In its 13th annual duplication and cost savings report, GAO identified 100 new matters and recommendations in 35 new topic areas for Congress or federal agencies to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of government. Some of the biggest potential savings identified in the report come from improvements to Medicare payments within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), nuclear waste disposal within the Energy Department, Navy shipbuilding, and IRS enforcement efforts.

“Congressional and agency action in these areas has yielded about $600 billion in cost savings and revenue increases. Addressing remaining matters and recommendations could save tens of billions more dollars and improve government services,” the GAO said in a summary of its report released this week.

The GAO issues annual reports on federal programs, agencies, offices, and initiatives that have duplicative goals or activities and also identifies additional opportunities for greater efficiency and effectiveness that could result in cost savings or enhanced revenue collection.

Fragmentation refers to instances when more than one federal agency (or more than one organization within an agency) is involved in the same broad mission and opportunities exist to improve service delivery and efficiency.  

Overlap occurs when multiple agencies or programs have similar goals, engage in similar activities or strategies to achieve them, or target similar beneficiaries. 

Duplication is when two or more agencies or government programs are engaged in the same activities or provide the same service to the same beneficiaries.

Some of the largest areas of financial benefit to the federal government and taxpayers from the GAO report include:

• Medicare Payments by Place of Service: Congress should consider directing the Secretary of HHS to equalize payment rates between settings for evaluation and management office visits and other services that the secretary deems appropriate, which could create financial benefits of $141 billion over 10 years, per Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data.
• Nuclear Waste Disposal: The Department of Energy may be able to reduce certain risks by adopting alternative approaches to treating a portion of its low-activity radioactive waste and create tens of billions of dollars in financial benefits in the process, per GAO data.
• Navy Shipbuilding: The U.S. Navy could improve its acquisition practices and take steps to ensure ships can be efficiently sustained and create financial benefits of billions of dollars, GAO data showed.
• Medicare Advantage: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services could better adjust payments for differences between Medicare Advantage plans and traditional Medicare providers in the reporting of beneficiary diagnoses and create financial benefits of billions of dollars, per MedPAC data.
• Internal Revenue Service Enforcement Efforts: Enhancing the IRS’s enforcement and service capabilities can help reduce the gap between taxes owed and paid by collecting tax revenue and facilitating voluntary compliance. This could include expanding third-party information reporting, which could save billions of dollars, per Joint Committee on Taxation data.
• Congress could reauthorize the First Responder Network Authority by 2027 to ensure the continuity of the public-safety broadband network and collection of potential revenues of billions of dollars over 15 years, the report states.
• Foreign Military Sales Administrative Account: Congress should consider redefining what can be considered an allowable expense to be charged from the administrative account of the Defense Department which could create financial benefits of tens of millions of dollars annually, per GAO data.

The new additions to the report fall on top of the 1,885 that GAO has identified in prior reports. Of those, Congress and agencies have fully addressed 1,239 — about 66 % — of those existing items.

The post Government could save over $100B by reducing big overlaps, duplications, watchdog finds appeared first on FedScoop.

The post Ethical AI frameworks are crucial to reducing biases, says former Navy CIO Aaron Weis appeared first on FedScoop.

“The Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) … will provide the Department of the Navy (DON) access to Amazon Web Services’ commercial cloud environment, which can process and store data that meets both Department of Defense (DOD) and DON information assurance policies,” Charlie Spirtos, a Navy spokesperson, said. “This collaboration with AWS will ensure that the Navy’s networks are modernized, secure, and capable of providing our Sailors and Marines with the enterprise network architecture required for mission success.”

A Dec. 19 contract announcement stated work on the contract will be performed for a maximum of five years and funds will be obligated as task orders are issued under a variety of funding types to include operation and maintenance, other procurement and working capital funds.

“We are proud to continue our support for the Department of the Navy and are committed to enabling their critical mission by delivering innovative, efficient, scalable, and secure cloud services,” Liz Martin, director of Defense Department business at AWS, said in a statement.

In recent policies issued by the Navy and DOD, mission owners must migrate from on-premise enterprise data products to commercial cloud environments with the assumption that such providers will be better equipped to provide them than the government.

A 2020 memo signed by the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition and CIO created a policy for the accelerated promotion and acquisition of cloud services.

The Navy’s information superiority vision mandates the service to modernize, innovate and defend as well as migrate applications to the cloud.  

The post AWS wins $724M contract providing Navy access to commercial cloud environment appeared first on FedScoop.

But as they speed up their adoption of zero-trust security, they still face challenges with legacy applications and architectural gaps; compliance requirements; or financial and operational concerns. It’s not necessarily about adopting new technologies or products but rather an overall strategy that should be programmatically mapped according to each agency’s unique use-case requirements and capabilities.

That is evident according to federal leaders from nearly a dozen agencies who joined FedScoop to talk about their success thus far and the challenges as they implement zero trust. The interview series, Federal Zero Trust: Moving from Aspiration to Transformation, underwritten by Forcepoint, provided a platform for leaders to share their experiences.

“Taking the federal government in this significant shift towards the zero-trust paradigm is not a singular project; it’s not one thing; it’s a fundamental change to how we’re approaching federal agencies, their data and their security evolve. Our goal is to raise the baseline over the next few years, and everybody is starting in a different place with different parts of that journey,” says Mitch Herckis, director of federal cybersecurity in the Office of the CIO at OMB.

He explains that one of the biggest challenges is the “decades of technical debt that have been ignored” and how that manifests itself when agencies are unable to implement security measures. “It’s so important for us to think of this as a cohesive strategy in line with their broader IT development strategy, and how they’re thinking about not just their cybersecurity [budget] as a whole, and how they strategically invest that, but also how they’re investing in their overall IT modernization.”

The Department of Defense, meanwhile, recognizes that its security efforts set an example for the entire federal government. David McKeown, senior information security officer and deputy CIO at DOD, says, “we have an aggressive schedule. We want to be in alignment with the federal mandates called out in EO 14028 and the corresponding NSM-8, which is also going to cover zero trust for national security systems. We want to implement zero trust throughout the whole [department] by the end of FY27. We will stay in alignment in the near term with the three-year goal for the capabilities that are being called out there, but our zero-trust plan that we have right now is very well defined; we’re hoping to share that with the rest of the federal government.”

Although the DOD has a robust plan for traditional admin-type and command and control networks, they still have work to do on the weapon system and critical infrastructure front.

At the U.S. Navy, CISO Tony Plater details how they’re planning to implement zero trust principles across multiple networks, domains and functional silos. He also talks about working directly with the DOD Portfolio Management Office, so they don’t duplicate efforts and ensure greater synergy.

Plater shares his insights on the Navy’s move to Flank Speed, a single enterprise cloud environment for daily work. “Flank Speed is our core platform for extending our zero-trust architecture across the Navy enterprise….and we see it as meeting or fully integrating into the eventual zero-trust ecosystem requirements. Today, Navy users can access Flank Speed sources without using a VPN to connect to government networks. So that’s a big step forward for us,” he says.

Another agency that leveraged the cloud was the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. CISO Shane Barney explains the agility of being 95% cloud-based and highlights how “[USCIS] started its zero trust journey many years ago, primarily because we were in the cloud; we recognized the value of cloud. And we recognize what we could do with the cloud, which would later become more known as zero trust; we just called it good cyber hygiene.”

He also discusses the importance of investing in security automation early. “Don’t make that one of the last things you do,” he says. “Make it the first thing you do because it’s much easier to add in the pieces of the puzzles as you go into that automation platform than it is to retrofit it in.”

Leaders understand the capabilities necessary to move forward in their journey, and each agency has different priorities to unify approaches across the pillars of zero trust to transform.

As Department of Labor CISO Paul Blahusch put it, “Zero trust is revolutionary, not evolutionary. It will take resources, technology, people and professional services.”

Other participants who shared their experiences in the video series include:

• Steven Hernandez, CISO, Department of Education
• Chezian Sivagnanam, Chief Enterprise Architect, National Science Foundation
• Stephen Haselhorst, Zero Trust Program Manager, FDIC
• Amy Hamilton, Senior Cybersecurity Advisor for Policy and Programs, Department of Energy

This video series was produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop and sponsored by Forcepoint.

The post How agencies are moving zero trust from aspiration to transformation appeared first on FedScoop.

In an update to Congress, GAO said it received a total of 1,658 cases over the period, which represents a 12% decline from 1,897 in the 2021 fiscal year.

GAO each year issues a report to Congress in which it discloses bid protest trends and outlines the total number of solicitation complaints received during the prior fiscal year.

Of the 1,658 cases, 1,595 were bid protests, 43 were cost claims and 20 cases were requests for reconsideration, according to GAO.

The number of contract award complaints filed with GAO has fallen substantially since fiscal 2017 when it recorded a total of 2,596 cases being opened.

Federal contractors seeking to challenge a contract award are able to file a complaint either at the agency level, with the GAO, or at the Court of Federal Claims.

Technology companies often choose to file a protest with the GAO because under the Competition in Contracting Act, the awarding agency must pause contested solicitation awards if certain timeline criteria are met.

In its update to Congress, GAO also noted that only one federal department declined to implement the recommendations of the office in connection with a bid protest during fiscal 2022: the Department of the Navy’s Naval Air Systems Command.

According to GAO, despite its findings that the Navy’s evaluation of the awardee’s proposal was not consistent with the terms of the solicitation, the department did not reopen discussions and request revised proposals.

GAO noted also that out of the protests sustained during the 2022 fiscal year, the most prevalent reasons for doing so were unreasonable technical evaluations, flawed selection decisions and flawed solicitations.

The post GAO reports 12% drop in protests filed during 2022 fiscal year appeared first on FedScoop.

According to four people familiar with the matter, she will move to the State Department from the Department of Defense, where she has served as principal deputy CIO and the primary adviser to CIO John Sherman.

Fletcher’s appointment comes after FedScoop in August revealed that acting CIO Glenn Miller will step down from the post at the year’s end.

Prior to holding the principal deputy CIO post at DOD, Fletcher served as deputy director for program analysis and evaluation at the Department of Homeland Security. At that agency, she also led the realignment of the Federal Protective Services.

Between 2016 and 2018, Fletcher served in the Navy including as acting Navy CIO and business modernization lead, and earlier in her DOD career worked within the Office of the Secretary of Defense Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation, where she served as special assistant to the deputy director and as an operations research analyst.

She received her doctorate in engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and her bachelor’s in science from Washington University in St. Louis.

Several senior IT leaders have exited the State Department in recent months. Glenn Miller took over as acting CIO following the departure of then-chief information officer Keith Jones in June.

Meanwhile, in August veteran IT leader Brian Merrick stepped down from his position as director of cloud programs at the department, a post he had held for three years.

Details of Fletcher’s appointment were first reported by Federal News Network.

In a statement on its website, the State Department said: “In her role as the Department’s Chief Information Officer, Dr. Fletcher will establish the strategic direction of information technology, including oversight for $2.5 billion of programs throughout the Department of State. 

The department added: “Dr. Fletcher brings a wealth of experience in both technological and strategic resourcing domains.  She is a member of the Senior Executive Service, having served as the Principal Deputy Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Department of Defense and as the Deputy Director for Program Analysis & Evaluation at the Department of Homeland Security – among other leadership roles in federal government.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated to include comment from the State Department.

The post Kelly Fletcher to join State Department as chief information officer appeared first on FedScoop.

The important Navy post has not been filled by a Senate-confirmed official since James “Hondo” Geurts stepped down as assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition near the end of the Trump administration. Frederick Stefany has been serving as the acting assistant secretary for RD&A since January 2021.

Guertin is currently the director of operational test and evaluation of U.S. military weapon systems in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. His nomination must be confirmed by the Senate before he can take on the Navy leadership role.

“He has an extensive four-decade combined military and civilian career in submarine operations, ship construction and maintenance, development and testing of weapons, sensors, combat management products including the improvement of systems engineering, and defense acquisition,” the White House said in the Friday announcement.

Notably, Guertin has previously been involved in applied research for government and academia in “software-reliant and cyber-physical systems” at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, according to his Defense Department bio.

His nomination comes as the Navy, and the Defense Department writ large, are putting more emphasis on software and cyber capabilities as the Pentagon pursues concepts like Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), which the Navy is contributing to as part of its secretive Project Overmatch effort.

“Over his career, [Guertin] has been in leadership roles of organizational transformation, improving competition, application of modular open system approaches, as well as prototyping and experimentation. He has also researched and published extensively on software-reliant system design, testing, and acquisition,” the White House said.

He previously served in the Navy Reserve as an engineering duty officer.

The post Biden taps Nickolas Guertin to be Navy’s acquisition chief appeared first on FedScoop.

The highly classified Project Overmatch is the Navy’s contribution to the Pentagon’s vision for Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2).

“We are swimming in data. How do you get the right information to the right decision maker at the right time to put yourself in a position of advantage against your opponent?” Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday said during remarks at the Heritage Foundation think tank.

“What we’re aiming for and we’ve actually had a lot of success with is developing a network of networks that allows us to transfer any data over any network. So it’s a software-defined communication, communication-as-a-service framework, where software actually decides what that prioritized information is and what’s the best path it should take to get to a decision maker,” he said.

Soon, part of the fleet will get to put the technology through its paces during a deployment. If all goes according to plan, it will then be expanded to other parts of the force.

“We’re at the point early next year where we will deploy a carrier strike group with this capability. We’ll see how it goes and then look to scale it after that,” Gilday said.

“We believe that the Navy is on a path to deliver the Navy tactical grid, which we think could easily become the joint tactical grid as part of … JADC2 for the Department of Defense. We feel we’re in a very good path right now in terms of our experimentation,” he added.

The Navy is using a DevOps environment to further the initiative.

“We’re actually leveraging the best technology that we can, but also the best processes that we’ve been able to obtain from industry,” Gilday said. “We’re trying to benchmark against world-class networks and world-class software systems.”

Project Overmatch has been the CNO’s No. 2 priority behind only the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine program. However, Navy officials have been relatively tight-lipped about their contributions to JADC2 compared to the Army and Air Force, who have been more open about discussing their Project Convergence and Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) efforts, respectively.

The post Navy on track to deploy Project Overmatch capabilities with carrier strike group in early 2023 appeared first on FedScoop.

The Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept seeks to connect sensors and shooters, and provide battlefield commanders with the right information to make faster decisions. But each of the military departments have their own JADC2 initiatives: the Air Force’s Advanced Battle Management System, the Army’s Project Convergence and the Navy’s Project Overmatch.  

“Every service has their own interpretation of JADC2. The Department of Air Force is ABMS, the Army is Project Convergence and I think the Navy and Marine Corps … [Project] Overmatch. All different. I’ve looked at all of the documentation associated with all three. We are not aligned with what we need to be to be interoperable to be able to fight together,” Wanda Jones-Heath, the principal cyber adviser for the Air Force and Space Force, said Tuesday at the annual Air Force Summit hosted by the Potomac Officers Club.

“Someone needs to just push us where we need to go because we are way out here, everybody’s doing their own part. We’re investing tremendously in those capabilities, but we just need to take step back, we need some leadership to push us in the right direction,” Jones-Heath said.

Industry partners are voicing similar concerns.

“A lot of the capabilities between them are not matching up. We’re beginning to find that out,” Joe Sublousky, vice president for All Domain Command and Control at SAIC, said at the same event Tuesday regarding ABMS, Project Convergence and Project Overmatch. “I’d rather find that out before we get to actual conflict with a near peer or peer adversary.”

Sublousky did note that the best example he’s heard for how to connect data and sensors was from the Department of Defense chief information officer’s discussion surrounding data cloud transport from the edge.

“Those are the components that we’re trying to focus in on to help understand a better way of looking at the JADC2 capability and architecture of the future,” he said.

There have been efforts to better integrate the services in their respective JADC2-related events. For example, last year’s Project Convergence exercise included systems and platforms from all the services. This year, the exercise will also include international partners — both as participants and observers.

“It’s not only just data, we’re talking about sensor data off of our mission systems to ensure we can share it not only with our joint partners, but also share it with our coalition partners,” Brig. Gen. Jeth Rey, director of the Army’s network cross-functional team, told reporters in May. “Can they tie into our Patriot missiles and then share the data and then the best system shoot? That’s what we’re going to try to find out about the integration piece of data.”

Earlier this year, Pentagon leaders submitted their classified JADC2 implementation plan to Congress. However, lawmakers are still worried about a lack of coordination.

“The committee is concerned about the Department of Defense’s progress in implementing the Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept,” the House Armed Services Committee wrote in the item of special interest in its version of the fiscal 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. Such items aim to prep continued legislation upon merging the House version of the NDAA with the Senate’s version.

“The committee recognizes the Department has made progress on JADC2 planning, but each of the military services has a separate effort to address the Department’s JADC2 requirements concept, and it is unclear what capabilities will be delivered to the warfighter, how much they will cost, and when they will be delivered,” the item stated.

The item also calls for a Comptroller General review of the initiative.

The Senate Armed Services Committee, for its part, has a provision in its version of the bill requiring “mission-critical effects chains” and an implementation plan for the establishment of a joint force headquarters that will be the operational command for certain JADC2-related capabilities, functions, missions and tasks.

“The committee believes successful implementation of JADC2 requires constant, long-term attention of the Deputy Secretary of Defense and the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with the support of the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, and commends them for their leadership on this issue,” a report accompanying the Senate’s bill states.

“However, it will take years to achieve universal common data standards and system interfaces across the Department of Defense (DOD) to support JADC2,” it added. “Therefore, it is critical that the Department enable interoperability and joint operations across domains, services, and systems by emphasizing experimentation and demonstration of novel kill chains that do not currently share common standards.”

The post Military services ‘not aligned’ on JADC2 efforts, Air Force official warns appeared first on FedScoop.

In June, the Navy along with L3Harris and Northrop Grumman agreed to a negotiated settlement to reopen discussions for the Next Generation Jammer Low Band program, according to a Navy spokesperson.

The Next Generation Jammer will serve as the Navy’s premier aerial electronic attack platform mounted aboard EA-18 Growler aircraft and will replace the ALQ-99 jamming pod. It has been broken into three pods covering three portions of the electromagnetic spectrum: mid, low and high.

Raytheon was awarded the mid-band pod in 2016.

L3Harris was awarded a $496 million contract for the low band jammer program in December 2020 after a broad agency announcement was issued in 2017. However, Northrop Grumman protested the award, alleging the Navy failed to consider the impact of a potential conflict of interest involving a Navy employee that developed specifications for the low-band system while simultaneously negotiating for employment with L3Harris during the solicitation.

The Navy initially decided to undertake a dual-track process in determining the award for the program, issuing Northrop and L3 at the time (prior to L3’s merger with Harris Corp.) an opportunity to demonstrate existing technologies in 2018 to help inform the Navy on how to mature the program.  

During the demonstration of existing technologies, Harris was a partner on the Northrop team, though officials noted there was a firewall between that team and the L3 team when the two companies eventually merged in 2019.  

The Government Accountability Office agreed with Northrop’s protest that there was the appearance of an unfair competitive advantage in favor of L3Harris. The GAO also said the Navy must engage individuals with the requisite technical expertise to conduct an independent review of the individual in question’s input during the relevant period of conflict to determine if their input was consistent with the Navy’s actual requirements.

A stop work order was issued, preventing L3Harris from working on the program.

L3Harris filed suit in the Court of Federal Claims on Sept. 7 disputing the protest.

The three parties have now agreed to a settlement that was accepted by the Court of Federal Claims, which details a path for reopening discussions with both vendors, a re-evaluation of their proposals and ultimately a re-award for the low band engineering and manufacturing development contract, the spokesperson said.

A contract award is expected in the first few months of calendar year 2023.

Following this agreement and the decision by the Court of Federal Claims, L3Harris said it will continue to support the Navy to bring this capability to the fleet, adding that it “remains confident in the technical superiority of our solution and look forward to being re-awarded this important contract.”

Northrop, for its part, said it “remains ready to provide the Navy with a low risk, mission-ready, speed to fleet solution to meet its Next Generation Jammer Low Band requirements.”

The post Following years of protests and litigation, Navy to re-award aerial jammer contract appeared first on FedScoop.