The legislation, among other things, would establish pilot programs to try out “more flexible, competitive purchasing practices” and require that government contracts for AI “to include safety and security terms for data ownership, civil rights, civil liberties and privacy, adverse incident reporting and other key areas,” according to a release.

“Artificial intelligence has the power to reshape how the federal government provides services to the American people for the better, but if left unchecked, it can pose serious risks,” Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., who sponsors the bill with Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said in a statement. “These guardrails will help guide federal agencies’ responsible adoption and use of AI tools, and ensure that systems paid for by taxpayers are being used safely and securely.”

According to the release, the Promoting Responsible Evaluation and Procurement to Advance Readiness for Enterprise-wide Deployment (PREPARED) for AI Act builds on a law passed in 2022 that required agencies to protect privacy and civil rights when purchasing AI. That legislation was also sponsored by Peters. President Joe Biden cited that law in a section of his executive order on AI that directed the Office of Management and Budget to take action on addressing federal AI acquisition. 

The OMB in March asked for input on AI procurement, including how the administration can promote competition and protect the government’s rights to access its data in those contracts. The administration has said it plans to take action on AI procurement later this year.

“As the role of artificial intelligence in the public and private sectors continues to grow, it is crucial federal agencies have a robust framework for procuring and implementing AI safely and effectively,” Tillis said in the release. 

A Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee aide told FedScoop that Peters, who chairs the panel, plans a markup for the bill this summer. Once it’s passed by the panel, the aide said Peters “will keep all options on the table and pursue any path forward, whether that’s advancing the bill as a standalone or as part of a larger vehicle.” 

The bill has the support of Center for Democracy and Technology, Transparency Coalition, the AI Procurement Lab, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), according to the release.

The post Bipartisan Senate bill would establish federal AI acquisition guardrails appeared first on FedScoop.

Before the policy, agencies and their contracting officials were limited to only data from their respective agencies, hampering data-driven decisions, according to a White House fact sheet. But the finalized circular (A-137) establishes that acquisition data is an asset to be used across the government and instructs agencies to be prepared to collect and share that information. 

The policy “marks a paradigm shift in the government’s acquisition data management practices,” the fact sheet said.  

Jason Miller, the deputy director for management in the Office of Management and Budget that houses OFPP, told reporters at a Tuesday roundtable the circular makes acquisition information a “government asset” rather than an agency asset.

“It’s just a huge step in us unlocking the business intelligence that allows those 40,000 contracting officials to operate smarter, better — both on delivering on mission and addressing costs and requirements in ways that result in better outcomes,” Miller said.

Christine Harada, senior adviser who leads the OFPP team in the absence of a Senate-confirmed director, told reporters the guidance changed slightly since a draft version was released for public comment last year. The final version incorporates other work the office has done on data and data-related strategies.

Harada also noted that the administration has created a tool called the Procurement Co-Pilot that “demonstrates the value and the power of having such an enterprise-wide access, and we’ve been rolling that out with our acquisition workforce.”

Better contracting

The data circular is one of the four elements of the Biden administration’s Better Contracting Initiative to improve efficiency and save money on federal spending. The others focus on enterprise-wide software license negotiation, improving contract requirements, and getting more value from sole source and high-risk contracts.

Those other elements of that initiative are also moving forward. On improving negotiation for enterprise-wide software, Miller said the administration has already taken the first step by bringing together agencies that are big buyers of those products to navigate where they have common requirements. He said he’s hopeful that the administration will have more to share on that progress “very soon.” 

Under that prong of the Better Contracting Initiative, the General Services Administration will “lead a government-wide IT software license agreement with a large software provider.”

Harada said in the workshop process, all 24 Chief Financial Officers Act agencies agreed on over 80% of the requirements, and the remaining ones can be tailored agency-by-agency. “There’s been a lot of really good buy-in from the agencies on this,” Harada said.

The Tuesday announcement came as OFPP marked half a century as an office. Harada and Miller remarked on the accomplishments of the office since then.

“When we were first established, the acquisition workforce had no training — no training whatsoever,” Harada said, noting they’ve since made progress on “investing in the acquisition workforce.” 

She also highlighted the establishment of things like the Chief Acquisition Officers Council and the Interagency Suspension and Debarment Committee, adding that the theme of the past 50 years has been the government getting “more organized and buying as one.”

The post White House procurement office releases data circular as it celebrates 50th anniversary appeared first on FedScoop.

The GSA’s Generative AI and Specialized Computing Infrastructure Acquisition Resource Guide details how contracting officers can approach gen AI procurement decisions through suggested questions and considerations, per an agency press release. 

“Generative AI technology will continue to evolve and we know that this resource guide should continue to evolve with it,” Laura Stanton, assistant commissioner in the GSA’s Office of Information Technology Category, said in the release. “Contracting officers will play a critical role by working closely with program and IT staff to find, source, acquire and make secure the right generative AI solutions for agencies’ needs.”

Along with acquisition recommendations, the guide also includes examples of generative AI in government, recommendations for how government entities may use things like sandboxes or testbeds before committing to a large-scale purchase, instructions on how agencies may define issues they are looking to solve, and more. 

The agency said in the release that the resource guide “will be updated as technologies develop.”

GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan said in the press release that the guide offers AI use cases, common challenges and information to support the public sector’s exploration of the “growing AI marketplace,” adding that the guide “starts to leverage the power of AI to better deliver” for the public.

“This guide is a key part of our commitment to equipping the federal community to responsibly and effectively deploy generative AI technologies to benefit the American people,” Carnahan said.

The post GSA releases generative AI resource guide for federal purchasers appeared first on FedScoop.

But for the General Services Administration, the decision to go all-in on AI wasn’t really up for debate.

“We’re doing this because it’s GSA’s job to have shared services for the government,” GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan said Thursday. “And generative AI tools are going to be a giant help in that.”

Speaking at AIScoop’s AITalks event, Carnahan said GSA is currently operating seven different sandbox environments, and there’s “more to come” across the agency with AI. Fully embracing the technology is a matter of recognizing that public- and private-sector tech leaders are “going to decide whether we’re on the right or wrong side of history on this topic, whether we get it right for the American people,” she said. “If we do, it opens up all kinds of possibilities.”

Exploring those possibilities to the fullest extent comes down to buying “best-in-class AI technologies,” Carnahan said. The agency plans to partner closely with industry, she added, and its IT category management office within the Federal Acquisition Service is in the process of developing an acquisition resource guide for generative AI and specialized computing infrastructure. 

“This is a big deal,” Carnahan said, “because procurement officers need to know about these new technologies. A sneak peek of what you’re gonna see in there is going to identify a lot of common challenges. It’s gonna identify use cases. It’s gonna help procurement officers navigate the marketplace so the missions of these agencies can be fulfilled.” 

The GSA is also focused on highlighting products that already have FedRAMP approval, part of the newly released roadmap for the federal government’s cloud services compliance program. Carnahan said that the strategy document is aimed at making FedRAMP more scalable, more secure and easier to use.

For any budget-strapped agency considering new AI projects, Carnahan pushed the Technology Modernization Fund as a means to “go outside your budget cycle and get access to funding for these new tools.” TMF is currently soliciting proposals from agencies with ideas for AI projects. 

“We expect to see a lot of interest from across the government,” Carnahan said. “If your agency hasn’t thought about using the TMF for your AI proposals, you should do that. Now is the best time for it.”

For the GSA internally, a new Login.gov pilot leveraging facial matching technology best represents the agency’s commitment to “using technology ethically and responsibly and securely for the public good,” Carnahan said. The pilot will help people verify their identities remotely, though the GSA is pledging to minimize data retention and ensure “that personal information is protected and not shared. And it is never sold.”

This next phase of the GSA’s work on the governmentwide single sign-on and identity verification platform, which includes a partnership with the U.S. Postal Service, is emblematic of what the agency views as its mission to deliver secure and inclusive products. And although there are “precarious uncharted waters ahead” when it comes to full-scale adoption of AI tools and systems, Carnahan is bullish on the government’s prospects.

“We know that by working together through our government teams, industry teams, that we can get to the other side,” she said. “The American people are counting on us to get it right. There is no time to waste. So let’s all get to work.”

The post GSA administrator: Generative AI tools will be ‘a giant help’ for government services appeared first on FedScoop.

Achieving that goal could mean establishing a governmentwide acquisition vehicle, such as a blanket purchase agreement and applying lessons learned from cloud acquisition, Sonny Hashmi, commissioner of the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service (FAS), told FedScoop in a recent interview.

“We want to leverage kind of our governmentwide buying power capability to do it once and repeat many times,” Hashmi said.

Purchasing AI is going to be different from software or hardware purchasing “because it’s not just a product that you’re buying,” he said. AI can include hardware, software, cloud, and is trained on data that comes from different companies or could be proprietary to an agency. 

“That becomes a very complicated acquisition environment,” Hashmi said. Making it more complicated: The tension between how fast AI capabilities are moving and government’s desire for stability with the things it acquires.

The following interview with Hashmi has been edited for length and clarity.

FedScoop: Tell me a little bit about the Federal Acquisition Service’s role in this executive order and what your piece of this is going to be going forward.

Sonny Hashmi: So as you know, the executive order is very comprehensive. It sets a very high level of expectation and vision for all of government to attack, and this is truly an all-of-government challenge. Both the challenge and the opportunity side requires coordination between all agencies — in the security space, the privacy space, and of course, the implementation side. The GSA, being a central agency, works very regularly on these kinds of things. We usually play a central role, whether you go back 10 to 15 years when the cloud was a new concept, GSA took the lead of developing a centralized capability, whether it’s through FedRAMP, or contracting vehicles to enable access to the right cloud solutions, right? 

I anticipate seeing a similar role for GSA as we move forward. In fact, some of our team members have been in collaboration with [the Office of Management and Budget] on this topic for some time already. So whether it’s creating a marketplace for capabilities, and how do you even define that? These are the kinds of questions we’re going to be asking ourselves. 

But ultimately, our role is going to be exactly what we do for any other category of product or service that the government needs. We create a marketplace, we identify all the providers who have capabilities in that marketplace, we set the standards for how we’re going to test and validate their claims, we want to make sure that it’s high quality in that process, and to the extent that requires us to develop a cross-agency coordination body, we also have the responsibility of doing that. And then ultimately, our job is to make it dead easy for agencies to focus on their missions, instead of having to figure out how to buy these complicated things on a one-off basis.

FS: What are some of the levers you can pull to help achieve faster and easier AI acquisition?

Hashmi: A few of the things that come to mind: We want to leverage kind of our governmentwide buying power capability to do it once and repeat many times. Purchasing AI capabilities is going to be very different than people know how to purchase software or hardware because it’s not just a product that you’re buying. You have to train that model on training sets. That training set comes from different companies. Maybe that’s internal to an agency. So it’s going to be a product, including hardware, potentially software, cloud, but services and training data all together, right? So that becomes a very complicated acquisition environment. And so what we want to do is to be able to build the right kind of repeatable acquisition environment, so it could look like a [blanket purchase agreement], it could look like some sort of an acquisition vehicle that then allows agencies to do very quick turnaround task orders against. 

So we’ve done that for cloud, for example, when we work with [the Department of Defense]. We’re able to create one environment where the DOD can transact and buy every time they need some cloud service. We’ve done similar kinds of things with, for example, in the telecom space where we spend a lot of time thinking through what the government’s back-office data and voice telecom needs are, but then once the agency is ready, they can very quickly do task order instead of having to do a full competition every time within the marketplace. So instead of spending a year doing an acquisition, we can turn it down to weeks, even, in some cases, right? So that’s exactly going to be the mode for AI, too. 

But before we do that, we’re going to get all agencies together to really understand what the common requirements are going to be. Because ultimately, if you don’t understand what the need is, then we can’t really build a solution that actually is gonna work for our customers. So we’re gonna be doing a lot of listening sessions both with industry as well as government partners. 

FS: What are the challenges you’re seeing? Have you seen anything common when agencies are trying to acquire AI right now?

Hashmi: I would say it’s early days, right? So we’re seeing a lot of early use cases; OMB has done a great job at identifying a long list of use cases that are potential opportunities for AI. We’re going to be looking through those use cases. Because it’s so early, especially in the generative AI space, we don’t see a lot of consistency yet. 

One could argue AI is already being used in the federal government, right? We are using AI within FAS, for example, to identify supply chain risk and be able to automatically kick off risky products and services off our contract vehicles. That’s been in place for some time — agencies using AI for imagery analysis, satellite management, like all sorts of different capabilities. But as we look at this, these are all very different solutions. So in the acquisition space, you need to kind of put like things next to like things so that you can do competition. So the closest analogy I can think of is cloud. Cloud is not one thing, right? [Infrastructure as a service] is very different than [platform as a service], which is very different than [software as a service]. It’s almost farcical to compare a product like, let’s say, Google Cloud services with DocuSign. They’re both cloud companies that serve very different use cases. And so when we think about the cloud marketplace, there’s different pools that you have to establish with different kinds of use cases, and I suspect in the AI space it’s going to be the same because AI is not just one thing.

FS: Are there any lessons learned from cloud that you could apply to the AI environment now?

Hashmi: Yeah, I think the biggest lesson is that the market is going to move faster than we anticipate. And I think the same thing happened with cloud. The market does not stagnate whenever there’s an impactful capability. You’re going to see many new companies start in a matter of weeks and months, you’re gonna see new capabilities scale, and if you’ve actually seen the progression from ChatGPT to GPT3, GPT4, even the foundational models are scaling very, very quickly and morphing very quickly. 

So we’re not going to have the ability to buy for one particular solution because by the time that capability comes online, the capability has already moved on. So we’re gonna have to develop a very agile, continuously evolving kind of an environment that can continuously ingest new capabilities. At the same time, government likes stability. We like to be able to test and validate that a product is actually going to solve a problem. We like to test and validate that a product meets security and compliance requirements, privacy requirements. And so this balancing act between stability so that we can have adequate insight and trust into a product and how fast the market is moving, that’s going to be the tension. And it’s going to be even more acute than in the cloud space. So that’s the challenge that we don’t quite know exactly how we’re going to navigate, but we are aware that this is something that we’re going to have to design in a new way.

The post GSA’s approach to artificial intelligence acquisition: ‘do it once’ and repeat, official says appeared first on FedScoop.

Speaking Tuesday at an industry event in Washington, D.C., State Department Director of Cybersecurity Supply Chain Risk Management Zetra Batiste said the agency’s Bureau of Information Resource Management is providing the additional training to help combat the rising threat of procurement processes being used to introduce malware into U.S. government systems.

Her comments come amid heightened concerns over cyber supply chain risk and what measures, such as the provision of software bills of material, should be imposed on technology companies working with government agencies.

She said: “My top priority is continuing to stay on top of our acquisition requirements because that [the procurement process] is how threats are introduced into the environment.” 

The State Department employs hundreds of contracting officers based around the world, speaking different languages, who are responsible for negotiating contracts on behalf of the agency. 

Batiste said her bureau is focused on creating repeatable processes for managing the IT supply chain that allow it to manage risks.

Last year, the Biden administration announced new plans under which all software vendors working with federal government agencies would be required to sign and provide attestation forms guaranteeing the cybersecurity of their products.

The new measures will make the collection of attestation forms a key part of federal government technology procurement, but contractors will not have to submit them for open-source software they use.

Concerns over cyber-supply chain risk across U.S. government agencies have risen since the 2020 SolarWinds cyber breach, during which foreign hackers used the software supply chain to exfiltrate data from departments including the Treasury and Homeland Security.

The post State Department providing extra cyber-supply chain risk training for 150 contracting officers appeared first on FedScoop.

The department will use a common form provided by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to collect the letters, which it expects will be available before June.

Details on the implementation timeline for the new requirements come as federal contractors’ cybersecurity arrangements attract enhanced scrutiny.

Writing in an op-ed for Foreign Affairs on Wednesday, CISA Chief Jen Easterly called for industry to take greater responsibility for ensuring the safety of its products and said shareholders should ensure c-suite executives are viewing cyberrisk as a board-level issue. 

By collecting the letters of attestation from vendors, GSA will work to implement a memo signed by the White House in September that requires federal agencies to ensure that all third-party IT software deployed adheres to National Institute of Standards and Technology supply chain security requirements. 

Requirements for software vendors working with government to attest to the safety of their products was also included in the Biden administration’s May 2021 cyber executive order. 

The Federal Acquisition Council is currently considering a rule change that would embed the requirement for software providers to attest to the security of their products within the Federal Acquisition Regulation.

In its memo, GSA said: “To comply with Executive Order 14028 and OMB Memorandum M-22-18, which require federal agencies to only use software that complies with Government-specified secure software development practices, GSA IT will update its processes to approve software including requiring vendor attestations.

It added: “GSA IT anticipates issuing an updated attestation process by June 12, 2023.”

In the acquisition note, GSA said that cloud providers are encouraged to continue working within the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) framework.

“The FedRAMP approval process will streamline the GSA IT Standards Process allowing for a timely contract start,” the agency said. “GSA also anticipates that leveraging FedRAMP will ensure and streamline compliance with requirements of OMB Memo M-22-18 in the future.”

Correction, 2/2/22: This article was updated to clarify that GSA will begin collecting letters of attestation only from software vendors it works with directly, not from those working with other federal agencies.

The post GSA to start collecting letters of attestation from software vendors in mid-June appeared first on FedScoop.

That was Dr. Bill LaPlante, DoD’s top acquisition executive, at a recent defense conference.

He also said: “If somebody gives you a really cool liquored up story about a DIU [project] or OTA [contract] ask them when it’s going into production, ask them how many numbers, ask them what the [unit cost] is going to be, ask them how it will work against China. Ask them all those questions because that’s what matters. And don’t tell me it’s got AI and quantum in it. I don’t care.” 

Dr. LaPlante is right to focus on volume production of munitions. This is a critical issue for Ukraine and for our own national security. I can appreciate his passion for wanting DoD to send a demand signal to ensure sufficient, long-term manufacturing capacity for Javelins, Stingers, High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), and other advanced munitions that America and its allies would need in a future conflict.      

His flippant comments on commercial technology, however, are misleading. “Tech bros” aren’t providing artillery, but the Ukrainians are directing the warfight on iPhones, social media, secure messaging apps, Starlink, and software applications they’re building on the fly. They are getting their intelligence from commercial satellite companies. And they are directing strikes using commercial drones. Commercial technology matters in the current conflict. More so than in any recent combat operation. 

I’d humbly suggest to Dr. LaPlante that if commercial technology isn’t scaling fast enough inside the DoD, it is precisely because the DoD isn’t focused on scaling commercial technology. And that falls squarely in his inbox as DoD’s chief acquisition executive.

The existing defense industrial base isn’t sufficient

Beyond underplaying the value of commercial technology in Ukraine, Dr. LaPlante set up a false dichotomy about volume production versus emerging commercial technologies. We need both. And indeed, neglecting either could leave the U.S. military unprepared for the next fight, as numerous studies have warned. 

Building the necessary capabilities to aid the Ukrainians and deter China requires considering not only how much we produce, but also what we produce, and how fast. This is one of the central findings in the interim report of the Strategic Competitive Studies Project (SCSP) Economy Panel. It calls for a new American techno-industrial strategy that harvests the best of traditional defense manufacturing and emerging technology through improved public-private partnerships. 

We will not be able to maximize our probability of deterring future conflict with China by focusing on systems that align with our current concepts and operational plans. That is exactly the same mistake Russia made, and we should not repeat it. 

Let’s be honest: will the existing traditional defense contractors create small unmanned drones, new cyber tools, and space-based communication and sensing capabilities — at high volumes and radically lower costs? That we can easily share with allies?  That can be rapidly adapted, integrated, and repurposed—even in the fog of war?  

Heidi Shyu, the DoD CTO, has identified 14 critical technology areas that are vital to national security. And the former Defense Innovation Unit Director, Mike Brown, observed that commercial industry already leads in 11 of those 14 areas. Maintaining our technological edge depends more on partnering with “tech bros” than ever, even if that’s not the industrial base that makes the Pentagon comfortable. 

Of course, we need traditional defense contractors and weapons systems. But they are not sufficient. We need to focus on how fast the DoD can incorporate emerging commercial technologies into its existing arsenal and future plans. 

As former Navy acquisition executive James “Hondo” Geurts and Gen. Joe Votel have argued, we need to take “full advantage of [technology] initially intended for commercial purposes … and agilely adapt such emerging technologies to defense use without costly and time-consuming reinvention and reduplication.”

VC-backed startups and scaleups: commercial innovation we need

The good news: many of the newer, innovative companies we need already exist. 

Startups and especially scaleups — startups that have good product-market fit and are rapidly growing revenue — can help DoD field important new capabilities. There is an entire ecosystem of ambitious defense-tech and dual-use companies in Silicon Valley and in other innovation hubs around the country. U.S. defense and aerospace startups raised $10 billion in 2021, triple the amount from 2019. More broadly, across industries, artificial intelligence and machine learning startups raised $115 billion in 2021, according to Pitch

Insight Partners, where I work, has invested in Rebellion Defense, Hawkeye360, Shift5, and LeoLabs — and we have met with most of the national security entrepreneurs seeking venture capital. We are also one of the larger venture and growth investors in AI, cyber, and enterprise software companies — many of which are also serving the U.S. government. 

I can say from a firsthand perspective: the innovation is here today. In most cases, commercial vendors are delivering important new capabilities at a much faster rate than any of the large defense contractors.   

Software and data analytics — which drive the intelligence that DoD desperately needs to deter next-generation conflict — do not rely primarily on physical production. Instead, software and AI are made, iteratively, by product managers, software developers, system reliability engineers and data scientists. 

Fortunately, VC-backed scaleups attract some of the best software and AI talent in the world. Scaleups compete on talent density, which creates product velocity and faster customer feedback cycles. And increasingly, talented technologists want to work on national security problems.  

Focus on the program executive offices

More good news: thanks to the efforts of current and past public servants — most notably the late Secretary Ash Carter, who was instrumental in pushing the DoD on this topic — thousands of startups and scaleups are already working with DoD. Through labs, rapid prototyping groups, and innovation units, venture-backed companies are coming through the DoD front door, alongside the traditional defense industrial base. It’s a positive development that the Department has become more startup-friendly with its R&D dollars. Now, it’s time to move the winners — those that have product-market fit inside the DoD — into production. 

The DoD should accelerate the buying and integration of commercial technologies by focusing on where procurement happens at scale: the program executive offices (PEOs). From ships to planes to enterprise logistic systems, PEOs are how the Defense Department buys and integrates technology into existing platforms, primarily through large defense contractors.

The Department should provide incentives for acquisition professionals inside the PEO portfolios to buy emerging tech for integration into existing programs. Winning technologies should be able to scale across different programs — what is known as “portfolio management” — even programs that comprise a number of different traditional defense contractors. Imagine the impact that would result from technology companies competing to become a “capability of record” for the DoD, rather than owning a smaller piece of a single program of record.   

PEOs should support innovative commercial companies by committing to procurement actions at the speed of relevance—and committing to experiment continuously with their capabilities. PEOs could accomplish this by creating a new executive role — a Portfolio Innovation Director — and giving them resources, tools, and most importantly, an innovation scaling mandate.

Building bridges with the PEOs is a two-way street, and the innovation community needs to do its part. I’ve been honored to participate in the U.S. Air Force training program, Banshee, talking with talented mid-career acquisition officials about how VC-backed companies differ from the defense contractors they are more familiar with. And as part of the Defense Ventures fellowship program, Insight Partners has hosted active duty service members — including acquisition professionals — to build greater familiarity with the VC-backed innovation ecosystem. 

Let’s get Silicon Valley tech into production

Dr. LaPlante’s “tech bros” comments divert attention from the real issue: DoD won’t win a future war without embracing commercial tech. Commercial technology has changed the course of the conflict in Ukraine. Deterring a peer adversary like China will require the DoD to exploit a wide array of commercial technologies across the U.S. and our Allies. And if deterrence doesn’t work, the side that can introduce new emerging technologies and updated software faster than the other is likely to gain a competitive tactical and operational advantage.  

As a former public official, I know how hard it can be to make changes in a large bureaucracy. It takes knowing the system deeply, starting small but aiming big, and partnering with unlikely allies. Heck, I wrote a book about it. The DoD machinery of requirements generation, acquisition, and budgeting is big and complicated. It’s easy to criticize DoD from the outside, and hard to make meaningful change from the inside. But with leadership commitment, it can be done.

Dr. LaPlante, you are the chief buyer for the entire Defense Department. You can lead the way. Will you put Silicon Valley into production? 

Nick Sinai is a senior advisor at Insight Partners, a commissioner on the Atlantic Council’s Commission on Defense Innovation Adoption, and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School.

The post Forging the defense industrial base for the digital age appeared first on FedScoop.

Vendors are encouraged to submit their technical capabilities and Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program-certified, commercial-off-the-shelf offerings — especially cloud solutions.

The IRS Office of the Chief Procurement Officer maintains three contract-writing systems: Procurement for Public Sector (PPS), Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and Procurement Request Information System Management (PRISM) for the Treasury Department. The agency’s RFI is the latest to attempt to learn how automation might help its procurement teams adhere to the Federal Acquisition Regulation and further standardize vendor evaluation and selection.

Ideal solicitation evaluation tools will handle document management, auditing with analytics and performance metrics, and intelligent automation scoring while supporting ratings that indicate the degree to which proposals meet the customer agency’s standards with adjectives like excellent or acceptable. The IRS uses General Services Administration vehicles, governmentwide acquisition contracts and federal supply schedules to procure IT for customer agencies, and any tool would need to evaluate solicitations based on requirements within them.

The RFI further asks vendors to provide their timelines for implementing such a solution and examples of three customers receiving similar services. The deadline for submissions is Oct. 13 at 5 p.m. eastern time.

The post IRS seeks tool to help automate solicitation evaluation appeared first on FedScoop.

Judge Catherine Blake from the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland sided with Booz Allen and denied the DOJ’s request for a preliminary order to stop the deal.

A preliminary injunction to halt a transaction is often sought by the U.S. Government in antitrust cases with an appropriate likelihood of success and when the balance of equities is weighted in its favor.

It comes after the Justice Department in June filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland in a bid to halt Booz Allen’s proposed acquisition of EverWatch, a subsidiary of EC Defense Holdings. In its complaint, the U.S. government argued the deal would directly threaten competition for government contracts that provide operational modeling and simulation services to the National Security Agency.

Booz Allen pushed back strongly in the past few months on the DOJ’s claim that the merger hurt the federal government and is in support of the Maryland judge’s decision.

“At this time our statement is that we appreciate Judge Blake’s careful consideration of the evidence in this matter,” Jessica Klenk, director of media relations at Booz Allen Hamilton told FedScoop.

Booz Allen announced its plan to take over EverWatch in March, shortly before the NSA was scheduled to release the requests for their latest government contract needs. 

In court documents filed in June, the Department of Justice said that prior to the merger agreement, Booz Allen and EverWatch had competed head-to-head to win NSA contracts and then “Booz Allen decided to buy its only rival.”

The DOJ’s argument against the deal centered on the award of a $17 million NSA intelligence modeling and simulation contract known as Optimal Decision, details of which were first revealed in court documents filed as part of the antitrust case.

As the principal U.S. defense intelligence agency specializing in cryptology, signals intelligence and the interception of communications, NSA periodically issues such government contracts to support its signals intelligence data missions.

Later in August, Booz Allen in court documents argued that the DOJ’s antitrust concerns that the deal is anticompetitive were “imaginative,” “bizarre,” and not based in law or economics. 

Shortly after this the company put forward proposals intended to allay the DOJ’s concerns, which included signing a commitment that both companies would remain independent for up to a year.

The NSA has a Oct. 31 deadline for government contract bids and Judge Blake has asked the DOJ and Booz Allen to submit proposals for any further legal proceedings no later than 14 days after that deadline. 

The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Federal judge declines to grant DOJ interim injunction in Booz Allen antitrust case appeared first on FedScoop.