DoD Chief Sustainability Officer Joe Bryan said last week that the department must plan for logistics to be part of a contested environment.

“We cannot expect a free pass to deliver the fuel we need, to where we need it, when we need it. So reducing the energy demand for our weapons platforms, and our forward-deployed forces is an imperative,” Bryan said on June 28 at the Federal Sustainability Forum, hosted by the Business Council for Sustainable Energy and the Digital Climate Alliance.

Bryan said that about 70% of DoD’s energy use comes from its operations, and that two-thirds of its operations energy use comes from its airplanes.

The Army, as part of its latest climate strategy, expects to put micro-grids on all its bases by 2023, and carbon-free by 2030.

Rachel Jacobson, the Army’s assistant secretary for installations, energy and environment, said the Army also seeks an all-electric non-tactical vehicle fleet by 2035, as well as progress in fielding some hybrid tactical vehicles. The Army is also looking to have a resilient supply chain by 2028.

Jacobson, said climate change is a “threat multiplier,” that can accelerate damage to DoD’s infrastructure, interrupt supply chains and interrupt personnel training because of extreme weather.

“There are going to be a lot of incremental approaches. It’s aggressive, but within a decade or so, we think we can achieve many of these goals,” Jacobson said.

The Army unveiled the DoD’s first floating solar array at Fort Bragg last month. The array is meant to provide backup power to Camp Mackall during electricity outages and provide supplemental energy to the local grid.

The Army in May also broke ground on a 100-acre solar-power project in Southern California and Joint Base Los Alamitos.

Jacobson said both projects utilize an electronic “recloser,” which can quickly reset the system and restore power during an outage.

“It will respond to events like tree limbs, falling on power lines, to reset the system to avoid what can be catastrophic when those kinds of things happen,” she said.

DoD funded the research behind the recloser in collaboration with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department.

The Army is also prototyping a hybrid Bradley fighting vehicle this summer at Yuma Proving Ground, where it will be tested against the conventional gas-powered Bradley.

Jacobson said hybrid vehicles are expected to reduce fuel consumption by 20% or more.

They’ll also require less maintenance, and will have a reduced heat and sound signature, making the vehicle harder to detect on the battlefield.

“It has these operational strategic benefits in addition to the greenhouse gas of benefits from it,” Jacobson said.

Jacobson said the Army is also looking to partner with the Energy Department on better measuring energy usage, as well as the impact of renewable energy projects and their cost savings.

“We have such a diversity among our bases. However many bases we have, that’s how many different kinds of measuring of programs we have, with respect to gathering this data. And ultimately, this has to be data-driven. This data has to be rock solid, because we keep having to make the case over and over again, that whatever investments we’re making now will pay off. The cost avoidance of not doing something is much worse than the investments we’re making now, but we have to show that,” Jacobson said.

Jacobson said DoD has set ambitious goals for bases to be carbon-free within about a decade, she said this work won’t happen overnight.

“We need energy independence and energy resilience, but the truth of the matter is that backup power is mostly diesel generators,” she said.

Jacobson said the Army still relies on an “ancient” a coal-fired power plant, at a base in Alaska.

“It’s a transition, and we’ll get there, but we can’t jettison the use of fossil fuels entirely at this time,” Jacobson said.

DoD is working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s  Lincoln Laboratory to evaluate backup power in the event of power failure on the local grid. Jacobson said the Army continues to rely on fossil fuels in combination with renewable energy to power bases.

The Army’s Office of Energy Initiatives manages its privately-financed, large-scale, energy projects Through this office, the Army has leveraged over $650 million through these projects so far.

“Obviously, if we just had to rely on appropriations, these projects would compete with other mission-critical projects, with other infrastructure projects, with just the array of investments that are needed on an Army base,” Jacobson said.

By the same token if someone from a nature fund or a save-the-kittens group asks for a donation, check them out BEFORE you send a check.

When a company advertises it can reduce your tax bill by tens of thousands of dollars put a cold cloth on your head and lie down until the urge to respond is gone.

All of the above, plus some things you wouldn’t dream up, are part of the IRS’s Dirty Dozen list. It’s part of the agency’s effort to protect taxpayers, tax preparers and corporations from scams ranging from the incredibly stupid to brilliant. All designed to take you for all they can get. Even if it’s all you got!

And if you think some of the long-distance scams you see on the Dr. Phil show: She (or he) wires money to soulmate they’ve never met so they can pay kidnapper’s ransom, get their mother a new body part, or repay a small debt to free millions of dollars from frozen account. The fact is it happens every day. Sometimes to otherwise savvy people. Like you, maybe?

So what are the scams and schemes on the Dirty Dozen list? Could you spot them? Or have you ever been had?

To talk about the ploys used to trick people we’ll be talking to tax attorney Tom O’Rourke. He’s a former IRS attorney, and he’s my guest today on our Your Turn radio show: 10 a.m. EDT on www.federalnewsnetwork.com or in the D.C.-Baltimore area on 1500 AM.

Most of us think we are too smart to be conned. But even geniuses have fallen for a ploy. Full disclosure: For three consecutive years on my first job I joined a bottle club. All I had to do was buy three semi-expensive Bourbons. Pass them on to the bottle club chain and wait while dozens, potentially hundreds of bottles, arrived at my apartment door. It cost me nearly a week’s pay, but the payoff was worth it. Almost. The thing is I’m still waiting for the happy clinking sound of a mass delivery! And I’m beginning to think I was had. Maybe. In any case Tom is an expert on what the scams look like and how to avoid them. Here’s his lead in to today’s topic, The Dirty Dozen:

The IRS has been publishing “the Dirty Dozen” for much of the past twenty years in an effort to advise taxpayers and tax preparers of scams and schemes that are in some way related to taxes. It is a list of questionable (or fraudulent) transactions designed to gain access to your money.

In recent years, the items on the dirty dozen lists have included bogus calls, texts, emails and online posts. A common scam during the past two years includes online text messages or emails about your entitlement to stimulus payments that often include a link. The link promises to help you get all you are entitled to under various stimulus programs. Accessing a link in such a message may compromise any security measures of your computer system.

Phone scams often include threats that the IRS or local law enforcement agents will arrest you if you do not immediately remit payment by way of a gift card. The IRS cautions that it always initiates contact by mail and never demands payment by gift card. You always have an opportunity to appeal any determination that you owe additional tax.

The dirty dozen also lists strategies that are many times fraudulent that offer to help you avoid taxes. Some of the more common tax avoidance schemes identified in the current list of the dirty dozen include:

• Captive insurance arrangements.
• Charitable remainder annuity trusts.
• Offshore pension arrangements.
• Monetized installment arrangements.
• Conservation easements
• High-income taxpayers who simply do not file tax returns.
• Companies that promise to settle your tax liabilities for pennies on the dollar.

All of these schemes involve transactions that on the surface involve legitimate transactions. They typically offer very significant tax benefits, but little else in the way of economic benefits.

Always exercise caution in investing in any transaction that promises benefits that sound too good to be true.

Best listening experience is on Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Subscribe to Federal Drive’s daily audio interviews on Apple Podcasts or PodcastOne.

If copyrights are a measure of women’s long-term rise in economic participation, trends show progress but still a ways to go. A recent study by the U.S. Copyright Office shows that over a 40-year period, women’s share of registrations rose from 28%, to 38% in 2020. Joining the Federal Drive with Tom Temin with analysis, University of Minnesota business school professor Joel Waldfogel, and Copyright Office chief economist Brent Lutes.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: Professor Waldfogel, good to have you on.

Joel Waldfogel: Nice to be here.

Tom Temin: And the Copyright Office Chief Economist Brent Lutes. Brent, good to have you back.

Brent Lutes: Hi Tom, great to be back.

Tom Temin: And let’s start with the genesis of this study. What was the purpose of it? And how did it come to be? I guess there was a collaboration here between academia and government, Joel?

Joel Waldfogel: Yes, so I spent the last year at the Copyright Office, but it was virtual because of COVID. But as the Kaminstein Scholar, what that means is that I was working on copyright issues, you know, taking time away from my academic appointment, although I was still in my academic appointment. But most of my research is on copyright. So it fit pretty well with what I do. In any event, the question before me was to update some earlier work examining what share of copyrights have been granted to women authors. Last time this was looked at was around 2012. And there had been progress between 1978, 2012. But what had happened in the ensuing eight years, that was my sort of first task. And the answer is that it continues to rise, it had gone from about 28% in 1978, up to over 38% by 2020. And it varies a lot across categories, but that just general growth reflects an increase in women’s activity in this area.

Tom Temin: And Brent, the summary of the study references a change in copyright law that happened in the late 1970s. And how does that figure into this?

Brent Lutes: So in a practical sense, the change of copyright law is the point at which we started collecting and retaining data in a digital form that allows us to do this sort of research.

Tom Temin: Got it. So you had the database available, therefore, that might not have existed before that, rather, you would have had to go through millions and millions of pieces of paper?

Brent Lutes: That’s exactly right.

Tom Temin: All right. And what can we make of this result, there is a substantial 10% statistically significant rise in the number of copyrights granted to women. But if you look at popular culture, and you look at entertainment, and book writing, and songwriting and all of this, it seems like women and men participate equally. So why the disparity do we think in the rate of issuance of copyrights?

Joel Waldfogel: Well, copyright covers a variety of different kinds of media. And it is different across different groups. So take the one called nondramatic literary works, but we know it as books. That one of the female share has surpassed 50% in the last few years. In other categories, for example, machine readable computer programs, it’s substantially less, although it has risen substantially, it’s risen, like by a factor of three over this period. In the copyright topics related to movies and music. It’s risen more slowly, and it’s on the order of a quarter to a third. But books, I think a big headline result here is that we’ve surpassed 50%, more than half the authors nondramatic literary works are women.

Tom Temin: All right, interesting. And Brent, what does the say then about the copyright process, if anything?

Brent Lutes: So I think it tells us that I think as you mentioned at the beginning, there’s still gender disparities that exist, they’re increasing. But I think it also gives us a good framework to understand why those disparities exist, and what are the factors that may propagate them or mitigate them, which I think is an important second step that we intend to look into in the future that will help us develop some very targeted and evidence-based policy.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Brent Lutes, He’s chief economist of the U.S. Copyright Office, and with Professor Joel Waldfogel, at the University of Minnesota, and the ability to create and get items that are available for copyright, of course, begins downstream of the copyright office itself, or maybe it’s upstream, but it’s not directly in the copyright office. Let’s put it that way. So that’s not anything the federal government can really control. What might some of the policy options be then to make sure that women do get their fair share?

Brent Lutes: Just to clarify one thing, that we may not directly control the creation of works, the underlying reason why copyrights exist is to incentivize the creation of works in the first place, Joel?

Joel Waldfogel: Oh, sure. So let me talk about another kind of headline results of a study. On the one hand, we show that the share of copyright registrations that are to female authors, and that’s growing and so forth. But it’s not absolutely necessary to register your copyright, it would be desirable in some sense to do so. So there’s a different question we asked in this study, which is how does the female share for example of registrations in books relate to the female share of activity in writing books? And same for other these categories? And one of the things that we find it’s a little bit I think, thought provoking for us is that basically the registration share lags the activity share based on occupation data by an average about 20%. So women seem to be very possibly less likely to register conditional on creating stuff. Now we say we have to patch that a little bit because the data on activity aren’t you know, airtight, but still there’s at least a suggestion that there may be some room to go to get more registration, even conditional on having done the work. I should finally mention, though, that that gap, that sort of shortfall has declined over time, it was like 25, 30%, 20 some years ago. Now it’s more like 10, 15%. So it’s shrinking. But there still is a gap that’s worthy of sort of exploration and policy could perhaps encourage registration conditional on having done the creation.

Tom Temin: Right, a parallel comes to mind with the Census Bureau, which has to make sure that every population group is counted. And so they have this elaborate and expensive and well developed program of outreach to very small relative communities, but many, many, many of them to make sure that everyone in those communities is counted. So it sounds like the Copyright Office then could develop outreach programs, maybe look at the application process itself in such a way as to garner more so that the activity share gets closer to the registration share, or vice versa. Brent?

Brent Lutes: I think you’re right there. And we do have substantial outreach, we’re always looking for ways to better target those efforts. And I think this gives us a good source of information and a good way to target those efforts. And to the extent that we can figure out exactly why those registrations are lagging, potentially come up with more targeted policy beyond outreach.

Tom Temin: Sure. And any particular forms that might take in mind yet, or you’re still evaluating?

Brent Lutes: Like I said, depends on figuring out why they lag, you know, if it’s a matter of not understanding the benefits of registering one’s copyright, for example, then I think outreach and education would be an appropriate policy for that. But again, I think, you know, as I previously mentioned, the second step of this research is figuring out the why I think Joel did a really good job of figuring out the what once we figure out the why that we can develop the appropriate policy solutions.

Tom Temin: And relative to say, a patent application where there’s this very elaborate process of verifying that it actually is patentable, you’ve got examiners looking for all the prior art, et cetera, et cetera, with a copyright, if you write a novel or you create a computer program, is there any adjudicative of process to ensure that it deserves a copyright? Or is it you apply, and you get it?

Brent Lutes: So it’s not quite an apply and receive setup, there are examiners who look through it and make sure that it meets the appropriate criteria. And you know, I’m not an examiner, and I don’t know the particulars of what they’re looking at, though my understanding is that it is perhaps less intensive than the patent examination process.

Tom Temin: But if I tried to copyright Moon River, it probably wouldn’t go through?

Brent Lutes: I doubt it would, because I assumed that the examiners would understand.

Tom Temin: Let me ask you this, we have now a good picture and a moving picture over time of women versus men applicants. And I imagine you don’t ask racial or other demographic makeup of those that are applying for copyrights. But is it possible to understand some of the other axes of ratios here, say racial or ethnic and so on, that are not asked?

Joel Waldfogel: I mean, we can study gender relatively easily because the names are on copyright. And names are very highly correlated with gender. So it’s really easy aggregate to say stuff about gender. Race is not there. And there are sort of fancy statistical ways to try to do it. But it’s I think it’s dicey and unclear. Geography is something that I think will be very study-able.

Tom Temin:
Therefore, there’s maybe the opportunity to match geographic against census data. And then perhaps you could have at least a way of extrapolating some potential racial disparities.

Brent Lutes: You’re right. We don’t have that data, currently. You know, we’re exploring ways to potentially get around that fact. But I think as Joel mentioned, some of those ways are a little bit dicey and not credible.

Tom Temin: Right. So you couldn’t get a statistically supportable picture. But you could get a picture that gives you an idea of where you might need to direct policy or outreach?

Brent Lutes: Yeah, and I think, you know, in some respects, we can get a statistically credible picture. But that picture would be limited, in many ways. So we kind of get perhaps a detailed, significant picture.

Tom Temin: Is it possible legally or under regulation to have a voluntary question for copyright applicants?

Brent Lutes: Let me be careful with that, because I’m not a lawyer. I don’t want to dispense any sort of legal advice. I’ll say that, you know, on the patent side, there’s actually a bill in front of Congress, right now trying to understand whether it’s appropriate and useful to have such a voluntary survey go with a patent application. And, you know, I think it’s worthwhile for the copyright system to also at least start thinking about that. And, you know, at the moment, we don’t have plans to ask that of Congress.

Tom Temin: OK. So in the meantime, then this study on female participation in copyrights will be something that the Copyright Office is looking at, and perhaps developing ways to get at and make more equality there?

Brent Lutes: Yeah. And I think we should think of this as not necessarily all of the answers but a very significant first step towards those answers.

Tom Temin: Brent Lutes is chief economist of the U.S. Copyright Office. Thanks so much for joining me.

Brent Lutes: Great to be here, Tom.

Tom Temin: And Joel Waldfogel is a business professor at the University of Minnesota behind that study. Thank you very much.

Joel Waldfogel: My pleasure. May I add one other thing that I think is also important to mention here?

Tom Temin: Sure.

Joel Waldfogel: In addition to doing this study, I think the Copyright Office has also made public for researchers all of these data from 1978 to 2020. This is a huge step forward in transparency and modernization, and it will allow outside researchers, inside researchers to potentially answer questions we haven’t figured out yet. So I’m pretty excited about that. I think it’s a great accomplishment for the office.

Brent Lutes: It’s the largest it’s most complete data set of copyright ever released anywhere.

Best listening experience is on Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Subscribe to Federal Drive’s daily audio interviews on Apple Podcasts or PodcastOne.

China can’t do anything to prevent Congress from passing a budget on time for 2023. But the China competitiveness bill could do just that. With the year-end just three months away now, legislative arguments over the bill threaten budget talks. For how, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin turns to WTOP Capitol Hill correspondent Mitchell Miller.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: Mitchell, what is going on with the China bill and the federal budget?

Mitchell Miller: Right, you would think well, what’s this have to do with the final federal budget, but this is a big thunderbolt here that’s entering the budget talks. Late last week. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he does not like the rumblings that Democrats may still come up with a watered down version of Build Back Better. And he’s threatening to hold up the more than $50 billion China Competitiveness Bill, which has been the focus of months of talks in house and senate conference committee. That’s the legislation designed to improve us production of semiconductors streamline production, known as USICA, the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act. And now this warning came afterward that Democrats had actually made some critical progress on the legislation that would cap the price of prescription drugs separately and deal with energy and climate provisions. This is the legislation that West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin has held up with a variety of reservations and warnings that caused McConnell’s ears to pick up and say, wait a second, if you’re going to move ahead with this. I’m going to hold back on the China Competitiveness Bill. Now Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wants to get a reconciliation bill for a vote later this month. But with this major reservation issued by McConnell, it now really puts a lot of this in doubt for July.

Tom Temin: And the schedule is kind of iffy, because they’re just running out of time.

Mitchell Miller: Yeah, exactly. I mean, we only have a few more weeks, obviously, in July after this recent break for lawmakers, and then we’ll go on recess in August, when they come back from that, of course, we’ll be right in the middle of the midterm election ramp up. So all of this, again, is pointing to another continuing resolution, even though as is often the case, everyone says they don’t want a CR. But that does seem the way we’re heading right now.

Tom Temin: All right. And well, we’ll have to see how it all plays out. Because sometimes these things have a way of having sudden breakthroughs too, because of those warnings issued.

Mitchell Miller: Right. And I should add that there has been actual progress on the House side. Late last week, they approved in the House Appropriations Committee, all 12 spending bills, so they are basically ready to go. Obviously, there’s some differences here and there. But there is something positive to report on that front

Tom Temin: And closer to home, Congress is starting to get annoyed with the Thrift Savings Plan of all things, because of a botched rollout of their updated system by which TSP account holders can access it.

Mitchell Miller: Right. This was the one that everybody thought was going to be new and improved, right when it came out about at the start of June, they had a variety of technical improvements, or at least they were supposed to be improvements, including a mobile app. But almost immediately, as you know, after this was rolled out, members started to say we’re having problems logging into the system. And then when they had more problems with the technical side of things, they would try to make a call and try to get somebody to talk to them and get them through. Well, that of course put more pressure on the system. So the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board has said there has been some improvement in connection with that, they’ve actually staffed up the call centers, they’ve added more than 300 people to help take these calls. They just had a public meeting with an update on all of these issues last week. And while they said there’s been some improvements, and they’ve had a decline in wait times for customers, this still is a huge issue for a lot of lawmakers who are really getting a lot of ear fulls of complaints from their constituents who say, you know, I actually didn’t have problems logging in. And I was actually working pretty good before all of this happened. So I think we’re going to see a lot more heat on this in the weeks and months ahead unless they get things resolved.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with Mitchell Miller, Capitol Hill correspondent for WTOP. And the IRS is starting to re-interest Congress in the age of inching up that agency’s budget. But then that report came out a couple of weeks ago showing how little progress they’ve made on customer service.

Mitchell Miller:
Right. And this is really frustrating to members of both parties here in Congress. They keep trying to get answers and trying to figure out exactly what can be done to fix this agency. Now, the agency, the IRS, for its part says lawmakers are part of the problem. And going back to the continuing resolution, this report that came out recently from the Electronic Tax Administration Advisory Committee. They basically said to lawmakers look, every time you guys approve a CR, it only creates more problems for the IRS because they can’t continually do long term buyouts for example, for the technical issues that they know that they have to address and this report found that the IRS has actually undergone basically more than 100 CRs over the last two decades. So, but basically what they’re saying is, it’s just too hard to do all this long term planning to get this equipment that they know that they need. So they keep doing these patchwork improvements, trying to get through, you know, around the next corner, but they keep building up. And as we’ve talked about in the past, the IRS still has a long backlog of paperwork that they needed to deal with, it goes all the way back through the pandemic and problems beyond that period. So again, another area where lawmakers are really going to be focusing and trying to find some solutions to this.

Tom Temin: And finally, I wanted to ask you about the Jan. 6 hearings. They went on for quite some time, then there was a surprise extension of them all before the cable television cameras. And they have, at least in sudden, some segments of society been quite gripping. And people are watching. Being up on Capitol Hill, what’s the effect been from what you can see?

Mitchell Miller: Politics aside, and everybody has their own view of these hearings, Republicans obviously, don’t agree with them. Many of them say they’re a sham, Democrats say they’re just trying to get this record put out. But I think what’s most interesting, just in terms of how hearings are held here on Capitol Hill, is this may signal a new type of hearing, at least when we have really, really big issues come along, because instead of doing the typical thing, which would be hold a hearing during the day, and then it goes well into the night. And even if you get the attention of the American people during the day, it tends to wander a lot. All of these hearings have been very tightly produced, they actually brought in network television producers to help to get these hearings to be produced so that they’re easily digestible for the American people. And whatever you think of them, they all are very well produced. They last each about two hours or so. And then they move from one topic to another. And I think what you may find, maybe on a more minor level, again, depending on the issue is this may be something of a template for congressional hearings, at least on as I said, major issues moving forward, because they really do concentrate all the information, they integrate both live testimony with earlier depositions. And I think that, again, whatever you think about these hearings, that has been effective, at least in terms of getting what has happened out from the panel.

Tom Temin: So Marshall McLuhan lives on on Capitol Hill.

Mitchell Miller: That’s right, absolutely.

Tom Temin: Look it up kids. Mitchell Miller is Capitol Hill correspondent for WTOP. Hey, thanks so much.

Mitchell Miller: You bet.

“There’s a lot of documentation out there. And it’s really hard to kind of see the ties between them all. But they are all interrelated,” said Danny Connelly, chief information security officer for the Americas at Zscaler. “The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Office of Management and Budget did a great job in aligning the mandates and policies where in the past, it’s all been, in my opinion, siloed. And agencies are left with multiple different mandates and initiatives and drivers that they try to comply with.”

For example, TIC 3.0 allows agencies to move away from the traditional network-centric security approach. Agencies no longer are required to move traffic back through a data center. It was forward thinking because, previously, agencies were trying to implement the same protections that they had on prem to the cloud environments, which doesn’t scale. So when TIC 3.0 came out and gave agencies the flexibility to really leverage modern solutions, its security capabilities aligned to NIST controls.

The problem is, agencies understand the importance of all of these disparate controls and requirements separately, but they struggle with figuring out how to move forward with all of them.

“They’re thinking that there’s some magical CISA Authorizing Official that says ‘you are TIC compliant.’ There’s no EINSTEIN cop out there,” Connelly said. “It’s supposed to be a joint partnership between the agency security teams, and CISA. And really, it’s up to the risk tolerance of the agency CIO and CISO to define what that TIC 3.0 framework looks like for their agency or what those requirements look like.”

The administration is struggling to find a balance here, Connelly said, between being prescriptive enough that agencies are all on the same page with their implementations, but offering enough flexibility to account for difference in requirements and differences in mission. That’s why the cybersecurity memorandum from the White House begins shifting the focus from compliance towards operational security.

One thing Connelly said he’d like to see additional guidance around is decommissioning VPNs. It’s a 20 year old architecture, and it did work for a long time. But a lot of agencies are slow in acknowledging that it’s outdated, that there’s a significant attack surface, and that it’s time to shift the model to connecting users to apps. That said, Connelly also said that runs the risk of being too prescriptive; it’s a double-edged sword that could help some agencies, but deny others the flexibility they need to function well.

Connelly said agencies have working capital funds and other similar mechanisms to get funding for these efforts. The challenge, he said, is where to start, considering all the different controls and frameworks and guidance to take into account.

That’s when it’s time to go back to CISA’s five pillars of zero trust, he said, and focus on your biggest risk. So, for example, agencies should ensure they have a robust identity access management system or endpoint detection and response put into place. And those efforts need accountability at all levels of the organization, Connelly said.

“CISA is there to help, and agencies that need help should engage with them. It’s a partnership,” he said. “When you’ve been operating in silos for 20 years, between network teams, security teams, identity access management, all just focused on their individual mission, it’s not going to work, because the shift to zero trust is such a monumental change that it really needs everybody to be on the same page. That’s the biggest hurdle. This is agencies’ time. It’s an opportunity.”

And it’s an opportunity that needs to be capitalized upon soon. Connelly said he’s seen technology and security initiatives in the past that had momentum behind them early on, but then turned into short term experiments because there wasn’t enough follow up to set the foundation for a long term change in philosophy. Most of those, he noted, were focused on the old way of protecting networks.

But one way zero trust can move forward is through more mature standards and metrics.

“In the past, zero trust used to always be kind of a marketing term. It meant least privileged, default deny, the things that we always knew as security best practices,” Connelly said. “But now that there are things like 800-207 and the CISA maturity model, it’s now defined and more measurable. Are those measurements effective and adequate? I don’t think we’ll know until organizations are using it.”

In retirement, some will decide to relocate to a different location or residence.  Maybe you want to live in a warmer climate or move closer to family.  Herb will discuss the main considerations and resources available in making this decision.

And if you plan to relocate, it’s important to manage the possessions you have collected over the years.  How do you determine what to keep?   Understanding the reasons why it may be necessary to downsize possessions and the steps necessary in the process will be discussed.

For questions or comments, email us in advance at ForYourBenefit@nitpinc.com

The February test lays the groundwork for the Army’s program to establish cloud at commands outside the continental United States (OCONUS).

“The First Corps, based out of Joint Base Lewis–McChord, made it part of one of their experiments to show how they can take mission command on the move using edge computing devices and then to be able to link back to data that was in the enterprise cloud,” Iyer told Federal News Network. “And it showed that [this capability] was not only much more resilient than the existing solutions that they had, but the performance, the reliability and the latency [were] far superior than anything that they’ve been used to. So technically, we know it can work.”

The First Corps was able to perform mission command functions from a C-17 Globemaster III over the Pacific Ocean en route to Guam and then later from a naval ship. The idea is to distribute command and control functions over a series of nodes, rather than centralized in one place, to remain mobile and present less of a target to adversaries.

Building on success of OCONUS cloud edge computing test

Now, Iyer said, the Army is looking at how to cement the test use case as part of its institutional processes and operations. Over the next 18 months, the Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM) will run roughly 40 exercises to test this functionality, discover best practices and resolve potential weaknesses.

After laying a foundation with OCONUS, the next step will be to take mission command and warfighting functions to the tactical edge and make them cloud native, as part of Army’s ongoing modernization efforts, Iyer said. Because there’s a fundamental difference between OCONUS cloud and tactical cloud, he said.

“An OCONUS cloud is essentially running a commercial cloud, say, at an Army base in Germany or Camp Humphreys in Korea,” Iyer said. “These essentially would be Army installations. And then we just work with a commercial cloud service provider like Google or Microsoft or Amazon, and then have them come in and essentially establish compute and storage, and then run it as a service for us.”

That has the advantage that those services are operating on sovereign land, and the Army has to work around data sovereignty rules, he explained. “Having these OCONUS cloud locations on Army posts will ensure that we are staying compliant with those requirements to have control over our data.”

Those requirements call for a different operating model. The Army provides the physical infrastructure like floor space, cooling and electricity, and the cloud service providers supply the technical infrastructure, provision it and run it. The service is currently working with the Defense Department to establish this in both Germany and Korea as a joint asset because these will be the first programs of their kind in DoD, Iyer said.

Army sets sights on tactical cloud needs

A tactical DoD cloud, on the other hand, must be capable of operating in more austere environments. It could involve satellite communications, for instance. Or, it could also require supporting a unit on the move. Therefore, developing tactical cloud capabilities must involve the additional elements of SATCOM connectivity and transport as well, Iyer said. That’s what the pilot program with USINDOPACOM and First Corps is focused on.

What’s more, this work requires collaboration across DoD, including from the Defense Information Systems Agency and the other military branches because tactical cloud edge computing will typically support combatant commands, he said.

“We meet and chat about this regularly to make sure that we’re not duplicating efforts,” Iyer said. “Because the brain trust for something as complex as this is just not that much out there. And so we want to make sure that we’re leveraging all of the expertise that we each have in our departments.”

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency is expanding its footprint in the cloud. And they are doing it in a bit of a usual way.

FEMA is partnering with the Agriculture Department and developing a charge-back model to its mission areas.

Jim Rodd, FEMA’s cloud portfolio manager, said as part of modernizing the National Flood Insurance Program, the agency and USDA are using the Google Cloud platform.

“They’re actually doing it in conjunction with USDA. NFIP is bringing it up in a methodology that will allow us to absorb it into the FEMA enterprise cloud with no issue. It’s all our standards and everything,” Rodd said at the recent ACT-IAC Emerging Technology and Innovation Conference.

Rodd said the reason FEMA looked to partner with USDA is two-fold. First, the two agencies partner to help citizens impacted by floods. But secondly, and maybe most important to the discussion around cloud, is Rodd found USDA among the most mature organizations in applying the charge-back model for enterprise cloud services.

“When I first took the position over, I wanted to speak to some other cloud brokers that were in the federal government, and three that popped up was two at DHS, which were U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service and the Customs and Border Protection directorates. I’ve talked to them, but neither one of them have a multi cloud solution with a chargeback methodology. So we wanted to make sure we were speaking to somebody in that realm as well. And USDA was pretty much the big dog on the block,” Rodd said. “They had a very mature cloud doing chargeback and it was multi cloud, so it only made sense to go and talk to them.”

Buying cloud services in a new way

This idea of a chargeback model for enterprise services hasn’t been easy for agencies over the last 50-plus years. Federal shared services for financial management and human resources have been out in front of this effort, but the agencies providing these services have struggled to make their case to large agencies for the most part.

The General Services Administration’s Cloud Information Center highlights several acquisition challenges, including advanced metering services from vendors and governance focused on who holds the responsibility of assessing cloud utilization reports for chargeback incentive purposes.

The Office of Management and Budget and the Federal CIO Council have been pushing agencies to implement the Technology Business Management (TBM) framework to measure the cost and value of IT services, not necessarily just cloud services. Agencies had to fully implement TBM cost towers as part of their 2023 budget requests that went to OMB earlier this year. But challenges around data quality and quantity have slowed down this effort over the last five years.

But understanding the costs in a multi-cloud environment is why FEMA is pushing forward with the chargeback model.

Rodd said with FEMA already is using Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure cloud instances and now adding the Google Cloud, it wanted to ensure it knew where and how much it was spending on these services. Former FEMA CIO Lytwaive Hutchinson said earlier this year that the agency’s goal to have at least 50% of all of their systems and services that are cloud ready moved into the cloud by the end of 2022.

“The thing with the chargeback model is being able to offset cost. That’s the name of the game,” he said. “All sudden our current cloud footprint is probably about $2 million-to-$3 million a year. If we can offset some of that, rather than what is happening right now where we’re carrying all of it, as we ingest more clients and more services, we should start to see an offset in costs.”

Big savings over time

Rodd said FEMA mission areas who have turned off on-premise or legacy technology are seeing costs reductions of 30% to 40%.

“It’s giving our internal and external OCIO clients, the opportunity to really be able to plan efficiently by having all of that in one place,” he said. “There’s obviously a massive cultural shift with moving to the cloud and FEMA is just as aware of that need for a culture shift as anybody else. We try to sell it on the scalability and flexibility, the ability to convert our redundant possibilities East Coast, West Coast, north, south, across this CSP, that CSP. We try to show all that, but they don’t really see it because that’s the back end. One of the things we like to do when we are briefing to a prospective client who has no knowledge of the cloud, I don’t make any promises on price because here’s the reality in any government agency for that first year or two, you’re running hybrid. You have to maintain that physical environment, especially for somebody with a mission like ours, where we have to be up no matter what. During that time, obviously, you’re costs are going to be substantially higher. So I actually stay away from that, or I brutally tell them look, this first year or two, it’s actually going to be more expensive. But as soon as we can start turning off your stuff in the physical environment, and shutting that stuff down and killing those contracts, that’s when you’re going to start to see your costs go down.”

Rodd added in a perfect world, he would like his cloud broker office to break even in terms of costs of providing the enterprise services and receiving funding from mission users.

“I don’t really ever think we’re going to get there, but even if we got to 50%, that’d be outstanding,” he said. “We developed a cost model. What we wanted is a one-stop shop so if a client comes to us and tells us their need, or we help them to develop a solution, we didn’t want them to then have to talk to the sustainment folks and get a price and then talk to the license folks and get a price. We tried to make our cost model as inclusive as possible. It covers everything from your basic compute needs, your migration, your authority to operate and your licensing. We’re actually adding cyber to it right now.”

Rodd said FEMA wanted to get a third-party expert to confirm its chargeback model would work, and received solid reviews from Gartner. He called it “elegant.”

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You might have heard in nearly every locale in the nation home prices have soared. Many houses get multiple offers and sell for way more than the posted price. The Veterans Benefits Administration has been tinkering with the 75-year old home loan program to ensure it gives veterans a shot at the house they want. For an update, VA’s Executive Director of Loan Guaranty John Bell III spoke to the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin: Mr. Bell, good to have you on.

John Bell III: Thank you, Tom.

Tom Temin: And just give us a sense of the scope of the program. How much money do you have under guarantee and what’s your entitlement from Congress to be able to offer? How big is this program?

John Bell III: If you put things in perspective of 27 million loans since 1944, that’s totaling over $3.4 trillion. Last year, we set an all-time record for purchases: 444,000 loans. We are about 12-13% market share of any mortgage product out there. So we’ve grown that over the past 10 years from 1% of the mortgage market to, again over 12% of the mortgage market as we stand today. So VA’s had a lot of growth, over 380% over that time period. And we credit a lot of that to changing the processes and procedures that we’ve had, the technology modernization advancements that we’ve had for the program, trying to get the word out about just how strong our veteran borrowers are. And one key characteristic that we change is the mindset. The mindset of this is not just a program that is available as a soft landing for veterans, this should be their product of choice. And by choosing VA over all the other home loan products out there, we’ve been able to really capture you know, a lot of that market share back.

Tom Temin: And just to be accurate, the Veterans Benefits Administration doesn’t loan money, you back loans, correct? That are made by regular commercial lenders?

John Bell III: That’s 100% correct. We have a 25% guarantee. And what that does is it entices lenders, because we carry 25% of the risk for them. So lenders will make mortgage loans. Then they will sell those mortgage loans called mortgage-backed securities. They will sell those in the open market. But this gives an assurity to the entire industry that the government backing of that 25% is going to stave off the faults, which is again, our default ratio is in line with conventional and much less than other agency programs out there.

Tom Temin: So a given borrower with VA backing, then if they had a risk rating to a lender of X, after they are backed by VA, then their rating would drop 2.75 risk or something?

John Bell III: That’s a great way to think about it. That’s pretty much what we do to try to limit cost to the veteran and to the lender that’s lending that money. And then on the back end of it, it’s from the default space. If that loan is going bad, VA is there to help mitigate between the borrower and the servicer so that we can figure out the best option available at that time. So servicers aren’t they’re doing it on their own. They also have the backing of VA to help our veterans make sure that they can stave off some of that financial impact.

Tom Temin: And then rolling up the mortgage portfolios into those securities, do you have any connection to the markets that are controlled by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae?

John Bell III: I think from a total market share that is correct. From a collaborative space, which is, if you take COVID for instance, we all had to work together to make sure that we stood up the mortgage industry while we went through COVID. So we had to ensure that we could still lend money, even if appraisers couldn’t make it into homes, right, we had to make sure that lenders still felt comfortable, and that they still had the government backing and originating those files. And then also keeping costs down, we were still able to break origination records through 2020-21 and now on to ’22.

Tom Temin: We’re speaking with John Bell, he’s executive director of Loan Guaranty at the Veterans Benefits Administration. And you mentioned that you made some process changes and some back-end information technology updates to make the program, I guess, easier to use for veterans. Tell us about some of those.

John Bell III: Yeah, some exciting things. If you think about VA 10 years ago, and how we would review files, a lender would mail in this file that was probably 300-400 pages thick. And we couldn’t glean any data from those files. We couldn’t share that nationally. So if Wells Fargo was doing a loan in the state of Oregon, and also doing a loan in the state of Washington, we couldn’t compare and contrast what that experience was like. Now we’re able to glean 237 pieces of information, data, from each one of those files we review and then we’re able to scorecard performance of our lenders so that they understand how they’re competing and benchmarking against other lenders. It has improved the overall health of the program, because they’re not only able to see how they’re performing against others, but they’re also able to see why they aren’t performing as well against the rest of the country.

Tom Temin: And what is performance for a lender? I would think, I guess, I presumed you were more worried about the performance of the borrower. But what are some of the parameters of lender performance that you need to track?

John Bell III: So what we require are lenders to at least follow our guidelines. And then lenders because they own 75% of the risk, they can establish or put on additional guidelines on top of ours. And so what we’re trying to understand is, is that additional requirement worth the value of preventing a veteran into the home? And so as we’re able to benchmark what those differences are, and the additional requirements that they have, were able to teach the lender, that value isn’t necessarily getting you the right result. And so that’s the piece that we were missing in the puzzle is being able to go back to the lenders and say, Okay, fine, you want to put a six-month reserve requirement on a loan that’s over $600,000. But the value of performance in that loan versus a loan that doesn’t have that requirement is the same, equal or better. And so while they’re missing out on all of those originations, they’re doing it for the wrong reason.

Tom Temin: And you were able to glean this information from these paper packets, in what manner? Scanning them or digitizing them, or –

John Bell III: No, it’s a wonderful question. So we started with electronic uploads. So they would be able to upload their packages directly from their what’s called the their loan origination system. And then we just switched earlier this year to a true electronic system-to-system transfer of that data. So they no longer have to download a package and upload it. It’s all done electronically. And then at the end of the year, we’re actually moving into our API tech, API’s application programming interface. And it gives us a lot of opportunities from an analytics shareability that we just didn’t have before.

Tom Temin: And what about the aspect of the program that faces the veteran borrowers?

John Bell III: So one of the big key changes are actually two of them, real quick. One is we improve the eligibility timelines. Ten years ago, we averaged about 20 business days in determining what the eligibility of the borrower was just to participate in the program, just to be benefit-eligible. Now, because we do those electronically and instantaneously. Now, 95% of applicants that apply for eligibility are approved in less than three business days. So it has really been a game changer for us in reducing the time that it takes in that process to get a borrower from an applicant to an eligible applicant for lenders. We also have improved our appraisal process. And in November, I actually testified in a hearing in December, but through November, we had 1,500 unassigned appraisals at that time. We just had a huge need for recruiting more appraisers, in particular areas. We had an impending volume of loans coming in. And so we’re at about 1,500 in unassigned appraisals, we’re now down to zero. But we’ve also reduced the time it takes to deliver an appraisal from 11.8 business days down to eight business days, which is honestly in line or better than most other markets out there and loan products. So by fixing those few things, we’ve decreased the timeline that takes to get into a loan, which then allows veterans to compete better when they go to bid.

Tom Temin: Yeah, my question then, has all of this helped veterans in this crazy market where sometimes you have to act fast, or go above the asking price, and not have any baggage associated with your bid for a house in the eyes of the seller?

John Bell III: So last year, we did 444,000 purchases. Wwe’re about 4% off that mark right now. And what we’re seeing is while rates are increasing, and prices in certain areas are stagnating, we’re seeing fewer bids, which are enabling more veterans to be able to take advantage of this time. What veterans were competing against six months ago, eight months ago were cash offers. Most of those offers were from investors that were flooding the market. Now that investor activity has constricted and it’s allowed veterans to compete better. Are we at a spot where we’re saying that we’re done? Of course not. We’ve got to get the message out. The message is mostly being lost to those sellers and the listing agents that really aren’t even accepting agency contracts to begin with. So when they go to list the property, they’re not marking list property available to submit from an agency. And so they’re not even seeing our veteran loan. So we’re hoping to reduce that by working with the National Association of Realtors. We’ve done a couple of videos with them. And then also, we talked to them again this week about getting the message out. And then for us getting lenders and we’re building out a training team to help with establish more materials so that we can combat those issues.

Tom Temin: John Bell is executive director of Loan Guaranty at the Veterans Benefits Administration. Thanks so much for joining me.

John Bell III: Tom, thank you so much for having me. And look, I want to leave you with one thing: If you know a veteran, they haven’t used their benefit, or they haven’t been able to use it because someone tells them they can’t, you’re costing them money. Tell them they’re leaving money on the table.

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• The Pentagon wants input from industry as part of a new study on the financial health of the Defense industrial base. Among other things, the Office of Defense Pricing and Contracting is looking for input on obstacles companies have faced in getting financing, whether small firms are getting prompt payments from prime contractors, and the overall health of the Defense industry. The study was prompted by a GAO report that found DoD hasn’t analyzed how its policies affect the industry since 1985. Comments are due July 18.

• The Army takes an important initial step to consolidating five business systems. The Army kicked off an initiative to consolidate and merge five separate business systems. The Army Contracting Command released a request for information, a prototype project opportunity notice and a statement of need seeking industry feedback. The Army wants to use another transaction agreement to hire a lead systems integrator to design, develop and demonstrate a prototype enterprise resource planning or ERP system that pulls in the capabilities of all five systems, including the General Fund Enterprise Business System and the Logistics Modernization program. Army CIO Raj Iyer said in June that the service spends $1.4 billion on these systems and many are more than 20-years-old. Comments on the RFI are due by July 18. The Army says it will hold an industry day later this year after reviewing feedback.

• The Defense Department’s inspector general says the Pentagon is inconsistent in how it applies classification rules. A new IG report found DoD components largely failed to maintain their security classification guides in accordance with federal guidance. The IG says DoD runs the risk of misclassifying information and accidentally disclosing sensitive data to U.S. adversaries. The report recommends DoD direct components to account for their security classification standards and ensure they conform with the latest guidance.

• Here’s one you may not have heard about for awhile, auditors give the Office of Personnel Management high marks on how it’s securing a key system for retirees. The Annuity Roll System, which contains records on annuitants and their survivors and forms the basic pay records for disbursing benefits, met nine different cybersecurity requirements under the Federal Information Security Management Act or FISMA. The OPM inspector general says ARS’s security systems plan is update; it has a recent authority to operate and has an updated plan of action and milestones. The IG says these and other documents provide a good foundation to security, but doesn’t necessarily guarantee the data and systems are secure.

• The lead U.S. cyber agency is about to get its own contracting powers. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will get procurement authority starting this month. CISA currently relies on Department of Homeland Security headquarters and other agencies for its contracting activities. It’s another step up for one of the newest standalone federal agencies. CISA was established in 2018. The new contracting authority comes as CISA takes on more responsibility for the cybersecurity of agencies and critical infrastructure. (Federal News Network)

• The Air Force is strengthening its separation policy to crack down on sexual assaulters. The Air Force will no longer consider an airman or guardian’s character, financial situation or mental health when deciding if a sexual assaulter should leave the service. The change is an effort to root out those in the military who commit sex crimes. The service will no longer grant exceptions to those who assault children or those who have previous convictions for sex related crimes. The Defense Department is beginning a concentrated effort to purge sexual assault from its ranks. Last year, it announced a handful of new measures to better handle sexual assaults, including taking sex crimes out of the chain of command and referring them to independent agencies. (Federal News Network)

• The Air Force’s Air Mobility Command is shifting to a new model it hopes will increase readiness and improve predictability. AMC’s previous force generation model has been in effect for 20 years. After a deep dive assessment, AMC will reconstitute manpower, aircraft and equipment that train, deploy and recover as cohesive units. That will happen through four specific phases that prioritize what each unit needs depending on its recent training and deployments.

• The Census Bureau is making its data easier to find, use and understand. The bureau redesigned its data webpage. It now features interactive text, ways to build customized maps based on their data, a new search tool to explore data tables and access to microdata files. It also includes search ideas for guests. With the new look, the website still has education, employment, health, housing and more data on over 100,000 American locations like states, counties, places, tribal areas, ZIP codes and congressional districts.

• Agencies have made progress in how they use data, but the Partnership for Public Service says some are looking to improve their data workforces. The way agencies recruit and develop their data and digital workforces scored poorly in a recent Partnership survey. Involving data and digital specialists in ongoing agency projects was one of the lowest scoring categories. But agencies who took the survey say they plan to dramatically improve their data workforce’s effectiveness over the next five years.

• A standard for the sustainability of federal buildings is coming soon. The Biden administration expects the first-ever Federal Building Performance Standards will put agencies on a realistic path to meeting some of President Joe Biden’s green government goals. The standards will establish metrics, targets and tracking methods to reach federal carbon emissions goals. Federal Chief Sustainability Officer Andrew Mayock says the standards will be publicly released in two or three months and will raise the bar on sustainability for more than 300,000 federal buildings. “We’re not getting where we need to go unless we focus on how we scale and how we scale is through technology.” (Federal News Network)

• The General Services Administration and National LGBT Chamber of Commerce are extending pride month by collaborating to expand support for LGBTQI owned small-businesses. The collaboration will provide owners of these companies greater access to GSA contracting opportunities. It also will focus on creating awareness of GSA’s programs among LGBTQI small business owners. The partnership will also provide information to local LGBTQI affiliate chambers of commerce around the country about GSA’s programs, services and events that help small businesses learn about contracting and subcontracting. There are an estimated 1.4 million LGBTQ business owners.

• There’s a new way to help federal employees affected by severe weather in Montana. Federal employees can donate unused paid time off to some of their colleagues. The Office of Personnel Management established an emergency leave transfer program for Montana’s federal workers, after severe storms and flooding hit the state in June. If you’re looking to either donate or receive unused paid leave, OPM says you should contact your agency. The paid leave will first be transferred among workers within the same agency, but OPM says it can be transferred across agencies, if needed.

• The Department of Veterans Affairs faces a 23% vacancy rate for Licensed Professional Mental Health Counselors, as well as Marriage and Family Therapists. Senate VA Committee Chairman Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Ranking Member Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) are seeking an update from VA and the Office of Personnel Management on steps to bring more of these personnel onboard. The senators specifically seek an update under the 2020 Commander John Scott Hannon Veterans Mental Health Care Improvement Act, which requires the agencies to create a new federal occupational series for these specialists.

FOIA, which celebrated its 56th anniversary on July 4, mandates agencies provide EDCs on all public information requests, although many agencies do not provide them, Alina Semo, director of the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS), said.

The agency’s annual meeting on June 29 comes after OGIS issued their annual Report for Fiscal Year 2021. OGIS is the congressionally mandated agency in charge of reviewing FOIA policies, procedures, compliance and improvement.

The report said OGIS handled 4,200 requests for assistance from both FOIA requesters and agencies. OGIS sees a fraction of the overall public information requests filed to various agencies. 

The FBI, alone, has about 30,000 incoming requests each year, Michael Seidel, the agency’s chief FOIA officer, said.

As agencies are still dealing with the fallout from the pandemic, OGIS reported the number of requests for OGIS assistance involving delays jumped 73%, from 220 cases in 2020 to 380 in 2021. In 85% of the requests about delays, the requester could not get an estimated date of completion from the respective agency. 

“Our assessment found that agencies were challenged even before the pandemic began to provide EDCs and the agency’s responses to such requests were mixed,” Semo said during the meeting.

The Office of Information Policy’s Summary of Agency Chief FOIA Officer Reports for 2021 said by the end of fiscal 2020, 34 agencies had their backlog increased by more than five requests. For example, the Department of Veterans Affairs had more than 1,000 requests backlogged in 2020, the agency’s 2020 annual report said. The VA closed their 10 oldest appeals in 2020. 

A request is backlogged when it is pending beyond the statutory time period for a response. For requests, the statutory time period is 20 working days from receipt of the request, unless there are “unusual circumstances,” as defined by the law, in which case the time period may be extended an additional 10 working days. 

Of the 35 agencies with backlogs, 14 processed more requests than the previous fiscal year, OIP said. Although, 26 medium and high volume agencies reported they reduced the number of requests in their backlog. 

FOIA officers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Postal Service and the FBI laid out five tips agencies may want to consider implementing to reduce backlogs, including being proactive in alerting requesters when records custodians delay EDCs and creating negotiation teams.

Proactive communication about EDCs

Among the most common recommendations from the panelists was open and proactive communication between records custodians and requestees. 

Gregory Bridges, chief of the disclosure branch of the records management division at FEMA, said proactive communication begins with agencies providing an EDC. 

At FEMA, Bridges said getting record custodians comfortable with the concept of providing an EDC was the first struggle. He said agencies with similar issues should base the EDC off the time it would take to complete the request if they worked on nothing else.

“There’s nothing wrong with telling a requester ‘we think it’s going to be ready by this date. If we don’t think we can meet that date, we’ll definitely reach out.’ But you have to reach out. If you’re saying, ‘the 25th,’ by the 20th or the 24th, you should have an idea of if you can meet the 25th and if you know you can’t, let the requester know before the 25th,” Bridges said at the annual meeting.

In his time at FEMA, Bridges said he finds the main complaint from requesters is thinking they have been forgotten. “Even if they don’t like the date being extended, at least they know that you’re actively working on it,” he said. 

He also said providing a clear timeline and EDC to requesters may encourage them to reduce the breadth of the request if they request more records than they need and want the records by a certain day. 

“Even if you have to extend [the EDC], then that could be another opportunity to narrow the scope,” he said. 

Record custodians at FEMA find it helpful to explain to requesters exactly what they are looking for in case it’s more than they need. 

“One of the things we do at our agency is explain to requesters why searching for all of the emails with the word hurricane during hurricane season might produce more records than you’re actually looking for,” Bridges said

Similarly, Nancy Chavannes-Battle, the deputy chief FOIA officer at the USPS, said providing partial responses when files become available if requests are taking longer than originally estimated. 

At the FBI, an online tool can tell requesters what stage their request is in and direct them to a PIO and the negotiations teams, who can answer questions in order to keep communication open throughout the process.

Negotiations teams

The FBI’s negotiations teams review the files and interact with requesters to answer questions. In fiscal 2022, the FBI received over 14,000 emails and over 1,100 phone calls about requests, Seidel said.

“We find that a lot of our requesters engage with our public information officer to get more information about the request and that’s where the discussion about the EDC really happens,” Seidel said. 

Negotiations teams ask requesters what they are looking for such as a specific event, a date range or an interview in order to stop processing unwanted pages, which, in turn, provides records faster. 

“We’re able to serve more requesters and give more requesters more information more frequently,” Seidel said. 

Seidel said the negotiations process has eliminated the processing of over 66 million unwanted pages that were originally requested. 

Automated EDC organization 

The FBI FOIA office uses automated multitrack processing programs to estimate the average number of days it takes to complete a request. 

They organize their requests into four tracks based on page size: small, medium, large and extra large. At the agency, the small track includes requests between 1 and 50 pages and the medium track is 51-to-950 pages, although other agencies who implement similar processes can change track size as needed.

“We’ll look at those dates within those queues of the dates requests were opened, we’ll do the math and compare them to the dates they were closed and we’ll come up with that average number of days it takes to complete a request within that queue,” Seidel said. 

The FBI FOIA office runs those audits every six months. Seidel also said an original challenge when implementing the program was deciding the right frequency for running the audit.

Estimated dates of completion: They’re not just for the requestor

Although EDCs are required by the FOIA, Bridges says, they do not only benefit the requester. 

“You should be establishing EDCs, just for your office’s knowledge,” Bridges said. “It’ll help you gauge your output, what can you expect to go out the door. So even though this does benefit the requesters in a big way, it can also benefit your office from managing your requests in a big way too.” 

He said every agency should incorporate the EDC timeline into the processing of all their records.  

“If you put all of your requests on an EDC that can also help you factor in how long it’ll take you to work on a particular request. Because you’re considering your current workload,” he said. 

Chavannes-Battle, from USPS, said PIOs should break down what increases the time of requests when setting EDCs, such as requests needing to be referred to other offices, going through corporate communications and legal departments. 

Connect with agency leadership

The OGIS assessment found support from agency leadership to be critical to the success in meeting requirements, such as providing EDCs.

At USPS, Chavannes-Battle says their staff training program is an important way PIOs connect with agency leadership to function smoothly. 

At FEMA, Bridges says training staff to work with attorneys at agencies helps set EDCs and return records quicker “especially when you’re dealing with senior managers who aren’t familiar with the FOIA process, and you’re coming into their program, trying to tell them why they need to make our work a priority against their work.” 

“It really is just understanding what that particular manager or leader cares about when it comes to the four year process,” he said. “Do they care that they’re in compliance? Some do, some don’t. Oftentimes, they care about not getting in trouble. They care about not having to spend money, they care about not having to get sued.” 

In FEMA’s FOIA department, PIOs treat senior managers as enforcers to get their staff to comply with FOIA requirements, he said.

Benefits of recommendations

FEMA began to implement the new procedures in 2018. Bridges says the agency has only been sued twice over FOIA records since implementation. While appeals over denied requests were previously between 1,200 to 1,700, they fell to around 45 each year since. 

“It isn’t because we don’t get those kinds of people [watchdogs], it’s because of implementing this new procedure and really establishing these response dates,” Bridges said. “That’s part of setting the expectations with the requesters so once we got people familiar with it, we really started to see appeals and challenges to our final responses reduce significantly.”

Customers who need to deal face-to-face with somebody, from the IRS to Veterans Affairs or Social Security need a real face (with brain and body attached) before them. But…

There are also lots of good reasons why many people say the 9-to-5 office of the 20th century is gone. For good. Working from home does wonders for rush hour traffic and air pollution, from the freeways of San Diego to the infamous beltway around Washington, D.C.

Many employees swear they are also more productive and likely to put in more hours if they can work remotely. So to test the waters we asked a random group from around the nation. Most answered quickly. With makes-you-think comments. Here are some of the first replies we got. All, every single one, is interesting. Some surprising. This is the first batch with more from-the-trenches feedback from readers.

A 30-year worker at NAVSEA in Dahlgren, Virginia:

I came to work every day throughout the pandemic. Went into the office; it was actually pretty nice since I was only one of very few that came in. Still coming in to the office every day.

I wouldn’t mind a couple of days a week teleworking, but I’ve got to get away from home (but I don’t have a horrible commute).

If I could work remotely from another area, I would agree that pay/raises should be based on location since a portion of pay is for locality.

Of note I have worked for Dept. of Navy for over 35 years.

A West Virginia based fed:

If you don’t want to return would you change jobs or agency if your new employer would let you work from home? So my answer to this question is “it depends.” I am not opposed to going into an office to work; I miss seeing people and working together. I feel that team building is more organic and natural if you are in one location vs. on a video conference. That being said, I would probably not change jobs into an agency or job that would require on-site presence 100% of the time. I think a hybrid situation suits me best. I should mention that I live in the eastern panhandle of WV so a commute to DC is 2+ hours each way.

If you could work remotely from a different city would you agree that future raises would be based where you were actually working, not where your official office is located? I fully understand that and would not expect to make D.C. locality pay if I was living somewhere with a much lower cost of living. That being said, I’m still thankful for Senator Robert Byrd who worked to ensure that my county is included in the D.C. locality pay area.

An about to retire employee:

I enjoyed teleworking for the last two years, until now. I am almost ready to retire with 32 yrs. of service. I am planning to work until Dec. 31, 2023.

A worker in suburban D.C.:

I am most likely not going to return to work. I got two times COVID positive: One in 2020 and the second one in 2022 and my immune system is weak.

Another is obviously making the best of what, for many, could be a tough situation:

Well, for me, I am perfectly well teleworking from home. It is a privilege that some people take for granted. I work for the Food and Drug Administration headquarters in Rockville; I have no plans to move away from Maryland, even if taxes are killing me, because I collect my SSI pension (yes, I am 71 yrs. old) and SSI is taxable in Maryland, but I enjoy this city. My office is only six miles away from home.

During the pandemic and we continue doing it now, the meetings are by Zoom. We even have a Christmas Party by Zoom. All the conferences, seminars, trainings are by Zoom or webinar. It is an amazing time! Even if I am suffering from an aggressive invasive breast cancer, I am enjoying telework. Blessed the Lord!!! That we have this incredible opportunity on these days of inflation, we get to save the gas money.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Daisy Thornton

Source: NPR

First off, the National Parks Service posted this on their Twitter account reminding everyone of all the monuments and parks that they manage. This evening, the National Mall, managed by NPS, will be host to fireworks in Washington, DC.

National parks are home to many of the nation’s most beloved monuments, historic sites, & landscapes. They tell stories from the road to revolution & creation of a new nation, to the journey of people continuing the fight for the freedom & liberty that our nation was founded on. pic.twitter.com/AG6T7Kf7ga

— National Park Service (@NatlParkService) July 4, 2022

The armed forces also wished everyone a great holiday:

Celebrating independence on watch around the globe, and at home. 🇺🇲⚓️ #HappyIndependenceDay #4thofJuly pic.twitter.com/dW3R9ljqwh

— U.S. Navy (@USNavy) July 4, 2022

Happy 4th of July from the world’s greatest Air Force 💥 pic.twitter.com/Mw6qxkidx2

— U.S. Air Force (@usairforce) July 4, 2022

We wish you all a very happy, but most importantly safe, 4th of July! 🇺🇸 🎆#coastguard #4thofJuly #semperparatus pic.twitter.com/vX0JowIACf

— U.S. Coast Guard (@USCG) July 4, 2022

#DYK
John Adams believed July 2nd was the correct date to celebrate and would reportedly turn down invitations to appear at July 4th events in protest.

Adams & Thomas Jefferson both died July 4, 1826 – the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. pic.twitter.com/MnVkqUnQdB

— U.S. Army (@USArmy) July 4, 2022

Elsewhere in the government, the National Archives and Records Administration celebrated in style. Pictured below is the Acting Archivist of the United States, Debra Steidel Wall standing with a few costumed colonists.

In Boston, the USS Constitution set sail in celebration of Independence Day.

In Poznan, Poland, U.S. soldiers celebrated with lunch and a cake.

In Asunción, Paraguay, Marines prepared for an Independence Day celebration at the U.S. Embassy.

Federal Chief Sustainability Officer Andrew Mayock said last week that the administration’s Federal Sustainability Plan will put the federal government “back in a position where we’re leading by example” on climate goals for the private sector to emulate.

“The government basically sat out sustainability for four years, and at best, things stayed in place, and at worst, we went backward. So we’re in a rebuilding phase and a learning phase,” Mayock said on June 28 at the Federal Sustainability Forum, hosted by the Business Council for Sustainable Energy and the Digital Climate Alliance.

President Biden, as part of an executive order he signed last year, expects agencies to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across all federal operations by 2050. That includes a 65% reduction by 2030.

“We’re not getting where we need to go, unless we focus on how we scale. And how we scale is through technology,” Mayock said.

Melanie Nakagawa, special assistant to the president and senior director for climate and energy at the National Security Council, said the leadership of at least 20 agencies is committed to implementing the administration’s clean-energy goals across the federal government.

“It’s really hard to find a department or agency that isn’t willing to take the call or engage,” Nakagawa said.

While agencies with the biggest climate impact are moving ahead on the administration’s sustainability goals, Mayock said the Federal Sustainability Plan focuses on making green initiatives a top priority governmentwide.

“We need to start acting and delivering as an enterprise, versus the deeply federated federal government that we are today. There are lots of efficiencies and lots of actions that we can take when we work better and more closely together,” he said.

The White House Council on Environmental Quality in May launched an interagency task force with the General Services Administration, the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency to develop the first-ever Federal Building Performance Standards.

The standards will establish metrics, targets and tracking methods to reach federal carbon emissions goals. Mayock said the standards, which he said will be publicly released in two or three months, will set standard performance goals across more than 300,000 federal buildings.

“The ways that we’ve executed this sustainability plan and past versions of it over past administrations, that didn’t speak to the decarbonization moment that we’re in today,” Mayock said.

While the administration is making government more sustainable where possible, several administration officials said some federal climate goals will rely more on cooperation with the private sector.

Mayock said emerging sustainability technologies, for example, will be crucial to meeting some of the federal government’s climate goals.

“A lot of the technology, but not all of the technology, is where we want to be. How do we handle that moment in the marketplace to make progress now, while we’re all pushing for the technology that we need to be delivered along the pathway?” Mayock said.

Tanuj Deora, CEQ’s director for clean energy, said the administration is trying to use its collective buying power to support sustainable energy industries but is also trying to overcome supply constraints in the market for goods like electric vehicles.

“We don’t want to be consumptive of the market’s ability to supply. We don’t want to crowd out other folks who are trying to invest. I know with electric vehicles right now, one of the biggest challenges GSA has is that the vehicles just aren’t available,” Deora said.

Deora said a pandemic-era shortage of semiconductor chips has limited the supply of all vehicles, including electric vehicles, for federal agencies to purchase.

White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy, a former EPA administrator under the Obama administration, said last year that less than 1% of the federal fleet is plug-in electric vehicles, and that agencies bought only 200 electric vehicles in 2020.

Kinga Hydras, a sustainable program design expert with GSA’s Office of Federal High-Performance Green Buildings, said electrifying the federal fleet also impacts plans to improve the energy efficiency of federal buildings.

“It’s not just buying the vehicles, it’s also creating the infrastructure and doing it in a smart way.  Now that it all plugs into our federal building portfolio, then how does that impact our energy consumption? How do we go about partnering with the utilities in the servicing markets, and maybe utilize the electric vehicle fleet as backup power. A lot of questions, a lot of opportunities out there,” Hydras said.

Hydras said GSA’s federal building portfolio within the Washington, D.C. metro area has reduced energy consumption by 60% through integrated energy retrofit projects.

GSA manages a portfolio of 370 million rentable square feet of space for more than a million federal employees. Its Federal Acquisition Service, meanwhile, oversees about $75 billion worth of annual contracts.

“We are all in it together. As most federal agencies and large organizations have silos, we do have silos too, but this aggressive goal brought us all together,” Hydras said.

The Energy Department, meanwhile, partnering with GSA to spend $13 million to retrofit and upgrade 17 federal facilities to reduce emissions and energy costs.

“We believe technology is way ahead. We see in the marketplace the technology’s there. We need to be smart about implementing and using everything in our tool house,” Hydras said.

Hydras pointed to the New Carrollton Federal Building as an example of a successful retrofit project. The building went through upgrades between 2012 to 201, which reduced the building’s energy consumption by 62% and cut water consumption in half.

Deora said federal agencies can better leverage data to find more buildings that stand to benefit the most from these sustainable upgrades, much like the New Carrollton Federal Building.

“It’s just a great example. There was one great value case, how can we take that and then replicate that and make that system-wide? We need to think about the value stack from not just energy or storage or whatever, but from the data itself,” Deora said.

The Biden administration is also looking to accelerate the pace of federal permitting and environmental reviews for thousands of infrastructure projects under the $1 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

The White House in May released a permitting action plan outlining ways agencies can ensure infrastructure spending projects remain on time and on budget.

However, Cole Simons, a policy adviser for Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said that more federal permitting reforms to are needed to prevent wasteful infrastructure spending.

“We need to eliminate some of the duplicity that is in the process. We’ve got issues right now, where Army Corps [of Engineers] says yes. Six months later, the EPA drops in and says ‘Just kidding, no,’ and there’s already been steel put in the ground, or there’s already been a process started, that just creates more waste, both from having already started a process and having to end it and you’re just like, ‘Well, what do we do with stuff that’s already there?’ as well as a lot of financial waste and a lot of uncertainty provided to anybody who seeks to develop in the U.S,” Simons said.

The new policy states that service members who commit sexual assault will be subject to immediate initiation of discharge procedures. Only in very few circumstances can an airman or guardian be considered for an exception.

Those exceptions are what DAF is updating; under previous policy there were more situations where assaulters would have an opportunity to stay in the service.

Exceptions are now strengthened for and bar exceptions when an airman or guardian assaults a child or if that person has a prior assault or harassment charge.

“Sexual assault is incompatible with our core values, the Guardian Ideal, and military service. These revisions will significantly improve our ability to discharge those unworthy of calling themselves airmen and guardians,” said Air Force Undersecretary Gina Ortiz Jones. “Our policies must set clear expectations and consequences for the force. Everything we do, and everything we say communicates the value that we place, or do not place, on one’s service.”

There are also factors that DAF will no longer consider when making an exception. Those include personal, family or financial circumstances, good military character and medical or mental health condition.

What DAF will still consider, according to the new separation guidance, is if the member’s continued presence is consistence with “the interest of DAF in maintaining proper disciple, good order, leadership, morale and a culture of respect for the safety, dignity and personal boundaries of all service members.”

The change adds mission-focused criteria to the exception consideration.

“These new objective criteria reflect our commitment to justice for sexual assault survivors and accountability of offenders,” added Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. “We are determined to maintain a culture of respect for the safety, dignity and personal boundaries of every airman, guardian and civil servant.”

DAF and the Defense Department are putting a large emphasis on combating sexual assault. DAF is asking Congress for increased funds in 2023 to strengthen sexual assault and integrated violence prevention programs.

Nearly a year ago, DoD announced it was changing policy to address issues with its sexual assault and prosecution process.

DoD is in the process of removing sex crimes and related crimes like domestic and child abuse from the military’s oversight and giving them to independent civilian agencies. DoD added sexual harassment as an offense in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and is creating offices in each military department to handle the prosecution of special crimes with appropriate legal oversight and guidance from the Pentagon.