Obama officially calls on Congress to avoid sequestration

President Obama formally asked Congress to come up with tens of billions of dollars in short-term spending cuts to avoid sequestration, which is scheduled to take effect March 1 unless a budget agreement is reached.

In an announcement at the White House, Obama asked Congress for a targeted way to reduce the federal deficit over the next couple of months in order to give Congress more time to work out a 10-year plan that would cut more than $1 trillion in deficit reductions.

“If Congress can’t act immediately on a bigger package … by the time sequester should take effect, they should at least pass a smaller package to delay the equally damaging effects of sequester until they find a smarter solution,” Obama said.

If Congress is able to find deficit reductions up to $85 billion, that would put off sequestration until the start of the next federal fiscal year.

If sequestration takes place, it would reduce the Pentagon’s budget by seven percent and federal domestic programs by five percent. It would also result in the furloughs of defense civilian employees and economists have warned the cuts could send the country into another recession.

Obama said the country should not be forced to face the economic issues associated with sequestration because “some people can’t get along.”

“President Obama first proposed the sequester and insisted it become law,” Republican Speaker John Boehner said in a released statement when news of Obama’s intended announcement broke. “Republicans have twice voted to replace these arbitrary cuts with common sense cuts and reforms that protect our national defense.”

He continued, “We believe there is a better way to reduce the deficit, but Americans do not support sacrificing real spending cuts for more tax hikes. The president’s sequester should be replaced with spending cuts and reforms that will start us on the path to balancing the budget in 10 years.”

‘We the People’ 2.0 to include APIs

The White House has started work on version 2.0 of its online petition site “We the People” and is inviting a small group of programmers to Washington, D.C., for a hackathon on Feb. 22.

White House Deputy Director of Online Platform Peter Welsch wrote on the White House blog that Petitions 1.0, the code “We the People” runs on is complete, opening the door for the second version.

“In software development, when you go from one version number to another it means that something big is going on,” Welsch wrote. “We’re taking a new approach to how the application works, one that starts with the assumption that it should be as open, transparent, and flexible as possible.”

Welsch said Petitions 2.0 will be based on an application programming interface or API that will be released to the public in a few months.

The first set of methods – the Read API – will be released in March and will allow anyone to retrieve data on petitions, signatures and responses.

A second set of methods, the Write API, will be released later and will allow other websites and applications to collect and submit signatures without directly sending users to WhiteHouse.gov.

“With this API in place we’ll be able to decouple the presentation and data layers of the application and build a new, streamlined signature process,” Welsch said. “This also means that developers who reuse our code will be able to choose which database the application relies on. Between that and our continued work on a white label theme, Petitions 2.0 will be easier for others to contribute to and reuse.”

To help with the API, the White House will host an Open Data Day Hackathon. Prior to the event the White House will give participants access to the “We the People” Read API methods so they can use them, ask questions, provide feedback and “build cool stuff,” writes Welsch.

For the hackathon, participants will come to the White House to share their work, talk with the API developers and submit examples to be included in a software development kit.

White House launches second round of innovation fellowships

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2de-8NXBNE&feature=em-uploademail

New year. New fellows. New projects.

The White House is accepting applications for the second round of Presidential Innovation Fellows who will work on projects centering on disaster recovery, cybersecurity, financial systems and innovation, along with continuing the open data projects of the initial fellows.

“We are looking for incredibly talented, entrepreneurial people from a diverse array of backgrounds and with a wide range of experiences,” U.S. Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel and Chief Technology Officer Todd Park wrote in a blog post on WhiteHouse.gov.

They continued, “Many of the Fellowship roles require coding and other tech skills, but not all do. We are also looking for gifted and accomplished change agents with skills in user experience design, product management, project management, business development, operations reengineering, and more.  In a nutshell, we are looking for people who can help make big things happen rapidly to advance the public good.”

The Presidential Innovation Fellows program launched last year and recruited top innovators and entrepreneurs from the private sector for six to 12 month fellowships in government.

The new projects are as follow:

• Disaster Response and Recovery will collaboratively build and “pre-position” critical tech tools ahead of future emergencies or natural disasters in order to mitigate economic damage and save lives.
• Cyber-Physical Systems will work with government and industry to create standards for a new generation of inter operable, dynamic, and efficient “smart systems”—an “industrial Internet”—that combines distributed sensing, control, and data analytics to help grow the economy and new high-value American jobs.
• 21st Century Financial Systems will work to move the financial accounting systems of Federal agencies out of the era of large-scale, agency-specific implementations to one that favors more nimble, modular, scalable, and cost-effective approaches.
• Innovation Toolkit will develop a suite of tools that empowers our Federal workforce to respond to national priorities more quickly and more efficiently.
• Development Innovation Ventures will help enable the US government to identify, test, and scale breakthrough solutions to the world’s toughest problems.

Apply here.

FedPod: National Day of Civic Hacking

[audio:https://fedscoop.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2013_02_Civic-Hack-Day.mp3|titles=National Day of Civic Hacking]

NASA’s Open Innovation team members Ali Llewellyn and Nick Skytland discuss the National Day of Civic Hacking, a weekend-long event, schedule for June 1-2, 2013, that will be held in cities across the United States.

The event aims to bring together citizens, software developers and entrepreneurs from all over the nation to collaboratively create, build, and invent new solutions using publicly-released data, code and technology to solve challenges relevant to our neighborhoods, our cities, our states and our country.

Government/Industry Collaboration Delivers Improved Levels of Security, Performance, and Cost Savings for Mission-Critical Applications (WHITE PAPER)

The Air Force Research Laboratory released a white paper on its SecureView collaboration with Intel and Citrix. The paper was written by the AFRL Information Directorate’s Dr. Ryan J. Durante and John C. Woodruff.

From the paper:

Client strategies for the U.S. Government must be affordable and readily deployable while meeting the most stringent requirements for data security and operational efficiency.  At the request of a customer, AFRL engaged with Intel and Citrix to create SecureView, a solution that expands on capabilities in Citrix XenClient* and 2nd- and 3rd-generation Intel® Core™ i5 and i7 vPro™ processors to meet these requirements.

SecureView, which has been deployed at more than a dozen federal agencies, is less vulnerable to modification or corruption than traditional software-based security solutions. It also provides high performance for mission-critical collaboration and saves the government tens of millions of dollars in total cost of ownership (TCO) for every 10,000 users to which it is deployed.

White paper

Read the case study and download the white paper here:

Government/Industry Collaboration Delivers Improved Levels of Security, Performance, and Cost Savings for M… by FedScoop

From the ground up, Kingsberry leads RATB IT

Since its inception in 2009, the Recovery Act and Transparency Board has become one of the federal government’s swiftest moving agencies, especially when it comes to information technology.

In an interview with FedScoop, Shawn Kingsberry, the agency’s chief information officer and one of the RATB’s first employees, said the agency took a unique approach to implementing new IT systems: It wrote a white paper to help itself gather the proper information before jumping in.

“We interviewed people that had already migrated their email and collaboration solutions to the cloud to get their perspective,” Kingsberry said. “We wanted the positives, the challenges they faced, the risks and also to learn the true cost of implementing a system like that.”

In total, Kingsberry and his team interviewed about 30 people – a mix of both government and industry – to create the white paper and also give them a view of what they wanted RATB’s system to look like.

Kingsberry decided on having RATB build its own cloud hub, where the agency could act as its own cloud broker. The agency also used its own security stack that addresses the agency’s security concerns.

Ultimately, RATB went with Microsoft’s Office 365, becoming the first federal agency to jump in the company’s government cloud, mostly because Microsoft’s model worked well with the RATB’s cloud brokering system.

“We really moved fast with our implementation,” Kingsberry said. “We thought about it and did a lot of planning for two months, but then the transition only took weeks.”

One of the key parts of move, Kingsberry said, was minimal impact on the agency’s customers – something his team was able to achieve.

Quick transitions, though, are nothing new to Kingsberry and the RATB. He was called upon to join the board after 17 years as the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, originally as CTO.

“We had a lot of things to do in a short matter of time, but we also had a motivated group of type A personalities that were driven to get it done,” Kingsberry said.

One of his first jobs was to meet with the owners of the different financial reporting systems within the federal government to see if they could be used to feed the information into recovery.gov.

Kingsberry quickly learned that would be too big a challenge, so it necessitated the board stand up federalreporting.gov for agencies to report their figures into.

All of it was a whirlwind few months for Kingsberry. The board was working out of the library at the U.S. General Services Administration and using infrastructure already in place around the federal government in order to meet its quick mandate.

“What made RATB interesting was the government got to hand pick its people,” said Kingsberry, equating the agency to an All-Star team of federal workers. “We had so many people motivated by a historic mission, and I was happy to have a role in it. It’s been the greatest thing I’ve been a part of in my career.”

FedRAMP grants second security authorization

The Joint Authorization Board for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program has granted its second provision cloud security authorization – this time to CGI Federal.

The JAB provisional authorization covers CGI’s infrastructure as a service offerings, including virtual machines and web-hosting capabilities, available for agencies to acquire from the General Services Administration’s IaaS blanket purchase agreement, according to GSA Associate Administrator Dave McClure.

This second authorization will further accelerate federal adoption of secure cloud solutions, GSA said.

According to GSA, CGI is the world’s fifth largest independent IT and business process services company and they join the previously approved small business Autonomic Resources on the list of FedRAMP-provisionally authorized CSPs.

NASA officially posts CIO job opening

NASA is now accepting applications for its upcoming chief information officer opening.

The job, posted at USAjobs.gov on Feb. 1, is open for applications until March 4. Salary is between $175,000 and $179,700 per year.

The person selected will replace Linda Cureton, who announced last week she will retire effective April 1 following a 34-year career in federal government. In an interview with FedScoop, Cureton said she plans to take a job in the private sector, but remain in the federal technology community.

NASA said that they plan to have a replacement for Cureton in place by April 1.

From the posting:

The NASA Chief Information Officer (CIO) is responsible for providing vision, leadership and advice in the development of information resource management (IRM) strategies; for ensuring the establishment of cost effective policies, programs and frameworks that develop and implement IRM and information technology (IT) programs and initiatives in areas supporting agency priorities; and for ensuring that agency IRM, IT, and IT security activities are conducted in accordance with strategic, program/project management, and capital planning and investment processes aligned and integrated with agency priorities.

Specifically, the incumbent: 

Develops and implements plans that include the organization’s goals, objectives, metrics, and actions needed to execute the strategic goals and outcomes in the NASA Strategic Plan. Defines IT program objectives and top-level requirements and monitors program performance, as well as effectiveness and efficiency of IT programs and processes.

Develops and implements Agency-wide strategies, policies, programs, and processes for the management of IT investments and services. 

Develops, maintains, and facilitates the implementation of the NASA Enterprise Architecture (EA), which is the framework for ensuring IT investments enable the mission and are integrated, efficient, and secure. Manages the risks of the IT plans and investments for NASA through an IT investment management process that is integrated with Agency processes for making budgetary, financial, and program management decisions for all NASA IT.

Leads and implements NASA’s IT Security program, ensuring appropriate confidentiality, integrity, and availability of all NASA’s information assets throughout the system lifecycle. 

Manages NASA’s IT systems as a joint responsibility with the NASA Centers, Mission Directorates, and all other Headquarters Offices.

The Centers, Mission Directorates, and Headquarters Offices have responsibility for the applications, while the CIO has overarching responsibility for ensuring alignment of those applications with entire agency and for all aspects of the IT infrastructure in which those applications reside.

Directs, manages, and provides policy guidance and oversight of the Agency’s Center Chief Information Officers’ (CIOs) activities, and operations. 

Provides for effective governance of IT through chartered boards with appropriate stakeholder representation. Ensures statutory, regulatory, and fiduciary compliance in the acquisition and implementation of IT. Provides oversight for all Agency E-Government initiatives. Oversees IT-related reporting as required by Congress, the Office of Management and Budget, and other external bodies.

GAO: FCC failed to protect information

The Federal Communications Commission failed to implement appropriate information security controls in the initial components of the Enhanced Secured Network project, the Government Accountability Office said in a new report.

“Although FCC took steps to enhance its ability to control and monitor its network for security threats, weaknesses identified in the commission’s deployment of components of the ESN project as of August 2012 resulted in unnecessary risk that sensitive information could be disclosed, modified, or obtained without authorization,” GAO said.

GAO said FCC’s efforts to effectively manage the ESN project were hindered by its inconsistent implementation of procedures for estimating costs, developing and maintaining an integrated schedule, managing project risks and conducting oversight.

If not addressed, these weaknesses could pose challenges for the commission to achieve the project’s goal of improved security GAO said.

Specifically, GAO said FCC:

• had not developed a reliable life cycle cost estimate for ESN that includes all implementation costs;
• did not, in its project schedule, adequately identify the sequence in which activities must occur, ensure that detailed activities were traceable to higher- level activities, or establish a baseline schedule;
• documented and managed some risks to project success, but its prime contractor did not identify any project risks until after the deployment of the initial components of the ESN project had begun; and
• had not included the ESN project in its processes for conducting regular oversight of information technology projects.

Panetta calls sequestration ‘shameful’

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said it would be a “shameful, irresponsible” act for Congress to allow sequestration to take effect on March 1, triggering more than $1 billion in cuts to the federal budget over the next decade, half of which coming from national security.

Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Panetta urged Congress to find a way to avoid the cuts, saying it would impact the military’s preparedness and could hollow out the force.

“If sequester goes into effect, and we have to do the kind of cuts that go right at readiness, right at maintenance, right at training, we are going to weaken the United States and make it more difficult to respond to crises,” Panetta said.

Panetta said DOD has begun making preparations for sequestration, because members of Congress have said they will let the cuts happen. Panetta has been critical of sequestration from the beginning, saying the threat of it alone has cost the DOD resources it could be using for the war effort.

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