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Coast Guard’s Robert E. Day Jr. on budget challenges

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5K3BQQaU00&feature=youtu.be
Rear Adm. Robert E. Day, Jr., assistant commandant for C4IT and director at Cyber Command, U.S. Coast Guard, discusses with FedScoopTV what he’s working on.

Excerpt:

I work on a smorgasbord – I wear three hats: I’m the CIO at the Coast Guard, I’m the director of the Coast Guard Cyber Command, and I’m also responsible for all the electronics. Big thing in this day and age is obviously cybersecurity; it’s the buzz everywhere. Mobility is humongous as well. Then there’s the budget working against us right now, and it’s going to slow down some of the modernization of some of the systems we have out there. It’s balancing all of these challenges and balancing the workforce, so I’ve got plenty to do. But at the same time, I wake up every morning after almost 34 years of service and I look forward to getting to work each and every day. It’s a good challenge, and say ‘there’s plenty to do.’

FedWire: Happy Tax Day

FedScoop’s afternoon roundup of news and notes from the federal IT community.

Happy Tax Day!

OK, so maybe a Not-So-Happy Tax Day as no one enjoys sending in their federal income tax unless, of course, there is a huge return coming your way. Hopefully, you are one of those people and if not, well, here is hoping you at least survived the day with enough quarters to get something off the McDonald’s dollar menu on the drive home.

Speaking of taxes, if you ever wondered where that money goes, the White House has a nifty tool to let you know how your money is being spent with its 2012 Federal Taxpayer Receipt.

Links

Joe Biden thanks CIA service members.

New Interior Secretary Sally Jewell is on Twitter.

Speaking of Sally Jewell.

Op-ed on the budget from OMB Acting Director Jeff Zients.

Bio-inspired flight for micro air vehicles.

Military information on flying objects.

“Every dollar counts.”

GAO: the federal government’s long-term fiscal outlook.

Cyber tops intel community’s 2013 global threat assessment.

The FedOSS podcast.

Video

Send your FedWire tips to tips@fedscoop.com.

FedOSS: Open Source for America looks to the future

2013_03_fedossFedScoop’s Luke Fretwell and Red Hat U.S. Public Sector Chief Technology Strategist Gunnar Hellekson discuss the latest in federal government open source software.

In this episode:

Intel, industry leaders to team with NIST

Intel will join the National Institute of Standards and Technology and fellow industry leaders April 15 for the launch of a new collaboration to advance the development of security technologies.

The announcement will come at the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence and include appearances by Patrick Gallagher, undersecretary at the Commerce Department and NIST director; Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley; and Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.).

Intel will provide industry expertise to a highly collaborative technical environment and most importantly, a two-way security-learning environment for public institutions and private industry to address the complex issues in cybersecurity.

Register for the event.

‘What are you working on?’ with Dr. Michael Valivullah

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9P6Dum9EhA&feature=youtu.be
Michael Valivullah, chief technology officer, National Agricultural Statistics Service, Agriculture Department, discusses what he’s working on in this interview with FedScoopTV.

Excerpt:

I have a few priorities that I’m focusing on right now. What we’re trying to do is trying to come up with an enterprise-level of identity access control and role-based management, and we don’t have a single sign-on at this point. We have so many databases and applications that we need to provide access to. So we’re trying to integrate all those things where people need to remember one, the user name and the password, just like a single sign-on to make people’s lives a lot easier.

Army agrees with DOD IG report on mobility

The U.S. Army Chief Information Officer’s office said Wednesday the department agrees with the recently released Defense Department inspector general’s report that two Army organizations failed to follow proper mobile procedures.

Margaret McBride, an Army spokeswoman, wrote April 10 the U.S. Military Academy and the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, who were cited in the IG report, “did not follow policies for tracking and configuring mobile devices using the Android, Apple iOS and Windows operating systems” between October 2010 and May 2012.

The Army said both organizations have made efforts to remedy the issues indicated in the report and highlighted a number of policies enacted since to prevent similar occurrences in the future.

“This year, the Army has published additional policies that help ensure oversight of all IT equipment, security and spending, to include commercial mobile devices,” said Lt. Gen. Susan Lawrence, the Army chief information officer.

On Feb. 1, the Army published new requirements to enforce information assurance, cybersecurity and to improve commander accountability. McBride said Army commanders must assess their IA posture and weaknesses via Army assessment tools, and develop a plan of action within five months.

She added that during a planned Armywide IA/cybersecurity awareness week this fall, commanders will train and teach their program to everyone in their command.

Lawrence said the Army continues to work with DOD to put in place systems allowing visibility and management of all commercial mobile devices and applications that connect to the DOD and Army network.

DOD: Intel budget at $14.6 billion

The Defense Department’s Military Intelligence Program budget request for the coming fiscal year will be $14.6 billion.

The Pentagon does not release any further budget figures or program details as they remain classified for national security reasons.

A 2014 fiscal year Overseas Contingency Operations funding request for the MIP will be submitted at a later date, the Pentagon said.

The MIP budget for FY 2013 was 19.2 billion, but that number includes overseas contingency operations. The MIP budget peaked in FY 2010 at $27 billion, which also includes overseas contingency operations.

News and notes: ACT-IAC Small Business Conference

2013_04_joejordan Office of Federal Procurement Policy Administrator Joseph Jordan (Photo: David Stegon/FedScoop)

FedScoop’s Kathryn Sadasivan co-wrote this article.

The White House Small Business Procurement Group is pushing to make senior leaders in the federal government more accountable for the small-business contracting goals set forth by the Small Business Administration.

John Shoraka, associate administrator of government contracting and business development at SBA, said Thursday program managers need to put more importance on the agency’s small-business requirements – something that occasionally gets overlooked in the pressure to get a mission completed despite the best efforts of an agency’s small-business head or director of procurement.

Shoraka said some agencies, including the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, have taken the message to heart by including small-business success as a metric in program managers’ reviews.

“What we’ve been able to do is get a dialogue started that small business is important,” Shoraka said at the ACT-IAC 2013 Small Business Conference held at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C. “Will we see an immediate impact? It will take time, but we believe it will make a significant difference.”

Shoraka also said under the recently enacted Small Business Act, the federal government is looking to expand the contractor mentor-protégé initiative beyond just the 8(a) set-aside program.

A draft will be released this summer for agency review calling to add the mentor-protégé program to the women-owned set aside, HUBzone and veteran-owned business that qualify, he said.

The SBA Mentor-Protégé Program is designed to encourage approved mentors to provide various forms of assistance to eligible business such as technical and management assistance or financial assistance.

Update from the White House

Joe Jordan, administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy at the Office of Management and Budget, said President Barack Obama’s budget proposal for the 2014 fiscal year includes a $4 million provision for SBA to hire 32 new procurement center representatives who will work strategically across the federal government to increase the share of procurement awards allotted to small businesses.

The budget is an articulation of the president’s priorities, namely small-business visibility and entrepreneurship, Jordan said. Despite an overall decrease in the SBA budget allocation, the administration committed the additional $4 million to facilitate increased collaboration between SBA, small businesses and federal agencies.

Jordan challenged small businesses to view this time of fiscal austerity as an opportunity to gain visibility within the federal government, to work collaboratively and in concert with other small businesses to demonstrate the value of small-business entrepreneurship, save the federal government money and encourage public-private partnerships.

“We are really challenging agencies to think in a new way, eliminate inefficiencies, collaborate with their CIO colleagues … acquisition is not just a small niche function,” Jordan said.

Jordan said his top procurement priorities are buying smarter, building the right supplier relationships and developing the acquisition workforce. In buying smarter, he hopes to increase the use of data analytics to drive better decision-making and better outcomes at lower prices. Jordan encouraged government agencies to be diligent in filling out past performance reports for small-business contractors to build the right supplier relationships.

Improving the recruiting, development and retention is critical to the development of the acquisition workforce. “It’s in every taxpayer’s interest to have a vibrant, intelligent, robust contracting officer workforce,” Jordan said.

Plague of small business

A number of industry representatives said small businesses without a set-aside are struggling to find work as they are not eligible for set-aside contracts and thus, have trouble partnering with larger firms. Their options, one industry executive said, are to compete head-to-head with larger businesses or look for small-business opportunities not given directly to set-asides.

Susan Truslow, procurement policy analyst at OMB, disagreed with that assessment, saying for certain procurements federal agencies must use a small-business vendor if two or more small businesses demonstrate the capability of doing the work.

By the numbers: the federal IT budget

2013_04_svr U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel

Budgets feature numbers. Lots of them, especially when it comes to the federal government’s 2014 fiscal year budget President Barack Obama released Wednesday. To help make sense of it for the federal information technology community, FedScoop pulled out some numbers key to the government’s spend on all things IT.

$81,996,000: The requested IT budget for the federal government, a 2.7 percent increase over the previous year.

$42.4 billion: The requested IT budget for the major civilian agencies.

$39.6 billion: The requested IT budget for the Defense Department.

7.09 percent: The Compound Annual Growth Rate of the federal IT budget from fiscal year 2001 to fiscal year 2009.

0.78 percent: The Compound Annual Growth Rate of the federal IT budget from FY 2009 to FY 2014.

$722 million: The amount the Veterans Affairs Department’s IT budget increased from FY 2013 to FY 2014, the largest spike in the federal government at 22.1 percent.

$96 million: The amount the Justice Department’s IT budget decreased from FY 2013 to FY 2014, the largest decline in the federal government in terms of total dollars.

$2.5 billion: The amount the FY 2012 PortfolioStat initiative identified in agency savings targets covering FY 2013 and FY 2015 through the consolidation and elimination of low-value IT investments.

$13 billion: The amount dedicated to cyber-related programs and activities, with one of the biggest projects including more than $300 million in new funding for the Department of Homeland Security to support continuous monitoring of federal networks and better prevention against computer intrusions.

FedPod: VanRoekel discusses FY14 IT budget request

U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel gives an IT brief on the fiscal year 2014 budget request.

Federal Information Technology FY 2014 Budget Priorities by FedScoop