Energy Department’s CIO office is here to ‘feed’ the Genesis Mission team

As the Department of Energy continues working on its Genesis Mission aspirations, the agency’s Office of the CIO is acting as a propellant, according to DOE’s top technology official. 

The Genesis Mission has commanded much of the Energy Department’s attention with its role at the helm of the Trump administration’s flagship technology project. The goals are lofty, the timelines are tight and the pressure is high. The to-do list includes standing up supercomputers, doubling the productivity of the country’s research-and-development budget and launching a platform combining quantum, high-performance computing and AI advancements. 

While most of the day-to-day work is being done by national laboratories and the Office of Science, the Energy Department’s OCIO plays a supporting, yet significant, role behind the scenes.

“We feed the Genesis team,” DOE CIO Dawn Zimmer told FedScoop, pointing to her team’s efforts to supercharge workforce enablement tools. 

One of the prized OCIO-built tools is Joulix, which acts as a front-end portal to a suite of AI tools, including EnergyGPT. The OCIO team also operates and distributes an AI-powered data analysis tool, called Quanta. Together these tools have cleared the way for speedier operations.

“We’re helping them sort through a large [request for application] process,” Zimmer said.

In March, DOE began taking applications for interdisciplinary teams that can address challenges at the core of the Genesis Mission. The RFA was accompanied by a $293 million funding opportunity for applicants. 

More than 8,000 responses flooded in, representing a total nearly three times as much as the next highest recorded RFA response, according to the technology official. 

“Our workforce tools are helping them organize and sort and find trends,” Zimmer said. Quanta assisted the Genesis Mission team in putting data in a uniform format and identifying duplications, saving a week to two week’s worth of work. 

“I always look at us like the little foundation over here, just kind of helping everyone get their job done and giving them as many tools as we can,” Zimmer added. 

The agency’s chief AI officer echoed the sentiment. 

“The OCIO’s role is the backbone, making sure we have the tools that can go accomplish these missions,” Conner Prochaska, DOE CAIO and director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, told FedScoop. “It’s great to talk about them, but if you don’t have the tools to enable it, then we’re kind of stuck.” 

Without help from Quanta and Joulix, Prochaska said the Genesis Mission team might still be combing through heaps of applications. Instead, DOE is preparing to announce the selected awardees later this month at an inaugural Genesis Mission Summit in Washington, D.C.

“It’s a good problem that couldn’t have been solved without the tools that Dawn’s team is providing everybody,” Prochaska said. “If we were just doing it the traditional way — the way we did it, say, five years ago — it couldn’t be done.”

A rising tide 

The Genesis Mission kicked off in November as the Department of Energy was already sharpening its AI focus. The initiative has underlined the need for better skills, and the agency anticipates Tech Force candidates could soon be tapped to help support the project.

Tech Force is an Office of Personnel Management-led hiring sprint aimed at filling technology hiring gaps across federal agencies, including DOE. 

“We’ve seen some really robust resumes with lots of AI capabilities,” Zimmer said. “We will take as many as we can afford to take on.”

Even as the Genesis Mission pulls focus toward AI, the CIO office is still working to maintain its other priorities, from infrastructure upgrades to cybersecurity enhancements. 

“This has been an unprecedented effort, as far as coordination and putting everything together,” Prochaska said. “Because of that, I think it’s expedited projects. But it hasn’t really moved any priorities away; it’s moved them faster.”

Secondary benefits are bound to come from the focus on innovation, the two officials said. 

“There’s tools that Dawn and OCIO are bringing on board that now other offices are going to benefit from,” Prochaska said. “That may not have been the case if we didn’t have this thrust from Genesis Mission.”

Amid the need for speed, governance is still top of mind for the CIO and CAIO. 

“We’ve got policies, procedures, rules in place that we’ve had for decades,” Prochaska said. “Those don’t bend. We don’t go around those just for the sake of speed. Yes, we want to move fast, but we’ve got a priority and a responsibility to the American people.”