DHA awards $2B health IT transformation contract
The Defense Health Agency has awarded a $2 billion contract to manage the transformation and consolidation of its IT services.
Peraton subsidiary Perspecta is the principal contractor on the firm-fixed-price blanket purchase agreement. It will carry out the contract with help from Capgemini Government Solutions as part of a contractor teaming arrangement.
The agreement is for 10 years and is part of an integration program that is intended to cut costs. The deal includes the transition of certain existing enterprise contracts, of which the largest is the DHA Global Service Center service desk.
This is the latest contract win for Peraton after the company earlier this month won a task order worth up to $979 million to counter misinformation from U.S. adversaries.
At the start of August, Peraton also won an IT infrastructure contract from the Department of Veterans Affairs that could be worth up to $497 million over seven years.
Earlier in February, the IT arm of defense contractor Northrop Grumman merged with Peraton for $3.4 billion. Peraton is owned by private equity group Veritas Capital, which has sought to acquire and roll up government technology operations. In January it paid $7.1 billion to purchase Perspecta in an all-cash transaction.
White House launches US Digital Corps
The White House launched a two-year fellowship Monday designed to place early-career software engineers, data scientists and other technologists at federal agencies.
Dubbed the U.S. Digital Corps, participants will improve IT service delivery in relation to the federal coronavirus response, economic recovery, cybersecurity and agencies’ individual missions.
The Day One Project proposed the fellowship back in December as a way to eventually recruit thousands of recent graduates across technical fields, in what could become the Biden-Harris version of President John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps or President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, said Nick Sinai, former federal deputy chief technology officer under President Obama.
“We have great opportunities for experienced tech talent to serve in term-limited roles in government like [the U.S. Digital Service], 18F and [Presidential Innovation Fellows],” Sinai said. “But we haven’t focused on getting talented technologists into government at the start of their career; the Digital Corps can change that.”
The Digital Corps will be housed within Technology Transformation Services at the General Services Administration, which partnered with the Office of Management and Budget, Office of Personnel Management, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Office of Science and Technology Policy to deliver the program. The collaboration is notable as GSA, OMB and OPM aim to restore trust in their working relationship, as is CISA’s involvement because USDS, 18F and the PIF program aren’t as focused on security.
An initial cohort will launch with 30 fellows in the fall at more than five participating agencies including GSA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Fellows will be matched with agencies based on their skills and interests and mentored through a development curriculum with individual performance plans.
Traditionally government has focused on credentials, but skills will matter more than a degree for the Digital Corps. Recruits will come from both leading undergraduate programs and alternative training pathways like apprenticeships, bootcamps and certificate programs to make the cohort as diverse as possible. Currently, only 3% of the federal tech workforce is under age 30, and only 26% are women.
“To provide best-in-class service delivery, agencies must have the right combination of workforce talent in place as their existing personnel accelerate towards retirement,” said Clare Martorana, federal chief information officer, in a statement. “The U.S. Digital Corps is a forward-looking solution that will build a deep bench for technology modernization and digital transformation across the federal government and meet the Biden administration’s goals of advancing federal IT and cybersecurity.”
The Digital Corps was inspired by nonprofit Coding It Forward’s Civic Digital Fellowship, which has placed more than 300 collegiate technologists at 12 agencies. Co-founder Chris Kuang and Caitlin Gandhi transitioned to GSA to build the fellowship.
Applications open in the fall.
“The launch of the Digital Corps comes at a time when more and more technologists want to contribute to the public good,” said Jen Pahlka, former deputy federal CTO. “Many are disillusioned with the opportunities of big tech and want to do things like ensure that eligible people get food assistance or veterans benefits or speed up visas for refugees into the US.”
Army seeks vendors for $10B IT Enterprise Solutions-4 hardware contract vehicle
The Army has issued a solicitation for IT hardware services that will award technology providers up to $10 billion over a 10-year period.
The military service is seeking vendors for services and technology, including the purchase and lease of commercial servers, computers, networking hardware and storage equipment.
At least 17 indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts will be awarded, and services must be delivered both within and outside the continental United States.
“The fundamental purpose of the ITES-4H acquisition is to support the Army enterprise infrastructure and infostructure goals with a full range of innovative, world class information technology equipment and solutions at a reasonable price,” the solicitation document said.
Contracts issued through the vehicle with have a base period of five years, with an additional five-year option.
The solicitation follows a $2.4 billion contract, awarded by the service in July, for IT services to its National Cyber Range Complex.
Space Force needs to make acquisition a critical capability, study says
One of the keys to an agile Space Force acquisition system is to remove barriers between operators and buyers and treat acquisition as a core function of the newest military branch, a study from the RAND Corporation suggests.
The study lists other recommendations, including increasing the volume of information that is shared with industry, and giving decision-making subordinates more autonomy. The Space Force has been working on a new method of acquisition to try and avoid the pitfalls of the industrial processes other military services use, which have been criticized for their sluggish pace and lack of ability to keep up with tech innovations.
The Space Force “is highly reliant on technology, even more so than other services,” the study states. “This dependence on technology necessitates [the Space Force] having a close, trusting, collaborative relationship with industry.”
Senior space leaders have echoed the call for an agile system that can keep pace with tech, saying that one of the advantages of starting a new service is the ability for it to chart its own acquisition path.
“We are a startup company ourselves,” Gen. John Raymond, chief of space operations, told lawmakers in March 2020. “We have to go at speed.”
Other key recommendation from the 87-page report include having a work force of “experts,” having an adaptive technical architecture that defines the overarching needs of the force and hosting “on-ramp” events to test new tech from industry. Overall, there needs to be trust between government and the private sector, the report adds.
“To effect real change, acquisition needs to be reimagined and understood as a warfighting capability critical to the mission,” the study states.
The Space Force remain responsible for its own acquisition strategy, a plan that member of Congress have been waiting to see. Some key lawmakers have expressed disappointment in the lack of progress by the Space Force on that strategy.
Frank Kendall, secretary of the Air Force and top civilian that oversees the Space Force, recently merged Air Force acquisition offices to focus on space. He moved the Space Acquisition Directorate, which was nested in the acquisition, technology and logistics office, into the Space Acquisition and Integration Office, he announced Tuesday.
“One area where we have not done enough yet is in the acquisition capacity of the Department of the Air Force,” he said during the Space Foundation’s Space Symposium Tuesday.
Cyber experts seek clarity on NIST supply chain framework
Cyber experts agree a technology supply chain security framework developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology will be a useful tool for agencies and industry. They are less sure about what it will look like.
The White House gave few details in the fact sheet it released — following President Biden‘s Wednesday meeting with private sector and education leaders on improving national cybersecurity — other than the guidance will address building and assessing the security of technology like open-source software.
NIST‘s existing Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) includes a supply chain risk management category under the identify function, but there are only five, high-level subcategories. Other NIST publications on the subject are highly technical, and the Cyber Supply Chain Risk Management (C-SCRM) project updated practices earlier this year.
“For me, I was left a little bit frankly confused because there’s already some supply chain stuff out there, though it’s not set up like the NIST CSF,” Malcolm Harkins, chief security officer of Epiphany Systems, told FedScoop. “So I would contemplate that they’re trying to take that existing C-SCRM set of practices, and research and assurance suggestions, and perhaps turn it into something like the CSF.”
The prevailing theory is the new framework will focus primarily on the software supply chain —in light of the recent Microsoft Exchange server attacks, Kaseya ransomware attack and SolarWinds breach — with hardware practices thrown in.
A framework that fleshes out NIST’s security measures for software acquisition would give the government more leverage with providers.
“Open-source vulnerabilities, just in general, are pretty huge, and a lot of the software providers out there use open sources like components,” said Padraic O’Reilly, Pentagon advisor and cofounder of CyberSaint. “So there’s demand for increased transparency around that, and that’s also part of what NIST is working on.”
Harkins wants to see the information supply chain finally addressed by NIST’s framework as well because, if the flow of information is poisoned or altered, it can have cyber consequences.
He likens it to knowing whether meat in a grocery store is safe, which can only be assured if the supply chain of information about the product is secure from the slaughterhouse to the point of sale.
“Historically they’ve stayed with the software side or the hardware side of it,” Harkins said. “I would love to see them expand into the supply chain of information flow because I growingly worry about integrity attacks in the flow of information.”
For its part, NIST isn’t saying much — as it just kicked off the effort.
“We will keep the public updated as we have more to announce,” said a NIST spokesperson. “This effort is separate from the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, but we envision they will be complementary.”
The White House fact sheet listed Microsoft, Google, IBM, Travelers, and Coalition as partners collaborating on the framework. Microsoft and IBM didn’t have anything more to add to the release, and Google did not respond to a request for comment.
Travelers Chairman and CEO Alan Schnitzer called the initiative “an important step in enhancing the nation’s overall cybersecurity,” in a statement.
CEO of Coalition, Joshua Motta, said the cyber insurance company would work with government and industry partners to help formulate the new NIST standards. “[W]e hope to create guidelines on how to build secure technology and assess the security of technology to provide organizations with a foundation for how to minimize their cyber risk,” he said.
Harkins worries the weight big players like Microsoft and Google have in the compute environment might introduce bias into the overall supply chain approach and hopes NIST reaches out to small and midsize businesses like Epiphany. Those businesses are often more innovative because they’re less risk averse and less worried about profit loss, he said.
O’Reilly cautioned the White House’s “aggressive” timeline to have agencies identify their critical software isn’t “terribly realistic,” as only some agencies have started. While those timelines may need to be revisited, there’s no reason NIST shouldn’t be pushed to publish its much-needed framework.
“It’s got to be expedited,” O’Reilly said. “So you can’t have the same timeline you had with the CSF or the questions around measurement.”
Note: this story was updated to include comment from Coalition.
DHS creates Cybersecurity Service similar to DOD’s Cyber Excepted Service
The Department of Homeland Security has created the DHS Cybersecurity Service, a new way to hire and manage cybersecurity professionals outside of traditional civil service requirements.
DHS announced the Cybersecurity Service as part of its long-awaited Cyber Talent Management System in an interim final rule published Thursday in the Federal Register.
Personnel hired to the DHS-CS will take what the department is calling qualified positions — excepted service roles with their own qualification requirements and that are not subject to the appointment, pay, and classification rules of traditional competitive service positions, based on special hiring flexibilities. The Department of Defense has its own Cyber Excepted Service initiative based on similar hiring flexibilities to make itself more competitive and quick in hiring and managing civilian cybersecurity talent to its forces.
“The goal of the DHS-CS is to enhance the cybersecurity of the nation through the most effective execution of the DHS cybersecurity mission,” the rule says. “DHS will use [the Cyber Talent Management System] to hire, compensate, and develop DHS-CS employees to reinforce the values of expertise, innovation, and adaptability.”
DHS was granted the authority to create a new personnel system for cybersecurity in 2014. What came out of that was the Cyber Talent Management System, an “agile and innovative personnel system” that better equips DHS to “compete for cyber talent with the private sector — speeding up the hiring process, attracting talent from non-traditional educational backgrounds, using innovative tools to assess applicants, and offering more flexible performance-based compensation.”
When finalized, the rule will allow DHS to hire cybersecurity personnel at salaries based on their skills, up to $255,800 —the vice president’s salary. That, however, can be overridden in special circumstances, with an “upper limit of 150 percent of EX-I ($332,100 in 2021),” the rule says.
“To invoke the extended range for specific DHS-CS employees, the Secretary must determine based on the CTMS compensation strategy, that the employee’s qualifications, the employee’s mission impact, and mission-related requirements warrant adjusting the employee’s salary beyond the standard range,” says the rule.
On a new recruitment webpage, DHS also touts the Cybersecurity Service’s career development approach. “DHS Cybersecurity Service employees are encouraged to keep their skills sharp and remain aware of emerging technology and threats through regular training opportunities,” it says, adding that employees will “participate in a range of classroom and on-the-job learning activities based on their current responsibilities, skills, interests, and career goals.”
DHS received $62 million between fiscal 2014 and 2021 to design and build the Cyber Talent Management System and Cybersecurity Service. For fiscal 2022, it has requested $16 million to finally launch and administer the programs. The department also hopes to hire 150 cyber professionals using the system.
The interim final rule officially takes effect Nov. 15 and is open for public comment until Dec. 31.
Other organizations including the Partnership for Public Service are working on improving the pipeline of cybersecurity talent into federal government. Earlier this week the nonprofit announced the second cohort of participants in its cybersecurity talent initiative, which aims to improve knowledge sharing between the private and public sector.
Note: This article was updated to include details of the Partnership for Public Service’s cybersecurity talent initiative.
Polaris paves the way for Aurora exascale supercomputer at Argonne
Argonne National Laboratory plans to pave the way for its first exascale supercomputer with a testbed system, Polaris, announced Wednesday.
The “stepping stone” supercomputer will afford staff and users early access to hardware and technologies that will be available when Aurora delivery begins in 2022, giving them time to prepare, Ti Leggett, Polaris project director, told FedScoop.
Aurora will be one of the first large-scale deployments of yet-to-be-released technology from Intel, so Polaris will employ a similar architecture in the meantime.
“It’s a different architecture than our systems currently run, that our users have been familiar with for many years,” Leggett said. “Polaris will fill the gap for hybrid computing with GPUs, the Slingshot, as well as preparing their data on the Eagle and Grand file systems.”
Polaris will be a hybrid central processing unit-graphics processing unit (CPU-GPU) system based off Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) Slingshot interconnect, just like Aurora. Both supercomputers will have the same HPE Cray programming environment and system software stack.
The new architecture used by HPE Cray exascale supercomputers is designed to handle massive modern analytics and artificial intelligence workloads.
Despite both sporting a unified memory architecture, the systems’ biggest difference will be between their CPUs and GPUs. Polaris will use NVLink, while Aurora will use Intel Xe links. Still CPUs will connect to GPUs via PCIe, and GPUs will employ high-bandwidth memory in both cases.
The first of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility’s (ALCF) users to benefit from Polaris, and later Aurora, will be those on Early Science Program research teams.
“We work with key projects with aspirations for running on the next machine as soon as possible and help us stress the machine and give feedback to the vendors on the design,” Leggett said. “So some of the first users we wanted Polaris to support were those Early Science Program users.”
Aurora will support not only ModSim science codes but artificial intelligence, machine learning and data-intensive workflows, and Polaris will be able to do that with the same architecture.
The Department of Energy, of which Argonne is a part, also has the Exascale Computing Project preparing scientific codes for the new architectures.
“We’ll be working with them to get them early access as well and continued access on Polaris through the end of the ECP project, in order for their codes and applications to make their deliverables,” Leggett said.
Argonne has a formal project with its own director for both the Polaris and Aurora system acquisitions for budget and delivery purposes. Susan Coghlan directs the Aurora project, and Leggett is her deputy.
Both projects will go through an acceptance period where the hardware is stress-tested and vetted for functionality, performance and stability, followed by Critical Decision 4, the project closeout date. Leggett declined to give date specifics.
“Those dates have been set and we’re marching to those and we should have the system deployed and accepted ahead of that,” he said.
The expectation is that Polaris will be available to the first users early in the first quarter of 2022, before going into production for the wider INCITE and ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge (ALCC) allocation programs soon after. While the Frontier exascale computer at Oak Ridge National Lab is being installed now, Aurora is next up with delivery in 2022 and production in 2023. Lawrence Livermore National Lab‘s El Capitan exascale computer is also due for delivery in 2022.
Polaris will leverage all of ALCF’s existing infrastructure, namely the 200-petabyte Eagle and Grand file systems deployed last year. They combine for 1.5 terabytes-per-second bandwidth, which will be leveraged for campaign storage.
The Eagle file system also has novel community sharing via Globus sharing that will remain available for Polaris users to generate end data and share it with the wider research community.
All systems will be supported by an InfiniBand Sand fabric and backend infrastructure including Theta, the current, Core-based Intel Knights LANDING CPU system Aurora is replacing.
Once Aurora is on the ALCF floor, Polaris will remain a production resource for ML, AI and data-intensive workflows.
Argonne also wants to use Polaris to explore integration with other experimental facilities, starting with several on site like the Advanced Photon Source and Center for Nanoscale Materials that can be incorporated “rather easily,” Leggett said.
“We’re going to use Polaris as a way to explore how we can connect these traditionally ModSim, high-performance computing resources with more on-demand, urgent computing that is required for those kinds of experimental facilities,” Leggett said.
OMB setting up program management office for interagency collaboration tool
The Office for Management and Budget is establishing a program management office for a new interagency collaboration tool, the deputy federal CIO has said.
Speaking on Wednesday at Fedscoop’s FedTalks, Maria Roat outlined the next steps for the pilot program, adding that interagency programs and partnerships are “laying the foundation” for future of the federal government.
The tool is officially known as the CIO Council Interagency Collaboration Tool and includes a chat function and the ability for staff from different agencies to share documents.
“[Next] we are standing up a project management office to manage the rollout and continue to bring on other agencies and departments and integrate multiple platforms as part of the long-term vision on this,” said Roat.
OMB has been working to launch such a collaboration tool for over a decade, but previous attempts have failed, in part because of the need for agencies to sign onerous data sharing agreements for every separate aspect of data sharing projects.
This latest pilot project is different, according to Roat, because it includes a single data agreement for all participants. Federal departments involved in the pilot project so far include the Small Business Administration, the Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, and NASA.
The launch of the scheme has been spearheaded with support from the CIO Council, which last year took on the task of helping to set up a cross-government employee collaboration tool.
I have been after this for a long time – for the ability to chat with someone not in my department,” added Roat.
Program management offices have been used by federal agencies since about the early 2000s. The concept originated in the private sector and is typically used to manage services that are shared across multiple business units of an organization.
Telehealth rates won’t fade after pandemic, VA CIO says
After struggling for years with clinicians and patients reluctant to use virtual appointments in lieu of in-person medical visits, the Department of Veterans Affairs believes telehealth is finally starting to stick as an option for veterans seeking care.
Even as Department of Veterans Affairs medical facilities have re-opened to in-person visits, veterans are still choosing to use telehealth options at rates similar to those during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, acting VA CIO Dominic Cussatt told FedScoop during an interview Wednesday at FedTalks.
“This is going to be a permanent state for us at the VA,” Cussatt said. “Telehealth helps us reach so many people in very remote areas that have a hard time getting to our medical centers.”
Before COVID-19, the VA conducted roughly 40,000 telehealth visits a month. “Now we routinely conduct 40,000 per day,” Cussatt said.
“And we know that’s not going to go away, that we’re gonna we’re seeing that volume level off,” he said. “Even with facilities reopening and people getting back out to more face-to-face experiences, we’re seeing our numbers kind of stay level. So there’s definitely the demand out there.”
As of early August, the VA had conducted 11.8 million telehealth visits since the start of the pandemic, Cussatt said. “The pandemic really forced our hand,” he added.
That scale of telehealth support wouldn’t have been possible if not for the cloud, he said. “We quintupled our telehealth capability by upgrading our on-prem IT systems and expanding further into the cloud. So we were able to work with our vendor partners to very quickly turn around some site-specific upgrades and technology upgrades to accommodate this huge spike in telehealth use so that we can use the capability to the greatest extent we could.”
The VA had already made the move to the cloud prior to the pandemic, so “we were able to scale up to face the anticipate unanticipated needs of the pandemic with very little prior planning because the platforms were already there. And the capabilities were there, we just needed to scale up,” Cussatt said.
It also helps that veterans, who tend to be older, have had to become more in tune with modern tech during the pandemic.
“The veterans are really embracing this technology, learning how to use it,” Cussatt said. “And I think that’s going to keep them doing so for the long haul. So … if there’s any silver lining in the pandemic, it really helped us to expand our ability to reach more veterans and in farther reaches than we ever did before.”
GAO report identifies 10 government agencies researching facial recognition
At least 10 U.S. government agencies are undertaking research and development work into facial recognition technology, according to a new report by the Governmental Accountability Office.
The study, which was published on Tuesday, identified a range of projects across government currently underway, from experiments with new forms of enhanced staff identification to research on the impact of race and aging on the accuracy of the technology.
Out of 24 agencies surveyed by GAO, 19 reported using facial recognition technology. The most common uses for it were digital access and domestic law enforcement.
Among the most prolific users of such systems are the departments of Defense and Justice, which according to the report use facial recognition for domestic law enforcement, physical security, and also national security.
At the DOJ, the FBI uses a platform called Next Generation Identification Interstate Photo System to generate leads during investigations by comparing photos of unknown individuals suspected of criminal activity against a repository of photos of known individuals.
According to the report, agencies also access commercially owned facial recognition systems as part of criminal investigations or to assist in identifying a missing person or victims of crimes, such as exploited children.
It found also that the Department of Homeland Security has entered into facial recognition technology-related agreements – which are known as project arrangements – with the British and Australian governments. DHS also reported transactions with the Mexican government and Guatemalan government.
NASA uses facial recognition technology to verify the identities of individuals being issued ID cards and also to demonstrate how such technology works in educational settings.
The latest report comes as lawmakers in the House and Senate consider legislation that could potentially halt the use of facial recognition and biometric data collection tools by federal law enforcement.
It follows a prior study from GAO, published in July, that called for agencies and Congress to consider improving standards, training and transparency around forensic algorithms.