The Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act last week showed support for a 2% raise for DoD civilian workers and a 4.5% raise for military members. In a vote of 22-3 on June 13, committee lawmakers advanced the 2025 NDAA to the full Senate for consideration. The House passed its version of the NDAA last week.

Although the NDAA’s provisions only apply to Defense Department employees, both civilian DoD workers and the rest of the civilian federal workforce on the General Schedule would see the same percentage added to their paychecks, if the raise is enacted.

In House appropriations legislation, committee lawmakers remained silent on the topic of the federal pay raise, indicating a likely alignment with the president’s raise proposal. The GOP-led committee advanced legislation for a fiscal 2025 spending package last week along party lines. The Senate Appropriations Committee has not yet released its versions of fiscal 2025 spending legislation.

President Joe Biden’s request of a 2% pay raise for most civilian federal employees on the General Schedule, if enacted, would be the smallest annual raise for feds since Biden took office. The 2% proposal comes in contrast to the 5.2% federal pay raise for 2024, which was the largest raise for feds since the Carter administration.

Biden’s initial raise proposal in March, contained in the fiscal 2025 budget request, did not indicate a breakdown between base pay and locality pay. But in most years, presidents typically set aside 0.5% for locality pay and leave the remainder for the across-the-board raise.

For the federal pay raise, nothing is set in stone until Biden signs an executive order to enact it, which usually happens in December. Ahead of that finalization, federal unions and other employee organizations have spoken out in favor of a larger pay raise for feds in 2025, calling for a 7.4% boost rather than the 2% proposal.

Legislation titled the FAIR Act, if enacted, would offer that large of a raise to feds next year. Unions including the National Treasury Employees Union have endorsed the bill, which lawmakers first introduced in January.

“NTEU continues the fight to pass the FAIR Act,” NTEU wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “Such an investment in the federal workforce would help close the significant pay gap between federal employee and private sector pay and help the federal government compete with the private sector for talented employees.”

But many agencies are already trying to figure out how to incorporate the larger 5.2% raise into their budgets for 2024. Some agencies’ budgets this fiscal year remained relatively stagnant, while other costs, such as federal employees’ paychecks, have continued to rise.

The next step in the process toward finalizing the federal pay raise will likely come later this summer. To avoid defaulting to the Federal Employees Pay Comparability Act (FEPCA), Biden will have to issue an alternative pay plan by the end of August.

Federal employees currently earn about 27.54% less in wages than those in the private sector with similar occupations, according to the Federal Salary Council. Although FEPCA allows for a large enough annual federal pay raise to bring the federal-private sector wage gap down to 5%, no president since 1994 has incorporated the fully authorized amount.

Decades of deviation from FEPCA have caused distortion of federal pay in multiple ways. It would now cost an estimated $22 billion to bring General Schedule salaries in line with the private sector.

Any potential changes in Congress that might break away from the current pay plans could still take place this fall ahead of an executive order in December.

The post Proposed 2% federal pay raise gets support in 2025 defense authorization bill first appeared on Federal News Network.

The agency maintains about 37,200 total web pages — of which 26,600 are web pages written in English. The rest are translations in other languages.

IRS.gov chief Angela Render said about 85% of visitors go to the agency’s top 100 English-language pages, and another 12% of traffic goes to the 900 next-most popular pages.

“The first thing you might start to think is, ‘Well, if [1,000] pages satisfy 97% of the people coming to the site, why do we have the rest? Can’t we get rid of those?’ And the answer is that we have to serve everyone. We can’t pick our verticals like a business would,” Render said Tuesday during a virtual event hosted by ACT-IAC.

About 51% of the IRS’ web traffic comes from mobile devices, and 59% of users access IRS web pages through online searches.

Among its current priorities, the IRS is tapping into billions of dollars in multi-year modernization funds to provide a higher level of customer service to taxpayers — including making its website easier to navigate.

“One thing we do know about our visitors is that they are there to complete a task. People do not come to IRS.gov for entertainment or to socialize. They are focused and if they’re not tax professionals, attorneys or the media, they may be scared and frustrated also,” Render said.

More than half of the IRS’ online audience reads at a sixth-grade level or lower. About 88% consider IRS.gov a top source for tax advice, and about 47% of taxpayers report feeling anxious when they receive any notice from the IRS.

“IRS.gov is one of those rare digital experiences that must serve all American taxpayers, whether individual business or tax professional, across all demographics and business types,” Render said.

To make the IRS website easier to use, the is holding focus groups with certain demographics, such a first-time filers, to understand their challenges navigating the website.

Based on this group’s feedback, Render said the IRS recently rewrote content on some of its top 11 webpages — which draw about 712 million pageviews each year — to appear at the top search engine results, and added nine new pages to “to fill significant content gaps, as illustrated by high search volume with poor results in external search engines.”

Within a month, the 20 rewritten or new pages drew more than 103 million views — nearly 28% of all traffic coming to irs.gov. Six of the new pages at the top 500 most viewed on IRS.gov and five more were in the top 1,000.

Karen Howard, director of the IRS Office of Online Services, said the agency is expanding its recruiting efforts across the country.

“The website is 24/4. We don’t want to overwork our existing talent, but we also want to expand and recruit from areas that have really good talent, that can help address the dynamic nature of the digital needs of the organization,” Howard said.

Howard said the IRS is also taking steps to address is tech “talent gap.”

“As the technology evolves, as tech players evolve, we have to make sure the understanding of evolution and that we have the talent and the skills — whether it’s upskilling, whether reskilling —to be able to address the needs of the taxpayer evolving and transforming in a in a more real- time manner,” she said.

As the IRS rolls out new technology to benefit taxpayers, Howard said the agency is also taking steps to ensure IRS employees also have the tools they need to do their jobs.

“There’s a saying — if the employees isn’t having a good experience, you can’t expect that to happen at the customer experience level,” Howard said. “The user experience team spends a lot of time working with our internal call center teams and recently did a huge study trying to understand some of the journeys that employees go through, so that we can better design and improve design on some of our existing applications.”

Among those tools, the IRS is using artificial intelligence to improve its digital experience.

Render said the IRS can use AI to reduce time spent on certain tasks, such as qualitative data analysis. AI can also assess content on the IRS website against governmentwide standards, or review conversations between a taxpayer and a chatbot that require an IRS employee to intervene.

“We understand that AI is not a magic wand that will relieve us of the responsibility of monitoring and improving our content, Render said. “I don’t see AI and technology as a replacement for a human, but rather as a toll that will allow us to address content more efficiently.”

Render said the IRS is already fielding AI technology, in the form of chatbots and voice bots.

“While AI happens to be on everybody’s minds right now, it’s not new technology,” Render said.

Render said the IRS, “for a number of years,” has used AI to look through call center logs and identify patterns.

“We reviewed call center logs to understand what people call about and then use this information to see if the information available on the website is findable and useful. This uncovered many pain points. That’s not to say we don’t want people to call, there are many instances where the call is important. What we don’t want is a situation where people must call when they don’t have to. A lot of people would like to just take care of things on their own time. And we should support this,” she said.

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Federal managers realized that offering transactions online would, to some extent, let citizens do things when they wanted or could, and not accorfding to government field office schedules.

Now people can access countless government services digitally. Just as you can buy a China-made garden hose from Amazon at 3 a.m., citizens can renew their passports, say, on Juneteenth or Sunday afternoon. You don’t print out the passport; it still requires approval, manufacting and mailing.

Like it or not, though, in-person appointments remain a part of what the government must offer citizens. The IRS, Postal Service, Agriculture Department, Veterans Affairs, Social Security and parts of Homeland Security come to mind. Collectively they operate thousands of field locations of widely varying size.  Dramatically as digital services have grown, demand for the in-person experience won’t go away.

In fact, the two work together, if by “digital experience” you include telephone call center operators whose ability to help people is aided by access to comprehensive data about the caller. At the IRS, according to recent analysis by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), agency experts resolve some 30% of questions over the phone — so people avoid the need to make an appointment to come in.

In doing its analysis, TIGTA auditors visited a sample of what the IRS calls special Face-to-Face Saturday Help, posing as taxpayers. The monthly events took place at some 90 locations during the 2023 filing season. (IRS repeated them during the most recent tax season.) At some of the first come, first served events, TIGTA’s Carl Aley said, people waited as long as seven hours. In a few cases, the doors shut before the auditors could get service.

Answers they did get were generally accurate according to tax law. But point is that the IRS has real demand for in-person during times when the average single or family taxpayer has time. Weekdays 9-5, the IRS lets people schedule appointments. In fiscal 2023, TIGTA said, the 363 Taxpayer Assistance Centers (TACs) conducted 781,748 appointments. That may not match the billions and billions served by McDonald’s, but it keeps rising as the country grows and Congress convolutes the tax code.

As agencies work to modernize their online services and improve customer experience, why not rethink the in-person experience? Why not have regular evening and weekend hours for tax and Social Security questions? Why continue like the restaurant that closes when more people can get there?

You might ask, what about the workforce? Lots of people across the industries like night work, or are fine with weekends that might be a Tuesday and Wednesday or a Monday and Tuesday. 24/7 work occurs in some places throughout government already. Air traffic controllers or border patrol agents work ’round the clock, so why not those knowledge workers who deal with the public? Maybe not 24/7, but at least some time beyond 9-5.

Some states offer off-hours functions. Last year I needed a certain permit from a neighboring state. I made a 6:30 p.m. appointment. I’d applied and received affirmation online, but the permit required obtaining in-person.

It was a longer drive than I expected. Turned out the office was open to something like 7:30. When I arrived after dusk the building was locked. But the guard sensed why I was there, let me in, and directed me to a brightly-lit, first-floor office. A super friendly clerk took care of the matter literally in a matter of minutes. So that’s what’s possible.

Good for the IRS for trying Saturday drop-in tax help. The agency has also offered extended Tuesday and Thursday hours during tax season. It knows its demand signals.  This should become part of every in-person agency’s thinking.

Nearly Useless Factoid

By Michele Sandiford

Tax form mistakes are 41 times more common on paper forms than through e-filing.

Source: The Motley Fool

The post How about night and weekend customer service — in person? first appeared on Federal News Network.

That’s according to new guidance signed out by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on June 14. The document lays out priorities over the next two years for sector risk management agencies. SRMAs are responsible for overseeing the security of specific critical infrastructure sectors.

“From the banking system to the electric grid, from healthcare to our nation’s water systems and more, we depend on the reliable functioning of our critical infrastructure as a matter of national security, economic security, and public safety,” Mayorkas said in a statement. “The threats facing our critical infrastructure demand a whole of society response and the priorities set forth in this memo will guide that work.

The memo follows on the heels of a national security memorandum signed by President Joe Biden earlier this year. The memo seeks to expand federal oversight of the critical infrastructure sectors. It specifically directed SRMAs to develop new sector risk management plans in the coming year.

China, AI and space

In his memo this week, Mayorkas highlights “cyber and other threats” posed by China as a key priority risk area. U.S. officials earlier this year said Chinese hackers had breached the networks of multiple U.S. critical infrastructure networks.

“Attacks targeting infrastructure essential to protect, support, and sustain military forces and operations worldwide or that may cause potential disruptions to the delivery of key goods or services to the American people must be our top priority,” the memo states. “Leveraging timely and actionable intelligence and information and adopting best practices for security and resilience, SRMAs, critical infrastructure owners and operators, and other SL TT and private sector partners shall devise and implement effective mitigation approaches to identify and address threats from the PRC, including plans to address cross-sector and regional interdependencies.”

It also encourages agencies to work with their respective sectors to mitigate risks posed by artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. Mayorkas also highlights the need to address climate risks, supply chain vulnerabilities, and a growing reliance on space systems, respectively.

Critical infrastructure ‘resilience’

Meanwhile, the memo also highlights several specific mitigation strategies that SRMAs should work into their plans. It specifically states SRMAs should work with critical infrastructure owners and operators to “develop and adopt resilience measures, anticipate potential cascading impacts of adverse incidents, and devise response plans to quickly recover from all types of shocks and stressors.”

“While we cannot keep determined advanced persistent threats or ransomware actors completely at bay or prevent severe weather occurrences, we can minimize the consequences of incidents by understanding critical nodes, assessing dependencies within systems, and developing plans to ensure rapid recovery,” Mayorkas writes.

Furthermore, the memo continues the Biden administration’s push to set minimum cyber standards across critical infrastructure sectors.

“Individual critical infrastructure owners and operators must be encouraged by SRMAs and, where applicable, held accountable by regulators for implementing baseline controls that improve their security and resilience to cyber and all hazard threats,” the memo states. “Establishing minimum cybersecurity requirements as part of these efforts to secure critical infrastructure also aligns with the 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy.”

Mayorkas points to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s Cyber Performance Goals, as well as the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, as models for cyber protection standards.

“DHS will work with SRMAs, regulators and private sector entities to ensure that baseline requirements are risk informed, performance-based and to the extent feasible, harmonized and to develop tools that support the adoption of such requirements,” Mayorkas adds.

The memo also encourages agencies to incentivize shared service providers to adopt stronger security measures. And it highlights the need to “identify areas of concentrated risk and systemically important entities.”

The post DHS names China, AI, cyber standards as key priorities for critical infrastructure first appeared on Federal News Network.

Comprehensive data management is key to unlocking seamless, personalized and secure CX for government agencies. Real-time data empowers informed, rapid decision-making, which can improve critical, high-impact federal services where time is of the essence, such as in response to a natural disaster. Alarmingly, only 13% of federal agency leaders report having access to real-time data, and 73% feel they must do more to leverage the full value of data across their agency.

While some agencies are making progress in their IT modernization journeys, they continue to struggle when it comes to quickly accessing the right data due to numerous factors, from ineffective IT infrastructure to internal cultural barriers.

Actionable intelligence is paramount. The ultimate goal is to access the right data at the right moment to generate insights at “the speed of relevance,” as leaders at the Defense Department would say. To achieve the speed of relevance required to make real-time, data-driven decisions, agencies can take steps to enable quicker access to data, improve their data hygiene, and secure their data.

How to effectively intake and store troves of data

From a data infrastructure perspective, the best path to modernized, real-time deployment is using hyper automation and DevSecOps on cloud infrastructures. Many federal agencies have begun this transition from on-premises to cloud environments, but there’s still a long way to go until this transition is complete government-wide.

Implementing a hybrid, multi-cloud environment offers agencies a secure and cost-effective operating model to propel their data initiatives forward. By embracing standardization and employing cloud-agnostic tools for automation, visibility can be enhanced across systems and environments, while simultaneously adhering to service-level agreements and ensuring the reliability of data platforms. Once a robust infrastructure is in place to store and analyze data, agencies can turn their attention to data ingestion tools.

Despite many agency IT leaders utilizing data ingestion tools such as data lakes and warehouses, silos persist. Agencies can address this interoperability challenge by prioritizing flexible, scalable and holistic data ingestion tools such as data mesh. Data mesh tools, which foster a decentralized data management architecture to improve accessibility, can enable agency decision-makers to capitalize on the full spectrum of available data, while still accommodating unique agency requirements.

To ensure data is accessible to decision-makers, it’s important that the data ingestion mechanism has as many connectors as possible to all sources of data that an agency identifies. Data streaming and data pipelines can also enable real-time insights and facilitate faster decision-making by mitigating manual processes. Data streaming allows data to be ingested from multiple systems, which can build a single source of trust for analytical systems. Additionally, these practices limit data branching and siloes, which can cause issues with data availability, quality and hygiene.

Data hygiene and security enable transformative benefits

Data hygiene is imperative, particularly when striving to ethically and accurately utilize data for an autonomous system like AI or ML. A robust data validation framework is necessary to improve data quality. To create this framework, agencies can map their data’s source systems and determine the types of data they expect to yield, but mapping becomes increasingly arduous as databases continue to scale.

One critical success factor is to understand the nature of the data and the necessary validations prior to ingesting the data into source systems. Hygiene can be improved by consuming the raw data into a data lake and then, during conversion, validate the data’s quality before applying any analytics or crafting insights.

In addition to data hygiene, data security must remain a top priority across the federal government as agencies move toward real-time data insights. Adopting a hybrid, multi-cloud environment can lead to a stronger security posture because there are data encryption capabilities inherent in enterprise cloud environments.

Agencies may consider using a maturity model to help their teams assess data readiness and how they are progressing in their cybersecurity frameworks. A maturity model lets agencies identify and understand specific security gaps at each level of the model and provides a roadmap to address these gaps. Ultimately, the cybersecurity framework is as essential as data hygiene to ensure agencies can harness data reliably and efficiently.

When agencies have data management solutions that reduce the friction of navigating siloed government systems and enable faster, more secure collaboration, it enables them to drive innovation. This is especially true for agencies that handle extensive amounts of data. For example, many High Impact Service Providers (HISPs) must manage vast amounts of citizen data to provide critical, public-facing services with speed and scale.

Data is the foundation for modern digital government services. Once data is ingested, stored and secured effectively, the transformational potential of emerging technologies such as AI or RPA can be unlocked. Moreover, with real-time data insights, government decision-makers can use actionable intelligence to improve federal services. It’s essential that agency IT leaders invest in a robust data management strategy and modern data tools to ensure they can make informed decisions and benefit from the power of AI to achieve mission-critical outcomes for the American public.

Joe Jeter is senior vice president of federal technology at Maximus.

The post Robust data management is key to harnessing the power of emerging technologies first appeared on Federal News Network.

The General Services Administration (GSA) deals with many governmentwide concerns, including real estate and office space. For more than 20 years, auditors at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) have considered federal real property management a high-risk issue. GAO recently reiterated a list of recommendations for the GSA on real estate. For more, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked with GAO’s director of physical infrastructure issues, Heather Krause.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin The General Services Administration deals with many government-wide concerns including real estate and office space. For more than 20 years, though, auditors at the Government Accountability Office have considered federal Real Property Management a high-risk issue.  GAO recently reiterated a list of recommendations for the GSA about real estate. We get more now from the GAO is director of physical infrastructure issues. Heather Kraus. Heather, good to have you back.

Heather Krause Thank you, Tom.

Tom Temin And this is a restatement of some longstanding things, some of them going back to 2003, and so forth. Any new recommendations for let’s start there for GSA on managing real estate and property?

Heather Krause We have 27 outstanding recommendations to the GSA right now. And what this recent work did was highlight the five that are priority recommendations. And so among the ones, so you know, they actually closed two of our priority recommendations last year, and we had added (an) additional one this year. That recommendation is focused on looking at the deferred maintenance backlog and GSAs plans to address deferred maintenance backlog. You know, there’s about a $3.1 billion deferred maintenance and repair backlog in fiscal year 2022. And so, we found that GSA did not communicate in its budget documents the amount of funding or timeframes that it would take to address that backlog. And so they did take some steps to address, you know, and provide some information and their 2025 budget justification, (but) we’re still looking for some additional information on those funding amounts and timeframes. And that kind of information is really important to inform decisionmakers about how funding levels could affect GSA’s backlog and really help them evaluate the proposal GSA has to address that backlog.

Tom Temin And that backlog applies to federally-owned properties.

Heather Krause Correct. And I should add too…actually, I think I maybe misspoke. I think the other recommendation — that one was around a little bit longer — but the more recent one was on space utilization data. I guess, just to speak to that. I mean, again, across the board, these five recommendations are really to address, Tom, as you said, up front, where we have seen a real high-risk area for the federal government, which is addressing that federal management federal property portfolio. And so another recommendation we made here was to look at plans to share information on space utilization data. And so what we found, and what we’re looking for is — they’ve taken some steps to share broadleaf information on how agencies can collect or look at methods for identifying space utilization. And they’ve done some things to share that information, but really looking for them to continue to have a documented plan to ensure those efforts are publicized, including to those that do not use GSA space, or portfolio planning services. And so kind of making all agencies aware of the cost and benefits of the various methods and technologies for collecting space utilization data. That kind of information, again, would really help agencies identify cost effective methods for collecting that information, and really informing the kind of decisions on potential changes to their real estate footprints.

Tom Temin Right. But they need the cooperation of agencies though, don’t they? The occupants who are having trouble figuring out who’s going to be in the office, who is not. And what percentage of the time?

Heather Krause Yeah, I think what a lot of these recommendations do is improve that kind of data that’s needed to help agencies make those types of decisions. Again, coming back to that space utilization, how can agencies — so, like, GSA is looking to really work with agencies to figure out: what are tools and ways that they can better understand utilization so they can assess what are we using? What might be opportunities to dispose of property that’s unneeded.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Heather Kraus, Director of Physical infrastructure Issues at the GAO. And that idea of disposal of property. That’s something they talk about for decades at a time. And there are commissions and looks at properties. And sometimes after all of that, they find a garage somewhere they can tear down or sell. There’s a more fundamental issue, though, isn’t there?

Heather Krause Yeah, this disposing of unneeded property has been a long-standing challenge. Sort of managing the property and addressing issues of disposing unneeded property has been a long-standing issue. Another recommendation that we made to help address that was trying to get — again, as you point out, Tom, that there is federal agencies that are also involved in in making these decisions, but looking for GSA to develop a process to collect and share lessons learned from what they had was, which was a temporary approach for reducing the federal government’s real property inventory. So there was a law back in 2016 that set up a process for them to select and prepare unneeded federal properties for sale. The first couple rounds of process did face some setbacks and challenges in carrying it out. So what we’ve recommended, to improve that last round of the process as well as looking ahead, is having a mechanism or a process to share those lessons learned, leverage those stakeholders that were involved — their knowledge and addressing potential challenges with disposing of real property. That kind of sharing of information, I think will provide stakeholders, including the Congress, with insights on how, you know, the federal government might better dispose of its Israel property.

Tom Temin And of course, GSA leases, probably way more space than the government owns for occupancy by agencies. And did you find are there open recommendations on the leasing side of things? Besides the occupancy information?

Heather Krause We don’t have a leasing recommendation when it comes to something that’s priority. But I think, you know, we’re often looking at ways — again, I think key areas is improving that data to help, GSA and agencies make decisions on federal property. Another way that we found in our work to improve that was around the accuracy, completeness and usefulness of some of the street address information that you find in it’s public database. So you know, when we looked at that issue, again, lack of reliable data on federal assets is really one of the main reasons is federal property management’s on our high-risk list. And GSA has a publicly available database, you know, of their buildings, structures and lands. The public can take a look at that for any number of reasons, including finding property that they may be interested in leasing or purchasing from the federal government with a space that the government no longer needs. But when we looked at that there were numerous issues with the database which can reduce that kind of benefit that we’re looking for, from sharing that kind of information. So we made a recommendation, again, to improve that data. And GSA is collaborating with OMB on looking to provide guidance to agencies to help them improve the quality of the data, set up data quality programs. And what we’re looking for is them to follow through and working closely with OMB and federal property officials to complete those inter to other efforts to improve the data. Because that kind of reliable data will really increase its usefulness to the public, and really support that disposition of unneeded property.

Tom Temin And the street addresses. How is it? Do you suppose they don’t have accurate data on street addresses? I just looked it up. And they show the White House at 1601 Pennsylvania Avenue. Just kidding. But it seems like that would be kind of fundamental.

Heather Krause Some of it has to do with kind of formatting and incomplete information. And so, I think some of this is looking to ensure that there’s complete, accurate, you know, formatted information in those data databases to make it more reliable.

Tom Temin And in the 20 years, you’ve been developing these recommendations, and some of them get carried over from, you know, biannual report and so on. There have been a lot of building services administrators, commissioners, and a lot of administrators. Do you get the sense that GSA says, ‘Yeah, we agree, we got to get to this.’ Or what’s the response been?

Heather Krause The GSA has been very responsive to our recommendations. We have a way to measure progress of agencies. So we look back over recommendations made four years ago. And in the most recent report, we found that they had actually implemented 100% of the recommendations that we made four years ago. We have found it similarly in the recent years, they’ve had over 80%, or up to 100% in recent years, as well, of recommendations are implemented. So they are very responsive. I think it’s important to draw attention to the recommendations that we do in this particular report to ensure that we continue to make those types of improvements as we tackle this longstanding challenge of managing federal real property.

The post GSA gets a refreshed set of recommendations for dealing with real property first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has changed a big part of the American landscape over the years. Established during the Franklin Roosevelt administration, TVA has a large cache of what are known as cultural heritage documents. With the deadline looming to present digitized records to the National Archives and Records Administration, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin checked in with TVA’s senior manager for enterprise records, Rebecca Coffey.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin  And for this agency, which started you know, in that depression era, as part of that new deal, and so forth, tons of maps, photographs, tell us what you do have that are considered cultural heritage for permanent forever preservation?

Rebecca Coffey  Well, TVA definitely has a rich heritage that we like to celebrate and make part of the American story. So when you think about our charge and our mission, we were really about bringing progress to the Tennessee Valley. It’s a seven state region. And we were charged with controlling flooding, which was a problem back then, or erosion. We did a lot of things with economic development, as well as some unexpected things like progress with malaria treatment. So as we came to the valley, one of the biggest programs we had was to build a dam system to control those rivers. Well, to do that, we had to flood a lot of properties that were belonging to long term farmers here in the Valley. And we had to move cemeteries. So our cemetery collection is probably one of the biggest, most requested books of records that we get people in the public wanting to track down. Hey, where did my ancestors get moved to, not just people who lived on the farms, but we also flooded areas in tribal grounds. And so we have a lot of relations with our Indian reservations and our partners there, where we track and make sure that we know not only where the cemeteries, the burial grounds are, but also some of their ceremonial grounds that were very sacred to them. So that is a big part of the records that we continue to create today. As we go through and make transmission lines as we build plants. We’re always looking to see what is underground, and what might be there that needs preservation. Now, you touched a little bit on our records with mapping. It is such a great story, TVA had just phenomenal people on staff to do some of that work. And we were commissioned a lot of times by other agencies to do mapping, even with World War II, we were sent to map areas overseas for the war effort. And so TVA had a huge collection of those records that we’ve turned over already to the National Archives to make them available to the public. And then in house right now, we have a big digitization project underway under the FADGI standards, to be able to make all of our mapping across the seven state region, not just the maps, but also aerial photography available to the public.

Tom Temin  Sure. I want to get back to those cemetery records, though, for a minute, that type of thing, because what are the forms of the records? I’m thinking construction crews encountered a cemetery? Did they take photographs of the headstones? Do they enter that information into a log book, their coordinates where this stuff was? What forms do they take?

Rebecca Coffey  Absolutely all of the above. And so we have a huge photography collection of the areas that they went into, not just the cemeteries but just life in the valley during that time. But they would go in and try to map talk to the people on the ground about who were in the cemeteries. Back in those days, not every cemetery had headstones. And so it required a lot of research by our TVA teams to figure out whose families are buried here to create the most accurate log. So you’ll have a lot of field books, to smaller books, where they’re out in the field talking to people with their handwritten cursive notes. And then we will have actual reports where we’ve sent back then it was more in letter format, I will say, we’ve sent letters to the President saying, you know, here’s what we’re doing. We’ve also got internal memos that we’ll talk about what we found how many people are there and negotiations for another place to move them to certainly a place that we wouldn’t expect to flood again, so that they are set up and ready to go. We also have some things that we’ve done back around then not teen 80s, where we shared a lot of this information with other agencies as well as schools. And so as we went through a huge digitization project back in the 80s, for some of these records, we digitize things based on of course, the standards in place at the time with a focus on making them sustainable, searchable, and all of that. Technology’s changed. And so we’re looking to sort of bring those up to speed with the FADGI standards of today as well.

Tom Temin  We’re speaking with Rebecca Coffey. She is Senior Manager of enterprise records at the Tennessee Valley Authority. So therefore, that’s involving imaging of these logbooks and photographs and so forth. Those were, of course, film photography, so you can image and scan those. That’s the basic process here.

Rebecca Coffey  Yes, and we’re working to make sure that we’ve got them in the best quality that we can. And so as you know, already, FADGI has been a great partner, lots of agencies involved, but they have released the technical guidelines for digitizing cultural heritage materials. I think at this point, we’re probably on version three of that. And so we always look to those guidelines to make sure that we’re capturing the best images, obviously, for these records, most are permanent. And so we want to make sure that they’re going to be usable for the future. Not only do we have the NARA guidelines that come out about these federal records, but because of the work that we do at TVA, we also have to meet some record standards under the National Environmental Policy Act, NEPA, the National Historic Preservation Act, NHPA. And the archaeological resources Protection Act, ARPA, specific to the cemetery, ones that we talked about, there’s also a Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. And that is one that really has been a focus the past few years. We are a partner in those tribal relations organizations. And so we have completely open the doors to the records that we have, so that they can get a better perspective on their people, and making sure that they feel confident that we are protecting them. As we’re making raster images of some of these, we’re making sure that we’re not just capturing the information in it. Because there’s intrinsic value, sometimes in the paper records, when you think about that TVA person out there in the field, talking to people and making their notes. And there’s always going to be some of those little stories that are captured in slides, you know about people that in and of itself is part of that cultural record.

Tom Temin  Right the picture of the page and not simply the information on the page. And by the way, we’ve been mentioning FADGI over and over. That’s federal agencies digital guidelines initiative for people that may not be familiar. Now, some of these things like maps that we talked about, also. They might be large, and consequently delicate, maybe faded, probably hand drawn, how do you digitize an image, something that’s large like that.

Rebecca Coffey  So we do use some of our partners across the industry, when we have things that we’re concerned about, like is our equipment good enough. And that helps us to be able to ensure that we’ve got the best views. NARA we recently opened up a new digitization center, it’s state of the art. And so as we’re thinking about some of these that they have an interest in as permanent records, it may be that they also get digitized over there, where they do have the best equipment. But in regard to ones that you just, you know, there’s just no way to capture it, it’s handwritten in pencil, it’s faded. Sometimes they will take smaller views, of course of the corners of the map if there’s things in the margins, so that we do have that big picture of exactly what’s there. But then we can focus in on particular areas. And while we’re still able to read it here at TVA, we can make annotations to the record in the metadata of what something says, just in case it’s not clear to everyone. And those are mostly the records that you’ll see NARA reach out to and say, you know what, not only do we want the electronic copy, but we want that paper copy too because of the intrinsic value that it has in their facilities, the federal record centers will have the archives, of course, they have very controlled cold storage, certain humidities that even exceeds the standards required by the federal agencies.

Tom Temin  It seems like in the case of TVA, this is almost a kind of sacred mission to preserve this because it did change the landscape. And if you look at the Tennessee Valley of 2024, nearly a century, since the agency and the corporation were established, it’s probably mostly unrecognizable, from a topographic standpoint, from the towns and roads and so on.

Rebecca Coffey  It is but having these records allows us to also tell that story of progression. We had a meeting on about some of our tree canopies that we’ve mentioned before, and not just tree canopies. But when you think about towns building up, our aerial collection allows you to sort of piece those things together to tell that story. And as we start introducing some AI to write those stories for us. It really allows us to target a particular coordinate on some of our maps that we have geo past, to pull it up and say, Okay, for this little square mile of a town, show us that progress, and it can go out there with those coordinates and know every place that we have a photograph, an aerial map some overlay to pull that story together very quickly, which obviously saves a lot of time.

Tom Temin  And just to put the period on it. You do get queries from descendants of people that were directly affected. Whether their burial grounds were moved or their town was changed, or maybe they worked on one of the big projects.

Rebecca Coffey  Oh, absolutely. One of the most important positions we have here at TVA in our communications department is our TVA historian. She is amazing. Her name is Patty Ezzell, and she will be able to help you in terms of the history of TVA. So if you’re a person and you send an inquiry to TVA saying, Hey, I know that, you know, we used to have a family cemetery. I’ve got records of it, can you help us figure out where it moved, she can point you to resources that are publicly available to track that down. We also interact a lot with universities. So TVA has such a great story that we get so many students who want to do their thesis papers, their research papers on the Tennessee Valley. And so we have a wealth of information, most of it already available publicly, but certainly ones where they can connect with us to find more information.

The post How one agency deals with digitizing its rich trove of cultural heritage records first appeared on Federal News Network.

Few occupations match the many dangers of coal mining. Even to this day, miners experience the dangers of mine collapses.  The Federal Drive with Tom Temin  next guest is a former coal miner and has devoted a federal career to improving mine safety. His platforms: The Bureau of Mines and, more recently, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, which is part of the Labor Department. Christopher Mark is now a finalist in this year’s Service to America Medals program.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin 
And we should point out I referred to you as Dr. Mark, because you got an doctorate degree in mining. Fair to say?

Christopher Mark 
That’s correct. Yes. In mining engineering, and geomechanics. My specialty is strata control underground, coal mines in particular.

Tom Temin 
All right. And just briefly, you were a coal miner when? And what was it like?

Christopher Mark 
I got a job in the coal mines in southern West Virginia, in Boone County, West Virginia back in 1976. And this was really at the height of the energy crisis. And so there was a lot of expansion going on in the industry, then. It was also a time of major transition in safety in the mines, which I was not really aware of, I just turned 20 years old. But a major landmark legislation, the 1969 Health and Safety Act, had just gone into effect a few years before, and it was still quite a bit of change going on in the industry.

Tom Temin 
All right. And at some point, you decided, well, maybe mining is not the job you’d like to have for the next 40 years. So how did you make the transition to mining engineering and then to the federal government?

Christopher Mark 
Well, I was absolutely fascinated with coal mining when I worked underground. So that’s why I decided to study Mining Engineering. And in particular, the field that I later specialized in, the mine I worked at, we really had some pretty poor roof conditions. So there were roof collapses on a regular basis, nobody that I worked with was killed in any of those, but it certainly intrigued me as a career. At that time, I really wasn’t thinking that far ahead. But ultimately, that became my kind of career goal to learn more about strata control, ground control, and then to try to do something about it.

Tom Temin 
Yeah, that idea of strata control is what causes or lack of strata control. People think that the roof collapses in mines, or from the weight above, and that just gets too much in the roof comes down. I guess your discovery is that there are lateral movements that can cause vertical movements. Is that basically what your chief finding has been.

Christopher Mark 
There’s a number of different aspects to it. That’s one aspect. I hope this isn’t getting too technical. But really, there’s kind of two classes of problems that we deal with. The first one is that you always do have the huge weight of the rock that’s above you. Our coal mines are 500, 1,000, sometimes 2,000 feet deep. And so something has to be there to hold up that 2,000 feet of rock, or it’s just going to smash any workings that you have. And so what you do is you have to leave coal in place strategically in large pillars, maybe 100 feet by 100 feet square. So one big part of my field is sizing these pillars so that you can control the great weight of the mountain above you. So this is what we call global stability. But then you also have local stability, which is dealing with the immediate roof right above the tunnel, the tunnel is typically about 20 feet wide. So it’s that rock directly above you, maybe everything from a small piece of rock, all the way up to maybe 5, 10, 20 feet of rock at the most. But making sure that doesn’t come down when people are working underneath it. And it’s particularly for that local stability problem that the horizontal forces become important. And you’re right, that was a discovery that I made several decades ago. I made the connection, I guess, between the horizontal forces that we see underground, and the plate tectonics that has really transformed the whole earth. All our mountain building and faulting and so on is also related to plate tectonics. And I just kind of connected those two fields and was able to use that knowledge to design better roof support systems for coal mines.

Tom Temin 
We’re speaking with Christopher Mark, he’s a principal strata control specialist at the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and a finalist in this year’s Service to America Medals program. And more than just discovered it, you codified it in tables and in software to help the industry design mines and mines supports better. Tell us more about that.

Christopher Mark 
That was one of the things from my mining experience. And then my kind of close relationships with people actually working in the industry. I kind of realized, and again, this is decades ago, that to put ones research findings in the form of say a peer reviewed publication or even a textbook, that it was going to be very difficult for people to use those things for professional people. We’re not talking about the coal miners underground here, but the professional people who design the mines, but even they were not going to go straight from some kind of a text to a mine design. But on the other hand, if you could take that knowledge and put it into a computer program that was easy to use, then that would have a lot more impact that people would be much more likely to use it. So that’s been kind of one of the real focal points of my work to try to take the research that I do, and then boil it down into a form that’s easy to use, and then put it into a computer program that is easily accessed by the busy mining professionals that don’t do strata control full time and have to fit that into the rest of the work that they do.

Tom Temin 
And your citation mentioned that you have some 160 published peer reviewed papers. So it sounds as if you didn’t discover something 40 years ago, and that’s it. It sounds like this is an ongoing refinement and discovery process for you.

Christopher Mark 
Absolutely. As you mentioned, when I finished my doctorate, I started working for the US Bureau of Mines, which was an agency that went back to 1910. And the Bureau of Mines was actually closed down back in 1995. But the safety research function, it was a research organization. And the research function was folded into the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). So we became the mining arm of NIOSH. So I continued to do research there up until 2010. So during that time, I was able to address a whole range of issues related to strata control. And in each case, tried to kind of move the boundaries of what the best practices were based on the new knowledge I developed, and then get those concepts transferred out to the mining professionals. And then in 2010, I actually transitioned, as you also said, over to the Mine Safety and Health Administration. So this is the safety enforcement arm of the federal government, which again, goes back to that 1969 Health and Safety Act. So my role there is as kind of the chief technical advisor when it comes to strata control issues.

Tom Temin 
And you and I are roughly the same age, within a year of one another, based on the arithmetic I did that you described. And does your mind, as mine sometimes does, wonder back when you’re doing your work to that initial job you had in the mine, digging the coal?

Christopher Mark
Absolutely. And I’ve actually had the luxury in the last few years of writing a couple of papers that directly address that history. In fact, I just had one published that I kind of dug back into industry literature, the trade magazines and so forth of that era, the 60s and 70s going forward and also evaluating the reports of fatal accidents, to try to see exactly what were the things that killed coal miners in those days. We know it was roof falls, but what were the individual attributes? And then how have we addressed them over the years, because when I started working in the mines, on average, every week, a coal miner was killed in a roof fall underground. And in 2016, we had the first year where we had zero roof fall fatalities. So even though the workforce is a lot smaller, still, that’s a tremendous improvement. So I was able to look back and kind of pinpoint exactly which of the innovations that came in during that time really made a difference.

 

The post Federal effort that reduced coal mining dangers first appeared on Federal News Network.

• Teleworking DoD employees are once again a target in the latest spending legislation from House appropriators. A policy rider in the fiscal 2025 defense spending bill would block any funding from going toward the costs of teleworking or remote working for defense employees and contractors. The GOP-led appropriations committee advanced the spending bill last week. The telework measure, however, may be unlikely to make it into the final appropriations package for fiscal 2025. Democrats, with a Senate majority, have remained largely in favor of federal telework. They say it fosters better workforce recruitment and retention.
  (Fiscal 2025 Department of Defense appropriations bill - House Appropriations Committee)
• Early signs are pointing in the right direction after some recent federal workforce reforms. The Office of Personnel Management’s initiatives over the last couple of years have included banning the use of salary history in hiring, creating a portal for internship openings and broadening eligibility for the Pathways Program. Larger impacts of those changes are likely still further down the road. But there are already some initially positive indications, especially for early-career recruitment: “It’s going to take a little more time. I do think what we’re seeing, though, is a renewed and increased interest in federal job opportunities by early-career talent,” OPM Acting Director Rob Shriver said.
  (Early-career federal job openings seeing ‘renewed and increased’ interest, OPM’s Shriver says - Federal News Network)
• The Energy Department wants to secure the future electric grid from cyber threats. Energy’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security and Emergency Response (CESER) is working to set security expectations for using the cloud. Later this year, the CESER office will convene with big cloud service providers and the clean-energy sector to collaborate on cybersecurity requirements. The discussion comes amid growing threats to critical infrastructure, including the energy grid. Many renewable energy operators are relying on cloud computing for critical services.
  (Energy working with renewables industry, cloud providers on cyber requirements - Federal News Network)
• The Department of Veterans Affairs is looking to keep aging and disabled vets living independently. The VA is looking at how smart-home technologies and wearables like smartwatches can flag when aging and disabled veterans are having a medical emergency in their homes. Joseph Ronzio, VA’s deputy chief health technology officer, said the department is also taking steps to ensure veterans have a say as to who gets this data, and how it may be used. “Everyone nowadays has some smartness in their home, whether it’s a speaker, whether it’s light switches, whether it’s different types of lights or other physical devices — cameras, motion detectors that leave a digital service," Ronzio said.
  (VA looking at ‘smart home’ tech to keep aging, disabled vets living independently - Federal News Network)
• The Army has taken over the role of the Combatant Command Support Agent for U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM). The Department of the Air Force has served in this role since 2017. The shift mainly happened because the primary location of CYBERCOM operations is at Fort Meade in Maryland, where the Army has a significant presence. About 350 Air Force civilian employees in U.S. Cyber Command became Army civilians as part of the reshuffle. The Army will now provide administrative and logistical support to CYBERCOM. Congress mandated the transition as part of the National Defense Authorization Act.
  (Army becomes combatant command support agent for CYBERCOM - U.S. Army)
• The Defense Department has signed a $248 million deal with Duke Energy to deliver solar power to five military bases in the Carolinas over the next 15 years. The power will come from two newly-built solar arrays in South Carolina, and DoD has agreed to buy all the electricity those facilities can generate. Defense officials said the project helps meet the government’s energy sustainability goals, and – in combination with on-base microgrids – makes the five bases more resilient against disruptions to off-site power supplies.
  (DoD Announces Two Solar Projects to Supply Five Military Installations in the Carolinas With Clean Energy - Department of Defense)
• Three more agencies are getting nearly $30 million to accelerate their IT modernization projects. The governmentwide Technology Modernization Fund is granting $17 million to the Energy Department to update its human resources IT systems. The fund is also backing a Bureau of Indian Education project to modernize school websites for tribal communities. The Federal Election Commission is also getting funding to improve online services for political campaign filers.
  (Technology Modernization Fund announces investments to modernize tribal school websites, campaign finance software, federal HR system - General Services Administration)
• The Department of Transportation (DOT) is drafting a new cybersecurity strategy. Transportation officials told the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that the agency will finalize the plan by September. GAO said DOT needs a strong cyber risk management plan to address threats to its data and systems. The congressional auditor is also urging Transportation officials to take a closer look at their cyber workforce needs.
  (Priority open recommendations for Transportation Department - Government Accountability Office )
• The Space Force’s first chief technology and innovation officer, Lisa Costa, has officially retired from federal service. At the Space Force, Costa was responsible for developing strategies and policies that advanced science and technology efforts across the service. She also spearheaded the Unified Data Library project, a repository that collects space situational awareness data from military and commercial sources. Prior to her current role, she served as the chief information officer at U.S. Special Operations Command. There is no information yet as to where Costa will be working next.
  (Space Force’s chief technology and innovation officer retires from government service - LinkedIn)

The post Teleworking DoD employees targeted by House spending bill first appeared on Federal News Network.

The VA is looking at how smart home technologies and wearables like smartwatches could flag when aging and disabled veterans are having a medical emergency.

Joseph Ronzio, VA’s deputy chief health technology officer, said the department is also taking steps to ensure veterans have a stay in who gets this data, and how it may be used.

“Everyone nowadays has some smartness in their home, whether it’s a speaker, whether it’s light switches, whether it’s different types of lights or other physical devices — cameras, motion detectors that leave a digital service,” Ronzio said during a Federal News Network-moderated panel discussion at ATARC’s DevSecOps Summit.

“Most of the time we’re not able to access that digital footprint because it’s kept in a cloud service or a cloud system, and that’s masking to us what’s going on,” he added. “We’ve been able to implement some technologies that have actually been able to unmask it, and then evaluate what is the best kind of healthy and then start detecting where there’s problems.”

This use case hits close to home for VA’s tech leadership. VA’s Chief Health Technology Officer Craig Luigart is a disabled veteran.

Ronzio said Luigart’s Apple Watch has saved his life “multiple times already,” by alerting family members when he’s experienced a medical emergency — and that the same technology can help veterans continue to live in their own homes.

“As we look more and more towards our veteran population who are aging in place and look at the need for skilled nursing beds and skilled nursing facilities over the long haul, or nursing homes, there’s definitely a need for this capability to be refined and developed,” Ronzio said.

The VA pays for disability modifications to veterans’ houses and provides veterans with accessible equipment.

“We are providing those sensors and those technologies. Now we just have to peel the onion on this and start building better algorithms to detect and share that data with caregivers – whether that’s a spouse, whether that’s a child, whether it’s a loved one, whether it’s a friend of the family,” Ronzio said.

As VA continues to develop this project, Ronzio said veterans get to decide who they wish to share data and alerts with, so that that person can support them.

“Everyone always talks about sending data to VA, but we are not ambulance crews, we’re not 9-1-1,” he said. “We need to interact with family members. Having this data available to the family, so that they can understand if that patient’s at a dehydration risk, [or] a fall risk, having mobility challenges, needs to go through advanced rehab — that they can live a happier and healthier life within their home, instead of being put off into a skilled nursing facility or even hospice at a time.”

Ronzio said veterans will always have a say in how their personal data is used.

“Having those data controls in place is tremendously important. From my perspective, I wouldn’t want all of my home data, all of my sleep data, all of my stuff, getting out there to anyone,” he said.

“As we talked about smart homes, my goal has always been to keep the data local to the person’s house. I don’t even want people sharing their data 100% with their medical staff. If you have a problem, we would be pushing out analytics that your devices can analyze your data with. And once you hit a tripwire or you hit a concern, you can select that you just want to share it with your loved ones,” he explained.

Meanwhile, the VA is setting up a Digital Health Office.

“This realignment is going to align a lot of virtual, a lot of AI, and a lot of technologies that typically had responsibilities in other places, into one area,” Ronzio said.

The creation of the Digital Health Office, he added, will impact the reporting structure of several hundred officials within the VA’s Central Office.

“It’s a major change to the organization. They’re moving a lot of different arms of VA under a Digital Health Officer. We have actings and interims in these positions right now for all the senior executives, so we’re still trying to figure out what this is really going to mean for the workforce,” Ronzio said.

VA’s Office of Information and Technology will remain its own separate entity, but Ronzio said the Digital Health Office will allow for greater collaboration with OIT.

“I’m hoping that we can actually improve the speed and efficiency of OIT’s processes to have secure systems rolled out. I’d anticipate that we can save some time just by having our internal communication. But if we can actually develop better relationships with OIT, this will have the potential to have dramatic results,” he said.

“Some of my projects in the past have taken two or three years to manifest. Now that we have access to people in our own organization and have more communication at the undersecretary level and above for digital health, this should actually speed up our iteration and speed up our ability to produce something,” he added.

The post VA looking at ‘smart home’ tech to keep aging, disabled vets living independently first appeared on Federal News Network.

National Guard Bureau Chief Gen. Daniel Hokanson, who is retiring in September, said sending Guardsmen to the U.S.-Mexico border does little to contribute to their military training, adds stress to their families and impacts the Defense Department’s long-term goals of building the “combat capable National Guard.”

“As I’ve expressed within the building as well, there is no military training value for what we do. This is a law enforcement mission under the Department of Homeland Security,” Hokanson said during the Senate Appropriations Committee budget hearing.

“I know that we’re providing additional support along there. But for our Guardsmen there, they might as well be deployed to Kuwait or somewhere overseas, because they’re away from their families. They’re doing mission sets that are not directly applicable to their military skill set and so it increases their personal operational tempo. And that time, I think, would be better utilized building readiness to deter our adversaries.” he said.

The National Guard  has been providing logistical support to DHS for the last seven years. Hokanson said there are currently 2,500 troops deployed at the Southwest border under Title 10, but the number of Guardsmen stationed there has gone up and down during the last seven years.

Lawmakers and some DoD officials have long expressed concerns over the Department of Homeland Security’s continuing reliance on the Defense Department to support its border-related operations, which is not part of the DoD’s mission set.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who approved the DHS’s request to extend the Pentagon’s border mission through September 2024 last year, said the Defense Department uses its operating budget to fund the deployment of National Guard troops to the border to support DHS’s operations.

“Of course that means that there’s something else that we’re not doing because of that support,” Austin said during a Senate Defense Appropriations budget hearing in May.

“The price tag spent is about $4 billion. But we are supporting the agency, and DHS is a lead agency — it’s important to our country and we’re going to do that.”

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who has criticized the White House’s border policies, pressed Defense Secretary Austin about DoD’s ongoing support of border operations and whether the administration should at all rely on the military to secure the border.

“I agree, [we should not]. But if we’re required to assist, certainly we will continue to do so,” Austin told lawmakers.

Despite the challenges the National Guard faces, including potential budget cuts in 2025, Hokanson said the Guard is still focused on operational readiness and building a force that is “manned, trained and equipped.”

“These are not insurmountable challenges, but they represent risks and vulnerabilities,” said Hokanson. “If we fail to modernize our equipment and force design adequately, we increase the risk of sending America’s sons and daughters into large-scale combat operations with equipment and formations that may not be fully interoperable with the active duty forces we serve alongside.”

The post Guard’s support of DHS adds no military value first appeared on Federal News Network.

The work is being led out of Energy’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER). It comes amid growing concerns about hackers infiltrating U.S. critical infrastructure, including the electric grid.

Puesh Kumar, the director of CESER, said “traditional large fossil generation” is often prohibited by regulations from using the cloud. But he said renewable energy providers are often starting out by relying on cloud computing.

“But really, we haven’t really sat down to define what are the security requirements? Who owns what part of the security picture? Is that the owner and operator? Or is it the cloud service provider?” Kumar said during a cybersecurity panel discussion hosted by Semafor in Washington on Tuesday.

“One of the big efforts that we’re going to be undertaking this year is really bringing together companies like [Google], to actually come together and establish those requirements for both sides, so that we can set up the energy sector of the future with that security built in,” Kumar added.

The CESER office is tasked with addressing emerging threats to energy infrastructure, including cyber risks, climate change and physical security. CESER is leading several initiatives to secure new energy technologies from cyber threats. Those programs are funded as part of the $27 billion Congress provided the Energy Department to modernize the electric grid in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

Kumar said the energy sector is going through “tremendous change” right now.

“We’re trying to combat the climate risk,” he said. “We’re trying to deploy more clean energy. We’re trying to deploy more renewables and electric vehicles and all that’s really great. And that can be a source of resilience in our energy sector in the United States. It can bring online more generation that hasn’t been online into our grid. But we also have to do that with security in mind. And so, as we’re fundamentally changing this grid, we have to ensure that security is baked into it.”

In addition to cyber threats targeting the electric grid, policymakers are also focusing more on the so-called “shared responsibility model” that lays out the cybersecurity responsibilities of cloud providers and their customers. The security responsibilities of cloud providers has come under particular scrutiny in the wake of China’s hack into Microsoft’s cloud email infrastructure last year.

Jeanette Manfra, global director for security and compliance at Google, argued large cloud providers can make security “cheaper and easier” for their customers. Manfra is a former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency official.

“There’s a huge opportunity to leverage that scale, and to drive cloud providers to increase that level of security and safety and reliability,” Manfra said during the Semafor event. “I do believe it is the responsibility of cloud providers, particularly the largest ones, who are increasingly serving more and more critical infrastructure sectors, to have that high bar of security and safety. But there’s also risk because you start to consolidate on just a few companies. And so you have to think about what does that mean, that concentration risk? You have to think from a policy perspective of how you both leverage that opportunity, while also managing that potential concentration risk.”

The post Energy working with renewables industry, cloud providers on cyber requirements first appeared on Federal News Network.

OPM’s initiatives over the last couple years, such as banning the consideration of salary history, creating a job portal for internship openings, and broadening eligibility for paid internships through the Pathways Program, all aim to open the doors to more candidates and make the hiring process more equitable.

Even though the larger impacts of those changes are likely still further down the road, OPM Acting Director Rob Shriver said signs are pointing in the right direction, especially for OPM’s efforts centered on improving recruitment and retention of younger employees.

“I do think what we’re seeing is a renewed and increased interest in federal job opportunities by early-career talent,” Shriver told Federal News Network Tuesday during an event for federal interns hosted at OPM’s headquarters office.

Tuesday’s event was part of OPM’s intern experience program, now in its second year, which offers resources and hosts events for federal interns interested in pursuing a career in public service. The program aims to support early-career federal recruitment and retention overall. It’s also a step toward revitalizing the federal internship program, which has struggled for years.

Early-career numbers appear to be trending in a positive direction. Data from the Office of Management and Budget shows that between fiscal 2022 and 2023, the number of federal interns increased by 33%. There’s also been a recent uptick in the number of federal employees under age 30.

As part of the intern experience program, OPM hosted a panel Tuesday with senior leaders from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, Department of Health and Human Services and Small Business Administration. Dozens of federal interns attended the event in person, with many more joining virtually to listen to the conversation.

“Events like these I think really help foster that engagement, that cohort spirit,” Shriver said after the panel.

Altering the Pathways Program

In another push toward better early-career recruitment, OPM is also now focused on helping agencies update their internal use of the Pathways Program, after finalizing new regulations in April. The recent updates to Pathways aim open the doors to more diverse applicants and alleviate some challenges agencies have historically had with the program.

The Pathways Program changes will still take a while to fully get off the ground, but Shriver said OPM is already working with agency HR offices as they iron out some of the early wrinkles to adjust their agency-specific programs and align with the new regulations.

“There’s a lot of stuff in there that is new for them to figure out, including the types of programs that now qualify — not only community colleges, but technical skills programs,” Shriver said. “Also the fact that now there’s a streamlined pathway to entry for registered apprentices, for people who participated in Job Corps, or [AmeriCorps] VISTA volunteers. [We are] making sure that not only central HR, but HR out in the field, are understanding these new flexibilities.”

That work to help HR offices and other Pathways Program leaders at agencies also involves collaborating with chief human capital officers, hosting informational webinars and educating colleges about the opportunities now possible for a broader swath of candidates, Shriver said. Additionally, OPM is working with agency HR departments to participate in job fairs, reach out to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and meet face to face with potential federal talent.

Just this week, OPM also met with other agencies to discuss its program, “Level Up to Public Service,” which focuses on expanding awareness around public service careers through partnerships with K-12 institutions and universities. The program particularly targets recruitment of individuals with disabilities who may be interested in pursuing federal employment.

“We’re getting a lot of really engaged people that are considering the federal government for a career. They’re asking smart questions, they’re navigating the hiring process, and so I think that our efforts to reach out and engage early-career talent are paying off,” Shriver said. “It’s just a matter of time, with these new tools that we put in place, before we’re going to start seeing that impact.”

Agency-specific targets for early-career talent

Senior leaders like Sara Bronin, chairwoman of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, said early-career employees and interns often bring new and different ideas to her agency.

“The nature of people in preservation is that we always want to keep things the way they are — that’s in some ways the definition of preservation,” Bronin told Federal News Network at OPM’s event Tuesday. “But a field like ours needs fresh perspectives.”

Because of the desire for those broader perspectives, Bronin said her office focuses significantly on early-career talent in both recruitment and development.

“I really try to help interns and early-career professionals understand the big picture, why we are doing something and what their specific contributions can add to that effort,” she said. “For managers, it’s really important to provide the context to arm interns and early-career professionals with information and to connect them with others in the field who can help enhance their understanding of what they’re doing — not just in the internship, but in how they might approach work beyond just their specific internship.”

Additionally, the Environmental Protection Agency is aiming to double their number of federal interns by the end of this summer, according to Performance.gov.

Kimberly Patrick, EPA’s principal deputy assistant administrator for mission support, said while the agency is expanding its onboarding process to offer a full year of resources to new employees, that onboarding will also extend to all of the agency’s interns.

“We want to make this place as attractive as possible for our interns, so caring for them as well, as a part of that umbrella, is something that we’re looking to do, especially as we increased considerably the number of paid interns we’re having at the agency this year,” Patrick said at a June 6 GovExec event.

Alongside managing the intern experience program and other early-career talent efforts, OPM is also planning to create a governmentwide mentoring program for interns in the coming months.

“We talk about it a whole lot — how can we make the government a more attractive employer? What are the obstacles to bringing in early-career talent? And how can we be more competitive as agencies with the other opportunities that you all have?” Shriver said to the interns who attended OPM’s panel Tuesday. “We want to make sure you hear that message from us loud and clear.”

The post Early-career federal job openings seeing ‘renewed and increased’ interest, OPM’s Shriver says first appeared on Federal News Network.

Complaints are coming from contractors on the General Services Administration’s multiple-award schedule. They say contracting officers are trying to re-negotiate finished contracts and making unreasonable demands for information. For more, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin talked with federal sales and marketing consultant Larry Allen.

Interview transcript 

Tom Temin  And you have found that this is mainly happening in the information technology part of the Unified Schedules program.

Larry Allen That’s right. And at the outset, you know, I’ve worked on the GSA Schedules program for well over 30 years. And we certainly have seen things ebb and flow over that time. But recently, the level of industry discussion on problems, particularly with the IT schedule, has been pointing up close to an all-time high. And it’s time to get these issues out in front of people… get a little disinfecting sunshine on them, if you will, so that we have a program that works better not just for contractors, but for government customers.

Tom Temin Well, what is happening? What are contracting officers actually doing, that the contractors are complaining about?

Larry Allen  They’re doing several things. I think one of the most notable things, Tom, is that there seems to be no end to the amount of data that contracting officers feel that they are entitled to. Papering the record, just one more set of transactional data, and you know, all of that data…everything a contractor submits, it has to be accurate, current and complete. And the more you’re asked to submit, the more, you’ve got to keep track of everything and make sure you’re meeting that standard. And if you’re not, then you are setting yourself up for some future potential audit problems, not to mention the paperwork that you’re having to provide in an endless stream of requests that come. One of the other things that’s happening is — and you alluded to it in the setup — and that is (for) contracts that are already in place, GSA has already negotiated it, the contracting officer has found that to be a fair and reasonable price. Six months (or) a year later, a company comes in and asks for a contract modification. And the contracting officer now uses that as an occasion to reopen negotiations on everything and say, ‘Well, wait a minute, that maybe wasn’t a fair and reasonable price.’ And the contractor is left saying, ‘Well, wait a minute, this is how I’ve been selling. I’ve been doing this for the last year, people enjoy doing business with me this way.’ You know, there’s only so much blood in the turnip that you can give. And that’s an issue too. I think one of the things that every contractor ought to be concerned about as well, Tom is contracting officers asking companies who have their contract set up through GSA’s Transactional Data Reporting pilot, for contractor-based sales information. That’s not supposed to happen at all. And it’s a real danger for me, I think, look, when TDR was set up, I put a blackbox warning out on it on exactly this issue. And since then, things have you know, mitigated a little bit where TDR has proven to be a viable pathway for companies who can’t use the traditional method to get on scheduled. But if we’re getting into a situation where there’s no standard for what constitutes enough data, or how much data because there’s not supposed to be any data in the first place, that is a moment that every TDR contractor should wake up and say, ‘Stop. What’s going on here?’

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Larry Allen, president of Allen Federal Business Partners. I mean, there are legal restrictions on what the government can ask for — correct? — in what are basically totally commercial products. This is not cost plus contracts or development contracts, but simply commercial items available widely.

Larry Allen Right. And I think this is one of the disconnects, Tom. First of all, the Paperwork Reduction Act is a rule that even the schedules program has to adhere to, where the government is only supposed to make reasonable data requests. And in fact, GSA has to go out every so often, and renew its authority to collect data from contractors. Usually, that type of request is rubber stamped at the FAR Council. But right now, I don’t think it should be. It seems like if it just sales through the rulemaking process, then the idea is that whatever we’re asking for is fine, and we’re not asking for anything more than we should be. And that’s manifestly not the case. Ironically, we’re talking about this at a time when GSA is trying to be pro-environment, but there are a lot of trees that are losing their lives to provide the paperwork, the contracting officers want. Are you aware that GSA management is aware of this? And maybe we’ll do something to mitigate it… get some word out to their CEOs? Tom, I think they weren’t aware of it before this, but they’re aware of it now. I know that the schedules program management office is aware of these issues. They’ve already indicated that they want to have discussions with the contracting officer management team at the IT part of GSA. I think that’s a good idea. But I do think it’s going to take some senior level intervention here to say, ‘Hey, look, this program worked best when it’s a partnership. When contractors and GSA work together to serve our common federal customer. This is not a program that works well of contractors have a target on their back.’  And just because you’re doing $20 billions a year today through this program, from the IT schedule doesn’t mean that thus now and forevermore, it shall be. One need look no further, Tom, than the Oasis Plus Program and the fact that Oasis overtook the GSA professional services schedule in terms of sales a couple of years ago. So you can actually kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

Tom Temin All right, well, we’ll keep an eye on that one and see what develops. Especially as you say, there’s a lot of G wax around that people can use alternatively to the to the schedules. Also your reporting that whistleblower lawsuits are reaching companies in greater frequency, especially to help enforce the cybersecurity regime.

Larry Allen That’s right, Tom, we’d forecast when all the cybersecurity rules started coming down, that the primary way that they would be enforced would be through whistleblower cases. And we’re just starting now to get some evidence that that’s actually what’s playing out. We had a whistleblower, this time, blowing the whistle against SAIC alleging that on one of their government contracts, they didn’t fulfill all the cybersecurity duties they were supposed to adhere to. We don’t know whether that’s true or not. But what we can say is that once the allegations were made, the contractor in this case acted in a way that is probably not a best practice. You don’t solely isolate the employee, you don’t take away their rights, you don’t fire them for blowing the whistle. There are FAR rules on that type of stuff. And you can actually make the situation worse for yourself. Because now instead of just having to defend against the cybersecurity allegations, you’ve got a retaliation suit that you’re gonna have to settle as well. So it’s just really full employment for your legal staff.

Tom Temin Yeah. So, what’s your best advice for companies then, besides making sure the cyber procedures are in place that are required to start with?

Larry Allen Well, I think at a basic level, if you have whistle — every company has, on paper anyway, whistleblower protections. Those whistleblower protections actually have to be operational. It’s nice to have them on a piece of paper, it’s nice to have them in a policy document, but they actually have to be lived. And don’t fear the people who blow the whistle. Look if, at a minimum, if you’d listened to the whistleblower in this case, you would have an opportunity to know whether or not the allegations were valid or not. Now you’ve got lawyers involved and the Department of Justice, it’s going to cost you a lot of money, it’s probably going to cost at least one person, their job in the company. And you didn’t need to do it. So, my advice is to relax, work through it, follow the rules that you’re supposed to follow. They’re there for a reason. And they can actually save you some time and aggravation.

Tom Temin I guess that’s our theme today. Stay within your guidelines and your lanes of travel, whether you’re government or industry.

Larry Allen I think that’s a good takeaway. These things exist for a reason and they help make sure that we have a good government market. And that’s really what the outline is. We want to be able to have the business of government run smoothly.

The post GSA contracting officers are driving schedule holders crazy first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Treasury Department announced Tuesday that Oregon will opt into Direct File next year, and expects other states will also do so ahead of the next filing season.

The IRS announced last week it will make its Direct File platform a permanent option for taxpayers to file their federal tax returns, after piloting the system this year with 12 states.

More than 140,000 taxpayers used the platform to file federal tax returns this year — exceeding the IRS’ goal of 100,000 users. About 19 million taxpayers living in those 12 states were eligible to use Direct File this year.

The Treasury Department expects at least 580,000 Oregon residents will be eligible to use the free online filing tool next filing season.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) told reporters that Direct File will give taxpayers more options to file their taxes.

“Direct File is long overdue. It’s the kind of public service the government ought to be providing to Americans and Oregonians whenever they can,” Wyden said in a call Tuesday.

At a committee hearing at the end of this year’s filing season, Wyden praised the IRS for creating a free website that allows taxpayers to file their federal tax returns.

“The website was user-friendly, quick and easy to use. I went out and talked to some of those people who used it, and that was the answer that I got,” he said. “It didn’t hassle users with up charges for add-on services they didn’t need. It got overwhelmingly positive reviews. With Direct File, I believe the IRS has built a good tool that people are going to like, because it saves time, headaches and money.”

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement that expanding Direct File will help taxpayers save time and money, “and ensure they receive the tax benefits they are owed.

“After a successful pilot this Filing Season, we are pleased to expand the program as a permanent offering and welcome Oregon as the first new state to offer this free new option to taxpayers,” Yellen said.

The IRS is adding more states to Direct File as House Republicans propose defunding the program.

The House Appropriations Committee released a fiscal 2025 spending bill earlier this month week that would cut IRS funding by nearly 18% and zero out funding for Direct File.

The full committee advanced the bill last week, and awaits a House floor vote.

Wyden told reporters he’ll “fight with everything I’ve got to protect Direct File.”

“If Republicans in the Congress have the opportunity, they are going to put an end to it,” he said.

Congressional Republicans have called Direct File wasteful and duplicative, since some tax software companies already allow taxpayers below a certain income threshold to file online for free through the Free File Alliance program. 

The IRS and U.S. Digital Service spent a combined $31.8 million to launch the Direct File pilot.

However, Wyden said taxpayers deserve more options in how they choose to file.

Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, no longer participates in the IRS Free File program. But Intuit notified some taxpayers in Oregon that its TurboTax software might not have selected the best deduction option, resulting in a possible overpayment to the state.

The state of Oregon says this issue affects about 12,000 of its residents.

“It was another example of how the big software companies have been upcharging for products that aren’t that great to begin with,” Wyden said.

States that opt into Direct File have options in how they participate.

During the Direct File pilot, taxpayers in Arizona, Massachusetts, New York, and California were directed to a state-run tool to complete their state tax returns, after they filed their federal tax returns.

Taxpayers in Arizona, Massachusetts, and New York were also able to import their information from Direct File directly into the state-run platform, making it faster to file their state tax returns.

“Moving from Direct File to the state tool went very smoothly. Taxpayers were able to bring their information with them. It was able to prepopulate a lot of the information needed for a state tax return. And then taxpayers had to answer just a couple of additional state-specific questions to complete the filing of their state return,” an administration official told reporters.

The IRS limited participation in this year’s  Direct File pilot to taxpayers only reporting certain income types, such as wages on a Form W-2, and tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit.

“Over the next few years, the goal is that direct files eligibility is expanded to cover the most common tax situations, especially those that affect working families,” another administration official told reporters.

The post IRS adds another state to Direct File, as House Republicans seek to defund it first appeared on Federal News Network.