“The CIO-SP3 and CIO-SP3 Small Business extension requests are currently being routed for approval,” Ricky Clark, deputy director of the National Institutes of Health’s Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC), said in an emailed statement to FedScoop.

The news comes a little over a month after NITAAC again started sending out new notices to successful and unsuccessful CIO-SP4 offerors following corrective action by the agency. The filings in federal court, which are not time-limited, could further delay the award process.

“Protests have been filed at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims (COFC) against the CIO-SP4 procurement. Unlike Government Accountability Office (GAO) protests, which are typically decided within 100 days, COFC protests have no set timeline for a decision,” Clark said in the statement. 

As a result, the agency is requesting the existing vehicle, CIO-SP3, be extended to Oct. 29 so there is no break in service, a NITAAC spokesperson confirmed. That vehicle had previously been extended through April 29. Federal News Network was first to report the news.

CIO-SP4 — which stands for Chief Information Officer-Solutions and Partners 4 — is the fourth version of a 10-year, governmentwide contract vehicle for acquiring IT products and specialized services. 

The solicitation has faced challenges from companies seeking to be included in it since NITAAC first requested proposals in May 2021. NITAAC’s July commitment to corrective action came after the GAO sustained dozens of offerors’ challenges to the competition process for the solicitation. 

“​​Agency customers should be assured that NITAAC is open for business and both the CIO-SP3 and CIO-SP3 Small Business [government wide acquisition contracts] are available for agency use,” Clark said. “NITAAC is ready and capable of fulfilling all your task and delivery orders to ensure all your mission-critical information technology needs are met.”

NITAAC didn’t provide additional details about the protests in the Court of Federal Claims.

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Candice Ling, senior vice president of Microsoft’s federal government business, announced the launch in a Tuesday blog post, highlighting the data safety measures of the service and its potential uses for productivity and innovation. 

“Azure OpenAI in Azure Government enables agencies with stringent security and compliance requirements to utilize this industry-leading generative AI service at the unclassified level,” Ling’s post said.

The announcement comes as the federal government is increasingly experimenting with and adopting AI technologies. Agencies have reported hundreds of use cases for the technology while also crafting their own internal policies and guidance for use of generative AI tools.

Ling also announced that the company is submitting Azure OpenAI for federal cloud services authorizations that, if approved, would allow higher-impact data to be used with the system. 

Microsoft is submitting the service for authorization for FedRAMP’s “high” baseline, which is reserved for cloud systems using high-impact, sensitive, unclassified data like heath care, financial or law enforcement information. It will also submit the system for authorization for the Department of Defense’s Impact Levels 4 and 5, Ling said. Those data classification levels for DOD include controlled unclassified information, non-controlled unclassified information and non-public, unclassified national security system data.

In an interview with FedScoop, a Microsoft executive said the availability of the technology in Azure Government is going to bring government customers capabilities expected from GPT-4 — the fourth version of Open AI’s large language models — in “a more highly regulated environment.”

The executive said the company received feedback from government customers who were experimenting with smaller models and open source models but wanted to be able to use the technology on more sensitive workloads.

Over 100 agencies have already deployed the technology in the commercial environment, the executive said, “and the majority of those customers are asking for the same capability in Azure Government.” 

Ling underscored data security measures for Azure OpenAI in the blog, calling it “a fundamental aspect” of the service. 

“This includes ensuring that prompts and proprietary data aren’t used to further train the model,” Ling wrote. “While Azure OpenAI Service can use in-house data as allowed by the agency, inputs  and outcomes are not made available to Microsoft or others using the service.”

That means embeddings and training data aren’t available to other customers, nor are they used to train other models or used to improve the company’s or third-party services. 

According to Ling’s blog, the technology is already being used for a tool being developed by the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine. In collaboration with the National Cancer Institute, the agency is working on a large language model-based tool, called TrialGPT, that will match patients with clinical trials.

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Take for instance the U.S. government’s General Services Administration (GSA), which went from 17 different email and messaging services to one, creating a faster and more efficient platform; or how the National Institute of Health (NIH) changed its approach to cancer research by securely and safely sharing a wide collection of up-to-the-minute datasets and providing powerful new analysis tools. 

We saw these advances in government enabled by one particular technology: cloud. As promising as these results are, what matters most for the long term is approaching cloud services through the lens of solving issues of the present, while simultaneously setting up for the future. 

Ending an old habit 

Having spent three decades providing technology to the government, I’m no stranger to building solutions by applying a technological know-how with a deep understanding of public sector agencies and their missions. Too often in government, we see the sustainment of past technologies, which keeps systems afloat, but does nothing to address present and future needs. Legacy solutions, simply put, just don’t have the scale or speed capable of handling the workloads and requirements of today’s world.

Like much of the private sector, our government services are becoming more data-driven, demanding an IT environment that will support the digital-first approach. Government is first and foremost a people business, delivering citizen-centric services, education, public safety, national security, and more, all of which require secure and reliable systems where AI and ML capabilities can promote quick, agile, and efficient services to constituents. And all AI and ML capabilities boil down to one thing: data. That data must exist in a secure environment, and the best way to secure an environment is to modernize.

We’ve seen too many security breaches from exploits of buggy software and obsolete security systems, and at a local level, ransomware attacks are rife.

Modernizing the infrastructure through thoughtful cloud implementation can solve these issues. In the cloud, system management and upgrades are easier; performance data more readily available. Personnel training is more flexible and accessible. Application modernization is more automated. Data management and analysis are more nimble, with faster output and lower time to insight. 

Bringing the cloud forward

Infrastructure modernization goes beyond simply moving data and applications from on-prem to the cloud. Modernizing means reimagining the approach to the entire IT environment and rebuilding with a new mindset that assumes cloud as the default. Cloud-native is that approach. 

Unlike monolithic applications, which must be built, tested, and deployed as a single unit, cloud architectures decompose components into loosely coupled services to improve the speed, agility, and scale of software delivery, making applications easier to deploy, edit and integrate with other applications. Because of its inherent pliability, this approach lends itself better to building and deploying emerging technologies, like edge computing, AI, ML, and more. 

For example, to train AI/ML models, agencies need high volumes of diverse, credible data with a lot of computational power and that can only be done in the cloud. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Technology Engagement Center, the U.S. spends $143 billion on information collection just at the federal level. This is a wealth of information that — in a modern infrastructure that can protect and process said data — could create opportunities for citizen engagement and service delivery that we’ve only dreamt of until now. But for that, government agencies will need to begin thinking differently about their cloud strategy. 

In order to be a cloud-native organization in the public sector, you cannot continue to just do things the way you have always done them. This is why, over a decade after establishing FedRAMP, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) outlined modernized guidance on cloud deployment, steering government agencies away from dedicated GovClouds. The OMB has recognized that dedicated GovClouds are not cutting it for government agencies to modernize their infrastructure and that agencies need a better approach to cloud computing that delivers commercial-grade scale and flexibility, all the while remaining secure and compliant. 

In 2024, we are going to see a major shift in the technology landscape in government towards modernization. In order to do so, government and public agencies must evolve culturally and procedurally with flexibility and the courage to modernize by reimagining for the future.

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The Department of Veterans Affairs’ Rory A. Cooper, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Ashok Gadgil and the National Cancer Institute’s Steven A. Rosenberg were among those that Biden presented with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. They were honored for their respective advancements in accessibility, “life-sustaining” innovations and cancer research.

“For this year’s recipients, outstanding may be an understatement. They’re extraordinary,” Biden said in East Room remarks before presenting the awards.

In addition to the technology and innovation awards, Biden also awarded recipients of the National Medal of Science in the same ceremony. A total of 21 individuals were honored.

Of the government awardees, Cooper, founding director and CEO of the Human Engineering Research Laboratories — an institute jointly operated by the VA and the University of Pittsburgh — received his medal for his contributions to innovations in wheelchair technology and mobility devices. 

“Dr. Cooper’s groundbreaking work has improved the lives of so many of his fellow veterans and wheelchair users,” VA Secretary Denis McDonough said in an emailed statement after the event. “We are honored to have a great public servant like him working at VA and serving our nation’s heroes.”

Gadgil, a retired senior faculty scientist at LBNL and current professor at the University of California, Berkeley, received his award for innovations in what the event announcer called “life-sustaining” technologies.

 “His innovative, inexpensive technologies help meet profound needs, from drinking water to fuel-efficient cook stoves,” the announcer said.

The national lab, which is under the Department of Energy, applauded Gadgil’s award Tuesday.

“Ashok’s decadeslong commitment to developing technologies that address urgent humanitarian crises epitomizes Berkeley Lab’s mission of bringing science solutions to the world,” Berkeley Lab Director Mike Witherell said in a release.

The honor is the second National Medal of Technology and Innovation awarded to LBNL researchers, according to the release from the lab. 

Meanwhile, Rosenberg, who is the longtime chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, was honored for his advancements in cancer treatments. Rosenberg led the development of the first effective immunotherapies, saving “countless lives,” the announcer said.

“We are thrilled that President Biden has elected to present Dr. Rosenberg with this auspicious award, which celebrates his groundbreaking contributions to the field of immunotherapy,” Monica Bertagnolli, director of the National Cancer Institute, said in an emailed statement. “His transformative impact on how we treat cancer today is extraordinary, and a testament to why he deserves this recognition.”

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The decision comes after the federal IT contractor filed a motion for voluntary dismissal of its complaint Tuesday saying corrective action being taken by the agency “appears to moot Inserso’s protest.” The contractor previously alleged that the agency acted unreasonably, unlawfully, and contrary to the terms of the solicitation when evaluating its proposal. 

In a filing last week, the agency said it “intends to reevaluate” the self-scoring sheet for Inserso and will evaluate the company’s proposal as part of the corrective action the NIH Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC) is already being undertaken as the result of previous protests.

That ongoing corrective action will result in new decisions about which proposals will advance past the first phase of the competition, the agency’s filing said. It also said it planned to begin corrective action related to Inserso on Sept. 15. 

In response to the corrective action, Thomas Daley, an associate at DLA Piper who represents the company, said “Inserso has prevailed.”

“The company applauds the Government’s willingness to rethink its position, and the outcome is particularly noteworthy given that the GAO ruled against Inserso, on the same issue, prior to the court protest,” Daley said in an emailed statement. 

In an emailed response to a request for comment on the case, NITAAC Deputy Director Ricky Clark said “CIO-SP4 will be awarded prior to the expiration of CIO-SP3. CIO-SP3 sunsets on April 29, 2024.”

CIO-SP4 — which stands for Chief Information Officer-Solutions and Partners 4 — is the fourth iteration of a contract vehicle for acquiring IT products and specialized services across the federal government. The solicitation has faced challenges from companies seeking to be included in it since NITAAC first requested proposals in May 2021.

In July, NITAAC said it would again take corrective action after the GAO sustained dozens of bid protests. The statement was the third time the agency agreed to corrective action on issues relating to advancing offerors to the second phase of the competition. 

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The agency’s updated fiscal year 2023 AI use case inventory — which is required of agencies under a Trump-era executive order — shows 163 instances of the technology being operated, implemented, or developed and acquired by the agency. HHS’s public inventory for the previous fiscal year had 50 use cases. 

“Artificial intelligence use cases tripling from FY22 to FY23 is indicative of HHS’s commitment to leverage trustworthy AI as a critical enabler of our mission,” HHS’s Chief Information Officer Karl S. Mathias told FedScoop in an email.

The increase in reported uses at the agency comes as the conversations about AI’s possible applications and risks have intensified with the rise in popularity of tools like ChatGPT. The Biden administration, which has made AI a focus, is crafting an executive order to address the budding technology and provide guidance to federal agencies on its use.

The majority of AI tools used by HHS – 47 of them – are managed by the National Institutes of Health, according to FedScoop’s analysis of the data. The FDA manages 44, the second-highest number of uses, and the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response follows with 25 AI tools.  

Among the new instances reported in the inventory are tools used by NIH for classifying HIV-related grants and predicting stem cell research subcategories of applications, which were both implemented earlier this year. 

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is exploring using an AI tool to transcribe cognitive interviews, which are used to evaluate survey questions and offer a detailed depiction of respondents’ meanings. According to the inventory, it plans to compare outputs from OpenAI’s automatic speech recognition system Whisper to those of VideoBank, company that provides tools for management of digital assets such as recordings, and manual transcription.

Also at NCHS, the agency is evaluating a tool from Private AI to identify, redact, and replace personally identifiable information “free text data sets across platforms within the CDC network.” The database states that use is in the development and acquisition phase, though it also includes an implementation date of May 2, 2023.

AI use case inventories are required of federal agencies under a Trump-era executive order (EO 13960) aimed at promoting trustworthy AI in government. Under that order, agencies must review their current and planned AI uses annually, check for compliance with the order, share them with other agencies, and post them publicly.

A recent FedScoop review of large agencies’ handling of those inventories showed that efforts across the federal government have so far been inconsistent, varying in terms of process, what they include, and timelines for publication.

The new HHS inventory offers a more detailed look into the agency’s AI uses than its inventory last year and includes nearly every category required under the Chief Information Officers Council’s more expansive guidance for documenting uses in fiscal year 2023.

The agency’s inventory for fiscal 2022 included the name, agency, and description of each use. The fiscal 2023 inventory includes those categories plus the stage of every use case and whether it was contracted. Some uses also include the dates it was initiated, began development and acquisition, and was implemented. 

A little more than a third, 36%, of HHS’s reported AI uses are in the operation and maintenance phase, 28% are in development and acquisition, 20% are in initiation, and 16% are in implementation. 

One key requirement of the executive order was to bring into compliance or retire uses that didn’t comply with its framework for AI use in government.

In response to an inquiry about any use cases that were retired or abandoned by agencies since the last inventory, Mathias said: “Some artificial intelligence use cases, like other technology projects, have pivoted or are no longer pursued for various reasons, but none have been retired because of lack of consistency with principles of Executive Order 13960 of December 3, 2020.”

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In a complaint recently filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Inserso alleged that the agency’s Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC), which is responsible for CIO-SP4, acted unreasonably, unlawfully, and contrary to the terms of the solicitation when evaluating its proposal for the solicitation. 

Those actions resulted in Inserso not progressing past the first phase of the competition, the company claims. The complaint was filed under seal in July and made public in a redacted version Aug. 1.

Inserso’s challenge comes as the agency is again taking corrective action on the solicitation after the Government Accountability Office sustained dozens of challenges to the solicitation. CIO-SP4 — the fourth iteration of a contract vehicle for acquiring commoditized IT products and specialized services — has been dogged by pre-award protests since the agency first requested proposals in May 2021. 

In its complaint, the Virginia-based company specifically took issue with how NITAAC defines indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contracts and blanket purchase agreements (BPAs) as including requirements contracts. But the company argues the solicitation, federal acquisition law, and precedent define those terms as separate.

The difference in interpretations led NITAAC to evaluate Inserso’s experience less favorably than the company had in its own self-score for its proposal — a points-based process used in the solicitation to tally each offeror’s experience. 

While Inserso evaluated its experience under an Air Force contract as having a $57.9 million value and points value of 1,950, the agency calculated it as having a $5.6 million value and points value of 780. The company said that points reduction meant its proposal didn’t advance to the next phase of the competition.

NITAAC declined to comment on pending litigation. Inserso could not be reached for comment.

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The Precision Surgical Interventions program will be funded through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which was established last year to fund breakthroughs in the biomedical and health spaces. The announcement marks the second program the agency has funded and the first related to cancer, the White House said in a release Thursday.

Current technologies can’t help doctors “easily and fully distinguish cancer cells from normal surrounding tissue in the operating room,” the White House announcement said, which can lead to repetitive procedures, difficult recovery, cancer recurrence, and higher costs of care.

“ARPA-H’s new Precision Surgical Interventions (PSI) program aims to deliver groundbreaking new tools to enable surgeons to successfully remove cancer for patients through a single operation by better identifying and differentiating between healthy and cancer tissue,” the White House said. 

The technologies will assist surgeons with identifying and avoiding “important structures such as nerves, blood vessels, and lymph nodes, which can be mistakenly damaged during invasive surgical procedures,” the White House said. 

The administration will also ensure the technologies are accessible in rural and urban areas, in line with the cancer moonshot’s goals to advance equity, the White House said.

Ileana Hancu, the manager of ARPA-H’s Precision Surgical Interventions program, said the program seeks to “fundamentally change how surgery is done.” 

“Imagine if surgeries fixed problems flawlessly, the first time,” Hancu said in a statement from ARPA-H Thursday. She added that the tools have the potential to be used for other types of surgery outside of cancer.

ARPA-H will solicit proposals for ideas on how to improve the visibility of cancer and anatomical structures during surgery in a coming Broad Agency Announcement and anticipates multiple awards. Those awards will depend on the quality of the proposals and available funds, the White House said.

Congress initially funded ARPA-H with $1 billion through the appropriations process for fiscal year 2022. Lawmakers subsequently appropriated an additional $1.5 billion for the agency in the following year.

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The National Institutes of Health Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC) announcement that it will take “corrective action required to reevaluate all proposals” comes after the Government Accountability Office recently sustained a total 119 “bid protest” challenges to the solicitation in two separate decisions.

The statement marks the third time the agency has agreed to corrective action on issues relating to advancing offerors to the second phase of the competition. The GAO previously dismissed prior bid protests in March 2023 and November 2022 after the agency elected to take corrective action.

NITAAC said it doesn’t expect needing to extend existing contracts under the solicitation’s predecessor, CIO-SP3, to prevent a gap in coverage while it conducts the reevaluation. Those existing programs expire Oct. 29.

“We are optimistic about the promise CIO-SP4 holds for our federal government customers and look forward to helping federal civilian and [Department of Defense] agencies get IT done,” NITAAC said in a statement.

CIO-SP4 — short for Chief Information Officer-Solutions and Partners 4 — is the fourth iteration of a contract vehicle for acquiring IT products and specialized services across the federal government. The solicitation has been enmeshed in challenges by companies seeking to be included in it since NITAAC first requested proposals in May 2021. 

“The journey of bringing CIO-SP4 to market has admittedly been a long one, filled with all the expected growing pains of a record setting competitive federal acquisition,” the NITAAC statement said.

In June, the GAO found sustained 93 bid protests, concluding that the agency “unreasonably failed” to advance proposals past the first stage. And on Monday, the watchdog sustained 26 more protests, concluding that the agency couldn’t show that it reasonably evaluated offerors’ self-scores, a points-based process for demonstrating a prospective contractor’s work in certain areas.

The acquisition arm also defended itself in the statement, saying two recent GAO decisions sustaining bid protests received “significant attention,” but “it is equally as important to note the overwhelming number of protest arguments/allegations that have been dismissed, withdrawn, or found to have no merit.”

Editor’s note, 7/13/23: This story was updated to correct the total number of protests sustained.

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In a Thursday statement, managing associate general counsel for procurement law at GAO Kenneth E. Patton said the agency’s decision to not advance those proposals was “flawed”, citing NIH’s inability to show that it both reasonably evaluated phase one proposals and determined which would move on to the next stages of the competition.

“GAO recommended that the agency reevaluate proposals consistent with the decision, and make new determinations of which proposals advance past phase 1 of the competition based on the results of these new evaluations,” Patton said, echoing previous statements from the organization.

Patton also said the GAO found the agency “unreasonably evaluated specific aspects” of a phase one proposal from Sky Solutions LLC. GAO denied remaining arguments the protesters raised, which included challenges to other aspects of the evaluations and untimely challenges, he said.

The decision was issued under a protective order because it “may contain proprietary and source selection sensitive information,” according to Patton. It addressed protests by entities represented by outside counsel who were eligible for a protective order. Protests filed by entities not represented by counsel will be addressed in a separate, forthcoming decision, Patton added.

CIO-SP4 is the fourth iteration of a contract vehicle for acquiring commoditized IT products and specialized services that has been dogged by pre-award protests since the agency first requested proposals in May 2021. The CIO-SP4 vehicle has a $50 billion ceiling.

Entities seeking inclusion in National Institutes of Health Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC)’s 10-year solicitation have made multiple challenges through bid protests over the last two years. Those challenges have focused on the process and criteria by which the awarding agency was using to select awardees. They’ve been both dismissed and sustained, as the agency pushes forward with the solicitation.

In March, the GAO dismissed a round of bid protests after the agency agreed to voluntary corrective action to make a new phase one determination on highest rated offerors. GAO previously dismissed 117 complaints in November 2022 over the use of a points based scoring system used to analyze prior performance of the entities bidding. The agency agreed to voluntary corrective action in that case as well.

Both of those decisions came after GAO partially sustained a pre-award protest arguing the procurement unfairly disadvantaged large companies in mentor-protégé arrangements in November 2021.

Commenting on the bid protest decisions, founder of federal procurement consultancy ProcureLinx, Mark Hijar, said: “This is a sign, to me, that they have some very serious retooling to do before they move to the next phase of evaluation. And for this to happen at this late date is not a good sign.”

Hijar, who has worked with contractors who were awardees under past iterations of the vehicle, said he’ll be watching how the agency addresses the recommendation efficiently “without materially changing the evaluation criteria that were originally provided.”

Editor’s note, 6/29/23: This story was updated to add further context about prior CIO-SP4 bid protests and to include comment from ProcureLinx.

Editor’s note, 7/13/23: This story was updated to correct the number of protests sustained.

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