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

Just when you thought government contracting was about to get fun, again, the General Services Administration decided boring is the right approach.

That’s right, I’m saying government procurement and fun in the same sentence because we had an upcoming contract that had so many possibilities intertwined with it. GSA has been planning the follow-on to its highly popular and successful OASIS contract for the past year. It started by calling the vehicle BIC MAC—best-in-class multiple award contract. Oh the possibilities there!

The agency moved to Services MAC for the last few months. And with both of those names, unlike its more traditional and unexciting names like Alliant or Millennial or 8(a) STARS, these names had so much potential for fun in headlines and leads and so much more.

But GSA decided — and I’ll blame the lawyers here, only because it’s always fun to blame lawyers — to pick the name OASIS+, or maybe Oasis-Plus, for the new governmentwide contract, ending any real chance of bringing fun back to federal procurement.

“The name echoes a successful brand that our customers have come to know and trust, reflects the expanded scope of services that will be available through the new program, and embodies the contract’s flexible domain-based structure,” wrote Tiffany Hixson, the assistant commissioner in GSA’s Office of Professional Services and Human Capital Categories in the Federal Acquisition Service, in a blog post from June 15. “The new program will have a broad scope. As their respective ordering periods conclude, the new program will be able to fulfill requirements currently met by GSA’s One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Services (OASIS); Human Capital and Training Solutions (HCaTS); and Building, Maintenance, and Operations (BMO) contracts. In addition, new scope areas include environmental, intelligence services, and large enterprise solutions. Plus, we’ll build-in the flexibility to expand scope as customers identify new federal services needs.”

All kidding aside to the good folks at GSA, the decision around OASIS+/Oasis-Plus is seems small, but important. It’s clear there is recognition in FAS that the current contract is popular, in part because GSA has spent the better part of a decade promoting, creating a brand and working with everyone from the Air Force to the Homeland Security Department to the Army to commit to putting hundreds of millions of dollars through OASIS.

Since 2015, agencies have spent $48.8 billion on OASIS, OASIS small business and OASIS 8(a) through more than 3,200 task orders.

The Air Force remains the largest user, issuing more than 1,000 task orders worth more than $28 billion. The Army is the largest user by total sales with more than $30 billion across 458 task orders.

The updated vision for OASIS+ also recognizes the struggles of the HCATS contract.

GSA awarded HCATS to 109 vendors in May 2016. The 10 1/2 year contract has a ceiling of $11.5 billion and replaced the Training and Management Assistance (TMA) contract run by the Office of Personnel Management for the last two decades. After a series of bid protests, GSA finally issued the notice to proceed for HCATS in September 2016. Over the last almost six years, agencies have not used the contract like may believed they would, awarding 300 task orders worth $764 million.

Six contracts with five for small business

Sheri Meadema, the acting assistant commissioner of GSA’s Office of Professional Services and Human Capital Categories in the Federal Acquisition Service, said during the Coalition for Government Procurement spring conference that the changes to OASIS-Plus also acknowledges what GSA’s customers have said about the draft details of the new contract over the last few months.

“We had originally envisioned one contract with small business reserves, and working closely with the Small Business Administration and our Office of Small and Disadvantage Utilization Office and our customers, quite frankly, we ended up switching that strategy. So the plan is to now award six separate contracts, five of those being for small businesses and the six being unrestricted,” she said. “The second change is scope. Oasis will cover all of the scope areas in Oasis currently today, plus HCATS and building maintenance and operations as those contracts expire. In addition, in the initial stages of the contract, there are additional scope areas that we’re adding on to include environmental intelligence services and a domain we’re calling enterprise solutions, which will be unique to the unrestricted vehicle. That domain is for very large, complex, high-dollar value, non-commercial type work.”

The domains is another change for OASIS+. GSA will add or remove domains based on customer needs and usage throughout the life of the contract.

That gives us a lot more flexibility as things change and customers’ needs change to introduce new scope areas,” Meadema said. “We are trying to keep the solicitation open continuously after we initially close it to deal with solicitation protests. This is all about our ability to onboard industry partners at any time during the contracts life.”

The onramp for OASIS was far from a smooth process, beset by protests and delays.

Meadema said the new contract will make it easier for companies who grow out of the small business size standard to apply to get on the OASIS+ unrestricted version.

“The evaluation criteria will drive the highly qualified pool of vendors that we’re trying to attract. We’re not recreating the Multiple Award Schedules. We are setting the bar relatively high,” she said. “That being said, we are giving careful consideration to how high we set the bar for unrestricted. So again, we can allow companies who re-represent their size to move on to another vehicle.”

Price not a key evaluation factor

As part of the evaluation factors, GSA will be applying the authority it received under Section 876 of the 2018 Defense Authorization bill, where price is most important at the task order level, not at the main contract level.

GSA stated in recent answers to industry questions that OASIS-Plus will not have a total dollar ceiling attached to it, joining Polaris as the only other contract do deviate from the Federal Acquisition Regulations in the last nine years.

Meadema said GSA expects to release some new or updated draft sections of OASIS-Plus for industry comment over the summer and then release the full draft request for proposals in early fiscal 2023. GSA expects to issue the final solicitation in the second quarter of 2023.

The new name, scope and domain changes are important steps for GSA in this journey, but they still don’t necessarily answer all the questions about how OASIS+/OASIS-Plus isn’t just creating a new type of schedule contract. The Coalition has expressed concern over the last year about possible duplication with the schedules, cross-walking what OASIS+ will include and what the schedules already provide.

The next key stop in this journey is when GSA releases the draft RFP for industry comments to see how it differentiates from the schedules and whether it alleviates any concerns in industry about duplication. Most would agree that last thing industry or government needs is another contract that doesn’t add value and meet agency needs.

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

The return of in-person conferences still is a bit weird. As most attendees will say, it’s great to see people in person, but it’s less fun to wear “real” clothes and shoes. The “business on the top and vacation on the bottom (dress shirt and shorts)” doesn’t work well when you are in a hotel or conference center for most people.

Maybe the best part of the return to in-person events, at least for intrepid reporters, is the ability to ask follow-up questions after a presentation or speech. That is when you turn a story that is likely to be a lemon into sweet lemonade.

At the recent Emerging Technology and Innovation Conference sponsored by ACT-IAC in Cambridge, Maryland, the lemonade was flowing thanks to the bevy of speakers who were willing to talk about all the good things happening in their agency.

From Army chief information officer Raj Iyer offering an update on his digital transformation efforts to Sonny Hashmi, the commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service in the General Services Administration, talking about the latest contract to buy cloud services, to Stacie Alboum talking about her new job at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation as deputy director of enterprise strategy, the news flowed like, well lemonade.

But here are three items you may have missed from the event.

AFWERX moving back to DC

The Air Force’s innovation arm missed the Washington, D.C. metro area after all.

AFWERX closed its offices in Arlington, Virginia during the pandemic, figuring it would use its offices in Las Vegas and Austin, Texas as places to recruit innovative companies.

But like in Godfather Part III, AFWERX may have been screaming  “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” to Washington, D.C.

Garrett Custons, a Spark cell director at AFWERX, said the organization is looking for new space in the D.C. metro area.

“It’s really a blank slate with what it could look like,” Custons said. “We want to build out an incubator in the D.C. area. We’d love it to be co-located with other organizations in the government innovator space. We don’t just the space, but a place where tools and products can be tested.”

AFWERX, which the Air Force launched in July 2017, focuses on accelerating agile and affordable capabilities by teaming innovative technology developers in the private sector with Airman and Guardian talent.  In 2020, the Air Force split AFWERX into three different branches: AFVentures, Spark and Prime. The Spark branch is focused on empowering innovation at the operational edge.

Custons said the decision to rethink the need for an office in the D.C. area is based on two factors. The first is internal growth of staff. The second is number of vendors in D.C. metro area.

“This is where the decision makers are,” he said. “It’s a logical progression of the lifecycle of AFWERX to help companies get into the federal market.”

AFWERX has money set-aside for the office space, but isn’t against the idea of sharing space with other agencies or innovation cells.

Custons said one option would be to share space with the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the National Security Innovation Network in Arlington, Virginia.

“If a government organization has office space, we’d like to talk to them. It’s hard to know what is available and what’s out there,” he said. “We are talking to the General Services Administration because they have collaboration space that isn’t being used as much as they thought, so maybe partnership play there.”

Commerce BIS sprint to the cloud

You’d think moving to the cloud would by now would be passé. Agencies have been talking about it for more than a decade.

For the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, cloud services represent an entirely new way of doing business.

Mike Palmer, associate chief information officer for BIS, said the goal of moving to the cloud is, of course, IT modernization. But the bigger win will for BIS is how the cloud services will free up data and break down silos.

“We’ve focused over the last six months on upgrading our infrastructure. In January, we decided to take our entire infrastructure to the cloud and out of this archaic on-premise based infrastructure,” he said. “By July 1, our six month move of our entire infrastructure to the cloud should be complete. In the meantime, in parallel, we are starting to do some interesting things with data. It gives us more flexibility to make quicker decisions.”

Palmer said BIS is launching a pilot program around a data warehouse and data sharing platform to improve how they work with the intelligence and law enforcement communities as well as conducting a pilot to take some of its data from licensing offers and turn it into export control impact.

“One of the things we believe in is trying things on a smaller scale and expand it from there so  quick, small investment to prove out a concept,” he said. “The next phase of our product lifecycle modernization effort is to do a lot of user research over the summer as part of our enterprise modernization activities.”

A BIS spokesperson offered a few more details by email.

The spokesperson said the move to the cloud will set the foundation for a broader modernization journey that includes creating new data sharing capabilities, public-facing digital services and a zero trust cybersecurity architecture.  The move to the cloud is expected to improve BIS’s operational resiliency and security, reduce costs, and provide modern tools for developing new software applications that will improve the BIS customer experience.

Palmer said at the event that one of the biggest challenges for BIS is getting the workforce comfortable with using cloud services and no longer being in a physical environment.

BIS expects the infrastructure modernization to save money, but Palmer said the CIO’s office still is finalizing those details.

Coast Guard less disconnected

The Coast Guard Commandant’s tech revolution will not be televised, but it now will be on Zoom or Microsoft Teams.

That’s right, major cutters now have enough bandwidth to use video teleconference platforms.

Brian Campo, the Coast Guard’s deputy CIO, said the service recently upgraded the communication bandwidth for all major cutters, which are out to sea 180 to 200 days a year.

“The Coast Guard has been going out with Navy fleets for the last several years into places like Indo-PACOM and around the horn of Africa, but also going up into the Arctic. These are places were communications are really challenging. So one of the thing we have been trying to do is upgrade equipment, working with industry partners and looking at different communications links we could use,” he said. “One of the most amazing things have done in about the last year is we’ve doubled connectivity to the major cutters. What we have been able to do is upgrade them so that they have enough bandwidth so now on the morale side in some of the mess decks and personnel areas, they can actually get what we would call ‘dirty’ internet to be able to send email back to loved ones. Just recently we just doubled their internet again so they can actually do video teleconferences using Teams and Zoom to actually reach back and talk with their loved ones.”

Former Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Karl Schultz, who retired on June 1, made the increase of bandwidth to cutters a central part of his Tech Revolution plan.

The Tech Revolution Plan includes four other priorities: Data to decisions, software, mobility and the cloud, cyber readiness and command, control, communications, computers, cyber and intelligence (C5I).

Campo said the Coast Guard now is adding two new lines of effort command and control and navigation.

“Each of those two new systems are game changing to the Coast Guard. They are systems we have been leveraging from the Defense Department that we will be retiring in the next few years,” he said. “We are trying to build out some new replacements for those systems and taking a different approach. We are leveraging what we did in the first half of the tech revolution bringing in things like data, making data part of what we do for our C2 systems, making sure as we develop navigational systems we are leveraging the technology through commercial satellite communications. We are thinking about how we can use artificial intelligence to actually build out navigation systems that can manage these over congested ports and work with the shippers to give them more information as they come into a port.”

But that preparation focused mainly around kinetic warfare where Marines or soldiers would have to face an enemy that was, relatively speaking, close and understood.

Todd Harrison, a senior associate in the Aerospace Security Project and Defense Budget Analysis for the Center for Strategic and International Security (CSIS) wrote in a 2021 report that “For some types of non-kinetic attack, third parties may not be able to see that an attack has occurred, or the party being attacked may not know right away who is attacking. For these reasons, non-kinetic attacks may be perceived as less escalatory in some situations, although this remains a point of debate. It can be difficult to determine if some non-kinetic forms of attack are effective, particularly if the effects are not publicly visible. And some methods of attack — such as exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in a cyberattack — may have a limited period of effectiveness before an adversary develops defenses against them.”

The non-kinetic attacks are not limited to just weapons systems, but logistics to move supplies and troops, communications to make data sharing more difficult and GPS jamming and spoofing.

Today, the Marines are preparing for an environment that is disconnected, denied, intermittent and/or with limited bandwidth (DDIL) where the enemy could be hundreds of miles away, behind screens and impacting both kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities.

The Marine Corps awarded General Dynamics IT (GDIT) a task order under the Defense Enterprise Office Solutions (DEOS) contract to test out how they can receive Microsoft Office capabilities both on-premise and in the cloud in a classified environment approved at the secret level.

The Defense Information Systems Agency and the General Services Administration awarded GDIT the 10-year DEOS contract that has a $7.6 billion ceiling in August 2019. DISA began migrating users to DEOS in January 2021 after protests and corrective action delayed the implementation.

Navy leading DDIL working group

Jim Matney, vice president and general manager of the DISA and Enterprise Services Sector for GDIT’s defense division, said in an email to Federal News Network that GDIT already is supporting an unclassified environment for these services that is rated at impact level 5 (IL5). He said through this proof of concept that mainly will be done in a lab environment, the Marines will be able to see how the enterprise collaboration tools can work in DDIL environments.

The six-month project is worth under $1 million.

The Marine Corps Tactical Systems Support Activity (MCTSSA) has put together a DoD DDIL lab environment where GDIT will evaluate these proposed architectures and developed capabilities.

GDIT says it also will partner with Microsoft to test capabilities, investigate scenarios and provide applicable recommendations for mission partners deployed in a DDIL environment.

“[T]hese collaboration services must also operate on-premises. As cloud service providers are providing more software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings to support collaboration, such as Office 365, users must have access to the cloud to leverage these capabilities,” Matney said. “The challenge then becomes ensuring the on-premises solution used to support DDIL in an outside the continental U.S. (OCONUS) environment can interface with the enterprise capability that is being used in CONUS.”

Matney said the on-premises collaborative capabilities, such as Microsoft Exchange, Skype for Business and SharePoint, must remain and integrate with the cloud-based services.

GDIT says the proof of concept will include testing several different scenarios to access capabilities including word processing and spreadsheets, email and calendar and file sharing and instant messaging.

All of this is helping the DoD figure out how to deploy DEOS in DDIL environments, where reliable and timely connectivity to warfighters at the tactical edge is critical.

Refine requirements, develop use cases

This task order proof of concept with the Marines is part of the DoD chief information officer’s effort to find technology capabilities that provide seamless operations in denied, degraded, intermittent and limited bandwidth environments.

In 2021, the DoD CIO designated the Department of Navy CIO as the executive agent to lead a cross-service joint working group focused on DDIL.

“These low bandwidth and high latency conditions are prevalent at the tactical edge and experience regular disconnects from the broader network, including cloud services, often for substantial periods of time,” the DON CIO’s office wrote in late 2021. “Network server software and hardware exist at the tactical edge to provide critical IT services and data in these DDIL environments, along with a variety of spectrum communications and unclassified and classified network transports leveraging satellite links and low-Earth Orbit (LEO), Wi-Fi, cellular/4G LTE, millimeter wave/5G and others.”

The working group is leaning on industry for help in refining DoD requirements and use cases to develop standardized architectures and capabilities in these austere environments.

“These tools operate as a hybrid capability, which will allow users access to the full feature set when cloud connectivity is available, but remain productive locally within the DDIL environment,” the DON CIO wrote.

Matney said GDIT is currently supporting multiple agencies across the DoD, civilian, and intelligence sectors with on-premises collaborative capabilities that may be considered and tested as potential DDIL approaches.

The challenge that the Marines are trying to solve isn’t just a Marines or DoD challenge. It’s one nearly every agency from the departments of Treasury to Homeland Security to Justice face. And with so much dependency on email communication and collaboration tools, having access no matter the network environment is critical.

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

Clarification: Several smart readers pointed out that GSA’s OASIS multiple award contract was actually the first governmentwide contract not to have a total dollar ceiling. GSA issued a FAR deviation for that vehicle in 2013. 

For most of the past 18 months, the federal contracting community has expected the Polaris small business governmentwide acquisition contract to have a ceiling of $50 billion. It’s unclear whether it was an estimate from a market research firm like Deltek or Bloomberg Government, or just a rumor that took off on its own, but for much of the past year, every story and every discussion about Polaris by multiple media organizations highlighted this $50 billion number.

Then a few weeks ago, the General Services Administration suddenly asked for a correction on a story about Polaris that says it has this $50 billion ceiling. The request was a bit surprising given the 18 months of stories and discussion, and never a request for a correction previously.

Well like any good journalist, I put on my investigative hat and found out why.

GSA quietly issued a class deviation to the Federal Acquisition Regulations in March removing the requirement for Polaris to have a minimum or maximum quantity under the indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity (IDIQ) type contract. By the way, and to be clear, FAR deviations are rarely big news items that deserve big fanfare and press releases. But you’d think that with Polaris being in the news and garnering attention like it has, GSA may have wanted to alert folks of the significant change.

A GSA official said in an email to Federal News Network that while they issued the deviation in March, it was planning for some time to remove the ceiling requirement.

“GSA incorporated a number of good-for-government key features in the Polaris GWAC program. An important one that we’ve seen misrepresented in the media is the mention of a contract ceiling on Polaris,” said the official, who requested anonymity in order to talk about an active procurement. “In fact, designed to ensure ongoing availability for customers and maximum opportunity for vendors, Polaris will not have a contract ceiling at the master contract level.”

This is the first time  in nearly a decade that GSA, or any agency for that matter, created a multiple award, IDIQ type contract that didn’t have a ceiling.

Sonny Hashmi, the commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, said GSA is using the authorities Congress granted them under Section 876 of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act where costs only matter at each individual task order level and not at the master contract level.

“The two or three things that historically have defined how we’ve done large, multi agency or governmentwide vehicles, there’s always been a ceiling, on-ramps have been very few and far between and typically we’ve always had price negotiation at the master contract level. All three of those things are done for the right reason and they follow well-trodden paths and the Federal Acquisition Regulation. But all those three things, many times come together to cause unnecessary friction and heartburn for the industry,” Hashmi said in an interview with Federal News Network. “For our customers, ceilings are great when you can have perfect predictability, what the future is going to look like. We’re living in a world where we can’t predict what the future looks like. Digital is going to be a more central part of how the government operates. Organizations at state local tribal level are going to be going through digital modernizations and that is going to continue to accelerate. So we don’t know what the number looks like. So why come up with an artificial boundary that requires people to do artificial work at some point in the arbitrary future?”

Hashmi said GSA wants Polaris, and really all its acquisition vehicles, to solve problems.

“If it’s highly adopted, that’s a great thing because it means that it’s solving real business problems for people,” he said.

Jeff Koses, GSA’s senior procurement executive, signed the deviation because the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act (FASA), now codified at 41 USC § 4103, says a solicitation for a task or delivery order contract “shall include [among other things] the maximum quantity or dollar value of the services or property to be procured under the contract.”

In the memo, Koses wrote that the authority to issue the FAR deviation is based on the IT Category’s plan to “on-ramp” new contractors to the Polaris program at least every three years.

“Such on-ramping opportunities do not need to cover all pools, but ITC is encouraged to consider an annual on-ramp, opening a different pool each year,” the memo stated.

Top-line ceilings going away

Polaris isn’t the only contract GSA is planning not to have a ceiling for.

In its response to industry questions about the Services MAC, GSA says it will issue a FAR deviation to remove the minimum and maximum requirements.

Hashmi added that these two will not be the last ones where GSA will seek the FAR deviation.

While he didn’t specifically call it out, it’s easy to see the Ascend cloud blanket purchase agreement fall into the similar category as Polaris and the Services MAC.

Federal procurement experts were surprised about the FAR deviation for Polaris or for any of the other vehicles.

As one federal procurement attorney said, “In light of this [FASA and USC code language], I don’t see how GSA can waive the maximum quantity/dollar value requirement.”

Another said, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) may want to consider asking GSA for a business case as a contract with no ceiling may harm small businesses by reducing other means for competition. The expert added that the agency also is taking on increased risk of protest by unsuccessful bidders.

The other reason for removing the ceiling of Polaris likely is related to the challenges GSA faced with the 8(a) Stars II program. In May 2020, GSA announced the popular contract would reach its $15 billion ceiling 16 months before the end of the contract. GSA had to increase the ceiling size by $7 billion but had to limit the period of performance for contracts as a result.

Polaris update

By not having a ceiling with Polaris, GSA can avoid this potential problem over the life of the contract.

And speaking of Polaris, Hashmi offered a bit of an update. GSA just started reviewing industry feedback on its suggested updates to the evaluation criteria that came out in May.

“You can’t solve for every single use case, so we’re going to try to find the best approach that creates opportunity for the most small businesses that we can,” Hashmi said. “There’s going to be a trade-off that we need to find and that’s just reality. Depending on the feedback that we get, and then to what extent we need to completely change strategy will determine the timeline. I’m hoping that the adjustment that we’ve made or proposed in our updated criteria is it meets the expectations of industry. If that’s the case then we should be able to release the RFP for official response by the end of June timeframe but although don’t hold me to that because all of that depends on the feedback that we get and what adjustments we have to make.”

There are a lot of eyes on Polaris already so it’s understandable why GSA didn’t play up the FAR deviation for Polaris, but at the same time finding out “by accident” because of a request for a correction also makes one wonder whether GSA was trying to downplay another way Polaris is breaking many of the old rules for GWACs.

The proliferation of political appointees across government focused on cybersecurity is both a signal of the threat and a recognition of the level of attention the topic needs.

There are three political appointees at the White House alone. Anne Neuberger is the deputy assistant to the President and deputy national security advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology on the National Security Council. Chris Inglis is the national cyber director. And finally Chris DeRusha is the federal chief information security officer in the Office of Management and Budget and last November took on an additional role as the deputy national cyber director.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the  Department of Homeland Security is led by Jen Easterly, another political appointee.

The National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command are led by not only a general, Gen. Paul Nakasone, but he also is confirmed by the Senate.

The Commerce Department, the Federal Communications Commission, the Department of Veterans Affairs and many others have similar cyber-focused leadership positions that require presidential appointments and some are Senate confirmed too.

The one missing from this list is the Energy Department’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response (CESER). The Senate is required to confirm the assistant secretary who typically runs the office. But the Biden administration and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm have decided not to make the position a political appointee, raising concerns across the spectrum from Capitol Hill to industry executives to former CESER officials.

They call that decision shortsighted and damaging at a time when the energy sector is facing an increased level of threats.

“The problem is I’ve served as both a career and as a political across multiple administration and being a political appointee gives your office a presence by law,” said Sean Plankey, a former director of cyber policy at the White House’s NSC and the former principle deputy at CESER. “You are part of the conversation and subject to Congressional oversight, which helps ensure there isn’t mismanagement, but also ensures you are responsible for results. For the most part, a career official is likely not have that seat at the table to ensure they have resources or in whatever meetings. If you are a career official, you are never going to be in that ‘trusted circle’ of the secretary.”

Plankey, who now is director of cyber missions at DataRobot, other former career CESER officials, as well as other cyber experts say not having a political appointee to lead the office sends a bad message internally and externally to the agency employees and the overall energy sector.

Threats to energy sector on the rise

And that message comes at a time when threats against the energy sector are increasing.

President Joe Biden issued a statement in March urging critical infrastructure providers, many of which are from the energy sector, to “harden your cyber defenses immediately” in light of threats by Russian hackers.

Dragos, a cybersecurity firm, found in its 2021 ICS/OT Year in Review report that of the 18 worldwide threat groups that it tracks, two of the three newest ones focused on industrial control systems (ICS) intrusions with “a focus on access operations and data theft over disruption. This shows that adversaries are willing to spend time, effort, and resources targeting, compromising, and harvesting information from ICS/OT environments for future purposes.”

Jeremiah Baumann, the deputy chief of staff of the Office of the Under Secretary for Infrastructure, where CESER resides, said in an interview with Federal News Network that having a career official and not politicizing the office will make it more effective.

“It has been a deliberate decision that this position is too important to leave subject to the whims of shifting politics, and we need to have steady leadership in the job. That’s been the consideration from day one,” he said. “I think in my experience of this administration, at least, is when you’ve got strong skilled leaders who bring the right kind of expertise to the table, I haven’t really seen a huge distinction on who is a political appointee and who’s not a political appointee. The secretary works with both political and career leaders on all sorts of matters. They sit at the same table have an equal voice, and I say the same thing in interagency processes. I think our career leader for the CESER office is among the most respected people in D.C. when it comes to cybersecurity and I don’t think there’s anybody you can’t sit at a table with and hold his own.”

Currently Puesh Kumar is the director of CESER. He’s highly respected for his knowledge and background.

Energy created CESER in 2018 with $96 million from the appropriations bill with a goal of elevating “the department’s focus on energy infrastructure protection and will enable more coordinated preparedness and response to natural and man-made threats.”

Karen Evans was the only politically appointed and Senate confirmed assistant secretary of CESER. She started in September 2018 and lasted about 18 months before leaving in February 2020. Since then, CESER has had either acting or career deputies in charge.

Career not equal to political appointees

Experts say Kumar would be an excellent choice to be the political appointee, but as the career official, he’s at a disadvantage when he walks into a meeting with Easterly, Neuberger, Inglis or with CEOs from top energy companies.

Plankey, who also worked at BP as a global cyber intelligence advisor, saw this happen first hand.

“You try to bring the same level of official to the table. If the CEO of multi-billion dollar organization is sitting down with career official who isn’t at that level, that’s a problem,” he said. “I’m not taking anything away from that career official, but if you are not the designee through political appointment status it’s hard to curry that same level of focus and attention.”

Nick Andersen, the chief operating officer at Invictus International Consulting, a non-resident senior fellow in the Cyber Craft Initiative at the Atlantic Council and a former principal deputy for CESER, called Energy’s rationale for having only a career person at the helm a “little disingenuous.”

“All positions in Energy have senior career deputy to provide continuity. That is part of what we do with transition planning,” he said. “We are not having this debate with any other cyber or critical infrastructure positions across the government. Not at CISA or at FEMA. If you look at where cyber and resiliency mission sits in the Defense Department, they have an appointee who is a deputy assistant secretary and a Senate confirmed assistant secretary for defense for homeland defense and global security. It sends a strong message about internal prioritization of missions. When you are willing to take that level of visibility away from the office, it makes it more difficult to be on level playing field with other departments, which are maintaining level of importance for same mission areas.”

The increase in threats to the energy sector caught the attention of Congress, particularly in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Lawmakers expressing concerns

In March, lawmakers passed the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022 as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022.

The legislation establishes mandatory cyber intrusion reporting requirements for critical infrastructure companies, including companies in the energy sector. While Congress gave CISA the role to implement the law, Energy, under existing authority, remains as the sector risk management agency (SRMA) for energy sector cybersecurity.

A recent letter from House and Senate oversight committees, the Committee on Energy and Commerce and the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, respectively, wrote to Granholm in early April expressing concern about DoE’s role in remaining the cybersecurity lead for the energy sector.

“CESER’s mission and responsibility has grown a lot in the last few years and a lot of it is attributed to work it has done over the last few years,” Andersen said. “It has taken on work at the tactical level by coordinating with the sector or providing cyber threat information with intergovernmental partners. It has expanded the expertise it provides. And CESER is looking at strategic risk to drive one consolidated view of where risk is and how shore it up, especially within the research and development and supply chain areas.”

The letter by Senate and House members to Granholm isn’t the first expressing concerns. In March 2021, 11 Senators wrote to the secretary pressing her to name a political appointee to lead CESER.

“It is imperative that the department does not march backwards on its responsibilities to the energy sector and the protection of our critical infrastructure given the persistent, growing and significant threat cyber attacks pose to our nation’s economy and national security,” the lawmakers wrote.

Some sources say one reason that Energy isn’t making the CESER position a political appointee is there are only a limited number of slots available and Granholm and/or the White House have decided to allocate the positions differently.

Energy’s Baumann and other Energy officials referred to studies that found more than 1,200 political appointees across all agencies and the time it takes to get someone confirmed.

“We actually think that certain things are so critical and so important that they shouldn’t be left so vulnerable as to be sitting around vacant for months at a time just because of whatever political spat of the day means a single senator doesn’t want to confirm someone,” he said. “We think it’s absolutely critical that there be steady leadership, someone who can be in place, regardless of the politics to work on things like emergency response and cybersecurity. We don’t think it would be good to have situations like the Texas grid going down or the Colonial Pipeline getting hacked, and there’ll be no leadership in place because of politics.”

Funding, resources easier to come by

Mark Montgomery, the former executive director of the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission and now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, pushed back against that rationale, too.

He said when you have an assistant secretary that is politically appointed ad Senate confirmed, the organization does better with funding and other resource allocations, which, he said, is management 101.

“If you value something, and think it’s important for your mission, then you assign an increasingly senior person to manage that issue. DOE over last several years has made a lot of good decisions. They have worked well with Congress on the infrastructure act and got significant cyber resources. As it gets more responsibilities and more grant programs to manage, that lends itself to more senior and accountable leadership.”

Montgomery added it’s also easier to hold the office accountable when there is a political appointee at the helm. Typically, administrations aren’t keen on letting career officials testify before Congress so a political appointee is preferred both from an accountability perspective as well as operational one.

“Over at the White House or on Capitol Hill, it helps to be a presidential appointee to argue for your agency’s or the President’s priorities, and it’s the same on Capitol Hill,” he said. “And if you’re working with the private sector, they understand where the lines of responsibility are. CEOs are more comfortable with an assistant secretary than a deputy assistant secretary. We should want this person meeting with CEOs to be in the ‘C suite’ because this is a C suite issue and is a C suite engagement.”

The issue of whether there should be a Space National Guard has gone back and forth between Defense officials and lawmakers for the past couple years. Now, legislators are making moves to establish a part-time component for the new service.

A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers are introducing a bill in both houses to create a Space National Guard. The effort led by Sens. Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) would ensure a pipeline for guardians to work part-time and move between active duty and the Guard.

It would eliminate the need for the Space Force to route funding between it and the Air Force, and would allow the Space Force more control over Guard members who work on space functions.

Currently there are more than 1,000 Air National Guard members who perform space missions.

“Without a National Guard component for Space Force, we risk losing many talented individuals who want to keep serving their country and their states after they leave active duty, and that is simply unacceptable,” Feinstein said. “Creating a Space Force National Guard would also save money and ensure a smoother process in the event we need to activate personnel. Not establishing a Space National Guard was a mistake when Space Force was created, and this bill will remedy that.”

Not everyone is convinced that a Space National Guard is the best idea, however. Kaitlyn Johnson, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tweeted last Friday that she thinks the component is a bad idea.

“Why would a governor ever need satellite operators to support their state/local issues? The argument that people are already doing this is not a good one — sounds like a realignment issue and not a ‘Let’s just create another bureaucratic org,’” she wrote. “What happened to the Space Force being new/revolutionary/unique? What happened to redefining how we support the space mission? Seems to me like Feinstein and Rubio are forcing the opposite values that the USSF was established on to get more money for their states.”

The Space Force itself isn’t so sure it wants a traditional Guard component. Service officials floated the idea of a “space component” last month during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, which would be a hybrid structure merging full- and part-time guardians.

Chief of Space Operations Gen. Jay Raymond described it as the service’s number one legislative priority.

“You could keep the Guard units in the Air National Guard and have the Air National Guard continue to provide support,” Raymond said. “Option two is you could take the men and women out of the Air National Guard and set up a separate Space National Guard. Or you can take those capabilities out of the Guard totally and put them in this one component.” — SM

Air Force missing out on DoD’s colorless money software pilots

As part of its 2023 budget, the Air Force is making a serious effort at getting in on the Defense Department’s effort to prove that budgeting for software development is very, very different from budgeting for traditional weapons systems.

As of now, the Air Force is the only military service that’s not participating in DoD’s Software and Digital Technology Pilot Program at all. And the vast majority of the Pentagon’s overall proposed increase for 2023 within the pilot effort is explained by Air Force requests to change that. The service has teed up eight potential candidates for Congressional consideration.

Under the program sometimes called the “Budget Activity 8” pilot, DoD components are allowed to use “colorless” money for software development, without having to worry about whether the phase of development they’re in should be funded by R&D, procurement or operations accounts. Critics have long argued that funding construct, intended for weapons system development, makes no sense for software and simply bogs down efforts toward agile development.

Andrew Hunter, the recently-confirmed assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, said his discovery that the Air Force wasn’t participating in the pilot caused him “dismay” when he assumed the new role.

“But it’s not from lack of interest,” he said during a conference hosted by the Naval Postgraduate School last week. “The Air Force submitted several candidates [in past years] to be part of the software pilot program, but we were unsuccessful in the competition for being selected. I’m rueful that we aren’t doing it. And it’s maybe slightly ironic, because I’d like to think the Air Force was a leading voice in making the case for the flexibilities required to do effective software development.”

The pilot program is only in its second year, but so far, Congress hasn’t shown overwhelming enthusiasm toward expanding it. Lawmakers didn’t approve the addition of any new programs between fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2022. The House Appropriations Committee’s version of the 2022 bill would have expanded the program, but its Senate counterpart never approved a Defense spending bill of its own.

Overall, for 2023, the Defense budget proposal would place $1.785 billion worth of DoD software programs in the BA-8 pilot, up from the $742 million Congress approved for this year. The vast majority of that increase would come from the Air Force’s proposed additions, which total $946 million.

The programs include:

• Strategic Mission Planning and Execution System ($100 million)
• Air & Space Operations Center ($178 million)
• Defense Enterprise Accounting and Management System ($136 million)
• Distributed Cyber Warfare Operations ($37 million)
• Air Force Defensive Cyber Systems ($241 million)
• All Domain Common Platform ($190 million)
• Air Force Weather Programs ($58 million)
• Electronic Warfare Integrated Reprogramming ($6 million)

—JS

USS George Washington deaths on Austin’s radar

The tragic events aboard the aircraft carrier USS George Washington are catching the attention of the nation’s top Defense official.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told lawmakers last week he was concerned about the three suicides aboard the ship last month and the five in total over the past year.

“This is a really, really important issue,” Austin told the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee. “That’s why we’re asking you for, in this budget, additional resources to help us provide greater access to our troops which includes telehealth care opportunities as well.”

About 400 sailors were living aboard the USS George Washington as it is being repaired in Newport News, Virginia. The Navy is now moving more than 250 sailors off the ship for mental health purposes and is looking at moving all the sailors to short.

“There are choices that have been made or will be made in the future in terms of how billet sailors when that repair is ongoing,” Austin said. Whether or not we made the right choices is left to be seen. Certainly there’s a problem there, we got to understand what that problem was a bit more and then we have to figure out what to do to ensure that we don’t have these kinds of problems in the future.”

Austin is waiting on two investigations from the Navy on the climate and command aboard the ship. The maintenance is taking longer than expected and the ship will be docked for another year. It was supposed to be finished this year.

“For hundreds of those sailors they have no access to housing or a car and they’re stuck on a ship. This is really demoralizing,” Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) said. “I am troubled by the Defense submission on the Navy because I see it getting worse. I just wanted to point a flashlight at this part of the budget and say, we got to do something and I’m not sure what it is.”

There have been seven deaths in the last year among the 2,700 sailors working aboard the ship as it is overhauling at a shipyard in Newport News, Virginia.

Five of those deaths are apparent suicides, three of which were in the space of one week last month, leading the service and others to wonder about the mental health among the Nimitz-class carrier.

The Navy is already taking some steps to address mental health concerns. It has embossed a 13-person special psychiatric rapid intervention team to provide services from April 16-19. The ship also added an additional clinical psychologist and social worker. Sailors are being given expedited appointments with mental health services on shore in Hampton Roads. Telehealth options are also available.

NBC News reported that the Navy is offering other morale boosting activities like a video game competition and soccer tournament.

However, sailors told NBC that morale remains low and some feel that the efforts are too little, too late.

Late last month, Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) sent a letter to Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael Gilday asking for answers on conditions and climate aboard the ship.

“I am calling on the Department of Defense, the Department of the Navy, and CNO Gilday to provide the House Armed Services Committee and members of Congress with a full accounting of what steps are being taken to address command climate, safety concerns, mental health, and other issues that may have contributed to this tragic loss of life on USS George Washington,” she said. “Every member of our armed forces must be treated with respect, and we have an obligation to ensure that our active-duty personnel on USS George Washington and around the world are being heard and supported while serving our country.” — SM

The federal shared services effort is about to undergo yet another revival.

The 20-plus year initiative to get agencies to move to common, back-office systems for financial management and human resources will, once again, try to convince agencies they have the cure to the legacy system disease.

“Many of the new solutions the government is or will be working on are digital products and services. This means that they are and must be designed with certain human best practices in mind. Those include human centered design, agile delivery, and frequent iteration in response to user feedback, which is critical to the work that we do,” said Krystal Brumfield, the associate administrator in the Office of Governmentwide Policy at the General Services Administration, at the recent ACT-IAC and Shared Services Leadership Coalition 2022 Shared Services Summit. “As we work on new shared services, we also want to continue to increase the adoption of existing and established shared services. If you have worked with federal services, and some of these might sound familiar, GSA fleet smart pay and the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) vehicle. I’m happy to report that all 24 CFO act agencies have adopted GSA SmartPay. This is a big win for shared services. We will continue to work with the senior accountable points of contact at each CFO and agency to promote federalwide shared services. We will also actively reviewing other federalwide share services to see if they are willing and meet the criteria to be included in the existing shared services portfolio.”

Brumfield joined the long-list of federal officials offering the “this time will be different” speech about shared services.

A quick history: The Office of Management and Budget kicked off this idea of shared services in 2001, added the Lines of Business initiatives in 2004 and by 2019, added at least three more memos, a new strategy, which created the quality service management office (QSMO) approach. During every one of these instantiations, the level of frustration grew among users and the number of legacy systems continued to increase.

And despite all this hard work, time and effort, many agencies still need to modernize back-office systems — financial, human resources, grants and acquisition — to name a few. The Treasury Department found in 2021 that at least 56 federal financial systems are approaching the end of their useful life.

The number of human resources systems facing a similar fate is not yet known. The Office of Personnel Management is about to launch a survey of the state of HR systems to help direct their future strategy and marketplace.

Shared services challenges remain the same

With the exception of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Homeland Security Department, the QSMO effort suffers from the same maladies as previous attempts ranging from a lack of a clear mandate to no direct funding to oversight and accountability that ebbs and flows from OMB and from Capitol Hill.

Former and current federal officials who worked on shared services say while some mandates may be necessary, the key to this effort continues to be answering the “what’s in it for me?” question.

Jacqueline Jones, the deputy assistant secretary for administrative services at the Interior Department, said at the conference shared services providers, which the Interior Business Center is a governmentwide provider, must show agencies why moving their functions to another agency will be valuable.

“Are you going to take me to the next level for data analytics? How will you support my mission in a future state? How are you keeping up with everything that seems to change?” Jones said. “What I’ve experienced is it was always ‘that’s great, but it seems repetitive’ to what the agency is already doing. So we can’t just offer repetitive work. It must be mission focused work.”

Beyond the move to four e-payroll providers in the early 2000s that OMB mandated, there are only a handful of successful financial management or human resources shared services efforts. Even the latest attempt to modernize those payroll providers fell apart in November when one of the teams that the General Services Administration awarded a place on a multiple award contract dropped out.

The question then is, why is this latest revival different?

The answer, of course, is it may not be. Hopefully, the lessons of 20 years of fits and starts will drive the new efforts in the financial management and human resources areas to start.

Financial marketplace close to launch

The financial management QSMO led by the Bureau of Fiscal Service in Treasury is furthest ahead of the other non-cyber initiatives. The Fiscal Service just finished a two-year assessment to be ready for the future of financial management.

As part of that analysis, Commissioner of the Bureau of Fiscal Service Tim Gribben decided that they needed to run this QSMO marketplace as a business.

Tami Perriello, the deputy commissioner for finance and administration at BFS, said, the marketplace will be required to be competitive, control costs, focus on quality service delivery, be innovative and constantly looking at customer experience. She said the Administrative Resource Center (ARC), where the financial management shared service offering lives, now reports directly to Gribben.

Perriello said BFS will launch the FM QSMO marketplace with public and private sector providers later this year.

“We’re establishing and, very nearly there, partnering with our colleagues at GSA a more standards-driven marketplace that’s designed to meet common needs at a baseline of capability. We are collaborating with government and industry to establish those baselines and included in them all of the things that everyone could think of, which is going to be challenging for all of you providers of services and solutions to government,” she said. “The idea behind all of this is to reduce burden on agencies to adopt these shared services solutions. If it meets the basic standards, then the fewer, more unique requirements you have can be plugged in. But you can be confident that after we’re done reviewing it and it’s available on the marketplace, that service or solution is going to meet the basic governmentwide reporting needs and capabilities that all of us have to have to meet.”

GSA and BFS announced in April it would refresh the multiple award schedule with a new special item number for financial management quality service management office (FM QSMO) core financial management solutions and IT professional services.

GSA and the QSMO will hold a webinar on May 18 for vendors to learn about the technical evaluation requirements for SIN.

GSA and Fiscal Service are trying to make sure they answer the “what’s in it for me?” question too.

Brumfield added GSA is collaborating with agency and industry partners to create a performance management framework to measure the impact of the QSMO services.

“This framework will take a balanced scorecard approach to ensure that we’re able to measure how the marketplaces are performing,” she said. “The scorecard will roll out in three phases to validate what we’re doing, to make sure that there’s value in the work that we’re doing based on industry feedback. We will modify our business standards based to allow for public comment. These standards are placed on Regulations.gov.”

Brumfield said GSA also is looking for other shared services options from agencies. But, and going back to the value comment from Jones, Brumfield made it clear that “our lens should focus on what our customers want and their experience says from start to finish, this administration is committed to building an effective, equitable and accountable government that puts the public first.”

Technology a differentiator this time?

Perriello, a former CFO at the Small Business Administration, said the value question was one she often wrestled with in that role.

She said CFOs must be able to demonstrate to leadership that moving to shared services will make the agency mission more efficient and effective.

“One of the things that new technologies has brought to us is the ability to bring disparate systems together. New technologies allow not just a general ledger sitting there with dead transactions in it, but that bring that data in with all of the loan systems, the procurement system and the other systems that are providing transactions, and looking at all of the across all of those feeder systems and bringing that data together is now possible because of the advances in technology,” she said. “But not everybody can afford to do that, so making that available is incredibly important to meet both the unique needs of an agency and to achieve the benefits of standardization that a shared services can provide.”

It’s a positive sign that GSA and the Fiscal Service are talking about the needs of the customer and taking a human-centered design approach as they develop the marketplace. But what will matter in the short term is getting agencies to buy in to that concept and get some successes from a few early adopters.

Four months after NSA lost what many believe to be its first ever protest of a contract award at the Government Accountability Office, it re-awarded the 10-year cloud contract, known by the distinctive moniker, which could be worth as much as $10 billion to Amazon Web Services.

The spy agency made the re-award in February, but details just surfaced in the last week.

An NSA spokesperson confirmed the agency’s decision.

“This contract is a continuation of NSA’s Hybrid Compute Initiative to modernize and address the robust processing and analytical requirements of the agency,” the spokesperson wrote in an email to Federal News Network. “Consistent with the decision in [the GAO protest] case, the agency has reevaluated the proposals and made a new best value decision.”

Sources also confirmed that Microsoft, which won the initial protest at GAO in October, decided not to protest the re-award to AWS, despite what many believe is a titled playing field.

A source, who requested anonymity in order to speak to the press, said a new protest would’ve just delayed the process, which would be detrimental to NSA and possibly national security.

But the source added, NSA’s decision does raise concerns about another single award contract for cloud services, in this case classified and top secret instances. Experts continue to question NSA’s decision especially after the controversial JEDI acquisition collapsed under immense pressure and scrutiny of its single award plan, and the move by the intelligence community from a single vendor — AWS — under the C2S vehicle to multiple cloud vendors under the C2E vehicle.

Additionally, sources highlight NSA’s decision again continues to, at least, offer the perception of special treatment for AWS. Sources says under the C2S contract, NSA and its intelligence community partners supported the development of AWS’s secret cloud instance while other cloud service providers received no financial or other type of benefit.

15 month acquisition saga

As for Wild and Stormy, NSA issued the solicitation in November 2020 and made the award to AWS in July under a two-phased best-value trade off approach.

AWS and Microsoft advanced to phase 2. NSA rated AWS higher and offered more value than Microsoft despite a base price of $482 million compared to $422 million, according to GAO’s bid protest decision.

Microsoft filed a protest on July 21 claiming NSA misevaluated proposals under the technical factor, under the management factor and around total price. Microsoft claimed that “the agency’s best-value selection decision was improper, and that NSA failed to meaningfully consider Microsoft’s lower price as part of the price/ technical tradeoff.”

GAO sustained Microsoft’s protest and recommended “NSA reevaluate technical proposals, consistent with this decision, and based on that reevaluation, perform a best value tradeoff and make a new source selection decision.”

NSA declined to offer any more details about how it reevaluated the proposals and how it came to the new award decision.

Joe Petrillo, an attorney with Smith Pachter McWhorter, told the Federal Drive with Tom Temin in December that GAO’s recommendation didn’t require NSA to reopen discussions or the Microsoft and AWS to revise bids.

“It’s up to NSA to decide how to implement this. They may have valid reasons for wanting to reopen and reevaluate the proposals,” Petrillo said. “One of the issues, interestingly enough, that wasn’t successful, although GAO did note, NSA should take it into account was there was a question about how the evaluated prices were developed, and how they were evaluated. They consisted of three sample task orders, and then prices for five different benchmarks. Those were all totaled, although it seemed that the benchmark prices, which were very small in comparison to the task order prices, in actual performance, those benchmark prices would constitute much more of the total price. Somehow the evaluation system didn’t take that into account. And NSA might want to fix that, but that would probably require a new round of proposals.”

What NSA exactly did this second time around may only be known by a handful of people involved in the procurement, but given the lessons learned with JEDI, C2S and the broad move to multi-cloud in the public and private sector, the single award is perplexing. It may make perfect sense to NSA now, but it’s hard to imagine locking any organization in to even one top secret cloud offering when others are obviously available is a smart decision over the long term.

A few months ago, Sultan Meghji walked out the door of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for the last time. The FDIC’s first chief innovation officer gave up after just 12 months of effort to try to bring some innovation to the federal financial sector.

If you read his commentary in Bloomberg published the day he left, it was clear he was frustrated and had a sense of despair.

Meghji told the Federal Drive with Tom Temin in April about why he left with what he called a “bruise on his forehead.”

“[T]he vast majority of people and systems in our regulatory environment are designed for the analog era, not the digital era,” he said. “In the op-ed, I wrote, I specifically called out that we have a lot of analog people making digital decisions. And it’s a real uphill battle. And I came to the conclusion that it doesn’t really matter where you are in a lot of these agencies, you’re not actually going to be able to impact the change.”

Meghji’s frustration and decision to move on from federal service is unfortunate, but also not surprising.

There are plenty of examples of private sector experts who came in to federal service with the best of intentions only to fall flat for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s not understanding the culture of the organization. Other times it’s the frustration with how slow agencies can move.

In Meghji’s case, it may have been a case of all of the above and more.

Meghji’s commentary got me thinking: What does it take for successful innovation in the federal sector?

The Partnership for Public Service created a federal innovation council, toolkits and released a host of reports looking at what makes innovation successful in agencies.

PPS came up with 10 organization characteristics that foster innovation, including the usual like leadership support, empowering creativity among employees, creating a culture of change and the usual broad based ideas that we all think we already do well. The partnership said the 2020  Best Places to Work in the Federal Government® data shows that just under 67% of public servants feel encouraged to come up with new and better ways of doing their jobs — more than seven points lower than private sector employees.

So I asked two former federal executives, who like Meghji came to government with limited or no previous public sector experience, took on entrenched bureaucracies and found a path toward innovation.

Ryan Cote was the Transportation Department’s chief information officer from February 2019 to January 2021. After serving in the Marines for four years, Cote worked in the private sector at Northrop Grumman, Contract Lumber, IBM and Gartner.

Marcy Jacobs served as a digital service expert for the U.S. Digital Service from February 2016 to January 2018 and then was the executive director of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ digital service from May 2017 to October 2019. She is now an associate partner at McKinsey and Company. Previously, she worked at SRA International and was a web designer.

FNN: What makes innovation in government possible at both the operational and strategic levels?

RC: Two main ideas come to mind here. The first, of course, is people and culture. The second is finding great partners and technologies who/that can help you execute the work. In order to innovate (and in many ways that means modernize) IT systems, particularly in the federal government, it requires people who have the skills, passion, energy, vision and stamina to see difficult projects through from inception to completion. This is one of the reasons the federal government struggles in many ways, in places, to innovate and/or modernize. They simply lack enough great people, for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons are external forces at work, but some are frankly self-inflicted. I’ll take this opportunity to grumble just a bit about one of the most frustrating aspects of my time in government. And that is the labor unions. In my opinion, the federal government will never attract, train and retain top talent as long as unions are allowed to operate in the government space. Firing unproductive and unsuccessful employees is nearly impossible in the federal government and everyone knows it. Which is why the bar to perform is set so low. Too many individuals know that they can perform at a minimal effort level and still stay employed. The desire to exceed expectations and push the limits of performance were almost never on display during my tenure in government.

Stop and think about the numbers from our own Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. On average, in any given month in America, 8% of the civilian workforce is fired, quits or voluntarily separates (leaves or retires) from their job. In the federal government, it is 1.5%, most of which are retirements. The federal government almost never fires anyone, which means (by logical deduction) they believe they are the best in the country when it comes to recruiting, interviewing and hiring personnel. In the real world, in business, most human resources folks know that they make bad hires all the time. Sometimes people are just not a good fit, or they simply “don’t work out” and are asked to move on. But because the federal unions protect the bad employees, we are forced to accept the notion that the federal government never makes hiring mistake? Which we know on the face of it is just not possible. So, we are often left with under-performing employees, which makes innovation and modernization projects difficult to begin and complete successfully. OK, OK, I’ll get off my soapbox and return to the main question.

The only way innovation is possible is for leaders to seek out, find and align with the highest performing individuals in their organizations. And there are some really great people working in government, there are simply too few of them. Find your thought leaders, empower them, motivate them, support them, encourage them to think and act with boldness and energy and then let them loose to unleash their inner greatness.

After you’ve found and identified that team of teams, equip them with the tools they need to be successful. That means partnering with integrators and technologies who have a proven track record of success. Get your people the tools and the technical expertise they may be lacking and support their efforts at all times. Whether you are innovating and modernizing operational systems or planning your next 3-to-5 year strategic roadmap, your success or failure will be a direct result of the amazing (or not) people doing the work and the positive (or negative) culture you help shape and build.

MJ: Innovation is born of a need to solve a problem or to do things differently. Innovation requires a mindset of experimentation and iteration — my team at the VA was focused on bringing new ideas to the table — new approaches and new ways of working. Showing progress and results built momentum and credibility.

FNN: What were 2 things you did during your time in government to promote/accomplish innovative projects? Please describe the before and after in terms of impact on mission and/or people.

RC: Probably one of the best decisions we made was to create (for the first time) a position of chief innovation officer within the Transportation Office of the CIO. My tenure ended before we had a chance to fill that position, but I’ve heard that my successor, Cordell Schacter (doing great things there also I hear), has hired the former chief innovation officer from the city of Dallas, Texas, Laila Alequresh and she is well on her way to establishing a great new culture of innovation throughout the department. It’s crucial to have someone at a very high-level pushing innovation and a “modernization revolution!”

One fantastic and innovative project we were able to develop and deliver during my tenure at DOT was to build a grants database visualizer leveraging a visual analytics platform called Tableau. We built an interactive map of the U.S. (underpinned with all the historical and real-time grants data we had) and built a friendly user interface that allows anyone, with just a few clicks, to find any and all Transportation grants data going back over a decade. Users can drill down to the congressional district level anywhere in the U.S. and find data on all grants awardees and dollars given out. It was very well received by leadership and my understanding is that it is being copied and replicated at other federal government departments and agencies.

FNN: What were some of biggest obstacles you had to overcome? Discuss why you were able to overcome them.

MJ: Agencies are very risk cautious (with good reason), but frequently maintaining the status quo is seen as the lower risk option, even if the results have been mixed, than trying a new approach. Creating the space and cultivating the executive support and air cover were big priorities.

RC: The biggest obstacles were always people and budget. Simply put, (related to my earlier complaint) there aren’t enough really smart, motivated, passionate, great federal employees! Too few rock stars in the misfit band that is the [1.8] million federal bureaucrats at work in the federal government today. Somehow, and I don’t claim to have this answer, the federal government really needs to do a better job of recruiting, training, supporting and retaining the top technical talent available in today’s workforce.

As it relates to budget, there were always too few dollars allocated to the IT budget (particularly in the cyber budget) to adequately address all the modern threats out there today. I was able to get a slight increase in the DOT cyber budget as I was leaving, and I understand that that has grown even more since I left, but Congress needs to keep increasing the funds in this particular area because new threats keep emerging every day.

At the end of the day, I’m not sure that I can claim any great victory in overcoming these two particular obstacles. I’d like to think that by sheer force of will I was able to have small successes here and there. But overall, these two aspects of the job were constantly frustrating to me and makes the job more difficult than it should be.

FNN: What advice would you give to other executives coming into the government for the first time about how they can be successful in innovating processes and technologies?

RC: There’s a lot to comment on here, but I’ll try to keep things succinct. Get ready for a wild ride! It’s both thrilling and terrifying to understand the scope of responsibilities and the challenges you’ll face. Never accept the status quo! Always believe that change isn’t only possible, but it is achievable with requisite effort! These institutional, monolithic, static departments and agencies are difficult to change, but change is exactly what they need and you’re being hired to almost always push change! Push yourself and your teams to discover untapped talents and reserves of energy and intellect to push the performance boundaries like never before. As soon as possible, find your thought leaders, your rock stars. Promote them. Empower and support them. Figure out who the naysayers and “dead weight” are and marginalize them. Ignore their negativity and surround yourself with only the best and the brightest, most positive folks in your office. Quickly work to forge successful alliances in HR, finance/budget, and legal offices. Make friends fast and try to avoid making enemies. Constant and steady leadership led by principle and expertise will allow you to effectively lead innovation and change!

MJ: Innovative ideas happen at all levels of an organization, especially at the front lines with customers – either on the phone or in person. Make the time and space to understand where there are opportunities for improvement and leverage and elevate great ideas from career staff who have likely been thinking about challenges for a long time but maybe didn’t have the avenue to actually try a solution.

It’s hard to remember a previous time when FAS was dealing with so many moving pieces. From the long-awaited move to the Universal Entity Identification number from the DUNS number, to the now much-maligned Polaris small business governmentwide acquisition contract (GWAC), to the unexpected challenges brought on by inflation which impacts nearly every aspect of the public and private sectors, the changes and updates have come fast and furiously since January.

So in case you missed some of the important work GSA has been doing over the last few months, here is a recap. This isn’t all-encompassing, but just highlights some of the significant memos, opportunities and items you may have missed.

Federal Marketplace Strategy 2022

Sonny Hashmi, the commissioner of the FAS, continues to make simplifying the buying and selling experience through the schedules and GWACs the organization oversees.

To that end, GSA said it will launch a new buyers’ experience effort based on human-centered design.

“This development will reduce pain points that federal agency buyers, suppliers and GSA acquisition professionals have mentioned in feedback,” GSA said in an April 13 release. “The updated buyer experience will offer buyers access to acquisition tools and market research solutions, as well as documents, templates and pricing resources to help plan acquisitions.”

GSA said its goals with these news tools are typical, reducing burdens, simplifying the customer agency’s experience and the like.

But digging deeper, FAS is trying to address some long-standing complaints about the menu of items it offers.

“That strategy will help to clarify government procurement options, qualification requirements, and the process of preparing to submit an offer,” GSA said. “Further, GSA is working to update the Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) Roadmap to simplify suppliers’ onboarding processes. Federal acquisition professionals have been working with industry to make it easier to get on the GSA Schedule, and GSA launched the new Vendor Support Center earlier this year so that all prospective and current MAS contract holders can find information and resources they need to do business with the government.”

While the specific details about the strategy are to come, if you review what Hashmi and FAS have been pursuing in the fall 2021 strategy it’s not difficult see what’s on tap.

Inflation adjustments still coming

GSA responded fairly quickly to contractors calling for help to deal with the 7.9% inflation the nation is facing.

On March 17, Jeff Koses, GSA’s senior procurement executive, and Mark Lee, the assistant commissioner in FAS’s Office of Policy and Compliance, temporarily changed requirements around the Economic Price Adjustment (EPA) contract clauses.

The four changes Koses and Lee outlined in the memo are:

• Lower the approval for price increases above the EPA clause ceiling from the contracting director to one level above the contracting officer;
• Relax time limitations on EPA increases;
• Relax limitations on the number of EPA increases a contractor may request; and
• Clarify that if a contractor has removed an item from their Schedule contract, GSA will not enforce the limitation on adding the same item back at a higher price.

“While EPA clauses normally act to protect GSA’s interests, in the current marketplace they make it harder for Federal agencies to acquire needed goods, services, and solutions. Contractors are removing items from the Federal Supply Schedules contracts to avoid selling at a loss. This particularly hurts new entrants and small businesses, the very firms the President’s initiatives around procurement equity are designed to support,” Koses and Lee wrote in the memo. “To ensure that GSA is able to continue offering a full range of products, services, and solutions, GSA must be flexible in how it applies these EPA contract clauses. Even with this added flexibility, contracting officers remain responsible for evaluating price increases and may accept them, negotiate them, or remove items from the underlying contract.”

GSA said the memo remains effective through Sept. 30.

While contractors applauded GSA’s quick action, the Coalition for Government Procurement recently raised some concerns about how FAS contracting officers are implementing the memo.

“Members are reporting that contracting officers are overlaying arbitrary (as in nowhere to be found in the Acquisition Letter) information requirements on contractor EPA submissions, effectively capping prices at certain levels without any nexus to contractor experiences in the market,” Roger Waldron, the Coalition’s president Roger Waldron wrote in an April 1 blog post.  “In addition, the scope of these information requirements is broad, indeed, broader than would exist otherwise and seeking information that is beyond the right of contracting officers to request. All told, even if contractors were to comply with such information requests, the administrative delay associated with them would be onerous.”

The challenge with any of these memos is trying to drive it down to the contracting officers, and then once they know it exists, ensuring consistent implementation can be another hurdle.

The fact FAS seems to be struggling to drive down the consistent changes to its contracting officers is a bit concerning, especially given agencies have not planned well for inflation and the impact it’s having on vendors.

The Defense Department, for example, expected inflation to be 4%. DoD senior leaders told Congress on April 5 that the military is currently feeling the impacts of a higher inflation rate than assumed. However, DoD has not released any calculations on reduced buying power.

It’s worth watching how big of a factor inflation becomes over the next few months, especially as agencies must spend 12 months worth of funding in six months.

Price remains a factor on Schedules

One final decision GSA made that may have slipped under your radar came in February and was made public in March.

GSA decided not to use its authorities to remove price as an evaluation factor when awarding a contract, provided by under Section 876 of the 2019 Defense Authorization Act, for its schedules program.

After a series of listening sessions with industry and agency customers, GSA decided keeping pricing at the contract level, versus the task order level, preserves the MAS program’s current value.

“Customer agencies expressed deep concerns about moving the pricing negotiation requirement from the contract level to the order level. Most agencies stated that this move would significantly reduce the value that MAS contracts give them,” GSA wrote in a March 23 blog post. “Industry stakeholders were split. Some acknowledged it would save time. Others had concerns about their internal market research and increased procurement acquisition lead time (PALT) at the order level.”

In a white paper outlining its decision, GSA said an integrated project team conducted six listening sessions among agency and industry customers and came up with a “pros” and “cons” list as well as risks.

Among the reasons why GSA should implement 876 authorities under the schedules program included is the potential to reduce the workload of its contracting officers as well as industry support for the change.

Meanwhile, the list of reasons not to implement 876 authorities were much longer. These included GSA already ensures prices at the contract level are competitive and agencies can ask for further discounts at the order level based on volume buying, and contracting officers wouldn’t have to conduct a formal, negotiated procurement, as required under FAR Part 15, at the order level.

“Early talks with industry during the Office of Governmentwide Policy (OGP) listening sessions indicated the risk that there may be some level of industry backlash as a result of not implementing Section 876. While the IPT acknowledges that compared to customer agencies more of our industry partners are open to implementing Section 876, this initial discovery phase did not produce any solid evidence that industry would turn away from MAS if Section 876 was not implemented,” GSA wrote. “Instead the opposite was stated by some industry partners during the IPT’s interview. Some voiced the fear that implementation of Section 876 would put more burden on customer agencies and deter them from using the MAS Program. In addition, while some stated that they would rather be able to develop pricing at the order level, the majority of industry partners interviewed by the IPT acknowledged that there were benefits to having pricing at the contract level.”

GSA has used, or plans to use, Section 876 authorities for several large multiple award contracts, including the awards under ASTRO, the multiple award vehicle for manned, unmanned and robotic platforms. It’s also strongly considering its use for the upcoming new services multiple award contract.

Two more points emerged from the listening session. The first is that GSA should review the use of the Price Reduction Clause and Commercial Sales Practice. Both are seen as historical drags on the program. GSA has been working on moving away from the PRC and CSP for almost eight years, but hasn’t quite pulled the plug.

The second recommendation is the ability to manage Service Contract Labor Standards wage determinations and pricing at the task order level, rather than the contract level.

Roberts, who announced in December he would leave at the end of the 2021, delayed his retirement for a few months but now is ready to move on.

A TSA spokesman has confirmed that the agency has chosen Yemi Oshinnaiye, the deputy CIO at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), as its new permanent CIO.

Roberts will retire at the end of May and Oshinnaiye will start in early May to ensure there is an easy transition.

Oshinnaiye has been the deputy CIO at USCIS since March 2019, but worked at DHS previously from 2012 to 2017. He went into the private sector for a short stint before returning to USCIS.

During his tenure at USCIS, Oshinnaiye helped lead the effort to consolidate and improve how the agency uses cloud services.

In 2021, USCIS launched an effort called “clean my cloud.”

“There are so many cloud services at some point, we’re going to be a plethora of different clouds integrating and underlying our network. We took a step back and took a look at that and now anytime we move or build a new workload, we’re looking at what’s in the cloud already. That has enabled us to optimize. Now we have this thing where we’re looking at, our CTO called it ‘clean my cloud.’ So we’re looking at it every month. When you put something in cloud, if you haven’t done something to optimize it, we kind of call you out. So we gamified it a little bit,” Oshinnaiye said during a March 2021 panel.

That optimization effort led to savings that USCIS can put into other modernization initiatives.

Oshinnaiye said using virtual machines and automation are some of the ways his office increased the value of technology while reducing complexity and costs.

In coming to TSA, Oshinnaiye inherits a huge organization in the midst of a technology transformation.

Research firm Deltek estimated that TSA’s IT budget request for fiscal 2023 would be $967 million. This is less than the $1 billion IT budget it received in this year, but $161 million more than it received in 2021.

One of TSA’s big requests for 2023 is enterprise cybersecurity. The agency asked for $23.5 million to support 17 employees.

“This funding will enable early detection to dramatically improve the cybersecurity of TSA networks and provide a better ability to protect TSA’s sensitive data,” the DHS budget request stated. “In 2021, TSA investigated 2,412 cases in the calendar year, which subsequently yielded 84 confirmed incidents. A significant number of these cases (over 72%) were sourced from security logging, which captured unauthorized/malicious activity in TSA’s networks. TSA recognizes that to keep pace with today’s dynamic and increasingly sophisticated cyber threat environment, decisive steps are necessary to increase visibility into threats while adopting security best practices for logging and performing threat remediation via enhanced investigation tactics and increased resources. In addition to implementing one of TSA’s key strategic priorities, these funds support requirements described in Executive Order 14028.”

Along with TSA, the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review has a new CIO, and a familiar face at that.

Sanjay Gupta joined EOIR in March after more than five years the Small Business Administration’s chief technology officer.

Gupta became at least the fourth former SBA technology executive to move into a larger role over the last 18 months. He joins Guy Cavallo, who is now the CIO at the Office of Personnel Management, Nagesh Rao, who is now the CIO at the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, and of course Maria Roat, the former SBA CIO and recently retired deputy federal CIO, in leaving the agency for bigger opportunities.

Gupta helped lead the SBA’s technology transformation, moving applications and systems to the cloud, testing out leading edge cybersecurity tools and embracing more digital services delivery.

In joining the Executive Office for Immigration Review, Gupta enters an entirely new sector where he will be supporting lawyers and judges who are adjudicating immigration cases. EOIR conducts immigration court proceedings, appellate reviews and administrative hearings.

EOIR’s IT organization has four directorates:

• Chief architect
• Operations services
• Governance, planning and support
• Software development

In case you missed these CIOs on the move

There has been a lot of other agency CIOs coming and going over the last few months. Here are some others that you may have missed.

FEMA CIO Lytwaive Hutchinson is retiring after 41 years of federal service.

Hutchinson joined FEMA in April 2019 after spending her entire career with the Defense Department. She served 21 years in the Army and then spent 17 years working in various senior leadership roles in the DoD CIO’s office.

The CIA named La’Naia Jones as its new CIO and the director of the Information Technology Enterprise (ITE) within the Directorate of Digital Innovation at the CIA in February.

She took over for Juliane Gallina, who moved to a new role in February. Gallina is now the deputy director of the CIA’s Directorate of Digital Innovation. Jones came to the CIA after serving as the deputy CIO at the National Security Agency for the past year. She also served as the deputy CIO of the intelligence community in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for two years.

Finally also in March, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines selected Adele Merritt to serve as CIO for the Intelligence Community.

Merritt was most recently program manager at DreamPort, a cyber innovation nonprofit created by U.S. Cyber Command.

Michael Waschull had been acting IC CIO for the past year. Haines said he would stay on as Merritt’s deputy.

Two other job openings

The Office of Justice Programs finally put out the job announcement to fill its vacant CIO position.

Brian McGrath, who had been CIO at OJP for six years, retired in October.

OJP said in its job announcement that the CIO “[h]as full responsibility for the oversight and management of all OCIO functional areas, including enterprise architecture, application development, infrastructure and engineering, cybersecurity, policy and planning and project management. Ensures the implementation of an integrated enterprise through coordination of resources across the agency and collaboration with other components to deliver a fully integrated capability that supports internal and external customers. Develops performance metrics and data to determine goals and decides methods, plans and schedules work, adjusts staffing and procedures to allocate resources, sets and adjusts priority, and assigns work based on priority.”

The application deadline was April 15.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is looking to hire a chief data officer.

NHTSA outlined seven roles the CDO will fill, including “developing and continually updating a comprehensive data and information product portfolio strategy, and developing and implementing a data services strategy to maximize use of NHTSA data for internal users, including data warehouses, data sets (e.g. MAX data), business intelligence tools, utilizing DOT shared services offerings whenever possible and practical.”

Applications for the position are due by May 5.

Finally, Oki Mek, the former chief artificial intelligence officer and chief technology officer for the Department of Health and Human Services, is back after a short time off.

Mek announced he joined Equideum Health as its chief information security officer. The company says Mek ensures that Equideum Health’s critical infrastructure is protected through cybersecurity capabilities and uses artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technologies.

CORRECTION: Treasury, USAID and Labor do not have MGT Act IT-WCF, but have requested authority for the fund in 2023. 

December will mark the fifth anniversary of President Donald Trump signing the Modernizing Government Technology Act into law.

While many in government and industry still love to focus on the Technology Modernization Fund as a big win from that bill, the ability to create IT working capital funds will, over the long term, be former Rep. Will Hurd’s (R-Texas),  Reps. Gerry Connolly’s (D-Va.) and Robin Kelly (D-Ill.) true crowning achievement.

It’s clear today that Hurd, Kelly and Connolly overestimated the appropriators’ enthusiasm for and acceptance of IT WCFs. Only a handful of agencies have been able to convince House and Senate money managers to approve these bank accounts, and most agency CFOs have been reluctant to just set these rainy funds up without prior approval.

And like with most things on Capitol Hill, change comes slowly, but it does come.

The latest example comes in President Joe Biden’s fiscal 2023 budget request to Congress.

The number of IT WCFs is growing, albeit much more slowly than is needed to address $7 billion or more in technical debt across the government.

The Treasury Department is the latest agency to ask lawmakers grant  them the ability to create an IT working capital fund. The agency would like to retain up to 5% of its appropriation to this new bank account and it can remain available until Sept. 30, 2026.

Treasury, at least at the headquarter level, has been a cautious mover to the cloud, and many expect its modernization effort to pick up steam with the impending award of the T-Cloud program, which seeks to establish a Treasurywide set of cloud services through multiple providers.

2 MGT Act working capital funds

There still are only two agencies with specific IT working capital funds using authorities under the MGT Act. The Small Business Administration, which was first, and the Office of Personnel Management  received appropriators’ blessings.

The budget request details how much money, or at least, what percentage they hope to have in their accounts.

Labor, for example, expects to spend its $3 million if it receives approval for a IT WCF this year.

USAID would expects to have up to 5% or $30 million available pulled from six different accounts. The money also will be available for three fiscal years.

OPM and SBA plan to use the IT-WCF authority this year. OPM can save up to 5% of their extra funding into the IT WCF account, and it will be available through Sept. 30, 2026.

SBA said it will retain up to 3% of its funds from two different accounts and it will be available through Sept. 30, 2026.

Other agencies such as the departments of Education and Commerce also have requested IT WCF authority over the years, but haven’t received approval.

HUD, EPA also funding IT modernization

Along with these specific IT WCF, several other agencies also are putting money in existing working capital funds to address IT modernization.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has an IT fund for “the development, modernization and enhancement of, modifications to, and infrastructure for departmentwide and program-specific information technology systems, for the continuing operation and maintenance of both departmentwide and program-specific information systems, and for program-related maintenance activities…”

HUD said in the budget that it expects to have $382 million, of which $339 million will be available to Sept. 30, 2024 and $43 million will be available through Sept. 30, 2026, which seems to connect back to the MGT Act.

The Environment Protection Agency is taking a similar approach to HUD.

It’s using a working capital fund created in 1997 and the authorities under the MGT Act to modernize IT services, including “agency postage costs, Cincinnati voice services, background investigations and enterprise human resources IT services managed by the Office of Mission Support; financial and administrative systems, employee relocations and a budget formulation system managed by the Office of the Chief Financial Officer; the Agency’s Continuity of Operations (COOP) site managed by the Office of Land and Emergency Management; legal services managed by the Office of General Counsel; regional information technology service and support managed by EPA Region 8; and multimedia and agency servicing contracts managed by the Office of the Administrator.”

EPA expects to have $414 million in the WCF in 2023.

The Department of Homeland Security is dissolving its working capital fund and instead “will transfer funds to the servicing management lines of business for fee-for-service and governmentwide mandated services.” DHS says it still expects to have $139 million in the working capital fund in 2023 as it liquidates pre-existing obligations that occurred against the fund and wind down activities.

Aside from working capital funds, the White House offered mixed support for IT modernization.

Overall IT spending for civilian agencies would rise to $65.8 billion in 2023 from $58.4 billion this year. OPM, SBA and DHS are among the biggest winners with significant increases in funding requests.

Meanwhile, the Office of Management and Budget requested “only” $300 million for the TMF. This is down from $500 million it requested in the 2022 budget. But the lower request comes after Congress zeroed out the TMF in the 2022 omnibus bill, citing needing to spend the remaining $700 million currently in the TMF, most of which came from the American Rescue Plan Act.

“With the continuously evolving IT and cyber landscape, these investments are an important down payment on delivering modern and secure services to the American public, and continued investment in IT will be necessary to ensure the United States meets the accelerated pace of modernization,” OMB wrote in the budget request.

OMB, GSA’s other IT funds to see boost

But two other related IT modernization funds would see boosts in 2023.

OMB’s IT Oversight and Reform Fund (ITOR) asked for $14 million in 2023, up from $12 million. The U.S. Digital Service, which like the TMF benefited from a windfall in the American Rescue Plan Act of $200 million, asked for no new funding.

Congress approved $8 million for the ITOR fund in 2022.

USDS is using the ARPA money to increase its full-time employees to 271 in 2022, up from 161 the year before. It says the larger number of employees will enable “USDS to quickly address technology emergencies, ensure access and equity are integrated into products and processes, and help agencies modernize their systems for long-term stability.”

At the General Services Administration, the administration is seeking a huge increase for Federal Citizen Services Fund to $115.8 million. GSA requested $59.2 million in 2022 and $58.4 million in 2021.

Congress approved $55 million in 2022.

Additionally, GSA’s Office of Governmentwide Policy is seeking a modest increase to $70 million, from $68.7 million that Congress allocated in 2022.

GSA says it also would spend $12 million on the acquisition workforce training fund and $10.9 million would go into a working capital fund to continue the e-rulemaking modernization project.

Beyond the funding requests, OMB also laid out some policy objectives in the budget.

After being fairly quiet over the last two years, OMB re-initiated the concept of shared services.

Along with the Quality Service Management Office efforts at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which were most active over the last few years, OMB says the Grants Management QSMO, led by the Department of Health and Human Services, released its initial marketplace in fiscal 2021, identifying a dozen systems.

“The Grants QSMO is now working to verify that the functionality of these systems is consistent with the agreed to grants standards,” the budget states. “The remaining QSMOs are working to release their marketplaces as soon as possible, potentially as early as fiscal 2023.”

Of course, all of these figures are just that and lawmakers will take this request and do what they will with them. This is why the more agencies who receive permission for the IT-WCF will have a better chance of getting out of technical debt and delivering modern services to citizens and businesses.

The Defense Department says it finished up its planning for 2023 before inflation rates rose and before Russia invaded Ukraine causing oil prices to spike.

According to DoD, it assumed a 2.3% inflation rate when the budget was created, however current rates are more than three times that level.

The top Republicans on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees are curious as to what effect the current inflation rate will have on the military’s buying power next year.

“The inflation we are experiencing is effectively a 5% to 8% cut to the department’s buying power, which could amount to between $20 billion to $30 billion in unfunded costs in fiscal year 2022 alone, not to mention lost buying power in fiscal year 2021 and potential lost buying power in fiscal year 2023,” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Attached to the letter are 23 questions they want answered by April 15.

Those include: Has DoD appointed an official to lead inflation-related effects? Does departmental leadership have a regularized meeting schedule to discuss inflationary effects on departmental budgets? What major defense acquisition programs and middle-tier acquisition programs have seen the most and least inflation in the above time periods, and why do you believe these programs are experiencing these rates? And what changes in behavior is DoD observing from the defense industrial base due primarily to the inflation spike?

DoD officials say they are keeping an eye on inflation.

“We’re seeing inflationary pressure here in 2022,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said last week. “We just had the omnibus pass. That omnibus did not yet take account of inflation in 2022. We’ll be working with Congress through the summer on how this year lands and how it affects service members.” — SM

Congress weighs in on basic needs allowance

Congress created a way to monetarily help struggling service members and their families in the latest defense authorization act. Now lawmakers are chiming in on how the Pentagon can best use that authority.

A mixture of legislators from the House Armed Services Committee and the House Agriculture Committee sent three recommendations to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, which they think will best serve people in the military.

Perhaps the most powerful of these recommendations is that the Defense Department exclude basic allowance for housing (BAH) from consideration as income for determining if service members need a basic needs allowance.

“We encourage you to utilize this authority to the greatest extent possible and to exempt as much of the BAH as possible for as many service members as possible,” the lawmakers wrote to Austin.

BAH has proven to complicate the ability for service members to get benefits in the past. The government takes BAH into account when deciding if families should receive SNAP benefits, sometimes leaving low-income military families out.

“The Agriculture Department counts this housing allowance toward your income, despite the fact that the IRS does not treat it as income and other federal subsidy programs do not treat it as income,” Abby Leibman, president and CEO of MAZON, told Federal News Network in April. “We see this as a glitch. What it does is misrepresent service members’ income so they cannot qualify for SNAP despite the fact that that money is actually ongoing for housing costs and cannot be spent on food.”

The Agriculture Department ran a study on military food security, marking only the second academic look at military food issues.

“There’s really two key findings that are really important to focus on here. The first is that one in three active duty soldiers in our sample were classified as marginally food insecure,” said Matthew Rabbit, an economist at the USDA Economic Research Service. “The second key finding here is that the mental health of our service members is key to their long term connection to the military and the wellbeing of their families. Given that we find the service members’ mental health is associated with their food insecurity; addressing food insecurity may be one way to improve these outcomes.”

Marginally food insecure encompasses individuals who report any indications of compromised economic access to food among themselves and their families, which are classified as having marginal, low or very low food security according to the Agriculture Department’s food security status classification system.

Congress created the basic needs allowance to ensure service members were able to put food on the table.

Another recommendation by lawmakers include an opt-out option for service members who do not want to receive the funds. Finally, the letter asks DoD to certify eligibility for the allowance annually to reduce administrative burdens. — SM

At least DoD 758 sites chosen for renaming

One year into its work, the committee advising the Defense Department on changing the names of military property honoring Confederate officers has identified 758 different streets, buildings and bases that need to be considered.

The Naming Commission list of properties it will consider between now and October will go through a test to determine: Whether their names commemorate the Confederacy, and if a recommendation is warranted for renaming or removal.

A vast majority of the items are located in the cultural south with only a few exceptions for New York, Japan, Germany, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Washington State and Washington D.C.

Items on the link include Lee Road on Ft. Belvoir, named after Robert E. Lee; Fort Hood, which is named after John Bell Hood, a Confederate general; and Fort Polk, named after Confederate general Leonidas Polk.

The Naming Commission is made up of eight members including former Marine Corps Commandant Robert Neller, former Navy Adm. Michelle Howard and Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.).

Its goal is “providing naming, renaming, and removal recommendations to Congress for all Department of Defense items that commemorate the Confederate States of America or any person who served voluntarily with the Confederate States of America,” according to the commission’s website.

The commission has already deliberated of thousands of possible names to replace the current ones. It has narrowed the list down to about 100 names including Dwight Eisenhower, Harriet Tubman, Colin Powell and Felix Conde-Falcón. — SM

Hundreds of small businesses are now in an unenviable position of having to make a tough decision — to bid or not to bid on the Polaris governmentwide acquisition contract.

For those small businesses not in a mentor-protégé joint venture relationship with a large business, they now have to weigh their chances of winning based on a last minute change to the solicitation for this potential 10-year contract with a $10 billion ceiling.

This decision point came because many experts believe the General Services Administration swung the pendulum too far in an effort to give small businesses more opportunities under another massive governmentwide IT contract.

On March 18, GSA released new details under the section for joint ventures and mentor-protégés that removes any requirement for the small business to submit any relevant experience or past performance as part of the bid.

“The [mentor-protégés joint ventures (MP-JV)] with a large business can max out their scores because now you have small businesses competing with multi-billion dollar corporations, and they just can’t win. The MP-JVs can max out almost every category based on the experience of mentors,” said Stephanie Mitchell, co-owner of BD Squared, a bid and proposal consulting firm. “The optics are terrible here. This will be a small business vehicle controlled by large businesses when they already have Alliant 2 and now rolling into Alliant 3. Based on the new information from GSA, they are not evaluating small businesses at all in Polaris, since the information in the bids will mainly come from large businesses.”

Experts question whether Polaris will end up just being a pass-through contract for large businesses given this change as well as the fact GSA is letting small businesses subcontract out as much as 60% of the work on any single task order.

First two Polaris RFPs are out

On Friday, GSA issued the solicitation for the first two pools under Polaris, for small businesses and women-owned small businesses with these changes to the mentor-protégé and joint venture requirements.

The Small Business Administration lists more than 1,500 mentor-protégé teams, though not all of them include a large business mentor.

Brian Friel, also the co-owner of BD Squared, said if the large business mentor can bring all the relevant project and past performance experience, it’s nearly impossible for a non-MP-JV small business to compete for any of the expected 100 spots under the Polaris small business pool.

Mitchell, small business owners and other experts say GSA’s last minute change means that for many companies the bid-no bid decision comes at the expense of months or more of work and tens of thousands of dollars in preparation.

One small business owner, who requested anonymity so as not to potentially anger GSA, said they have spent about $80,000 over the last 12-15 months preparing to bid on Polaris. Now, the owner said, they may not bid because the chances of them winning are so small.

“The MP-JVs will just take over the program,” said one small business owner. “If you look at the structure of the self-scoring system, the mentors will give their protégé’s a leg up based on their references, systems like cost accounting or earned value management and purchasing. If the protégés can get everything from their large business partner, then there is no way a small business can compete on Polaris.”

The small business owner said their proposal is about 95% done and now they must decide what to do next given the new information from GSA.

GSA declined to comment on the last minute changes to the mentor-protégé joint venture requirements. A spokeswoman said the agency doesn’t comment on open solicitations.

Waiting for new GWAC for 3 years

Small businesses have been waiting for Polaris since the Alliant 2 small business GWAC collapsed in June 2020. The ordering period for the Alliant small business GWAC ended in February 2019 so it’s been more than three years since agencies have had a large scale small business GWAC for IT services. Agencies have had more specific small business governmentwide contracts to use such as 8(a) STARS II and III, VETS 2 GWAC and others from organizations like NITAAC.

Experts say the changes in the Polaris solicitation seems like the changes are an over-correction by GSA.

Cy Alba, a partner with PilieroMazza, said there are good arguments for both sides.

On one hand, SBA has been pushing agencies to make sure small businesses have more contracting opportunities as it has seen the growth of “best-in-class” (BIC) contracts and category management.

“As agencies are putting more BICs together and making them bigger so it’s less likely small business can secure an award, SBA has been pushing joint-ventures and mentor-protégés to combat that,” Alba said. “That way the government is less likely to say small businesses can’t do the work and therefore it will be set aside. It’s clear the opportunities for joint ventures and mentor-protégé relationships are growing.”

One the other hand, Alba said what has been lost in this discussion is what about those companies who don’t want to be part of a mentor-protégé, joint venture relationship.

“The law, as it currently stands, doesn’t differentiate between MP-JVs with large businesses versus those with small businesses. They are all eligible small businesses and are in one bucket,” he said. “There is no way to separate that out right now, which is part of the concerns we are seeing with Polaris.”

Too strict of an interpretation?

Alba said GSA’s over-correction may come from the experience the National Institutes of Health IT Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC) with its CIO-SP4 solicitation.

NITAAC issued multiple amendments and lost its only protest over its approach and subsequent changes to JV-MPs.

Friel said it seems like GSA is interpreting the policy in a way that says it’s fine for the small business not to have to bring any past performance or relevant experience to the bid.

But, he said, it doesn’t make sense for a small business vehicle to have bids based on large business experience.

“It seems like GSA is interpreting the policy more strictly and against common sense,” he said. “We believe GSA can require the protégé to bring some experience to the table. Maybe they could establish a minimum number of examples like two out of five.”

The small business owner said the timing of the changes also are problematic. If GSA had changed the MP-JV requirements six or nine months ago, it would’ve given companies more time to establish these agreements.

Alba added on average it takes 105 days to set up a formal mentor-protégé agreement through SBA. Firms can set up a joint venture in a matter of days, but that’s assuming everyone agrees to everything, which is rarely the case.

BD Squared and others have sent letters to GSA and members of Congress seeking help and an explanation for the change. But in the week-plus since GSA issued the change, they haven’t heard anything back from agency officials.

Alba and others say they will be watching for small businesses to file pre-award protests over the terms of the solicitation.

“I do think the way the SBA rules are set up allows for use in JVs and MPs where any member’s experience can count so it leaves it up to an agency’s discretion where they are in that process and how many or what restrictions they want to require,” he said. “SBA doesn’t get into that so then it becomes a question for the Government Accountability Office or the Court of Federal Claims to say if it’s unduly restrictive. GSA may say they are increasing competition, but what’s funny they may be also limiting competition in a de facto sense because now people may not bid because they know their chances of winning are so low.”

Mitchell said vendors have invested a lot of time and money since December 2020 and to have GSA spring this change in the last minute is “crushing” to many small businesses.

And after all the challenges GSA had with Alliant 2 small business and the time and effort they put into developing Polaris, it’s a shame that, once again, last minute changes could throw a wrench into this new effort.

The 2022 appropriations bill President Joe Biden signed last week includes $1.2 billion above and beyond what the military services requested in the spending accounts they use to maintain and repair deteriorating facilities, going some way toward backfilling an infrastructure maintenance hole the Defense Department has been digging for at least a decade.

The final Congressional agreement gave big increases to each of the military departments’ facilities sustainment restoration and modernization (FSRM) accounts, compared to their spending requests. The Army’s appropriation totals $4.5 billion, 11.1% more than it requested. The Navy will have $3.4 billion, 15.4% above its request, and the Air Force received $4.2 billion, 8.7% more than its budget request. Those figures do not include the much smaller amounts set aside for the services’ National Guard and Reserve components.

Although the FSRM accounts are a drop in the bucket in the context of a nearly $730 billion budget, it’s an area where the department has consistently chosen to take “risk” at least since the onset of the spending caps imposed by the Budget Control Act in 2011.

But this year’s budget proposals showed the BCA caps weren’t the only motivator. Despite the caps’ expiration, each service chose to propose spending levels that still would have only covered 80% of the funding needs estimated by DoD’s own Facility Condition Index and Sustainment Management System.

And Defense officials have previously acknowledged those underinvestments have consequences. In a single year, between 2015 and 2016, the number of DoD facilities rated as in “failing” condition rose from 7% of its overall portfolio to 18.9%.

During a House Armed Services Committee hearing on facilities, energy and environmental programs last week, Defense officials did not provide updated estimates on facility conditions.

But in written testimony, Paul Cramer, the principal deputy assistant secretary of Defense for installations, suggested the department is considering a pivot away from the current models it uses to assess facility conditions and building FSRM budgets. He said the new model for facilities spending would move away from assessments of DoD’s overall real property portfolios, and toward a new model that makes more “granular” assessments of each facility.

“It is guiding our transition to an asset management approach for budgeting for and managing the department’s infrastructure that addresses facility investment as a holistic program instead of independent sustainment, restoration and modernization programs,” he said. “As the system is implemented over the next few years, the department intends to set baseline parameters using factors such as mission criticality to set a minimum condition standard on its facilities.”

The Air Force has already made similar moves. Last year, the service began creating an “integrated priorities list” to replace its previous approach to FSRM funding, a “worst-first” approach that put its most deteriorated facilities — usually the most expensive ones to recapitalize — at the front of the line.

It’s possible that a long-term focus on mission criticality could have led to a different outcome in the recent fuel discharge episode that forced DoD to decide to drain and abandon its largest fuel storage facility in the Pacific, the 250-million-gallon storage bunker known as Red Hill.

The latest discharge into Oahu water supply, which sickened nearly 6,000 people and forced some 4,000 military members from their homes, appears to have been the result of operator error. But the facility had leaked fuel into groundwater supplies several times before, and has been subject to a consent order with Hawaii health officials since 2015 to reduce the chance of discharges from the aging facility, first built during World War II.

“Moving forward, DoD’s going to have to focus on this a lot more,” Tim Walton, a fellow and military logistics expert at the Hudson Institute told Federal News Network in an interview about the Red Hill closure decision. “In general, I think the department has tried to avoid recapitalizing these major projects that were built during World War II or the Cold War, just because they’re major expenses and they usually don’t have any large constituencies. It’s easier for members of Congress to point to the ship or the aircraft that’s built in their district. Few people get fired up about fuel tanks.”

There’s now at least a little bit of fire on infrastructure issues.

Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Readiness Subcommittee warned senior military officials last year that his subcommittee is “not messing around” in its desire to see improvements in the state of DoD’s organic industrial base, such as shipyards and munitions depots.

And last week’s hearing before the same subcommittee included a major focus on Red Hill, where Rep. Kaiali’i Kahele (D-Hawaii) noted that the new appropriations bill also includes $736 million to remediate the environmental damage from the latest discharge, on top of $403 in emergency funding Congress passed several weeks earlier, and is likely to cost the government billions of dollars more before the full extent of the damage is discovered.

“I’ll give you one example: The Red Hill Elementary School, which sits less than a mile from Red Hill, has started to see their toilets leak because the fuel in the water has been eroding the seals in the toilets, and they’ve had to replace them,” he said. “So there’s a lot of expenses out there that have not been reimbursed … and it may be very probable that we may never bring the Red Hill well back online to serve the Navy’s water system. We may need to drill new drinking water wells or to establish new monitoring wells in that area. The Board of Water Supply is already calling for water conservation efforts for individuals in the affected area and also to plan for water restrictions during the summer, so this is something that clearly is not going away.” —JS

Space Force going for digital fitness instead of testing

The Space Force has promised to be the first digital military service and it’s taking that role seriously even in the realm of physical fitness.

This year, the service is piloting a program that uses wearable tech to monitor guardians’ health in lieu of fitness tests.

After the testing, the Space Force said it will take a three-pronged approach at tackling fitness that is data-driven and focused on self-awareness rather than relying on a yearly physical fitness exam.

“It is time we implement a data-driven, research-informed, holistic health and fitness approach to increase the wellness and readiness of the force,” Patricia Mulcahy, deputy chief of space operations for personnel wrote in a March 16 memo.

The program will promote “physical activity, lifestyle/performance medicine principles and increase education and awareness to ensure all guardians are mentally and physically fit.”

The program will be implemented in 2023 and incorporate the use of wearable technology and a software that provides workout regiments and preventative health practices to increase self-awareness and provide continuous insight into health.

For this year, however, guardians will still need to complete the Air Force’s fitness program. But, the assessments will not determine retention or promotion eligibility or be used for disciplinary measures.

“Every guardian remains responsible for ensuring they are mentally and physically fit,” Mulcahy wrote. “We will embrace this exciting opportunity to combine leading-edge physiology and technology to foster a culture of wellness.”

The Space Force paired with a company called FitRankings for its pilot. The fitness platform tracks goals, and connects to other devices like FitBits and iPhones.

The company’s mission is to give organizations “the technology, tools, and support to create authentic and impactful digital fitness and health experiences for their communities,” the website states. “We give individuals the ability to connect their fitness data to organizations, causes, and experiences they care about.”

As the military continues to trying to attract talent for the 21^st century it’s finding that not all careers need to uphold the physical standards of the past.

The Defense Department has been experimenting with and rethinking what physical tradeoffs are acceptable for people who work in the cyber realm and may never go into a real-world combat situation. — SM

DHA dropping the ball on screening, treatment for alcohol abuse

The Defense Health Agency may be failing service members in properly screening and treating them for alcohol disorders.

A report from the Defense Department Inspector General found that military health care providers did not provide annual tests in a timely manner to help identify hazardous alcohol users in nearly 78% of the service members in the seven units the office investigated.

“Units we reviewed were 66 to 200 days past the annual requirement,” the authors of the report wrote. “However, 15 service members did not receive their alcohol screening for more than 300 days past the due date.”

That’s not the only area where the military failed to help service members who may have issues with alcohol. Service members who went into clinics were not being tested for alcohol abuse either. Out of the 270 service members the DoD IG reviewed, 104 did not have an intake assessment to diagnose alcohol use disorder with DHA-established timeframes. Nearly 100 did not get the recommended treatment in a timely fashion and three service members who were diagnosed did not get treatment at all.

“Furthermore, 103 of the 270 service members we reviewed were involved in an alcohol-related incident. Of these 103 service members, 31 were not referred for an intake assessment within the Army, Marine Corps, or Air Force timeline requirements,” the authors wrote.

The DoD IG said delays in treatment and screening can have serious issues affecting physiological, psychological, familial and employment health.

In addition, DoD risks the health and readiness of service members who could be best served by treatment.

Heavy alcohol abuse is a significant problem in the military, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

“Alcohol misuse is strongly associated with mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression,” the DoD IG authors wrote. “If service members are concerned with their alcohol use or suspected of alcohol misuse, they can be referred to the substance abuse center, or the service member can self‑refer. Once referred, service members undergo a comprehensive intake assessment to determine their alcohol use diagnosis and the appropriate level of treatment.”

DoD IG is recommending that DHA require a standardized mechanism that will track when service members are due for their annual screenings.

“Furthermore, we recommend that the DHA director review the civilian hiring and retention practices for substance abuse personnel and make applicable improvements to minimize vacant positions,” the authors wrote. They go on to suggest DHA should “establish a maximum number of days between a substance abuse referral and an intake assessment for a substance use disorder; and establish the maximum number of days to provide substance abuse treatment following a diagnosis of a substance use disorder.” — SM