“Even a utilitarian feature, such as a 404 page, can be fun — and potentially temper any disappointment at having followed a link that is no longer active,” an NPS spokesperson said in an email to FedScoop. “Similar to our voice and tone on other digital platforms, including social media, our main goal is to always communicate important information that helps visitors stay safe and have the best possible experience.”

404 pages are what appear when a server cannot locate a website or resource at a specific URL. Hitting a 404 could be due to a number of reasons: a spelling error in the URL, the page may not exist anymore, or the server moved a page without having the link redirect. As a result of the error, many different entities with websites — such as state and local governments — have had a stroke of creative genius to make users aware of an issue while also having a bit of fun — which rings true for some federal agencies as well. 

While 404 pages could seem like a silly or boring part of the federal government’s use of technology, there has been a significant push in the Biden administration, specifically out of the Office of Management and Budget, to enhance the user experience of federal agencies’ online presence — with a focus on accessibility. 

NPS’s spokesperson said the agency strives to make its website “as user-friendly as possible” and “have processes in place” to make sure that the links are working. 

Currently, the park service’s site has a revolving 404 page that showcases several different nature-themed images, with puns or quotes alongside information on how to get back on the right track for whatever online adventure a visitor seeks. 

NPS said that it doesn’t have any plans to update its error page, “but we’re always working to better understand our users and to improve the user experience of NPS.gov and all our digital products.”

So, until further notice, visitors can still see an artistic rendering of a bear — complete with a relevant pun — if they get a little turned around on NPS’s site.

NPS isn’t alone in walking a line of informing the public about website miscommunications and simultaneously showcasing a bit of humor. The Federal Bureau of Prisons, for one, told FedScoop in an email that it “seeks to optimize the user experience in performance, access and comprehension.”

“The design of the FBOP’s 404 page was meant to be both functional and informative; by combining imagery with text, we educate the user as to the nature of a 404 error beyond standard system language and provide explanations as to why the error occurred,” Benjamin O’Cone, a spokesperson for FBOP, said in an email to FedScoop. 

Unlike other agencies, the FBOP’s 404 imagery is not totally relevant to the mission of the bureau. Instead, it offers something a bit more meta than the others — referring to the 404 page as a “door that leads to nowhere.”

“While the Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBOP) seeks to ensure a fully responsive and evolving website, we recognize that there may be occasions where search engine indexing is outdated and may contain links to expired pages,” O’Cone said.

Similarly, NASA has a specific area of its 404 page that shares information about its updated, or “improved,” site, with an option to look at a sitemap and submit feedback. “Rockets aren’t the only thing we launch,” the agency muses.

This also comes with an equally creative 404 page, stating that the “cosmic object you were looking for has disappeared beyond the horizon,” against the backdrop of outer space. 

Other websites, like the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s site, may not have artistic renderings or out-of-this-world visuals, but NIST instead shares a joke centered around the agency’s area of interest. 

As NIST releases significant frameworks and updated guidance for different areas of federal technology use and deployment, it only makes sense that the agency refers to its error page as a request that isn’t standard.

While this collection of websites represents just a handful that add a creative touch to error messages, many government entities lack the same information and resources that others have. 

For example, see the Department of Energy, which simply states that “the requested page could not be found” and offers no further clue as to what a user could be experiencing.

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Singh will work closely with Beth Niblock, the department’s chief information officer, and senior official for policy development Solomon Greene “to advance responsible AI innovation, increase transparency, protect HUD employees and the public they serve, and manage risks from sensitive government uses of AI,” a spokesperson told FedScoop in an emailed statement. 

Under President Joe Biden’s recent AI executive order (EO 14110), certain government agencies will be required to name a chief AI officer within 60 days of the Office of Management and Budget’s corresponding guidance, which is currently in draft form and being finalized. According to the order, the new CAIOs are responsible for coordinating an agency’s uses of AI, promoting AI innovation and managing risks, among other things.

While some agencies already had chief AI officers before the Biden order, such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security, others are getting started publicly naming their officials. 

In response to FedScoop inquiries, for example, the National Science Foundation and the General Services Administration both disclosed that their chief data officers will serve as each agency’s chief AI officer. The Department of Education also said it tapped its chief technology officer for the role.

Among the responsibilities for the chief AI officers outlined in OMB’s draft guidance will be vice chairing their agency’s AI governance board. Those boards, which will coordinate AI adoption and manage risk, are required within 60 days of OMB’s guidance and will be chaired by each agency’s deputy secretary. 

Prior to the Biden administration order and draft guidance, agencies were already required to have a responsible AI official under a Trump administration order (EO 13960). But according to OMB’s draft guidance, the new chief AI officers will also carry out those responsibilities. For HUD, a decision about the existing role is forthcoming. 

“​​The AI Governance Board will determine the appropriate role and integration of the Responsible AI Official into the important work ahead,” the HUD spokesperson said.

Outside of naming a CAIO, other agencies told FedScoop they’re making progress on AI-related work in response to inquiries.

A NASA spokesperson, for example, said the agency “is developing recommendations on leveraging emerging Artificial Intelligence technology to best serve our goals and missions, from sifting through Earth science imagery to identifying areas of interest, to searching for exoplanet data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, scheduling communications from the Perseverance Mars rover through the Deep Space Network, and more.”

Similarly, a Department of Transportation spokesperson said the agency is working on a “strategy to align with the EO.”

Rebecca Heilweil contributed to this story.

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Salvagnini took up the role on June 4, following the retirement of preceding CDO Ron Thompson last year.

He joins NASA after spending more than 20 years working in technology leadership roles within the intelligence community. Most recently, he was director of the architecture integration group and chief enterprise architect within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Prior to that, Salvagnini was technical director within the chief information office and chief data officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, according to his NASA bio.

Commenting on the appointment on LinkedIn, Salvagnini said: “As I look to the future, I am energized by the NASA mission, ‘NASA explores the unknown in air and space, innovates for the benefit of humanity, and inspires the world through discovery’ and the strategic themes: discover, explore, innovate, and advance that enable that mission. I am also excited to grow my network and partner with CDOs and data professionals across government, private sector, academic, and research institutions.” 

In recent years, NASA has worked to increase automated data sharing with government and commercial contractors, including for the Artemis human exploration mission.

Within federal agencies, the chief data officer is responsible for data governance and lifecycle data management, as well as working to make sure agencies meet the requirements of the Federal Data Strategy and Open Government Data Act.

A NASA spokesperson confirmed Salvagnini’s appointment.

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The space agency says it’s taking precautions as it looks to examine possible uses for generative artificial intelligence. Employees looking to evaluate the technology are only invited to join NASA’s generative AI trial if their tests involve “public, non-sensitive data,” Edward McLarney, digital transformation lead for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the agency, told FedScoop.

In June, Microsoft announced a new Azure OpenAI tool designed for the government, which according to the company is more secure than the commercial version of the software. Last week, FedScoop reported that the Microsoft Azure OpenAI was approved for use on sensitive government systems. A representative for Microsoft Azure referred to NASA in response to a request for comment. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

Experimentation with the technology has just begun, McLarney noted, and “many iterations” of testing, verification, validation, bias mitigation, and safety reviews, among other types of evaluations, are still ahead. 

“NASA workers are assessing usability of the tools, accuracy of the results, completeness of AI-generated outputs, security behavior of the overall cloud services, speed of the models, costs, supportability and more,” McLarney said. “NASA is excited about the potential of generative AI and is also being clear-eyed about its risks and shortcomings.” 

He added: “NASA also uses cloud services from other companies and is interested in testing generative AI capabilities from them. NASA may conduct additional generative AI testing with Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, or other companies in the future.”

Right now, the space agency plans to study OpenAI’s chat, code assistance capabilities, and image-generating capabilities. AI-generated art could help provide “inspiration” for NASA artists, McLarnley explained, while the system’s text-generating software could help with writing documents. He pointed to other use cases, too. 

FedScoop learned about NASA’s generative AI tests after receiving a list of employees titled “Initial NASA OpenAI on Azure Testers” in response to a public records request. Last month, FedScoop obtained an email — which was sent by NASA’s chief information officer to employees in May — focused on preliminary guidance for using AI tools like ChatGPT. That email noted that some “early adopters” within the agency were preliminarily working with the technology. 

Notably, the space agency’s generative AI testing had not begun when NASA began collecting its fiscal year 2023 AI use case inventory, which was required by a 2020 Trump administration executive order. Still, McLarney noted that as “NASA generative AI testing and nascent use begins, it will be included as appropriate in future AI inventory reporting cycles.”

NASA’s experimentation with OpenAI software is just one part of the agency’s growing focus on AI. Officials also released a Responsible AI plan last September — and artificial intelligence and machine learning remain an element of the agency’s digital transformation efforts.

The agency is one of the first government departments to disclose details of its approach to experimentation with OpenAI. The use of generative AI tools can raise privacy, trust and oversight, and national security concerns, as a Government Accountability Office brief from June highlighted. Relatedly, the Department of Transportation recently deleted a reference to using ChatGPT from its AI use inventory, in response to FedScoop’s reporting.

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As Gizmodo first reported last week, an entity called USA Memorabilia has released a “Man on the Moon” NFT featuring an Apollo 11-era image of Buzz Aldrin on the moon. This seemingly goes against NASA’s merchandising rules and media guidelines, which say that the agency isn’t approving the use of its images in NFTs and does not want to be associated with its technology. 

Allard Beutel, a NASA spokesperson, confirmed the agency’s position on Monday.

“As a U.S. government agency, NASA makes its imagery and video publicly available for educational and information purposes,” Beutel told FedScoop. “Since Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are digital tokens owned by someone as a “one of a kind” digital asset, NASA does not approve use of its materials for NFTs and does not approve merchandising requests involving NFTs.”

NASA didn’t directly address the NFTs promoted by Melania Trump — or how it goes about enforcing its anti-NFT stance.

Notably, NFTs that appear to use NASA imagery are already pretty easy to find on digital asset marketplaces.

USA Memorabilia and the office of Melania Trump were contacted for comment.

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Before joining NASA, Iris Lan was an associate deputy attorney general with responsibilities over the nation’s 93 U.S. attorneys and the department’s Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys.

She takes over as NASA general counsel following the departure of Sumara Thompson-King, who retired from the agency in December. 

Lan began her career at the Department of Justice as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, where she prosecuted complex counterterrorism, counterintelligence, export control, cyber intrusion and corporate fraud cases.

Later, she was also deputy chief of the appellate section, supervising attorneys in briefing and arguing cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Lan is an elected member of the American Law Institute, and according to LinkedIn, has also held an adjunct lectureship at Columbia Law School.

Commenting on her appointment, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said: “I want to thank Scott Barber and Charles “Pete” Polen, both of whom served as acting general counsel. Our team of attorneys, paralegals, and professionals are critical to NASA fulfilling our mission to explore the unknown in air and space, innovate for the benefit of humanity, and inspire the world through discovery. With Iris at the helm, I am confident they will continue to help NASA maintain our standing as the world’s premier space agency.”

Lan takes up the post amid rising concerns over the cybersecurity measures of contractors working with civilian government agencies. 

In April the head of the Pentagon’s Cybersecurity Maturation Model Certification program Stacy Bostjanick said the DOD is working with civilian government departments on a new Federal Acquisition Rule that would impose basic requirements to protect federal information on all civilian contractors handling government data.

Meanwhile, in March last year, NASA agreed to conduct a risk assessment of its unclassified systems to determine whether an insider threat program should be expanded, after a watchdog investigation found the agency still had high-value assets and critical infrastructure facing “higher-than-necessary risk.”

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The Department of Defense (DOD), General Services Administration (GSA), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) issued the interim rule for implementation of the No TikTok on Government Devices Act applicable to any contract solicitations the agencies issue on or after June 2. 

“The rule revises the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) to implement the prohibition on having or using the social networking service TikTok or any successor application or service developed or provided by ByteDance Limited or an entity owned by ByteDance Limited (“covered application”),” the rule titled ‘Federal Acquisition Regulation: Prohibition on a ByteDance Covered Application’ says in the Federal Register. 

All contract solicitations issued before June 2 but awarded after that date must amend their solicitation to comply with the interim rule by July 3, 2023.

Under government contract law, an interim rule impacts acquisition from the date it is listed in the Federal Register, and has the force of a Federal Acquisition Regulation requirement. The FAR is the set of rules that governs U.S. government procurement.

The TikTok prohibition applies to the presence or use of any covered application on any information technology owned or managed by the Government, or on any IT used or provided by a contractor including equipment provided by the contractor’s employees, unless an exception is granted in accordance with Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Memorandum M–23–13.

The OMB in February published a memo that gave all federal agencies 30 days to ensure Chinese-owned video app TikTok is no longer present on government devices.

The memo requires government IT leaders within 30 days to “identify the use or presence of a covered application on information technology” and to establish an internal process to adjudicate limited exceptions.

IT departments can enforce such measures by remotely removing the TikTok application across selected devices, which can also require the use of “allowlists” or “blocklists” when targeting a specific piece of software.

Nevertheless, three senior officials told FedScoop earlier this year that the OMB policy document poses significant technical and definitional questions and challenges for agencies working to implement the new guidance.

Some critics of the TikTok ban, both inside and outside of the government say it is unconstitutional because it violates the First Amendment. Others say that all social media platforms, including those headquartered in America, take a dragnet approach to collecting users’ data.

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Reuter will step down from his post on June 30 after 40 years of service at the space agency.

The technology executive has led NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate since 2018 and before joining that division worked in multiple leadership roles in the agency’s human spaceflight programs and at Marshall Space Flight Center.

His career at the agency began at the Marshall Space Flight Center, where he was initially an aerospace engineer in the structures and propulsion laboratory. Reuter has since led offices including those responsible for the International Space Station, Constellation and Space Shuttle Programs. He played a leading role in managing the shuttle’s return to flight after the Columbia Shuttle disaster.

Commenting on his departure, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said: “Under Jim’s leadership, STMD expanded its excellent work developing cross-cutting technologies that support NASA’s current and future missions for the benefit of all, demonstrating technologies that provide more efficient ways of sending data, improved propulsion, next-generation landing capabilities, and more.”

NASA will conduct a nationwide search and open competition for a new associate administrator.  

In January, NASA named A.C. Charania as its agencywide chief technologist, in which role he will serve as principal adviser to the NASA administrator at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.

That appointment followed a yearlong search by the agency for a new innovation leader to help improve commercial partnerships with the U.S. space industry.

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The Enterprise Multimedia and Integrated Technical Services (eMITS) contract includes both cost-plus-award-fee core services and indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity task orders.

The performance period for the contract has an initial 90-day phase followed by a 12-month base period. This is followed by seven 12-month option periods and a six-month extension, which would take the performance period of the contract to Jan. 31, 2032, if all options are exercised.

Work performed under the contract will support the agency’s Office of Chief Information Officer and Office of Communications across all of NASA’s centers and facilities.

According to the agency’s announcement, Rothe Ares will provide IT management services, customer collaboration and support services, information management services and digital communications services.

It is the latest IT services contract award to be made by NASA, which last month issued a request for proposals for its Consolidated Applications and Platform Services (NCAPS) contract. The agency will potentially award a $1.3 billion IT services contract to a single company.

Prospective bidders on that contract have until 2 p.m. Eastern time on April 28 to submit a proposal.

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Vescent Photonics has agreed to pay $402,621 to resolve allegations that it used contractors located outside the United States in research projects funded by the Small Business Innovation Research program.

The federal contractor, which manufactures and researches complex laser technology, had received SBIR awards from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the United States Air Force.

Under the Small Business Innovation Research program, federal government agencies make awards to small companies for domestic research and development (R&D), but the awards stipulate that all R&D must be carried out within the United States.

Commenting on the case, U.S. Attorney Cole Finegan said: “SBIR funds are intended to help support qualified small businesses in the United States, and to encourage domestic innovation and domestic technology development.”

“Diverting SBIR funds to foreign nationals located abroad undermines the purpose of this funding and violates the rules of the SBIR program,” he added.

Assistant Inspector General for Investigations at NASA’s Office of Inspector General Bob Steinau said: “The settlement agreement with Vescent Photonics is the result of a joint effort to protect SBIR contracts from fraud and abuse, and this case demonstrates the commitment of the NASA OIG and our law enforcement partners to work with the U.S. Attorney’s Office to investigate and prosecute companies that defraud SBIR programs.”

The investigation was carried out jointly by NASA OIG, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, and the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations. It was handled by Assistant U.S. Attorney Zeyen Wu.

It is the latest False Claims Act settlement between a federal technology contractor and the U.S. government.

In June, rocket propulsion system manufacturer Aerojet Rocketdyne agreed to pay $9 million to settle allegations that it violated the FCA in its representation of compliance with cybersecurity requirements in certain government contracts. That was the second settlement between a contractor and the department to occur as part of the Civil-Cyber Fraud Initiative.

The False Claims Act was first enacted in 1863 in response to defense contractor fraud during the American Civil War. It was amended in 1986 to increase incentives for whistleblowers to come forward with allegations of fraud.

In an emailed statement to FedScoop, Vescent CEO Scott Davis said: “Vescent absolutely denies all the allegations of wrongdoing. Despite this, a settlement was significantly less expensive than full litigation.”

He added: “As a small company, we chose the less expensive, more expedient route to returning focus to our mission: US-based development and manufacturing of important laser technologies to enable scientific and field-deployed quantum applications.”

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