Speaking Wednesday at the Scoop News Group-produced UiPath On Tour: Public Sector event in Washington, D.C., IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel said the agency is using Inflation Reduction Act funds to continue to modernize systems through AI utilization. While taxpayers can interact with the IRS through paper, at in-person centers and over the phone, Werfel said that employing AI capabilities will allow taxpayers to not have to wait or be put on hold, instead logging on and interacting with those technologies to find the answer to a frequently asked question or challenge. 

Werfel said AI can also assist the agency with automated efficiency to reduce mistakes and strengthen the tax system’s integrity, allowing investigators “to go where scrutiny is needed most.” The technology, according to Werfel, can be used to select the corporations and wealthy individuals most in need of auditing, and leave those who are “playing by the rules” alone.

“We’re gonna need an AI-powered solution to help taxpayers get the answers they need,” Werfel said. “Those solutions have to be developed, increasingly. … We have a strong baseline and momentum in using [IRA] funds, of starting to build AI, build chatbots and other solutions to go after these basic questions, but we’re really just getting started.” 

These tools could also help those who face complicated challenges when it comes to filing, including taxpayers living in vulnerable communities, according to the commissioner. Werfel noted that these populations are more susceptible to fraud schemes and often do not have access to services that investigate suspicious or malicious acts.

“Maybe over time we can increasingly find AI solutions to address” more complicated problems, Werfel said. “But in the meantime, we will continue to have human interaction and expert account managers to help.”

Earlier this year, Werfel testified in front of the House Ways and Means Committee and acknowledged that the IRS is using AI to help identify corporations and individuals with a “higher risk for tax noncompliance.”

During the same hearing, Werfel said that from 2010 to 2022, Congress clawed back the IRS’s budget by 25%, a fact he mentioned again at Wednesday’s event. 

The agency’s use of technology was “stagnant” over that time period, he added, despite the tax system reportedly growing in number of filings and overall complexity over the course of 12 years. 

The IRS reported more than 98 million e-filed returns in 2010, accounting for nearly 70% of total filings. In 2022, the agency reported over 152 million e-filing returns received, almost 92% of the total filings.

During the ACT-IAC/DCI CX Summit in Arlington, Va., last year, Werfel said the IRS was making progress in the push for digitization and needed to address “some real mission critical-risks” with IRA funding. This included improvements to static IRS web tools and hiring staff so that taxpayers had a better chance of getting through to the IRS via phone calls. Werfel said Wednesday that call wait times were down to an average of three minutes this tax season, and the agency saw “the most traffic to IRS.gov we’ve ever had.”

The IRS is also working toward the creation of a prototype validation server, specifically at the Statistics of Income division, Office of Science and Technology Policy Deputy Chief Technology Officer Deirdre Mulligan said during the IAPP Global Privacy Summit earlier this month in Washington, D.C. 

“The [SOI] at the IRS is creating multiple synthetic datasets and administrative tax data and building a prototype validation server using differential, formal privacy methodologies that empowers researchers to indirectly conduct statistical analyses on that confidential data,” Mulligan said. 

The federal government, she added, wants to “make sure that even researchers are protecting that data.”

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During a House Science, Space and Technology Committee hearing on Thursday, Republican and Democratic lawmakers asked for an update on where the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy stands in releasing  final guidance for securing institutions and organizations — primarily in higher education — that receive federal funding for research and development within science and technology.

OSTP Director Arati Prabhakar said that RSP is a “personal priority” for her and that the office is looking to “get this sorted and clear for everyone.” She added that OSTP is working through “very significant comments” that organizations have shared in response to the draft guidance and is “re-vectoring accordingly.” 

The feedback on the draft guidance from “inside and outside of government” throughout the research space “gave us considerable pause,” Prabhakar said during the hearing. “What I want to be sure of is that we don’t turn this research security program process into a checklist that an administrator signs off on. … [Researchers should] have an awareness of what’s going on and until we do that, that research security program isn’t really going to work. So that has turned out to be more complex and taking us much longer than I would like.”

The RSP’s creation is in response to a 2021 presidential memorandum on national security strategy in government-supported research and development. The memorandum, known as NSPM-33, directed OSTP to coordinate activities to protect federally funded research from “foreign government interference and outreach to the United States scientific and academic communities to enhance awareness of risks to research security and federal government actions to address these risks.”

Committee Chairman Frank Lucas, R-Okla., said during the hearing that RSP “is an issue that is critically important to the committee and for so many purposes overall,” urging Prabhakar to reach out to Congress if OSTP needs “any additional authorities or directives … to mandate this. We want to help facilitate this process as quickly and as effectively as possible.”

In February 2023, OSTP released draft guidance on requirements for research security programs at universities across the country. In March, the office issued a request for information for research organizations impacted by the program requirement and other research organizations, seeking comment on equity, clarity, feasibility, burden and compliance. 

Since then, multiple organizations have published comments to OSTP, but the office has not released official guidance on foreign talent recruitment programs. Prabhakar acknowledged during the hearing that the comments included the administrative burden of reporting and training, which “falls even heavier on smaller research institutions.”

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology submitted comments for OSTP’s request for comment, expressing various concerns about potential burdens and the need for clarification and consistency with terminology throughout the document. 

“Having a uniform certification standard should not mean that all research projects are treated identically, but rather that all projects that present a similar risk are treated similarly,” MIT’s response states. “The proposed standards do not seem to take risk into account, resulting in an undue burden on researchers and on activities that pose little in the way of risk to research security.”

Without the finalized guidance, officials from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health shared that they are attempting to fill in the gaps of guidance and implement security for enterprise research organizations until RSP is officially issued. 

“It’s a tough one, but the Department of Energy has had to step out and say, ‘We’re doing this right now,’ because we’ve got grants coming in,” Geri Richmond, Under Secretary for Science and Innovation for DOE, said during the hearing. “We’ve got to do this. We would just like to see more consistency.”

OSTP did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

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Arati Prabhakar, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Biden’s top technology adviser, spoke at an Information Technology Industry event on Thursday about the upcoming executive order’s impact and how the White House has been developing it.

While Prabhakar wouldn’t get into specifics about what will be in the forthcoming order, she did say it provides a mechanism for “the executive branch stepping out and doing what we need to do.”

“It’ll be broad. It really reflects everything that the president really sees as possible under existing law to get better at managing risks and using the technology,” she said.

Prabhakar added: “This President is clear that [AI] is one of the most powerful technological forces of our time. He has reflected for the last many years that we’re at a pivotal point in history, and that the choices that we make are going to shape the decades ahead in some very powerful ways.”

Her comments come just a day after joining President Biden for a meeting with the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, where talk about AI “was the bulk of the conversation,” Prabhakar said.

“We used that meeting with PCAST really to step back from the body of work that the Biden administration has been driving,” she said. “AI has been a top priority for this president. He’s really got the White House and the whole administration cranking on it … We wanted to give the president a chance to step back and really look at all the huge opportunities ahead.” 

She continued: “That’s really why we’re trying to wrestle with the risks and the problems that come with AI because we want to seize the great power that this technology has to solve some of our hardest problems. So we talked to him about how AI helps us model extreme weather in very practical, pragmatic ways as the climate changes. We talked about the kinds of new materials that are going to be possible with properties no one’s ever seen before. And we even talked about how we can understand the origins of the universe better with AI.”

In his remarks opening the PCAST meeting, Biden highlighted the companies that recently voluntarily signed on to assist in the safe development and distribution of AI, as well as other work the administration is doing to mitigate the risks of the technology.

“I have a keen interest in AI and convened key experts on how to harness the power of artificial intelligence for good while protecting people from the profound risk it also presents,” Biden said. “We can’t kid ourselves, the profound risk if we don’t do it well.”

Prabhakar said Thursday that it’s “remarkable” how AI has openly become a topic of discussion among the world’s leaders, and many are looking to Biden and the U.S. for guidance.

“I think the theme that the president reflected on is countries looking to him for leadership and looking to America for leadership as these rapid changes are taking place,” she said.

Prabhakar continued: “I think the one thing that we are all very clear on is none of us wants to live in a future that’s shaped by technologies that have been driven by authoritarian regimes and that’s why we are at a moment where American leadership in the world requires American leadership in AI and that is what is behind everything that you will see.”

“When we come to work for all the different missions that the government has, national security and every public mission, we need to be able to harness the power of AI,” Prabhakar said during the conference. “That’s those two elements, mitigating risk and then seizing these huge opportunities for public purposes. That drives everything that we do.”

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Bonner’s new position, which was first reported by Axios, builds on her current role at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where she focused on a range of telecommunications issues. She previously worked at the Federal Communications Commission. 

“For the last year, Austin has led White House efforts on a wide range of telecommunications issues, including wireless spectrum and national security/emergency preparedness communications,” read the email announcing her promotion. “She did this work with the grace, determination, and expertise needed to bring together different perspectives and drive policy forward.”

The email continued: “We’re excited to bring her leadership skills and expertise to bear on other key tech policy priorities, including privacy, accessibility, digital equity, and many other issues.”

Austin practiced communications and appellate law, focusing on complex technologies and telecommunications, prior to joining the FCC. Currently, she’s also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, where she focuses on topics including administrative law.

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The tech behemoths reiterated their support for flexible risk based AI regulatory frameworks like the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST)’s AI Risk Management Framework rather than more horizontal, rigid, top down regulatory approaches like the proposed EU AI Act that’s currently being debated. 

Google and IBM were responding to a public consultation launched in May by the Biden administration to gather evidence from industry and researchers on the major threats and opportunities presented by AI. It is one of several recent inquiries launched to examine the technology, including a request for information from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in April.

“IBM urges the Administration to adopt a “precision regulation” posture towards AI. This means establishing rules to govern the technology’s deployment in specific use-cases, not regulating the technology itself,” the company said in its comments submitted to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy regarding national priorities for AI.

“IBM supports leveraging existing authorities to regulate AI. As such, we recommend that the Administration support an approach to regulating AI that prioritizes empowering every agency to be an AI agency,” the company said.

IBM in its comment to the OSTP added that the White House should push for the greater resources and the expansion of the GSA’s AI Center of Excellence, the National AI Research Resource (NAIRR), and agencies with high compute needs like the Commerce Department and the Energy Department.  

Google in its comment to the OSTP reiterated the importance of NIST taking the lead on trustworthy AI policies, standards and best practices in the U.S., and highlighted the need to ensure government acquisition policies are reformed to require AI training for acquisition workforce, remove barriers to data governance that harness the power of AI, and push federal agencies to use AI systems to enhance operations and decision making. 

The search giant also pushed for the White House to establish an AI competitiveness council in the form of a National AI Security & Competitiveness Council, or reactivate the National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI), to assess research and development (R&D) gaps and AI deployment to ensure that the US government is equipped to address security and defense challenges from foreign rivals and advocate for aligned international governance. 

IT global trade association, the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), also submitted a comment to the OSTP calling for NIST to be at the forefront of AI regulatory technical standards. 

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Macgillivray, who led the White House’s push on the need for algorithmic transparency, joined the Biden administration in December 2021 after previously serving as deputy federal chief technology officer during the Obama administration.

Following his departure, Deirdre Mulligan takes the role of U.S. deputy chief technology officer, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Mulligan is a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and is on leave from the institution while serving in the White House. In February she was installed as U.S. deputy chief technology officer for policy, and has also worked as principal adviser to the National AI Initiative Office.

Macgillivray, who led the White House’s push on the need for algorithmic transparency, joined the Biden administration in December 2021 after previously serving as deputy federal chief technology during the Obama administration. 

Before working in government, he held private sector roles as deputy general counsel at Google and general counsel at Twitter. It’s unclear where Macgillivray will work after leaving the White House.

“I am thankful for the support of WHOSTP Director Arati Prabhakar and am excited to see all the great work to come from the phenomenal Tech Division,” Macgillivray wrote on Twitter on Thursday afternoon.

“It was a huge privilege to get to work here again as part of the Biden Administration. I am extremely grateful and more than a little sad that my time is up,” he added.

Macgillivray during a speech on tech policy at the State of the Net Conference in March of this year highlighted three key goals of the Biden administration, which included improving federal privacy protections for Americans’ personal information and closing digital infrastructure gaps.

The OSTP, which Macgillivray is leaving, was established by Congress in 1976 and has a wide mandate to advise the president on the effects of science and technology on domestic and international affairs.

Details of Deirdre Mulligan’s new appointment were first reported by Axios Pro.

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According to a White House spokesperson, Ross took up the role earlier on May 16 after previously serving as U.S. chief data scientist, a post she assumed in November last year.

Following her new appointment, the Biden administration has named Dominique Duval-Diop as incoming U.S. Chief Data Scientist. She is a former American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow, and was previously U.S. deputy chief data scientist.

Ross’s appointment follows the departure of Lynne Parker, who in August last year stepped down from the dual-hatted position of deputy chief technology officer and director of the National AI Initiative Office at the White House.

The U.S. deputy chief technology officer for tech capacity role sits within the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House, and Ross will be tasked with with enabling governments at the federal, state, local, tribal and territorial levels to be more open, effective and equitable.

Ross is a fellow-in-residence at Georgetown University’s Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation, where she supports the Schmidt Futures data collaboratives portfolio, which focuses on issues ranging from disaster response and opioids/addiction to the decennial census and climate change.

Prior to this, Ross worked in a data leadership role at the nonprofit New America and also spent a period in government working as a senior adviser at the Office of Management and Budget and as a Presidential Innovation Fellow.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment about her appointment.

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In a request for information document, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy said it is seeking answers to questions ranging from how possible uses of the technology may threaten national security to how AI may be used to improve U.S. productivity.

Details of the consultation were published Tuesday alongside fresh guidance documents including an updated AI research and development roadmap and a paper from the Department of Education examining the future impact of the technology on learning.

In the RFI document, the White House said: “The Biden-Harris Administration is undertaking a process to ensure a cohesive and comprehensive approach to AI-related risks and opportunities … [t]hrough this RFI, OSTP and its National AI Initiative Office seeks information about AI and associated actions related to AI that could inform the development of a National AI Strategy.”

The public consultation is one of several policy initiatives issued by the Biden administration in recent months to address the key threats and opportunities presented by artificial intelligence technology. Through this consultation, it is seeking to fast-track the evidence-gathering process to help address areas of key policy concern around AI governance, including how the federal government supports the innovative use of the technology while protecting citizens’ rights.

The updated AI research and development roadmap published by the White House adds a ninth pillar to its existing strategy of establishing a “principled and coordinated approach to international collaboration in AI research.”

Other pillars, which were included in previous iterations of the roadmap document, include ensuring that investments in fundamental and responsible AI research are made with a long-term investment horizon and that effective methods are developed for humans to work alongside AI systems.

Earlier this month, the White House announced the launch of seven new AI research institutes, which will be housed within the National Science Foundation and will work to facilitate AI advances that are “ethical, trustworthy, responsible and serve the public group, as well as to drive breakthroughs in critical areas including climate, energy and cybersecurity.”

This came after the National Institute of Standards and Technology in January launched a voluntary AI Risk Management framework, which provides a voluntary risk-based guide for developing responsible AI.

In October, the White House issued an AI ‘Bill of Rights’ framework document, which sets out a rights-based approach to regulation of the technology, centered around five key principles: safe and effective systems, algorithmic discrimination protections, data privacy, notice and explanation, and human alternatives, consideration and fallback.

Individuals and organizations have until July 7 to respond to the request for information.

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Speaking at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing examining the use of AI by government departments, Lynne Parker proposed also that Congress require federal agencies to appoint a chief AI officers who would take full responsibility for oversight of the technology at each agency.

According to Parker, an AI officers’ council would be “responsible for coordinating these activities across all the federal government with an intent of prioritizing this AI activity across the government and providing leadership,” and would help on tackling the tech workforce shortage by identifying the areas in which agencies have a most urgent need for staff.

The former official said there was an acute need for a central coordinating body because of agencies’ such varied missions, and said it could be led by the Office of Management and Budget and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, with support from the General Services Administration.

Parker added: “We’re suffering right now from a lack of leadership and prioritization on these AI topics, and one quick way legislatively to address this is to appoint AI chief officers who are given the responsibility and resources to oversee the uses of AI and to develop strategies for their use of AI within their agencies.”

Parker was the founding director of the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office and also held the role of deputy federal chief technology officer until last October.

Speaking to FedScoop after the hearing, Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Gary Peters, D-MI, expressed an openness to Parker’s two ideas.

He said: “It’s something we’ve got to look at, we’ll certainly try to examine who should be responsible, and what sort of oversight is appropriate within each agency, so yes that’s a potential idea”,” Senator Gary Peters, D-MI., Chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee told FedScoop.”

Peters added: “So there’s certainly growing consensus on all the items you mentioned, transparency, without question, workforce shortages without question, having some clear lines of accountability and oversight without question, but then putting the details on specific pieces of legislation is always more difficult. We have to be thoughtful, deliberative and take our time and not rush to any conclusions.”

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Nelson initially led the OSTP Science and Society team, which had been newly created under President Joe Biden, and then led all of OSTP for eight months after Eric Lander resigned last February.

“We have landed some really big planes over these two years, and we’re in really good shape,” Nelson told Axios. “It’s a good moment to step away with some work launched that’s on the way to becoming implemented, and leave that work for others to do.”

Nelson, who is the first Black person and first woman of color, to lead OSTP, led the White House’s work on artificial intelligence, including the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, helped roll out more rigorous scientific research standards when crafting federal policies, and boosted STEM programs.

“The space of automated systems and AI policy moves very quickly, and we really can’t be on the sidelines,” she said. The popularity of ChatGPT and other generative AI programs being available to the public “is probably going to be a real shift in how people engage with technology and their day-to-day lives.”

Nelson will return to being a professor at the school of social sciences at IAS. She previously served on the faculties of Yale and Columbia universities. 

Nelson steps down from her position on Feb. 10. Details of her replacement at OSTP were not immediately available. 

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