Page 9 - FCW, September/October 2021

NDAA cyber reserve proposal revised with labor in mind
NASA seeks
Rep. Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.) tweaked his proposal for a program at U.S. Cyber Command that would bring in professionals from the private sector in response to opposition from the American Federation of Govern- ment Employees.
The plans for a cyber reserve, to be put forth in an amendment to the House version of
the National Defense Authorization Act, were
revised to allow for
reservists entering from technology companies
to make financial dis-
closures to the Office of Government Ethics. The
Panetta amendment also
calls for reservists to be
available for deploy-
ments of up to two years and have the status of part-time federal employees when on the job. The pilot program would sunset in four years.
AFGE National President Ever- ett Kelley alerted the chairman and the ranking member on the House Rules Committee to the organiza- tion’s support for the revised plan,
which AFGE had opposed in an ear- lier iteration.
The union is asking lawmakers to reject a proposal from Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) that would estab- lish a National Digital Reserve Corps at the General Services Administra- tion. Under that proposal, reservists would serve 30-day stints for short-
term digital and cyberse- curity projects, and GSA would assign participants to specific agencies. In addition, it would be launched as a fully fledged program.
“To presuppose as a mat- ter of statutory mandate that there will be a steady and growing workload for digital workforces absent
vaccination app
3,400+
cases are backlogged at the Merit Systems Protection Board, which has lacked a quorum for more than four years
employee
Rep. Jimmy Panetta
NASA officials are looking for a smartphone app that would allow the agency’s 18,000 employees to display their vaccination status when entering a NASA facility and also help officials analyze data on the immunization status of its work- force.
Under the executive order man- dating that federal employees be vaccinated against COVID-19, agen- cies must require documentation from employees that includes the date of vaccination and the name of the health care organization that administered it. That documenta- tion can be a paper or digital record that clearly and legibly displays the required information.
NASA issued a pre-solicitation in September for software that will allow employees to display their vaccination status on their smart- phones before entering a NASA facility. Users must be able to manu- ally input data as well as upload a photo of a proof-of-vaccination document with information about any booster shots. The solution must also allow NASA to see the results of rapid antigen tests and alert users to positive test results.
The app should verify the employee’s identity either through biometrics or a scan of a driv- er’s license or other government- issued ID. Uploaded data must be encrypted and converted into a QR code or a color-coded indica- tor so vaccine status can be easily checked.
In addition, aggregated data must be exportable so NASA can gener- ate reports that analyze overall vac- cination rates while maintaining the privacy of employee data.
— Susan Miller
Hurricane Ida knocked out key NARA system
A records management system at the National Archives and Records Admin- istration facility in Keyser, W.Va., was knocked off-line by remnants of Hur- ricane Ida that caused flooding on the East Coast earlier this month.
The Electronic Records Archives provides an online link for federal agencies to submit records schedules to NARA and request records transfers.
In a Sept. 17 memo to federal records managers, NARA Chief Records Officer Laurence Brewer said the system was back online after a sustained outage.
agers have an Oct. 1 deadline to file annual move transfer requests in the system. The outage could make it dif- ficult to meet that deadline, according to Brewer.
He added that NARA wants to improve the resilience of the current system. “While the outage has been resolved, we are seeking to avoid future sustained outages by strength- ening our connectivity by pursuing options like the potential implemen- tation of additional redundancy in our network circuits,” he wrote.
NARA and agency records man-
— Adam Mazmanian
detailed analysis from agencies them- selves is a recipe for fraud, waste and abuse,” Kelley wrote in his letter to lawmakers. Furthermore, the lack of a “meaningful competitive process [for hiring reservists] constitutes another chipping away of the merit- based, apolitical civil service.”
— Natalie Alms
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