

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While many of these actions are still preliminary, growing focus on the technology signals that federal officials expect to not only govern but eventually use generative AI. 

A majority of the civilian federal agencies that fall under the Chief Financial Officers Act have either created guidance, implemented a policy, or temporarily blocked the technology, according to a FedScoop analysis based on public records requests and inquiries to officials. The approaches vary, highlighting that different sectors of the federal government face unique risks — and unique opportunities — when it comes to generative AI. 

As of now, several agencies, including the Social Security Administration, the Department of Energy, and Veterans Affairs, have taken steps to block the technology on their systems. Some, including NASA, have or are working on establishing secure testing environments to evaluate generative AI systems. The Agriculture Department has even set up a board to review potential generative AI use cases within the agency. 

Some agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development, have discouraged employees from inputting private information into generative AI systems. Meanwhile, several agencies, including Energy and the Department of Homeland Security, are working on generative AI projects. 

The Departments of Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, and Treasury did not respond to requests for comment, so their approach to the technology remains unclear. Other agencies, including the Small Business Administration, referenced their work on AI but did not specifically address FedScoop’s questions about guidance, while the Office of Personnel Management said it was still working on guidance. The Department of Labor didn’t respond to FedScoop’s questions about generative AI. FedScoop obtained details about the policies of Agriculture, USAID, and Interior through public records requests. 

The Biden administration’s recent executive order on artificial intelligence discourages agencies from outright banning the technology. Instead, agencies are encouraged to limit access to the tools as necessary and create guidelines for various use cases. Federal agencies are also supposed to focus on developing “appropriate terms of service with vendors,” protecting data, and “deploying other measures to prevent misuse of Federal Government information in generative AI.”

Agency policies on generative AI differ

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Abraham Teklu Lemma, 50, allegedly accessed secret and top-secret information unlawfully and distributed that information to an unspecified African country, according to a press release and an accompanying affidavit. Lemma is a naturalized U.S. citizen who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, and was previously a citizen of an African country, according to the affidavit. According to the DOJ press release, Lemma is of Ethiopian descent.

Lemma was arrested on charges of gathering or delivering and conspiracy to gather and deliver defense information to aid a foreign government, in addition to having unauthorized possession of defense information and willfully retaining it, according to the criminal complaint that was unsealed Thursday. 

While working as a contractor for the State Department, Lemma allegedly searched classified portals to access non-DOS intelligence reports without “a need-to-know the classified information.” He then copied and pasted information from at least 85 reports – the majority of which was about the undisclosed African country – and printed and downloaded secret and top-secret information from the reports, the affidavit alleged.

The court document also alleges that Lemma used an encrypted messaging application to send classified national defense information to a phone number believed to be used by on or on behalf of an intelligence official for the undisclosed African country. In one such message, the foreign official praised Lemma, saying “[a]lways this beautiful country have [sic] some special people who scarify [sic] their life to protect our proud history. You always remembered. It doesn’t matter the results,” according to the court document.

Lemma has been working as a help desk technician in the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research since at least 2021 and as a contract management analyst at the Department of Justice since about May 2022. He has had a top-secret security clearance since at least 2020 and had been working with U.S. government agencies since at least July 2019, the court document said.

The Department of State said Thursday it found information indicating that an “information technology contractor may have removed, retained, and transmitted classified national defense information” during an internal security review. That 60-day review was in response to the arrest of a member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard who allegedly disclosed classified national defense information. 

The DOS commended the FBI and DOJ for their work that led to Lemma’s arrest, and said it “pledges its continued full support to the investigation.”

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According to Palantir, the blanket purchase agreement has a five-year time horizon and will be used by the State bureau to establish a new enterprise data management platform called Project Axiom.

The Bureau of Medical Services is the division of the State Department tasked with promoting and safeguarding the health and well-being of America’s diplomatic community and facilitating diplomatic efforts.

In a press release announcing the award, Palantir said Project Axiom will provide the bureau with a “common operational picture” to improve data-informed decision-making and help improve its ability to react to global crises by enabling workflows related to emergency management and preparedness, mission tracking and logistics and other areas.

Commenting on the contract award, Palantir State Department lead Mahtab Emdadi said: “We look forward to continuing to work alongside the Department to further their goals of data-driven diplomacy through the use of innovative technologies.”

It is the latest civilian agency contract win for the company, following a $443 million consolidated disease contract, which was awarded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in December. That agreement was renewed software and digital capabilities Palantir has provided to the U.S. government for disease surveillance and outbreak response.

In September, the Department of Homeland Security renewed a contract worth $95.5 million with the AI and analytics company for investigative case management.

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Secretary Antony Blinken’s modernization agenda and the department’s first-ever Enterprise Data Strategy — signed one year ago this week — are changing the game. The Enterprise Data Strategy (EDS) helped the Department surge data policy, data engineering, and data science resources to high-priority, high-visibility mission and management topics in successive, six-month “data campaigns.” Already, data is informing decisions across management issues like anomalous health incidents and cybersecurity, crisis operations like the Afghanistan retrograde, and foreign policy issues including strategic competition with China and U.S. engagement in multilateral organizations. We see our unique “campaign” approach to delivering on the data strategy as a key reason the State Department is currently seeing so much success.

What makes our campaigns different? Oftentimes in government, a strategy is blessed by senior leaders and organizations commit to impossible goals, even over the long term. And organizational and cultural change in large government organizations is famously hard, even with senior leader buy-in.

Instead, we recognize that like any technical project, priorities change quickly. No proposed implementation plan would survive first contact with mission realities. The EDS intentionally promotes an abstract three to five-year “implementation roadmap” centered on delivering decision advantage through analytics, effectively governing data as a strategic asset, building a culture of data literacy, and developing the needed tech backbone. 

The data campaigns are vehicles for applying the EDS to targeted priorities with which the department workforce is already intimately engaged. For example, the first two data campaigns were strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and workforce diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA). Our bet was that if we could prove data and analytics — and a cultural mindset supportive of them — could deliver real, tangible results on strategic competition and workforce DEIA, people throughout the organization would start to trust that data and analytics could help with their mission too. Change by showing, not telling. 

Animating philosophy and campaign structure

The animating philosophy for our data campaigns is “12-8-4”: We plan to accomplish 12 things, we’ll get eight of them done, and that will still be four more than anyone thought possible. We back up this philosophy with an aggressive surge of resources to apply analytics to a topic with a go-fast, sprint-to-the-finish mentality. We believe the core benefit of a campaign-based approach to digital transformation is that high-priority mission and management topics motivate people to partner, get to yes, and deliver results more quickly and robustly than abstract strategic goals. No one gets excited about showing up to a “data quality working group,” but a working group on how to unlock HR data to dismantle structural barriers to racial equity in our diplomatic workforce? That’s an effort worth getting behind. 

Functionally, a campaign is all about integrated, cross-functional delivery across our own teams. Each campaign is assigned not just dedicated analytics teams, but also communications staff, data policy and data-sharing agreement specialists, and full-stack engineers. Cross-functional delivery ensures we are bringing the right tools to the problem. If what we need is a new data policy, not machine learning, we shouldn’t be technological determinists just because it sounds more innovative. Often what our customers need first and foremost is systematized, sustainable data management and information synthesis, not predictive algorithms. Our cross-functional teams ensure we have and deliver the right tools to the problem. 

Crucially, the campaign construct attracts executive attention. Working on the highest-priority issues means analytics teams get the attention and support needed from senior leaders to actually implement the strategy in the face of inevitable technical and bureaucratic blockers. In exchange, campaign teams are accountable for actually delivering value — not producing “shelfware” strategy-implementation status reports. Fortunately, this visibility has helped deliver results. And we’ve been able to build trust among data skeptics and help leaders and staff alike understand the value of data to their own goals – why analytics is not just a “nice to have,” but a “must-have” on foreign assistance, competition with China, diplomatic engagement, or crisis operations.

Data campaigns and beyond

To help bring better data to the massive challenge of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA), we took a collaborative approach with Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley and her new Office of Diversity and Inclusion, the Bureau of Global Talent Management, the Office of Civil Rights, and the Office of the Legal Advisor. After a six-month DEIA data campaign, we produced a baseline assessment available to the entire department to bring hard numbers to the challenge of DEIA. One career ambassador told us this effort was “the most transparent and actionable information on DEIA” they had seen in their 30 years of service. To build this report, our campaign team worked with partners throughout the agency to develop the first DEIA data policy in the history of the U.S. government. The policy has made HR information more transparent and accessible while protecting individual privacy and meeting all legal requirements. 

Our China work has also been essential to the Department’s growing focus on strategic competition with the PRC. First, we developed an analytics platform tracking PRC activities around the world, which is regularly used to inform our foreign policy, strategic planning, global presence, and resource allocations. We also took a hybrid subject matter expertise survey and algorithmic approach to recommend foreign assistance projects under the Countering PRC Influence Fund, aligning foreign assistance to strategic priorities. We have also built a prototype platform to derive insights from millions of diplomatic cables at scale using machine learning, which helps the State Department make fuller use of our most important novel data asset: on-the-ground reporting from our worldwide network of diplomatic posts. 

The value of data to diplomacy that these campaigns and other efforts have shown has begun to pay dividends elsewhere. We’ve seen record enrollment in the Foreign Service Institute’s training courses on data literacy and analytics and the inclusion of data literacy in promotion precepts for the Foreign Service. We are also successfully competing for the top data science talent in the industry. Over the past year, dozens of new data scientists joined the State Department across an array of mission areas and bureaus – not just the Office of Management Strategy and Solutions’ Center for Analytics. And State’s current initiative to hire at least 50 data scientists for positions across the department received over 400 applications in only a few days. As Deputy Secretary for Management and Resources Brian McKeon said to Congress, it may surprise you to learn that top data scientists want to serve their country at the State Department, and are leaving top jobs in industry and academia to do so. With the unique opportunity afforded by the EDS and our data campaigns, this does not surprise us. 

When British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston received his first telegraph message in the 1860s, he exclaimed, “My God, this is the end of diplomacy!” Yet here we are, and needless to say, technology will never be the “end” of diplomacy. Rather, by infusing the art of diplomacy with modern technology and the science of data, we are strengthening the digital backbone of America’s diplomatic corps and ensuring the country’s oldest cabinet agency delivers results for the American people far into the future — one campaign at a time. 

Matthew Graviss is the chief data officer at the Department of State. Garrett Berntsen is his deputy.

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