Page 7 - Federal Computer Week, July 2019

OPM/GSA merger scuttled in House appropriations bill
The Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill was reported favorably out of subcommittee on a party-line voice vote in June and will be taken up by the full House Appropriations Committee.
The bill includes $35 million for the Technology Modernization Fund and reduces funding for the federal CIO office from $28.5 million to $15 million.
The bill notably does not contain any of the funding requested by the White House to merge most of the Office of Personnel Management into the General Services Administration. Instead, it includes language designed to stop work on planning for such a merger and scuttle efforts to unify aspects of OPM and GSA administratively via outsourcing or interagency agreements.
“I don’t see
any legislative
fix that’s going
to happen to
allow OPM
and GSA to
merge,” Rep.
Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) told FCW. “To suggest that that’s a fight that will ultimately be accomplished by legislative means would be to deny the reality of the divided Congress.”
The bill would boost election security funding with $600 million in grants to help states replace direct-recording electronic voting machines — systems that tally votes into a computer without issuing a paper ballot. The Election Assistance Commission, which administers the grants, would also
23.6% could have been saved on IRS commodity IT purchases by using GSA contracts, according
to an inspector general study
New CDM dashboard contract lays the groundwork for AI
Officials at the Department of Homeland Security plan to award a contract soon for a new Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation dashboard that will help the program take advantage of artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities.
At an FCW event in May, CDM Program Manager Kevin Cox said the new award will attempt to refashion the dashboard to incorporate emerging technologies and make better use of the data created through CDM.
“It’s going to take us a few years to get everything in place, but this is what’s going to enable us to get to the more advanced capabilities — being able to bring in machine learning to interact with the data and get additional value for the agencies, bringing in AI to write the algorithms to really expand out what we can do with the data — because we do
really have a treasure trove of data here, not just from a security standpoint but also from an operational standpoint,” he said.
DHS spent much of last year connecting larger agencies to the dashboard and is focusing its efforts now on adding smaller agencies.
The new contract will help DHS better integrate data into the Agency- Wide Adaptive Risk Enumeration algorithm that the department will use to evaluate the cybersecurity posture of participating agencies. The algorithm will have a soft launch in October to measure activities such as vulnerability management, patching and configuration.
The Office of Management and Budget’s recent memo on shared services does not directly affect the CDM program, according to Cox.
However, the program aligns with the memo’s intent and could be called on to support cybersecurity shared-service initiatives in the future, he added.
The OMB memo establishes DHS as the lead quality service management office for cybersecurity shared services, and although broader efforts will likely require a separate task-order vehicle, DHS is relying on CDM and its shared- services program for small and micro agencies to generate lessons learned and ideas for future improvements.
“One that’s commonly discussed is [security operations center]-as-a-service and where the federal government wants to go with that,” he said. “We’re part of that conversation. We’re at the table in terms of where CDM can help with that type of offering and future offerings as well.”
— Derek B. Johnson
“I don’t see any legislative fix
that’s going to happen to allow
OPM and GSA to merge.”
— REP. MARK MEADOWS (R-N.C.)
receive increased funding.
“If anything, the challenge of securing
our election systems should be a uniting force among Americans,” said Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), chairman of the Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee.
The bill also covers the Treasury Department and would allocate $12 billion to the IRS in fiscal 2020, which includes $290 million for business systems modernization.
— Adam Mazmanian
July 2019 FCW.COM 7