Though Freedom of Information Act requests to the tax agency can still be filed through FOIA.gov, the mail, by fax, or even in person, the IRS’s decision to point online filers to ID.me — whose facial verification technology has, in the past, drawn scrutiny from Congress — has raised some advocates’ eyebrows

Alex Howard, who directs the Digital Democracy Project and also serves on the FOIA Advisory Committee hosted out of the National Archives, said in an email to FedScoop that language on the IRS website seems to encourage ID.me use for faster service. It also doesn’t make significant references to FOIA.gov, a separate governmentwide portal that agencies are supposed to work with by law, he said. 

“While modernizing authentication systems for online portals is not inherently problematic, adding such a layer to exercising the right to request records under the FOIA is overreach at best and a violation of our fundamental human right to access information at worst, given the potential challenges doing so poses,” Howard said. 

The IRS defended its use of the service in responses to FedScoop questions, noting the other ways people can file FOIA requests and that the tool is only required of those seeking to interact with their public records electronically. The agency also said that ID.me follows National Institute of Standards and Technology guidelines for credential authentication services.

“The sole purpose of ID.me is to act as a Credential Service Provider that authenticates a user interested in using the IRS FOIA Portal to submit a FOIA request and receive responsive documents,” a spokesperson for the agency said. “The data collected by ID.me has nothing to do with the processing of a FOIA request.”

The IRS website currently directs people trying to access the agency’s online FOIA portal to use ID.me, which describes itself as a “digital passport” that “simplifies how individuals prove and share their identity online.” According to one IRS page, the “IRS Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Public Access Portal now uses a sign-on system that requires identity verification.” Those hoping to access online FOIA portal accounts created before June 2023 also must register for ID.me, the site states. 

The ID.me login page directs users to the FOIA portal, stating that those who can’t verify their identity can try visiting the ID.me help page or pursue alternative options. From there, another page tells users to try “another method” for submitting a FOIA. 

The system requires users to upload a picture of their ID: They can choose between taking a selfie and using biometric facial verification software that compares the image to their ID — or wait for a video appointment to confirm their identity. 

The system also appears to prompt users to share their Social Security number and includes terms of service that discuss the handling of biometric data. Two FedScoop reporters tried registering with the system: one had their expired identification rejected and had to attempt again with a passport, while the other’s driver’s license could not be “read” the first time but was accepted during a second attempt in combination with the video selfie. Both FedScoop reporters later received a letter, by mail, notifying them that their personal information was used to access an IRS service using ID.me.

What an ID.me scan looks like when signing into the IRS’s FOIA portal.

The IRS spokesperson said that the collection of a Social Security number is related to the digital authentication process, not the processing of the FOIA request itself, and biometric information is not retained by the IRS. 

“The IRS requires ID.me to delete the selfie and biometric information within 24 hours for taxpayers who verify using the self-service process,” the spokesperson said, adding that “ID.me is also required to delete any video chat recording within 30 days for taxpayers who choose to verify using the video chat pathway.” 

An ID.me spokesperson said in an email to FedScoop that no state or local agency uses the system for identity verification or as authentication for FOIA portals.  

The FOIA portals for the Treasury Department and Social Security Administration do use ID.me, the company spokesperson noted, but both agencies seem to provide more information on alternative submission options to submit requests online. ID.me referred additional questions regarding the IRS’s use of the company’s FOIA portal to the tax agency. Treasury did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

The Social Security Administration offers both ID.me and Login.gov — another government-run ID service — as options to log into its FOIA portal, FOIAXPress Public Access Link. Like the IRS, the SSA said in response to FedScoop questions that mail, fax, email and FOIA.gov are alternatives to filing FOIAs. A Social Security number is not required for accessing FOIAXpress, though it appears to be required for signing into ID.me, which some users might be using to file FOIA requests. 

“In the scenario where a customer uses their ID.me account to access FOIAXpress PAL, the customer selects this sign in option on the login page and is redirected to a webpage on ID.me’s website,” an agency spokesperson said. “If the customer creates an account in this session, ID.me retains info on the registration event in their records.

They continued: “Upon successful account creation, the user is routed back to SSA’s website and allowed access to FOIAXpress PAL. SSA and ID.me retain info on the transaction in our respective records.”

“Submitting a Social Security Number to ID.me is related to the digital identity authentication process; generally it is not required for the FOIA process,” the IRS spokesperson added. 

Albert Fox Cahn, a privacy-focused attorney who directs the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, expressed concerns about the IRS’s use of ID.me. “This isn’t just creepy and discriminatory, it might break federal law,” he said in a statement to FedScoop. “Under FOIA, public records belong to the public, and no one should have to hand over their biometric data just to see the records they’re entitled to access.” 

The use of ID.me by the government has sparked concerns in the past. In 2022, some members of Congress accused the company of downplaying wait times and misleading people about the way its facial recognition technology worked. The company, meanwhile, has defended its practices, including its work on fighting fraud during the pandemic.

Matt Bracken contributed to this article.

This story was updated June 11, 2024, to update Alex Howard’s professional affiliation.

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The State Department is no exception. According to Eric Stein, deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Global Information Services, the department’s eRecords archive system currently contains more than 4 billion artifacts, which includes emails and cable traffic. “The latter is how we communicate to and from our embassies overseas,” Stein said.

Over time, however, department officials need to declare what can be released to the public and what stays classified — a time-consuming and labor-intensive process.

The State Department has turned to cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to find a more efficient solution. Through three pilot projects, the department has successfully streamlined the document review process for declassification and improved the customer experience when it comes to FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests.

An ML-driven declassification effort

At the root of the challenge is Executive Order 13526, which requires that classified records of permanent historical value be automatically declassified after 25 years unless a review determines an exemption. For the State Department, cables are among the most historically significant records produced by the agency. However, current processes and resource levels will not work for reviewing electronic records, including classified emails, created in the early 2000s and beyond, jeopardizing declassification reviews starting in 2025.

Recognizing the need for a more efficient process, the department embarked on a declassification review pilot using ML in October 2022. Stein came up with the pilot idea after participating in an AI Federal Leadership Program supported by major cloud providers, including Microsoft.

For the pilot, the department used cables from 1997 and created a review model based on human decisions from 2020 and 2021 concerning cables marked as confidential and secret in 1995 and 1996. The model uses discriminative AI to score and sort cables into three categories: those it was confident should be declassified, those it was confident shouldn’t be declassified, and those that needed manual review.

According to Stein, for the 1997 pilot group of more than 78,000 cables, the model performed the same as human reviewers 97% to 99% of the time and reduced staff hours by at least 60%.

“We project [this technology] will lead to millions of dollars in cost avoidance over the next several years because instead of asking for more money for human resources or different tools to help with this, we can use this technology,” Stein explained. “And then we can focus our human resources on the higher-level and analytical thinking and some of the tougher decisions, as opposed to what was a very manual process.”

Turning attention to FOIA

Building on the success of the declassification initiative, the State Department embarked on two other pilots to enhance the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) processes from June 2023 to February 2024.

Like cable declassification efforts, handling a FOIA request is a highly manual process. According to Stein, sometimes those requests are a single sentence; others are multiple pages. But no matter the length, a staff member must acknowledge the request, advise whether the department will proceed with it, and then manually search for terms in those requests in different databases to locate the relevant information.

Using the lessons learned from the declassification pilot, Stein said State Department staff realized there was an opportunity to streamline certain parts of the FOIA process by simultaneously searching what was already in the department’s public reading room and in the record holdings.

“If that information is already publicly available, we can let the requester know right away,” Stein said. “And if not, if there are similar searches and reviews that have already been conducted by the agency, we can leverage those existing searches, which would result in a significant savings of staff hours and response time.”

Beyond internal operations, the State Department also sought to improve the customer experience for FOIA requesters by modernizing its public-facing website and search functionalities. Using AI-driven search algorithms and automated request processing, the department aims to “find and direct a customer to existing released documents” and “automate customer engagement early in the request process.”

Lessons learned

Since launching the first pilot in 2022, team members have learned several things. The first is to start small and provide the space and time to become familiar with the technology. “There are always demands and more work to be done, but to have the time to focus and learn is important,” Stein said.

Another lesson is the importance of collaboration. “It’s been helpful to talk across different communities to not only understand how this technology is beneficial but also what concerns are popping up—and discussing those sooner than later,” he said. “The sooner that anyone can start spending some time thinking about AI and machine learning critically, the better.”

Another lesson is to recognize the need to “continuously train a model because you can’t just do this once and then let it go. You have to constantly be reviewing how we’re training the model (in light of) world events and different things,” he said.

These pilots have also shown how this technology will allow State Department staff to better respond to other needs, including FOIA requests. For example, someone may ask for something in a certain way, but that’s not how it’s talked about internally.

“This technology allows us to say, ‘Well, they asked for this, but they may have also meant that,’” Stein said. “So, it allows us to make those connections, which may have been missing in the past.”

The State Department’s strategic adoption of AI and ML technologies in records management and transparency initiatives underscores the transformative potential of these tools. By starting small, fostering collaboration and prioritizing user-centric design, the department has paved the way for broader applications of AI and ML to support more efficient and transparent government operations.

The report was produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop, as part of a series on innovation in government, underwritten by Microsoft Federal.  To learn more about AI for government from Microsoft, sign up here to receive news and updates on how advanced AI can empower your organization.

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The congressional watchdog, tasked by a bicameral, bipartisan group of lawmakers to investigate FOIA response delays, found that the backlog jumped from 14% in 2013 to 22% in 2022, with the growing complexity of requests, staffing shortages and increasing threats of litigation also cited as impediments to the work.

A host of tech-related problems, including with FOIA request management systems and other processing tools, came up regularly during the January 2023 to March 2024 performance audit by the GAO, which conducted four virtual focus groups with senior officials representing 23 Chief Financial Officers Act agencies. 

“As technology has developed, we are able to store so many more records than in the past,” a senior FOIA agency official told the GAO. “When we search large volumes of data, we receive tons of records back that are potentially relevant. Unfortunately, we don’t have the budget to invest in sophisticated software that would help us to review the volume of records that we receive. So at the end of the day, it’s one person that’s having to review tens of thousands of records for potential responsiveness, which is a huge issue. It takes a lot of time.”

Another focus group participant called out requests related to email records or internal communications, such as chat and text, as their agency’s “most complex and time-intensive responses.” The large volume of records combined with coordination challenges with other agencies presents a legitimate problem, the official said.

When pressed by the GAO on how agencies could overcome technical challenges and pare down backlogs, some officials pointed to governmentwide adoption of technology upgrades, ensuring that FOIA offices use identical systems to streamline document review and general coordination. Standardization in tech upgrades will become increasingly important as agencies deal with a proliferation of agency records in electronic formats, officials added.

While standardized tech upgrades to support FOIA requests haven’t materialized yet, agency officials who have leveraged new technologies have seen a marked difference in their efficiencies. 

“We now have the ability in our FOIA office to search our agency’s email system,” one focus group participant said. “Before we were using our information technology staff to provide that service, where we would request that they run searches. They would use key terms, then come back to us, and we would have to go back and forth with different search terms, until we got it right. The ability for us to do the search has enabled us to finish these in a more timely and efficient way, which we couldn’t do previously.” 

Another official said their agency uses technology to remove “duplicative entries in extremely large volumes of responsive documents,” while another spoke of going from five different systems to process requests across multiple bureaus and offices to just one, “and that’s streamlined and automated a lot of our processes,” they said.

The FOIA office within Customs and Border Protection and the agency’s IT leaders were cited specifically by the GAO for their use of robotic process automation, a new technology that allowed staff to more “quickly search for records with specific criteria, and complete simple, routine FOIA processing tasks.” Per the Department of Homeland Security, CBP closed more than 12,400 simple requests thanks to the RPA tool, saving FOIA staffers over 1,500 hours of work. 

The GAO offered four recommendations to the Department of Justice, whose Office of Information Policy, along with the Office of Government Information Services, provides support and resources to agency FOIA offices. Those recommendations ask the Attorney General to direct OIP to issue guidance to agencies on effective backlog reduction plans, advise agencies to identify staff- and skill-related support efforts, develop a process to examine data reporting, and update training materials and related agency reporting standards.

The OIP has previously recommended that agencies “use enhanced technology to process requests,” per the GAO, pushing FOIA staff to partner with agency IT leaders to assess the efficacy and costliness of new tools, as well as acquiring “proper FOIA case management systems to automate the request intake process.”

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers applauded the release of the GAO’s report, which comes in the aftermath of the 2015 bipartisan FOIA Oversight and Implementation Act and was timed for release during Sunshine Week.

“An increasing backlog of FOIA requests compromises the already dwindling trust the American people have in their government,” House Oversight and Accountability ranking member Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said in a statement. The GAO’s report “not only outlines the key challenges that agencies face in their efforts to process FOIA requests in a timely manner, but it also highlights a pathway to transparency and regaining public trust in our institutions. Congress must ensure agencies have the resources needed to live up to FOIA’s promise.”

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, added that FOIA serves as “a cornerstone” for the country’s “belief in open and transparent government.” The GAO report “should serve as a starting point to reduce the backlog of FOIA requests so Americans can continue to hold those who represent them accountable.”

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Many agencies have updated their public records systems in order to ensure their systems work with FOIA.gov, a requirement established in a 2019 White House memo, according to a recent FedScoop review of 2023 Chief FOIA Officer reports and subsequent inquiries sent to agencies. But others are still running into technical and logistical issues.

The Secret Service and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have yet to meet these requirements, according to Wyn Hornbuckle, deputy director of the Department of Justice’s public affairs office. The DOJ, which tracks compliance with interoperability requirements, is also still catching up on the requirement. The agency says that all of its components should become interoperable within a matter of weeks. 

Communications staff for the National Archives and Records Administration told FedScoop that the agency is still working toward its goal of making its online portal for accepting veteran records requests interoperable with FOIA.gov. They added that in regard to requests for other records: “NARA continues to assess its options implementing a FOIA tracking and review platform and is mindful of the need for any system to interact with foia.gov.”

The Federal Aviation Administration told FedScoop only that it’s working on its FOIA case management system and that the agency will move to production “once testing is completed.” Meanwhile, the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General’s public records request system has not achieved interoperability and the agency is still working on meeting requirements with its contractor. 

The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Inspector General told FedScoop that it’s “taken significant steps to resolve technical issues that have prevented us from receiving requests from the National FOIA Portal FOIA.gov,” but that it expects to receive requests through the system in the coming months.  

Notably, meeting these interoperability requirements can be relatively easy, according to Michael Morisy, the founder and executive director of MuckRock, which offers a platform for filing public records requests. 

“A lot of times they’re … going to be working with a vendor that’s done this a number of times,” Morisy told FedScoop. “Some of the smaller shops are surprisingly nimble in being able to build their own tooling.” 

The White House memo, M-19-10, was required under the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016 and stipulated that agencies could become interoperable with the portal in two ways: incorporating an API or accepting FOIA requests through an email inbox. Unless granted an exception by OMB and DOJ, agencies using automated case management systems were required to use the first approach, while agencies with “non-automated” FOIA systems were supposed to take the second approach. As part of these requirements, agencies were also required to maintain an account on FOIA.gov

The memo established a timeline, too. Chief Financial Officers Act agencies were supposed to submit plans for achieving interoperability by May 2019. Agencies taking the structured email approach were supposed to set one up “as soon as technically feasible,” while agencies with automated case management systems were supposed to set up the API interoperability within two fiscal years. “No exceptions will be granted beyond August 2023,” the memo noted. 

“Foia.gov is a centralized portal,” noted Sue Seeley, a managing director at Deloitte who focuses on public records request technology. “Agencies have required interoperability between whatever system they use and that portal.”

Right now, it’s not clear how well the DOJ has been tracking compliance. The DOJ appeared to update its website for tracking 2023 Chief FOIA Officer reports in response to questions FedScoop scoop sent about the missing reports to them and several agencies, according to a website tracking tool that FedScoop set up. 

“The Department’s Office of Information Policy has been closely tracking each agency’s progress on interoperability and working directly with them to support compliance,” Hornbuckle, from the DOJ public affairs office, told FedScoop. “There currently are no exceptions for any agency,” he added. 

While agencies had been asked about their progress on achieving interoperability, Hornbuckle said, last year was the first time agencies were asked to publicly report on their compliance with the memo. Agencies with more than 50 FOIA requests in the prior fiscal year are required to produce a Chief FOIA Officer report. 

Several agencies indicated they’ve made some progress since their reports were published. For example, 97 percent of Defense Department components comply with the interoperability standards, while the remaining components are expected to achieve “100% compliance” by the end of this month, according to Sue Gough, a spokesperson for the department. 

In its 2023 report, HUD said it was not compliant, but the agency told FedScoop that it has since achieved interoperability. Similarly, the Central Intelligence Agency — which did not respond to a request for comment – reported that it was not compliant in its 2023 report. The agency has now met interoperability goals, the DOJ told FedScoop. 

For other agencies, it’s not entirely clear where they stand. Amtrak reported in its 2023 report that only its headquarters was interoperable and added that its OIG office tracked FOIAs via Microsoft Excel. The agency did not respond to several requests for comment.  

The Federal Housing Finance Agency, which said that it had been granted an exception and secured a contract to meet the interoperability requirement in its report, told FedScoop it has no further comment at this time.

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In its 2023 AI use case inventory, the agency charged with managing U.S. government documents disclosed it wants to use an AI-based system to autofill metadata for its archival documents. Similar to some other agencies, the National Archives also disclosed its interest in using the technology to help respond to FOIA requests.

While NARA shared these planned applications, it did not include any current, operational use cases of AI.

The list of AI use cases is required of most federal agencies under a 2020 executive order (EO 13960). Those inventories must be posted publicly and annually.

The agency’s public release of its AI inventory comes after FedScoop reported that the National Archives had published its list only on MAX.gov, a platform for sharing information within the government. The Office of Management and Budget later re-emphasized that agencies are required to release a list on their agency website, in addition to the MAX portal.

“The National Archives is excited about the use of AI/ML/RPA and how we can utilize these technologies to help with natural language processing, search, and process automation,” said NARA Chief Information Officer Sheena Burrell in a previous statement to FedScoop. 

Burrell also said the agency was in the process of developing a governance life cycle for AI “along with the evaluation criterias to assess our AI solutions for compliances in accordance with the Executive Order.”

While the agency provided most details required under the Federal CIO Council’s 2023 guidance for the inventories — and additional optional information — it appears to follow a format consistent with the guidance for the previous year’s inventories. As a result, it doesn’t include whether the use is contracted or consistent with the executive order. It also doesn’t include columns for dates that note when stages in a use case’s life cycle take place.

Researchers at Stanford’s RegLab reported widespread lagging compliance in the first year of agencies’ use case inventories in a December 2022 report about the country’s AI strategy. Recent FedScoop reviews of agency use case inventories found inconsistencies in reporting have persisted.

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According to the missive, which was sent in response to questions from House lawmakers, OPM’s Congressional, Legislative, and Intergovernmental Affairs branch received more than 9,000 congressional inquiries in 2022, compared with more than 3,000 in 2020. In other words, the number of inquiries from Congress to the agency has approximately tripled in three years.

FedScoop obtained the letter from Pearson through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Retirement services managers associated with a retirement case receive a notification when they receive a congressional inquiry about the applicant associated with that application, Pearson wrote. In the letter, she added that the agency’s CLIA “is working to improve its operations regarding congressional inquiries by focusing on customer service, improving processing times and educating congressional offices about best practices.”

“Seems like average response time of ~4 months to congressional inquiry,” observed Jason Briefel, the policy and outreach director at the Senior Executives Association and a partner at the government-focused law firm Shaw, Bransford, & Roth, in an email. “OPM’s congressional relations office seems overwhelmed with requests for information.”

OPM was contacted for comment.

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The agency said technical upgrades that improved how it uploads images were critical for meeting the milestone of adding 205 million pages to its online catalog by the end of August.

“In the context of the past couple of years, digital access means so much to archives and to our customers,” said NARA Digital Engagement Director Jill Reilly. “It has been really meaningful for us to accelerate our ability to get the content the National Archives and the partners have been generating and open that up to everybody via the Catalog.”

Some recently uploaded highlights within National Archives’ online catalog include photographs of the National Archives Building in Washington, DC, U.S. Marshal criminal bookings for 1961–1978, and utility patent drawings. 

In its final 2022-2026 strategy, NARA said it intends to process and digitize 85% of archival holdings by the end of the period. Additionally, it will work to enhance catalog descriptions that promote equity in discovery and archival access for underrepresented communities like Native Americans.

NARA also intends to deliver 95% of customer requests — including Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests — on time by 2026. It formulated a new strategy last year amid sustained criticism over its handling of a recent veterans’ records backlog at its National Personnel Records Center division.

NARA’s IT operation is currently being run by Sheena Burrell who was appointed to the post of permanent chief information officer in August. 

Burrell was previously deputy chief information officer at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), in which role she led IT programs and projects across four divisions, and helped to create the agency’s strategic plan. She first joined the agency in February 2019.

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In a letter sent to agency Acting Director Tae Johnson, Sens. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Ron Wyden, D-OR., cited a Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology investigation into the use of data for immigration enforcement. The study found that ICE in the past decade has gained access to driver’s license and home address information for three-quarters of American citizens.

The missive is the latest instance of Congress seeking to rein in the purchase of Americans’ personal data by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Last month, House leaders sent a letter to U.S. law enforcement agencies probing their purchases of private data sets to circumvent warrant requirements.

“According to a recent report, ICE has used facial recognition and other technologies, and purchased information from data brokers, to construct a ‘dragnet surveillance system’ that helps ICE carry out deportation proceedings,” the Senators wrote in the letter.

“Much of this effort, which has enabled ICE to obtain detailed information about the vast majority of people living in the United States, has been shrouded in secrecy,” the Senators added.

The Georgetown investigation was conducted by submitting hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests and by carrying out a comprehensive review of ICE’s contracting and procurement records.

The lawmakers’ missive comes after documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union earlier this year revealed that partnership with one data broker provided ICE with access to location data from about 250 million mobile devices. In total, the partnership gave the agency access to more than 15 billion location points per day. 

Those ACLU documents in July showed how millions of taxpayer dollars were spent by the Department of Homeland Security and ICE to buy access to cell phone location information being aggregated and sold by two controversial and opaque government contracted data brokers, Venntel and Babel Street.

“This surveillance network has exploited privacy-protection gaps and has enormous civil rights implications,” the Senators wrote in their letter to Johnson. “ICE should immediately shut down its Orwellian data-gathering efforts that indiscriminately collect far too much data on far too many individuals.”

‘The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act,’ introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR., and Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY., in April 2021 sought to force the police and certain federal agencies to obtain a court order before purchasing people’s personal information through third-party data brokers.

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A dataset obtained by FedScoop through a Freedom of Information Act request shows that the Oracle Cerner EHR system had a total of 498 major incidents between Sept. 8, 2020 and June 10, 2022.

The data includes 930 hours of “incomplete functionality” where the system was partially not working, over 103 hours of degraded performance and almost 40 hours of “outage,” which means that the system was completely down.

The dataset provides the most complete picture of system outages available to the public so far, however, separate internal agency communications also obtained by this publication point to a lack of clarity over how the VA discloses multi-day outages.

In at least one instance, descriptions of multi-day outages between VA officials in internal agency emails seen by FedScoop did not match up with the disclosed data. Multi-day outages are significant because it takes the VA longer to analyze and respond to the root causes of prolonged down time.

The latest dataset obtained by FedScoop also identifies the VA as the responsible party in approximately one-third of the incidents that have occurred in the past two years, while Oracle-Cerner is responsible in about two-thirds of the incidents. In almost half of the incidents the root cause is not clear to the VA, according to the reported data.

In a statement provided to this publication, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough, said: “The bottom line is that my confidence in the EHR is badly shaken. Regardless of whether an outage in the system lasts for one minute or one hour or one day, any outage or delay is unacceptable for the Veterans we serve and our VA health care providers who serve them.

He added: “The goal of the new system is, and always has been, to provide better health outcomes for Veterans and a better experience for providers. Right now, the system is not meeting those goals and needs major improvement. we at VA could not be more frustrated on behalf of Veterans and providers, and we’re holding Cerner, Oracle, and ourselves accountable to get this right.”

McDonough in the statement reiterated that the department has paused all future deployments of the system until 2023.

Commenting on the dataset, House Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Technology Modernizing Ranking Member Mike Bost, R-Ill., said: “The number of incidents listed in this disclosure is alarming. Some part of the Cerner system has been down more often than not for nearly two years.”

He added: “These problems have persisted since the very beginning of the rollout in 2020, and they put veterans at risk and make employees’ jobs impossible. If the Cerner electronic health record is not capable of delivering for veterans, it should not be used in any VA facility. Veterans, dedicated VA health professionals, and taxpayers deserve answers immediately.”

Another top member of the subcommittee, Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Mont., told FedScoop that the VA was playing “word games” in its attempt to downplay harm, after reviewing the data.

Speaking with this publication, Rosendale referred to prior reporting by The Spokesman-Review which obtained a report that described 180 VA EHR incidents since Sept. 2021 that were classified as degradations, “downtime” and full or partial outages.

In a statement to FedScoop, VA Assistant Secretary for Information and Technology and Chief Information Officer Kurt Delbene said: “We at VA have been — and will continue to be — fully transparent about outages, degradations, and incidents that have caused unacceptable problems for our Veterans and our providers.”

He added: “The most urgent focus is on outages, as they have the broader, system-wide impacts, but we track, report, and are pushing Oracle Cerner to improve all three classes of issues.”

Lawmakers from both parties in recent weeks have aggressively called out rampant issues with the cost, transparency and reliability of the VA’s electronic health record (EHR) system rollout that have seriously put veterans’ lives at risk.

The EHR system rollout issues have in some instances — including at the center in Spokane, Washington — caused major harm in which a veteran at risk for suicide did not receive treatment because records disappeared in the computer system. This system error occurred due to technical issues with what’s known as an “unknown queue,” that has caused nearly 150 instances of patient harm, according to the  VA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG). 

The “unknown queue” feature of the EHR system is of the most significant risks to patient safety because it has allowed medication and treatment requests to disappear into a digital black hole where the orders inputed into the system don’t get delivered to their intended location.

Members of Congress are putting pressure on the VA to punish those within the agency and within Oracle-Cerner for the major issues that have plagued the new EHR system since it was rolled out.

“Veterans and employees deserve better. I call on the VA leadership to get serious about accountability and impose penalties commensurate with the failures, not the slaps on the wrist we have seen so far,” Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., told FedScoop after reviewing the VA EHR incident report obtained via FOIA.

Oracle Cerner did not respond to a request for comment.

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According to court documents, she seeks details of all communications relating to her clearance and between the DOD, National Security Agency and other U.S. government agencies.

The latest lawsuit follows a previously amended complaint submitted in November, in which she sought access to classified information to address allegations made against her by the NSA and DOD. The lawsuit was filed in a D.C. federal district court.

Arrington, who held the post of chief information security officer for acquisition and sustainment at the Pentagon before the position was eliminated, officially resigned in February and announced that she would run for Congress after settling a protracted legal dispute over her security clearance.

She had been on paid leave from the Department of Defense since May 2021, after her security clearance was suspended.

According to court documents, Arrington was formally notified by a security officer on May 11 that her clearance for access to classified information was suspended, and that the action had been taken as a result of a reported unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

Commenting on the latest lawsuit, Arrington’s attorney Mark Zaid said: “Today we filed in D.C. federal court a FOIA Privacy Act lawsuit for Katie Arrington to compel the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency and others to release records to her pertaining to highly questionable actions to revoke her security clearance.”

“This is separate legal action from prior unprecedented lawsuit (though related) to force the U.S. government to complete security clearance processing. This current lawsuit will force the U.S. government to reveal documents re: what led to its decision and what we viewed as frivolous (even political in nature) security clearance action,” he added.

A DOD spokesperson declined to comment on the pending litigation.

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