Page 27 - FCW, January/February 2021

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Democrats push $9B TMF boost
Leading Democrats on the House Over- sight and Reform Committee want to include $9 billion for the Technology Modernization Fund in the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief and recovery pack- age that is being pushed by the Biden administration.
Several lawmakers — including Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), the commit- tee’s chairwoman, and Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), chairman of the Government Operations Subcommittee — sent a letter to House leaders on Jan. 27 that stresses the importance of expanding the fund, which agencies can tap for projects that improve service delivery, move systems to the cloud and other efforts to update IT systems.
“The federal government’s consis- tent failure to prioritize IT moderniza- tion and program delivery prevented the public from receiving the federal assistance Congress authorized to help the nation stay afloat during one of the worst global pandemics and economic crises of our lifetime,” the lawmakers wrote. “Without modern and nimble IT systems, the federal government cannot deliver critical payments and services to individuals, families and businesses [that] rely on them.”
The fund launched in fiscal 2018 with $100 million in funding and sub- sequently received another $50 million. However, the lawmakers said the fund- ing was not sufficient to meet demand even before the pandemic and charac- terized the proposed $9 billion boost as revolutionary.
Nevertheless, some appropriators have concerns about how agencies will repay the money they use from the fund, and a recent Government Accountabil- ity Office report recommends that the General Services Administration and Office of Management and Budget clar- ify administrative cost-recovery plans.
— Adam Mazmanian
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Biden reverses Trump-era workforce policies
IRS contracts were updated by the DATA Act Bot to insert legally mandated telecommunications security language
Shortly after his inauguration, Presi- dent Joe Biden issued executive orders to reverse multiple Trump adminis- tration policies related to the federal workforce and unions.
Biden revoked an order direct- ing agencies to reclassify certain policymaking and policy-determin- ing roles, as well as certain sensi- tive and supervisory posts, under a new Schedule F. Employees in that category could essentially be hired and fired at-will and would be blocked from union representation. The Office of Management and Budget had made moves to reclassify almost 90% of its workforce in the final days of the Trump administration.
Biden also reversed three executive orders issued by Trump in 2018. One made it easier for poor performers to
be fired and shortened the timeframe of performance improvement plans. The second order restricted the use of official time spent by federal employ- ees on union business, and the third changed the process for creating col- lective bargaining agreements.
In addition, Biden directed the Office of Personnel Management to develop recommendations for ensur- ing that more federal employees are paid at least $15 an hour and wants to mandate that federal contractors receive a $15 minimum wage and emergency paid leave.
The national president of the Nation- al Federation of Federal Employees, Randy Erwin, praised the moves on Twitter, saying that “the days of hostil- ity and disrespect are over.”
— Natalie Alms
Coming soon: Continuous updates to SP 800-53
The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Special Publica- tion 800-53 is the bible of security and privacy controls for federal IT sys- tems, so revisions are a big deal. Starting this summer, however, those updates will start coming far more frequently.
NIST Fellow Ron Ross said a “web- based, automated content control development and delivery system” is in the works and will debut midyear. “We’re basically not going to wait five or six years to update 800-53,” he said during FCW’s Cloud Security Workshop in January. “We’re going to have an online development pro- cess where you can propose new controls...and when the controls have
gone through enough of that public review and vetting, we will then...put that control into the catalog.”
The controls will be easily down- loadable in machine-readable formats so they can “go directly into the support tools that our customers are using,” he added.
The new process will require stake- holders to adjust their approach to reviewing by effectively moving from a waterfall process to a DevOps tempo, but Ross said he was confident it would be a change for the better.
“We’re never going to sacrifice quality or our customer interaction, no matter what kind of process we use,” he said.
— Troy K. Schneider
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