Lawmakers urge Department of Defense to help address backlog of veterans’ records

Lawmakers have signed a bipartisan letter calling on the Department of Defense to intervene after coronavirus delays caused a major backlog of requests from veterans seeking essential service records.

In the missive, which was sent on Thursday, 10 senior politicians called on Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to address the data pile-up. Signatories of the letter included Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, D-N.Y., and Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wisc., who is a ranking member on the committee’s National Security Subcommittee.

Veterans across the U.S. require access to the records in order to receive service-related benefits such as medical treatment, unemployment assistance, home loans and emergency services for unhoused veterans.

Since implementing workplace restrictions at the start of the coronavirus crisis last year, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has been unable to process thousands of requests for veterans’ records.

The call for assistance comes after NARA earlier this month requested help for pandemic recovery operations at its personnel records center. At the time, the agency’s Chief Operating Officer William Bosanko asked the DOD to support the off-site sorting and batching of military personnel folders to speed the retrieval of records.

“Veterans and their families depend on timely access to personnel records in order to receive life-saving medical care, emergency housing assistance, proper military burials, and other vital benefits earned through service to our country.

“We urge DOD to support the NPRC’s work and to ensure that we uphold our solemn pledge to care for our nation’s veterans,” the lawmakers said in the letter. “We respectfully ask DOD to prioritize and fulfill NARA’s request.”

According to NARA, as of May 10 the agency had a backlog of 500,000 delayed requests for veterans’ records.

Department of Veterans Affairs picks Booz Allen for $1.1B benefits processing contract

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has awarded a $1.1 billion benefits management and processing contract to Booz Allen Hamilton.

Under terms of the task order, Booz Allen will provide support for the VA’s benefits integration initiative, which is focused on reusing and expanding technologies used with the veteran benefits management system.

The contract award is the latest stage in a long-running attempt by the VA to modernize its benefits system, after lawmakers in 2017 passed legislation codifying systems improvement. The legislation requires an update to the way veterans can receive tuition and other benefits for higher education.

In March this year, VA announced it would build a new “Digital GI Bill” platform to increase communication between veterans, schools and the government. It awarded the contract to start building it to Accenture Federal Services.

The latest initiative is intended to increase the efficiency of technology systems within the Veterans Benefits Administration and the National Cemetery Administration.

VA issued the task order as part of its transformation twenty-one total technology contract (T4NG), which is used to procure IT services.

The task order comes after Booz Allen earlier this month announced that it would acquire federal IT consultancy firm Liberty, for $725 million.

Defense IT agency awards $217M cyber contract to ASRC Federal

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has awarded a $217 million cyber support contract to ASRC Federal.

Under details of the contract, ASRC’s communications division will provide cyber, cloud and other IT services to the agency over the next five years.

ASRC is tasked with developing a more efficient and secure cloud defense environment. It will build a centralized platform to serve as a cyber operations hub across the Department of Defense Information Network.

Commenting on the contract, ASRC Federal President and CEO Jennifer Felix said: “Implementing Cloud technology and Agile methodologies will allow the unified cyber situational awareness program to rapidly provide defensive cyber operations analysts the information they need to help protect and defend the Department of Defense from cyber-attacks.”

ASRC Federal is the government services arm of Arctic Slope Regional Corp., which is an Alaska-Native corporation owned by 13,000 Iñupiat shareholders. The group provides contract services to federal government agencies and has about 8,000 employees.

Earlier this year in February, ASRC was awarded a $457.5 million contract by the U.S. Air Force for base operation support.

Last week President Biden announced a cybersecurity executive order that pushes government agencies to adopt secure cloud services by making them develop zero trust security plans.

TMF Board braced for priority reviews of ‘pretty robust’ project proposals

The Technology Modernization Fund Board expects to receive fewer than 100 “pretty robust” project proposals from agencies by June 2, when it will begin priority reviews, said Federal CIO Clare Martorana.

Cybersecurity proposals are the board‘s focus — given the recent string of high-profile hacks compromising some agencies — followed by projects modernizing critical systems, providing public-facing digital services and encouraging cross-governmental collaboration with scalable services.

Project proposals submitted after June 2 will continue to be reviewed on a rolling basis, but the board is conducting priority reviews due to the “urgency” with which Congress appropriated $1 billion to the TMF fund in March, Martorana said.

“We are going to be working very collaboratively with agencies to see where their projects fit in these different priority areas and hope to be able to roll out some really high-impact projects that are helping us with our cybersecurity maturity across our entire federal enterprise,” she said during an AFFIRM event Wednesday. “As well as getting to the work that many agencies have been undergoing for multiple years, which is modernizing those high-priority systems and trying to roll out these high-impact, public-facing digital services.”

Agencies shouldn’t “self-edit” themselves out of the TMF process over repayment concerns because the Office of Management and Budget will work with the General Services Administration to develop partial and minimal repayment plans for agencies on a project-by-project basis, Martorana added.

The Office of the Federal CIO is also looking to increase implementation of the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (IDEA) — which is a “great blueprint” for turning paper-based processes into digital services — across government, she said.

“I know that there hadn’t been an enormous amount of guidance provided,” Martorana said. “So that is something we’re working internally on at OMB, to make sure that we can cascade the right guidance out to the federal community.”

The Federal CIO Council last week launched efforts to convene a working group around creating a governmentwide IT modernization plan.

On top of all of this, some agencies have struggled to mitigate cyber threats, use data strategically and acquire IT services during the pandemic, Martorana said.

“One of the challenges that I think we are going to continue to focus on is procurement and how procurement impacts our ability to deploy our dollars effectively, meeting the needs of our customers,” she said. “Also the scale of delivering these digital services across this enterprise.”

Those who are ‘data fluent’ will be future leaders of DOD, deputy CDO says

The Department of Defense is in the midst of a transformation rooted in becoming a more data-driven, digital organization. And to get there, the department is going to need to not only develop a culture centered on data but build a workforce of data-savvy leaders, said one of its top data officials.

The DOD is working this year to implement a “broad program of data training, education and outreach that will have a positive and lasting effect on DOD’s culture,” Clark Cully, deputy chief data officer, said at Informatica’s Data in Action Summit, produced by FedScoop.

As data management and utility becomes more engrained in the department’s DNA, the ability to understand and use data will become an essential skill across the ranks of the military — especially for those at the top, Cully said.

“Those who are fluent in using data will be the future leaders in our organization,” he said.

Cully’s remarks came shortly after Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks introduced “data decrees” to the department. The decrees give instructions, in concert with the department’s data strategy, on how to better use the military’s data for everything from back-office operations to battlefield decision-making.

This new model was developed to “enable our warfighters in the field to have strategic impact,” Cully said. “We need to equip and entrust our service members to operate as edge nodes able to sense, understand and act with both speed and precision.”

But the model is nothing without service members who understand how to operate in it.

“This approach is fundamentally rooted in the quality of our people,” Cully said. “While the latest technology is important, success ultimately depends on our investments in human capital. We urgently need empowered and data-savvy leaders. Recruiting, growing, retaining and reskilling the right talent is going to take us a lot of time.”

DOD procurement lead says software acquisition changes are yielding results

A top procurement official at the Department of Defense said Wednesday that recent changes to its framework for acquiring new software are yielding initial results.

The more flexible approach started with only a handful of programs, and the pilot is still being more fully evaluated, but initial results are positive, Stacy Cummings, acting undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, said during a virtual conference held by the National Defense Industry Association.

The Adaptive Acquisition Pathway purchasing policy, which was established in October 2020, is intended to allow DOD to do what was once difficult, if not impossible: Buy software fast and keep it updated.

“You want to work at a pace that allows the users to deliver,” she said of software teams trying to bring new tools to the department. “Early trends look really good,” added Cummings.

The DOD’s traditional acquisition approach has until recently been designed around buying big pieces of hardware, like tanks. The department is currently in the process of revamping its approach for a number of major contracts.

Historically, contracting officers would write up long requests to industry to ensure that manufacturers meet specific requirements. This process does not allow for iterative software updates, much to the chagrin of developers in and out of the department.

“Countless past studies have recognized the deficiencies in software acquisition and practices within DoD, but little seems to be changing,” the Defense Innovation Board’s (DIB) 2019 report on software acquisition stated.

Cummings said also that “dozens” of other programs are ready to be transitioned over to the software acquisition pathway, which was recommended by the DIB study.

According to Cummings, there is support in Congress for other new changes that would help the DOD improve its software acquisition practices. One of the biggest changes acquisition leaders have been pushing for is a new software “color of money,” or budget activity in technical terms. The DOD currently has different types of money, or colors, for different types of programs that have different regulations. A software-specific color would give contracting officers even more flexibility, leaders have said.

In the most recent National Defense Authorization Act, eight programs were approved to pilot the new budget activity for software and the DOD is seeking to add more with Congressional approval.

Oversight leader says volume of datasets ‘biggest challenge’ in COVID-19 fraud prevention

Processing the high volume of datasets held by federal government departments is the “biggest challenge” in COVID-19 fraud prevention, according to a top oversight official.

Speaking Tuesday, Robert Westbrooks said the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) is working quickly to triage and process first the most significant datasets.

“We’re going dataset by dataset by dataset, acquiring them and ingesting them into our system, and trying to make sense of it and put them in context with other datasets.

“The biggest challenge is the volume, quite frankly. You have to prioritize, you can’t do it all immediately, so have to pick and choose: What are your priorities today, to have the biggest impact on the criminal side, and also more importantly for all of us taxpayers, on the fraud prevention side,” Westbrooks said at Informatica’s Data in Action Summit hosted by FedScoop.

Westbrooks is the executive director of PRAC, which is an independent oversight committee within the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency.

PRAC is also working on cataloging lessons learned across all data-centric inspectors general fraud prevention work so that federal agencies are able to respond more effectively to future pandemics.

PRAC was created in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act of 2020. It is tasked with overseeing funds distributed through the CARES Act and all follow-on pandemic relief legislation, which now totals over $5 trillion.

Nearly 40 defense companies were impacted in SolarWinds breach

Thirty-seven defense industrial base companies were hit by the sweeping SolarWinds supply chain hack attributed to the Russian government.

The companies reported their impacts to the Department of Defense, which said it was not breached itself in the hack.

The announcement came in congressional testimony Tuesday as DOD is trying to secure its supply chain from hackers. Previously, suspected Chinese hackers were able to gather reams of data on sensitive defense programs by attacking the networks of contractors and subcontractors that handle sensitive information, which has proven to be the weakest point in the DOD’s supply chain.

“I believe we had 37 companies that reported [specifically] 44 different reports,” Rear Adm. William Chase, the deputy principal cyber advisor for the DOD, told the Senate Armed Services Cybersecurity Subcommittee. The hearing focused on DOD’s defense industrial base policy.

Under the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program, the DOD is working to shift its contracting cybersecurity requirements from simple self-attestation to having third-party assessors inspect contractor networks to ensure they are complying with requirements. The program has five levels of cyber maturity, with level one only requiring simple security measures and level five involving advanced and more-expensive cybersecurity operations to ensure networks can withstand persistent attacks.

Chase said there is a chance a CMMC level five could have stopped the SolarWinds hack had they been in place, but the program is still in its infant stages.

“Neither the department nor the defense industrial base may never be able to completely secure industry’s networks and controlled information, but our goal must be to complicate and frustrate adversary planning and operations such that they cannot conduct them with impunity or at scale,” Chase added.

National lab’s data tools are homing other agencies’ COVID-19 response efforts

The National Preparedness Analytics Center developed a series of data tools to help agencies identify where the socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are most severe.

Situated within the Department of Energy‘s Argonne National Laboratory, NPAC spent the last year gathering data from agencies and private sources used to create interactive indices, analyses and maps made public on May 12.

About 20 agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, use the tools to plan their COVID-19 response down to the county and demographic levels, and in the coming months they’ll help monitor pandemic recovery over time.

“FEMA recognized the need for a lot of data and analysis to inform that long-term recovery perspective,” Iain Hyde, deputy director of NPAC, told FedScoop. “How were they going to deliver critical services to communities?”

Within the initiative’s first month, NPAC collected between 100 and 150 data sources from departments like Commerce, the Treasury and the Interior. The center launched a web portal with the first set of analyses from its interdisciplinary team of 20-plus economists, emergency managers, attorneys, infrastructure specialists, and data analysts.

The County Economic Impact Index shows the change in local economic activity throughout the pandemic, relative to pre-pandemic levels in January 2020. A quick scan of the latest monthly map shows every county in Connecticut has one of the least stable economies, which could make the state the target of future federal relief efforts.

Meanwhile, the Housing Stability Index quantifies the decreased stability of both renter- and owner-occupied housing due to missed or deferred rent or mortgage payments or serious delinquency during the pandemic. The Department of Housing and Urban Development can use the information to understand the risk of eviction and foreclosure among vulnerable populations.

Still, other indices examine the pandemic’s impact on state and local government revenue and internet access.

NPAC updates the indices monthly as, say, the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases new unemployment numbers.

FEMA’s 10 regions, in turn, refer to the indices before deciding how to engage the most affected communities.

“The No. 1 decision that our resources have been able to help with is: How do the various agencies engage with their communities to understand impacts and support that locally driven recovery effort?” Hyde said.

NPAC is far enough along with its work that now agencies are requesting specific analyses. The Minority Business Development Agency and the National Endowment for the Arts separately asked for in-depth reports on how the pandemic is affecting minority-owned businesses and the arts and culture sector respectively.

Additional resources for the territories of Guam, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands are forthcoming, as are lessons learned from NPAC’s COVID-19 data initiative — intended to inform future disaster response efforts, Hyde said.

One thing NPAC hasn’t done is tapped into the National Labs‘ high-performance computing facilities for its work.

“However we have required a fair amount of computing power to be able to capture those impacts on a county basis; we’re covering approximately 3,200 counties,” Hyde said. “In some cases, we’re capturing indices down to a census tract level, so about 77,000 census tracts.”

How automation tools add resiliency to DOD’s IT workforce

The continuous rotation of officers and enlisted personnel is a vital part of maintaining military readiness. However, preserving institutional knowledge of thousands of existing IT systems — as well as new ones still being established — remains crucial to keeping Defense Department and military IT systems operating securely, says a new report.

That is why military leaders should be looking more proactively at automation technology, that performs repeatable tasks and reduces the risks and costs associated with staff turnover.

“Automation not only helps preserve the institutional knowledge often lost when technical personnel leave for new assignments, it also helps streamline orientation and training when new personnel take over, allowing them to get up to speed faster and focus on more critical tasks,” said Eric Hennessey, staff consulting solutions engineer for national defense accounts at Splunk.

The report, produced by FedScoop and underwritten by Splunk, takes a closer look at how advanced security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) tools offer a more productive approach for DOD organizations to support their IT and communications personnel.

SOAR tools, such as Splunk’s Phantom platform, “provide the means to monitor a wide range of existing technology systems and applications; identify their health in real time; and apply prescribed remedies all in an orchestrated, automated and controlled approach,” says the report.

The report details multiple benefits of automating IT tasks. One of the most significant benefits, according to the report, is in reducing the risk of errors that often occur performing repetitive tasks. Another is the ability to codify workflows, to reduce training requirements. Automation also helps security teams detect, investigate and respond to threats at machine speed.

Hennessey points to one example of how personnel are constantly rotating in and out of assignments, and the need for user accounts to be constantly created and removed. “Those types of processes are pretty straightforward and repeatable and very easy to automate. By taking that workload off the service desk staff, they can concentrate on other more important things,” he said.

From the military’s perspective, IT workforce automation is both fundamental and essential to meet the scale and scope of their needs as they push towards digital modernization and data-driven readiness.

According to Anthony Perez, Splunk’s global solutions architect, automating IT processes is also about to take on much greater importance for defense contractors as well.

In order to meet certification requirements for the Pentagon’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), “DOD contractors will need to deploy and adopt proven enterprise-grade technology that can be iteratively tailored and extended,” explained the report.

“From the contractor perspective, I envision organizations leveraging [Splunk’s automation tools] to automate the self-evaluation of their cyber security maturity, identification of gaps, and generation of the bulk of their technical evidentiary package for C3PAO [third-party] auditors to use in their evaluation and CMMC-audit and accreditation process,” says Perez.

These experts expect the need for powerful IT automation platforms to continue to grow as DOD officials place increased strategic importance on digital modernization as part of the National Defense Strategy. That means greater focus on data, cloud, artificial intelligence, C3 and cybersecurity — as well as the right skills and experience to ensure these programs flourish.

Find out more on how automation and orchestration tools can accelerate the performance of the IT workforce.

This article was produced by FedScoop and sponsored by Splunk.