VA to pause rollout of new EHR sites during review

Officials told lawmakers the Department of Veterans Affairs will stop the rollout of its modernized electronic health record system at new sites while the administration conducts a “strategic review” of the $16 billion program.

The VA officials said they want time to examine any potential problems with the EHR at the Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center in Spokane, Washington — the first facility to bring the system online. Prescription mix-ups and delays in care have led to lawmakers and others calling for the VA to pause its work to fix issues that could harm patients.

“The strategic review covers a full range of program areas, including productivity and clinical workflow optimization, a human-centered design effort to understand what veterans want to see from VA’s patient portal and a sandbox environment that will allow employees at future implementation sites to conduct interdisciplinary, team-based rehearsals of these workflows in the new EHR solution,” Dr. Carolyn Clancy, VA’s acting deputy secretary, told the House Veterans Affairs Technology Modernization Subcommittee.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough first announced the review with few details late last month. At the time of his announcement, the review was said to last 12 weeks.

The decade-long EHR modernization program will migrate VA’s patient records to a Cerner Millennium-based cloud platform that comes with an all-new user interface for clinicians. It’s a massive overhaul from the current health IT system that will replace much of the front and back ends of the VA’s EHR. The system is designed to become completely interoperable with the Department of Defense’s version of the modernized system. The DOD has already launched the EHR at several military hospitals with fewer publicly-known issues.

The Government Accountability Office in February recommended VA pause the EHR’s rollout, a request the department was initially lukewarm on. But the VA appears to be heeding the watchdog’s call now.

The next center slated to get the new system is in Columbus, Ohio, but it’s unclear now when that might be given the pause. The timeline of EHR’s site launches has been delayed several times in the past due to the need for more training and the transferring of resources during the early days of the pandemic.

Ann Dunkin picked to be Energy CIO

Ann Dunkin will return to federal service as a CIO, this time at the Department of Energy.

Dunkin will soon be tapped to take over the Energy CIO role, which has been vacant since Rocky Campione left government earlier this month, sources close to the matter told FedScoop.

She comes to the job after spending the past 15 months as Dell Technologies’ CTO for state and local government, building off of her three-year tenure prior to that as the CIO of Santa Clara County.

Before her time focused on state and local government, Dunkin served as CIO of the Environmental Protection Agency during the latter years of the Obama administration. Based on that work, she was called upon recently to serve as a member on the Biden-Harris transition team working with the EPA.

Shortly after the 2020 election, Dunkin penned a report with her former EPA CTO colleague Greg Godbout on how the Biden administration should think about scaling IT modernization and innovation across government, namely through the leadership of the General Services Administration.

Energy officials did not respond to FedScoop’s request for comment prior to publication.

Matt Cutts to depart as USDS administrator

Matt Cutts announced he’s stepping down as U.S. Digital Service director in a Medium post on Wednesday.

Deputy Administrator Edward Hartwig will fill the role in an acting capacity until a new administrator is appointed.

The changing of the guard comes as USDS receives additional funding, pursues new agency partnerships and looks to hire — all as it scales its operation modernizing government services and making them more accessible.

“USDS was created to provide private sector technologists an opportunity to serve their government for a short period of time,” Cutts wrote in his post. “This year, in addition to those that joined the civil service permanently, we’ve seen an impressive number of alumni return to serve their government a second time.”

When Cutts joined in 2016, two years into USDS’s existence, he only intended to stay on three to six months.

Now the agency seeks engineers, designers, product managers, acquisition strategists, and policy experts to continue its work. That work includes supporting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the COVID-19 pandemic, streamlining financial relief, improving the immigration and refugee processes, aiding students with their loans, and reforming procurement and federal hiring.

USDS grew to a team of about 180 people and a network of 500 alumni under Cutts while becoming a farm system for federal chief information officers and chief technology officers.

“The team has created and deployed tools to help better fulfill the promises we’ve made to our veterans. We’ve digitized the naturalization process and reimagined hiring across the federal government,” Cutts wrote. “We began supporting states in building more responsive systems for the millions of Americans who rely on them.”

DOD implementing new enterprise ICAM tool to support zero trust

The Department of Defense is working to implement a new identity, credentialing and access management (ICAM) tool, a key part of its journey to a zero-trust cybersecurity model, the department’s chief information security officer said Wednesday.

The tool was developed by the Defense Information Systems Agency, which had previously solicited input from industry to help develop the technology to verify users on a network. The first users who will be offered use of the tool are in DOD’s financial management divisions and will be given access on a fee-for-service basis, DOD CISO David McKeown told senators.

“Right now we have an enterprise-level solution for ICAM,” McKeown told the Senate Armed Services Cybersecurity Subcommittee during a hearing on zero trust. “That will be the exemplar that we adopt across the board, throughout the department.” It’s unclear how long it will take to roll out the solution across the department.

ICAM is critical to zero trust because the model relies on being able to track user identities across the network and ensure data access is limited only to those who can verify they need it. In the current model of cybersecurity, defenses are placed at login points — or at the perimeter — but if an attacker can get past those first defenses, they have free reign on sensitive data. That’s not the case with zero trust, where with the help of ICAM solutions access is heavily limited even within a network.

The recent SolarWinds hack where suspected Russian intruders gained access to systems and then moved around networks looking for sensitive information has pushed DOD to adopt zero trust with even more zeal, McKeown said in the hearing. DOD has said none of its networks were compromised in the hack, but it has spurred action nonetheless.

“These recent events have lead us to accelerate the implementation of our zero-trust frame works,” McKeown said.

USPTO chief information officer most excited about new search algorithms

New search algorithms for relevant prior art most excite the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s CIO right now.

USPTO created the machine-learning algorithms to increase the speed at which patents are examined by importing relevant prior art — all information on its claim of originality — into pending applications sent to art units, said Jamie Holcombe.

Filtering data into haystacks allowing patent examiners to more easily find what they’re looking for — the needle — is the new paradigm for search algorithms, Holcombe said.

“The ability to search, especially the big datasets, gets me so excited,” he added, during an ACT-IAC event Tuesday. “Because that means we can unleash that power to anybody who can get on a computer and access the net.”

Patent examiners previously had to scour three to four pages of single-spaces, text searches for relevant prior art assembled based on word relevance. Now examiners can search concepts like “chemical adhesion” and receive all the relevant prior art they need in one place.

Authorities to operate

One hurdle Holcombe faces as he attempts to test new innovations to modernize USPTO is that often they haven’t been approved by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP).

Small businesses have a hard time ponying up the money needed for authorization, and the federal government is “overly oppressive” when it comes to compliance, Holcombe said.

If a new technology has potential, USPTO temporarily tests it in a sandbox to determine the minimum requirements needed to issue an authority to operate (ATO).

“We’re not exposing everything to it,” Holcombe said. “But I’m giving it enough time to grow to the point where it can comply with the minimum amount of bureaucracy that it has to comply with.”

The most important thing to Holcombe when issuing an ATO? That data at rest resides in the U.S.

Data in motion around the world can be encrypted, but the rest of the world is the “Wild West” when it comes to protecting stored data in accordance with other countries’ regimes and authorities, Holcombe said.

DOD’s innovation ecosystem is growing, but strict compliance is a barrier, DARPA director says

The number of innovative companies the Department of Defense is working with has increased in recent years, but a key roadblock remains compliance regulations, the head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency told Congress Tuesday.

The growth of the innovation ecosystem is a welcome sign to DOD and is the result of outreach programs like the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards. But DARPA Director Stefanie Tompkins told senators that compliance requirements remain an obstacle to further growth of the innovation base, especially for small companies and some universities.

“We will be looking for ways to sort of meet them in the middle and find ways to make it easier for them to participate and while still being fully compliant with our requirements,” Tompkins told the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense.

While she did not name specific compliance regimes that are hampering growth of the innovation base, new requirements for contractors have been added in recent years, including the need to rid their networks of specific Chinese-made technology and to ensure their cybersecurity meets basic DOD standards.

Tompkins specifically noted some universities not being able to clear regulatory hurdles. In October, a group of universities asked for an exemption from the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), a new standard for contractors that will require them to pay for a third-party verification that their networks meet security controls. CMMC leaders have said that universities will not be exempt.

“We are going to be taking a hard look at potential barriers,” Tompkins said.

Other officials have voiced concern over the barriers CMMC could place on industry. Lauren Knausenberger, CIO of the Air Force, said she had “mixed feelings” on the program and worried some of the requirements were too strict.

“I would rather just say, ‘Hey let’s just give you some endpoint requirements,’” Knausenberger said about small sub-contractors that do not have the resources to meet some of the requirements.

Tompkins said it is important to keep growing the innovation base to meet growing technological threats. DARPA is engaged in research on artificial intelligence, hardware advancements and quantum sciences, among other areas, that often also have commercial applications.

“We are seeing that increase and we hope to see it even more,” Tompkins told Senators. “To get the best ideas and to get the best capabilities we need to be reaching the broadest possible and most diverse performer pool possible.”

Army to stand up multi-domain task force in Germany

The Army will stand up its second multi-domain task force, this time in Germany as the first unit focused on modernizing all-domain operations within Europe.

The Multi-Domain Task Force-Europe will lead the charge in implementing new combat operational constructs in Europe along with a Theater Fires Command, which will focus on increasing the range and precision of artillery through faster networks and data usage. More than 500 soldiers will be sent to Army Garrison Wiesbaden in Germany across both units, the Army says.

The task force will be comprised of artillery, missile defense, intelligence, cyberspace, electronic warfare and other elements and serve to combine their efforts through new networking technology. The task force will activate Sept. 16.

“The Theater Fires Command and Multi-Domain Task Force in Europe will enable U.S. Army Europe and Africa to synchronize joint fires and effects, control future long range fires across all domains and will create more space, cyber and electronic warfare capabilities in Europe,” said Col. Joe Scrocca, the spokesman for U.S. Army Europe and Africa.

The task forces are unique units of soldiers that are designed to implement the Army’s future concept of operations that will rely heavily on networking data across different domains, like air and land operations. The first task force was set up in the Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington to focus on multi-domain operations in the Pacific. The task forces also are building new all-domain operations centers that allow commanders to see more data and use technology to extract meaning from multiple operations at once.

One of the Army’s multi-domain priorities is extending the range and precision of long-range artillery, or “fires.” To achieve these goals, the Army wants to link data from all domains and create new software to fuse information into stronger targeting methods, leaders have said. The task force will take many of the lessons learned in previous Army test events and put them into practice.

“The future is all about range and speed,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville previously said about the work the multi-domain task forces are doing.

In Europe, where Russia remains the No. 1 security threat, focusing on long-range precision fires suits a land-based conflict.

The Pacific task force unit is focusing on area-denied communication resiliency, something that the Army anticipates will be a threat in the Pacific. Leaders have voiced concern about China’s technical abilities to create cyber-defenses and offensive weapons that could disable the U.S. military’s ability to communicate and use command and control systems.

“We face increased physical and virtual standoff through layered and integrated networks, where adversaries leverage all instruments of national power to blur the lines between competition and conflict, altering international norms to the detriment of the international community,” Brig. Gen. Jim Isenhower, commander of the task force in Washington, previously said.

Lawmakers ask Biden administration for Technology Modernization Fund spending plan

Lawmakers want to know what IT improvements the Biden administration is planning with the $1 billion recently injected into the Technology Modernization Fund, according to a letter sent by five Democratic members of the House Oversight Government Operations Subcommittee on Tuesday.

The letter asks the Office of Management and Budget, General Services Administration, and TMF Board to submit a spending plan to Congress for the funds appropriated in the American Rescue Plan Act, as well as for partial repayment by agencies.

TMF spending is perhaps the fastest way to invest in critical IT and cybersecurity projects across government. But agencies are expected to pay the money back within five years so the fund remains self-sustaining, which is an “unduly burdensome” ask on “inherently riskier projects,” according to industry.

“To ensure the most immediate and effective investment of the $1 billion TMF appropriation, we understood that the reimbursement model would need to be relaxed in the American Rescue Plan,” reads the letter from Democrats. “Although that requirement could not be retained in the budget reconciliation process, we strongly urge the administration not to let the reimbursement model atrophy during the expenditure of the investment made by the American Rescue Plan.”

Reps. Gerry Connolly, Va.; Carolyn Maloney, N.Y.; Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington, D.C.; Katie Porter, Calif.; and Jamie Raskin, Md., further want to know:

• how the TMF Program Management Office will scale to handle increased project proposals from agencies,
• how the TMF Board will encourage proposals from the agencies most in need;
• TMF Board proposal priorities;
• OMB timetables for agencies that can repay TMF funds on time; and
• criteria for measuring project success when timely repayment isn’t expected.

The subcommittee wants an OMB and GSA briefing on the plan no later than May 7. And the letter comes a day after GSA told FedScoop its offices will frictionlessly lend technical and acquisition expertise to agencies receiving TMF funds, albeit without naming specific projects likely to see investment.

“We look forward to working with you to ensure this funding catalyzes the transformative IT investments the federal government so desperately needs to better serve this nation at a most critical time,” reads the letter.

GSA planning to lend tech, acquisition expertise to support scaling TMF

General Services Administration officials anticipate lending technology and acquisition expertise to agencies modernizing IT using the more than $1 billion in funds allocated within the American Rescue Plan Act.

GSA holds weekly meetings with the Office of Management and Budget, U.S. Digital Service, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, federal chief information officers, and industry to discuss the $1 billion added to the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) and $150 million to the Federal Citizen Services Fund (FCSF).

The TMF is a central pot of appropriations that agencies can apply for to fund impactful modernization projects under the stipulation that they’ll pay it back within five years. The FCSF, on the other hand, is an internal GSA fund that TTS can use to support interagency digital services initiatives.

While process improvements streamlining how that money is distributed to agencies will be determined in the coming weeks and months, the news that GSA teams like Technology Transformation Services and 18F will offer assistance should assuage tech companies that demanded as much in a letter last month.

“If we can be of service along the way — whether it’s through our technology expertise, whether it’s through our acquisition expertise, whether it’s through our thought leadership in certain areas,” Sonny Hashmi, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, told FedScoop in an exclusive interview. “We will be available as a resource for those agencies to tap into in the most frictionless way possible.”

TTS is working with the TMF Board to bring in the right people, potentially from the Centers of Excellence and Presidential Innovation Fellows programs, said Dave Zvenyach, the TTS’s director and deputy federal acquisition commissioner.

Adding the right capabilities and skills to the evaluation side of investments is a priority, Hashmi said.

“We have to figure out our org chart behind the scenes and work with our agencies in all the many different ways that we can,” he added. “Because that has been a challenge historically that I think we have the ability to overcome.”

In addition to improving the way investments are made, government is reconsidering agency repayment requirements and how to hold projects accountable for the way funds are spent to “make the most good happen as quickly as possible,” Hashmi said.

GSA’s 10x program has had great success expanding Login.gov entity verification across government on a smaller budget than the TMF and FCSF have now, Zvenyach said.

He categorizes the uses of new funds in three ways: recovery tied to the COVID-19 pandemic, economy, racial inequity and climate change; rebuilding government services; and reimagining digital services delivery — all of which offer high-impact opportunities for investments.

“Some of them are going to be duds,” Zvenyach said. “But some of them are going to be home runs.”

Both officials declined to name specific initiatives that will likely receive TMF funds citing the many stakeholders involved in those decisions. But possibilities include immediate, tactical investments in cybersecurity in response to last year’s SolarWinds hack, new shared services, and specific systems helping people find COVID-19 vaccinations, vote or receive Social Security benefits, Hashmi said.

GSA is assisting the Small Business Administration with baking fraud detection into its loan application systems, which may have doled out as much as $105.4 billion in COVID-19 relief money to fraudsters.

“There are a range of specific initiatives we’re looking at,” Zvenyach said. “Everything from [the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program] to improving forms and digitizing paper-based services.”

Another factor in all of this is President Biden’s appointment of Clare Martorana as federal CIO last month. Martorana‘s experience with IT modernization as CIO of the Office of Personnel Management and, before that, at USDS bodes well for projects reimagining digital and shared services.

“She brings a wealth of knowledge and experience,” Hashmi said. “And new thinking around how the TMF can actually be used as an investment fund to change things at a much greater scale, across multiple agencies.”

Air Force can now deploy drones from other drones

The Air Force‘s unmanned aerial systems (UAS) capabilities took a step forward with new test flights that launched a small UAS out of a larger drone.

The test, conducted in late March by the Air Force Research Lab, showed that a larger Valkyrie UAS can release a smaller UAS through its weapons bay door, a new capability that could lead to the use of drone networks being deployed during battle.

“This is the sixth flight of the Valkyrie and the first time the payload bay doors have been opened in flight,” Alyson Turri, demonstration program manager, said in a release.

The Valkyrie XQ-58A is an “attritable” system, meaning it is cheap enough to easily replace it if destroyed or lost. The Valkyrie drone hardware is being developed for use in multiple Air Force emerging technology programs, including the Skyborg program, which plans to network attritable drones as “loyal wingmen” to human-piloted fighters, and the Advanced Battle Management System that will serve as the backbone of the military’s Internet of Things concept.

Nesting a smaller drone into the Valkyrie system that can be deployed mid-air could give the Air Force enhanced surveillance, counter-drone and even explosive-delivery capabilities. The smaller drones were developed by Kratos and Area-I — the latter of which was recently acquired by Anduril Industries.

Other parts of the military are also investing in research on how to build networks of drones and how to counter enemy systems. Turning single drones into systems of networked drones has also been a priority for Anduril, the new owner of Area-I, which specializes in mid-air launch systems.

“We believe that to really enable these technologies to go, you have to solve the autonomy side,” Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf told FedScoop when the purchase was announced.

The tests in late March also increased the altitude and speed at which the Valkyrie flew, giving it enhanced military capability.