House Oversight Committee approves extra $3B for IT modernization in budget markup

The House Committee on Oversight and Reform has voted to adopt an amendment as part of the fiscal 2022 budget reconciliation process that could provide an extra  $3 billion for federal IT modernization.

If it passes into law, the proposed change would allocate $2 billion for the Federal Citizen Service Fund to improve federal cybersecurity and the delivery of critical services, as well as $1 billion for the Technology Modernization Fund.

The amendment would also give the Office of Management and Budget $350 million for IT oversight and reform. It would provide extra support for U.S. Digital Service projects such as a forthcoming climate and economic justice screening tool.

Following the markup, the reconciliation package now moves to the floor of the House for further consideration by lawmakers. The legislation was introduced to the Senate early last month and passed the upper chamber on Aug. 11.

In a statement, the House committee said it sought to provide “crucial funding” to improve cybersecurity and to modernize federal technology. The $1 billion for the TMF is intended to facilitate the modernization of high-priority federal systems.

Chairwoman of the committee, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., said she looked forward to continuing working with the Biden administration and members of the House and Senate to pass the legislation.

The amendment was proposed by Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va.

Berkeley Lab quantum testbed aims to accelerate work of physicists, researchers

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will build a distributed quantum network with its five-year, $12.5 million award from the Department of Energy to accelerate the development of a nationwide quantum internet.

The testbed will connect quantum computers between Berkeley Lab and the University of California, Berkeley with the help of the California Institute of Technology while integrating a distributed quantum computing application.

The Quantum Application Network Testbed (QUANT-NET) would advance the nationwide quantum internet blueprint drawn up in New York City in February 2020 and the National Quantum Initiative more broadly, with recent DOE funding for quantum information science projects.

“A testbed seemed more synergistic because I’m doing practical networking for the Department of Energy, so I’m not on the physics or the device or the materials side of research,” Inder Monga, executive director of the Science Networking Division and ESnet at Berkeley Lab, told FedScoop. “I’m more on: How do we operationalize new ideas?”

Commercialization of quantum internet remains a way off, so it made sense to accelerate the work of physicists and other researchers with the help of academia and industry, Monga said.

Quantum networks encode more information than traditional computing with implications for quantum sensing, metrology and distributed quantum computing. The last application is the one Berkeley Lab hopes to demonstrate, but it remains theoretical as the algorithms don’t exist.

“These demonstrations will require seamless integration of a host of different technologies ranging from quantum information processing with trapped ions, color centers and superconducting systems to ultra-highly efficient conversion of quantum information from atoms to light and routing it through a fiber network,” said Hartmut Häffner, associate professor of physics at UC Berkeley, in a statement. “We envision that this work will pave the way toward a quantum internet for quantum communication applications and allow us to connect different quantum computers to create larger and more powerful ones.”

Despite its assistance, Caltech won’t be connected to the network due to the proximity issue. Signal photons can’t yet be sent and directed over long distances without a quantum repeater, which hasn’t yet been developed.

Berkeley Lab’s latest system ESnet has 309 locations where optical amplifiers help create a nationwide network, but those amplify light and not single photons, which is necessary for quantum networking. While the lab might not succeed, it hopes to develop a quantum repeater before its five years of funding runs out, Monga said.

Currently a number of homegrown devices exist to address physics challenges and synergies within quantum computing, and a perk of a testbed is it’s not tied to one device or technology. Berkeley Lab intends to leverage the best technology available from the National Science Foundation; University of Arizona; startups like PsiQuantum in Palo Alto, California, and Aliro in Brighton, Massachusetts; and NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

However pandemic-related supply chain delays might just be the testbed’s biggest hurdle, Monga added.

On the digital networking side, getting servers takes six months — even general purpose commodity servers. And some parts can only be procured from Sandia National Labs or small startups launched by university professors.

“Some of these are very specialized,” Monga said. “You need ion traps and quantum computing components, and I don’t have insight into how good the supply is and whether things will be delayed beyond what we have planned for in contingency.”

The ‘Big Bang’ of USAF application modernization

Public sector agencies that may still be wondering if open source software is the key to application modernization can simply look at the U.S. Air Force, which recently used Kubernetes to manage the weapons systems on the 65-year old U-2 spy plane.

Nicolas Chaillan, former Chief Software Officer for the Air Force, said the service was able to deploy new software services on the U-2 in less than two weeks. “In just 12 days with [artificial intelligence machine learning] containers on that legacy hardware, we were able to manipulate the sensors on the jet so the pilot could focus on doing other stuff,” Chaillan said, speaking during a panel session at the 2021 Public Sector Innovation Summit sponsored by VMware. (Watch the full panel discussion here.)

The new software was able to receive over-the-air updates of the container, “ensuring that we could be decoupled from the hardware and not put the jet at risk in terms of airworthiness and making sure that the pilot is safe,” Chaillan said.

The test flight, which took place late last year, was a first for the Defense Department. Since then, however, Kubernetes has become the central nervous system of the Air Force’s Platform One initiative. Platform One allows users to deploy a DevSecOps Software Factory and start solving software problems with a 90% solution immediately, instead of starting from scratch.

“For us, Kubernetes is becoming the foundation of all the software we do on jets to bombers to ships, and, let’s face it, to nuclear,” Chaillan said. “We have Kubernetes running across embedded systems at the edge on clouds, on classified clouds, and air-gapped environments. So it’s really kind of the enabler for us not to get locked into a single tech stack, and to be able to have a diversity of options.”

Leveraging a project called Platform One Big Bang, the Defense Department can install an instance of Platform One, called the Customer DevSecOps Platform, on behalf of other organizations. Big Bang is the Platform One Infrastructure as Code / Configuration as Code package that deploys a software factory in a customer owned environment. 

“We open-source the entire Big Bang platform, which is a full DevSecOps platform,” Chaillan said. “A lot of people think of DevSecOps as a [development] platform, but for us, it runs in run-time on the weapon, on the device, on the jet, on the system with Zero Trust baked.”

“When I look at open source, it’s really an opportunity for collaboration writ large,” said Craig McLuckie, Vice President at VMware, who also spoke on the panel. But there can be challenges, he said. “Culture really matters. Culture is effectively the operating system of the organization,” McLuckie said.

For the Defense Department, those challenges range from ensuring the security of open source code to modernizing the way the department thinks about managing large programs, said Chaillan.

“It’s important to realize that open source does not mean it is something that is safe or it’s going to last. You have to look at the community behind it. That’s why we like the [Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)] because we know to get to a certain stage you have to demonstrate some maturity and diversity of contributors,” Chaillan said.

“I love that some teams in CNCF are actually pushing for pen tests,” he said. “And for us in Platform One we actually have seven people full-time continuously pen-testing the stack. It’s not a once a quarter or once a year thing, it’s continuously.”

Just as important as security, however, is the ability to move at what Chaillan calls the pace of relevance. “No one wants to waste time and taxpayer money and reinvent the wheel. But we also design in a way that’s very siloed and you end up with a lot of people having to be convinced to make meaningful changes,” he said.

The other challenge is that the DOD doesn’t always control everything, like funding, he said. “If it’s cut into tiny silos, how do you do enterprise services well? In fact, I would argue that the Department is not really good at building enterprise IT because of that,” he said. “Because big programs get a lot of money and they don’t like having dependencies on others. That’s why we created Cloud One and Platform One.”

Learn more about “Application Modernization” and how VMware is helping to accelerate public sector innovation

JAIC completes draft of AI ethics implementation guidance

The Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) briefed Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks late last month on how it plans to implement the DOD’s AI ethics principles.

The brief was mandated by a May memo signed by Hicks and constitutes an initial milestone for implementing the DOD’s ethics principles, which were adopted in February of 2020. The JAIC did not provide any detail on its forthcoming guidance to be finalized by the end of October. The guidance was initially scheduled to be finalized by February 2020, a JAIC official previously told FedScoop.

“The Council will continue to adhere to the battle rhythm, collaboration efforts, and deliverable schedule established for delivery of the final Pathway document to the DSD as scheduled,” a JAIC spokesman told FedScoop.

The principles are “responsible, equitable, traceable, reliable and governable,” broad terms that the JAIC has acknowledge will need detailed guidance in order for the DOD bureaucracy to implement.

“Implementing the AI ethics principles will be hard work. The Department’s efforts over the next year will shape the DOD’s future with AI,” Lt. Geb. Jack Shanahan, former director of the JAIC said when the principles were adopted in February 2020.

GAO recommends HHS reconsider $330M IT contract award to Accenture

The Government Accountability Office has recommended that the Department for Health and Human Services reevaluate a $330M IT contract won by Accenture Federal Services (AFS), but dismissed a competitor’s claim that the awardees’ experience was improperly evaluated.

AFS was awarded the task order in April this year following a protracted solicitation process that has so far included three bid protests, the most recent of which was filed by Deloitte.

In its latest decision issued last month, GAO partly sustained the protest but also disagreed with the claim that AFS’ cost and price proposals were not properly assessed.

“We recommend that the agency reevaluate proposals consistent with the terms of the solicitation as they relate to transition, and make a new selection decision.”

“Alternatively, if the terms of the solicitation do not reflect the agency’s requirements, it should revise the solicitation, conduct discussions with the offerors; solicit, receive, and evaluate revised proposals; and make a new source selection decision,” GAO said.

Prior to the submission of bid protests by both Deloitte and AFS, the solicitation process had an initial closing date of August 5 2019.

The $330M solicitation included a task order to operate and upgrade IT services for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ federally facilitated exchange. The task order had a one-year base period that included a six-month transition period and four one-year option periods.

In November 2019, Deloitte was initially selected as the winning bidder on the contract, which was subsequently protested by AFS. In response, HHS took corrective action by reviewing and revising its evaluation document.

In June 2020, HHS again selected Deloitte for the contract, and AFS then filed another protest. Following corrective action, GAO dismissed Accenture’s second protest.

HHS then amended the solicitation, and in December 2020, the two contractors submitted their proposals for an amended solicitation process, prior to the most recent award of the contract in April.

In this latest decision, GAO also recommended that Deloitte be reimbursed for costs associated with filing and pursuing its protest, including reasonable attorney’s fees.

Deloitte had argued in its protest that AFS was improperly credited for experience during the award process because it relied on the experience of its corporate parent, Accenture LLP. GAO dismissed this claim in its opinion, saying that AFS in its proposal spelt out its intention to rely on resources from its parent company multiple times.

AFS and Deloitte declined to comment. HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

House adds $4.2B in cyber, innovation funding to NDAA

The House Armed Services Committee voted Wednesday to add $4.2 billion in what it categorized as “cyber and innovation” funding to its draft of the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act.

The funding was a part of a nearly $25 billion increase to the top line of the authorization bill, which also includes $5.2 billion for research and development and other categories. The amendment brings the total proposed amount of authorized spending for the Department of Defense to $778 billion.

“The defense of our nation will not be shortchanged by Congress. I thank my colleagues for adopting this amendment to support the men and women who serve in our armed forces,” committee Ranking Member Mike Rogers, R-Ala., said in a statement. Rogers, the highest ranking Republican on the committee, proposed the amendment and garnered 14 Democratic votes in additional to all Republicans on the committee.

Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., chairman of the new Cyber, Innovative Technologies, and Information Systems Subcommittee, was one of the 14 Democrats to support the amendment.

In the funding increase, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center would get a $57 million increase specifically to fund the new AI and Data Acceleration (ADA) initiative. The effort is design to build “flyaway” teams of data scientist that can be deployed to combatant commands to build new and improve old tech systems. It’s an idea that was proposed by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI).

Other tech-related amendments would increase funding for AI trust research and several cloud programs, including the Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) MilCloud 2.0. Some proposed changes to the legislation would require reports to Congress on the software development, data science and AI workforce.

IT contractor gets 14-month prison sentence for bribing federal officials

The owner of an IT services business has received a 14-month jail sentence for paying bribes to federal and state officials in exchange for favorable treatment on contracts.

Charles M. Thomas was sentenced Tuesday for making the payments to two employees at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as to an employee of the District of Columbia Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE).

According to court documents, Thomas was the sole owner and president of a Maryland company that provided IT services to federal agencies, as well as educational services to public school children in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.

Thomas in 2018 pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit bribery and two counts of conspiracy to pay gratuities and to violate the Procurement Integrity Act.

Evidence presented by the government showed that Thomas provided HUD employee Kevin Jones with tickets to sporting events, travel, cash and other items worth more than $50,000, in exchange for Jones providing Thomas and his company with non-public information about pending HUD contracts.

According to government evidence, Thomas also gave a second HUD employee and former supervisor, LaFonda Lewis, tickets to sporting events, designer handbags, cash, and other items, worth more than $23,000 in exchange for non-public information about contracts.

At the District of Columbia Office of the State Superintendent of Education, government evidence showed that Thomas made about $53,000 in payments to employee Shauntell Harley, in return for non-public information.

Jones, Lewis and Harley were previously sentenced for their involvement in the schemes.

Thomas was sentenced by Judge Randolph D. Moss and as part of his plea agreement is required to pay restitution to the D.C. Superintendent of Education in the amount of $179,999. In his guilty plea, he admitted to carrying out three schemes.

GSA seeks online learning providers for upskilling pilot across 24 agencies

The General Services Administration is looking to pilot a tool that identifies a federal employee’s knowledge gaps and lets them purchase online educational content to fill them, according to a request for information released Thursday.

GSA wants online universities and tech companies to apply to work with the federal Chief Financial Officers Council on providing pay-for-access content across 54 competencies with an emphasis on data, technology and financial management skills.

The Biden-Harris administration has prioritized innovation within the government’s approach to workforce modernization and upskilling, and the pilot will leverage about 140,000 employees within its financial management community — spanning the 24 largest agencies in coordination with the Office of Management and Budget.

“Not only has this new pilot effort been driven up from agencies and required very little upfront investment,” said Deidre Harrison, deputy controller in OMB’s Office of Federal Financial Management, in the announcement. “But it can be quickly scaled to larger segments of the federal workforce if successful.”

If the pilot is successful in attracting effective, reasonably priced upskilling content, it could be expanded among the 2.1 million employees in the federal workforce.

Applications are also open to business education content holders and talent development vendors, and those selected will become “trusted providers.” The deadline to apply is Dec. 16.

“We really hope innovative learning content providers take note of this unique opportunity and
consider applying,” said Krystal Brumfield, associate administrator of GSA’s Office of Government-wide Policy. “We’ve structured this to be very low risk for them and the commercial opportunity for any selected providers has the potential to be wide open.”

NSA awards $2B GreenLake contract to Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has won a $2 billion contract from the National Security Agency to provide the intelligence agency with high-performance computing technology.

Under the contract 10-year contract, HPE will provide fully managed, on-premise, secure cloud services through its GreenLake platform.

GreenLake is a pay-per-use cloud platform that provides cloud services for servers, storage and networking, as well as a range of applications, including container management and machine learning. It was first launched by HPE in 2017.

According to HPE, the contract will help support the NSA’s growing use of artificial intelligence and data and offer it new forecasting and analysis tools.

“Implementing artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics capabilities on massive sets of data increasingly requires High Performance Computing (HPC) systems,” said Justin Hotard, HPE senior vice president and general manager.

“By using the HPE GreenLake platform, which delivers secure on-premises solutions as a service, the NSA is gaining industry-leading HPC solutions to tackle a range of complex data needs, but with a flexible, as a service experience.”

Government agencies are increasingly turning to pay-per-use cloud computing contracts as they seek greater storage flexibility amid an exponential increase in the volume of data being processed.

Take NASA as an example — the agency’s move to the cloud was in large part driven by the need to accommodate the vast volume of data it receives from space, Joe Foster, cloud computing program manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said recently.

“It’s saved us money, in terms of investing in infrastructure, and it’s allowed us to refocus those dollars into things like upgrading the actual satellite antennae themselves,” he said at the time.

Air Force software chief Nic Chaillan resigns

Nic Chaillan, the senior official responsible for leading DevSecOps and other software development initiatives at the Air Force, has resigned.

Chaillan announced his resignation Thursday from the post of chief software officer, which he has held since May 2019.

Chaillan was hired in August 2018 by the Department of Defense as a highly qualified expert (HQE), a contract position that allows the government to quickly onboard experts outside of the normal hiring process. In May 2019, he then moved to become CSO at the Air Force.

Before the Air Force, he worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense as a cloud security adviser and later DevSecOps lead at the DOD’s CIO office, according to his LinkedIn.

In addition to his role in the Air Force, Chaillan also contributed to Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) by working “part-time” with the Joint Staff’s J-6. JADC2 is the DOD’s new framework for making a battlefield Internet of Things, a system that would rely heavily on software to connect weapon systems.

Chaillan wrote in a fiery, candid post on LinkedIn that part of the reason he left was alleged inaction by senior Air Force leadership. He also complained about a lack of funding for his work and a lack of follow-through from DOD on commitments to elevate software modernization and agile practices across the department.

The list of things he had issues with included “funding, staffing and prioritizing IT basic issues for the Department. A lack of response and alignment is certainly a contributor to my accelerated exit,” he wrote.

Chaillan also wrote that the DOD’s “failure” to deliver on JADC2 was another reason for leaving. After being asked to build a product to show that all of the Joint Staff’s theorizing on JADC2 could translate to new tech, he was not given any funding, he wrote.

“After all the talk and continued assertions that this was critical work, DOD could not even find $20M to build tremendously beneficial warfighter capabilities,” the post says.

Chaillan continued in his post: “It seems clear to me that our leaders are not aligned with our vision in pursuing agility, the importance of DevSecOps, continuous delivery of capabilities, nor, most importantly, the need to fund teams, like Cloud One and Platform One, that are making things happen for the Department, and is a catalyst for change across the Government.”

One of Chaillan’s largest initiatives was helping to start Platform One, the Air Force’s DevSecOps platform. The coding environment has a security accreditation that allows software built in the system to be automatically authorized for use, a security process that usually takes months. The office now has approximately 200 employees, most of whom are private contractors.