Agencies push to a new normal with the power of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are playing a critical role in how government provides public support during the pandemic, pointing to the potential for a new normal of service delivery in government, according to a new report.

As government agencies confront unprecedented demands for services, from unemployment relief to health care support, AI and ML, along with the agility of cloud computing, have become crucial tools in keeping up with scale and scope of demands by the public and on employees’ time.

These technology-enabled tools are also demonstrating what the future of government looks like, suggests a new report produced by FedScoop and underwritten by Google Cloud.

“Technology is now the core competency of mission delivery, and agencies need to rationalize their portfolios now so that they can stop accumulating technical debt,” says Todd Schroeder, director, public sector digital strategy at Google Cloud.

However, AI implementation remains unfamiliar territory for many government leaders, he says. Having the right partners at the table — with experience developing AI-assisted processes — is an important factor to deliver more meaningful outcomes and long-term benefits to the public, at scale.

It starts with the recognition that AI isn’t so much a technology to buy and deploy. AI’s transformative power lies in how agencies use it to reimagine the mechanics of work.

AI-assisted technology and access to cloud services were instrumental in helping agencies respond to the massive surge in unemployment insurance requestions. A 2020 NASCIO report surveying state CIOs found that roughly three-quarters of U.S. states deployed chatbots to assist with questions on unemployment insurance, general COVID-19 questions or other agency services that are receiving unusually high traffic due to the pandemic.

By implementing turnkey tools like Google’s Contact Center AI, for instance, agencies, like Illinois’ Department of Unemployment, were able to quickly deploy intelligent agents to predict and answer citizen’s most frequent questions.

Being able to take a 30-year old mainframe and adjust it for 120 new questions to satisfy constituents’ most urgent questions can be done at a fraction of the cost of building and maintaining a legacy system, Schroeder says.

Not only do government agencies have thousands of calls and high online traffic demand on their systems, but they’re also drowning in paper, Schroeder says. One of the things that AI and ML allow organizations to do is rapidly process paper documents by pulling data and transmitting that information automatically.

A growing array of cloud-based AI tools are available on a FedRAMP-authorized computing environment, according to the report. These tools — along with Google Cloud’s deep expertise in machine learning — can help agencies streamline how they develop and manage AI components and workflow into their projects, Schroeder says.

Read more about establishing a new normal for government services with AI.

This article was produced by FedScoop and sponsored by Google Cloud.

DOD’s push for innovative, agile purchasing codified in adaptive acquisition policy

The Department of Defense set its latest overarching goals for driving innovation and agility in its acquisition programs with the recent signing of a new policy directive.

The newly rewritten Directive 5000.01 is a high-level policy that aims to empower program managers, simplify acquisition policy and rely more on data-driven analysis. In short, the new policy’s main purpose is to speed up the DOD acquisition at a time it wants to rapidly modernize into a digital force.

The policy also implements the Adaptive Acquisition Framework, which includes new software purchasing pathways. The policy is related to but doesn’t directly reference the department’s push for a new “color of money” for software purchases. Acquisition leaders say it will lead to greater innovation and easier purchasing of advanced technology.

“Representing one of the most transformational changes to acquisition policy in decades, the DoDD 5000.01 re-write was part of a comprehensive redesign of the DoD 5000 Series acquisition policies, which were streamlined and modernized to empower program managers, facilitate flexibility and enhance our ability to deliver capability at the speed of relevance,” DOD said in a statement.

Color of Money

DOD continues to push for a new “color of money,” or budget activity (BA), for program managers to use when buying code. Having a new way to purchase software would allow the department to sidestep policies designed for purchasing things like tanks when purchasing software, which often slows down the process.

Ellen Lord, the Pentagon’s top acquisition official, previously said pilots are underway testing the idea and the DOD has support from Congress in authorizing a new BA, which it would need to fully scale the idea. The new color of money originally was suggested by the Defense Innovation Board.

“[Software acquisition] policy will reflect a substantial departure from the way of doing things in DOD,” Lord said in August.

The new software pathways that Directive 5000.01 initiates are a start for the DOD, Lord said. They give program managers new tools and timelines to work with when buying code and open the doors for more collaboration between internal software factories, but are not the end of the DOD’s growth on software.

“While we are proud of the new software pathways, as an organization we need to continue to learn,” she said.

Culture shifts

Some of the cultural shifts the larger 5000.01 directive mandates include delegating more decision-making power to program managers and making more data-driven decisions. Leaders from Lord to the military’s No. 2 uniformed official Gen. John Hyten have said contracting authority needs to be distributed to lower-levels of command, especially for software.

“Creativity and critical thinking will guide acquisition business practice,” the policy states. “Acquisition professionals will seek, develop, and implement initiatives to streamline and improve the [Defense Acquisition System].”

To improve data-driven analysis for improving acquisition, the policy directs DOD to increase data transparency. The policy also directs DOD components to use data processing technologies like machine learning to “maximize efficiency” for programs.

“All DoD data will be shared as widely as possible across the Military Services and OSD,” the policy states.

Space Force continues work securing space from cyberattacks

As military leaders try to secure global communications and space-based data, the Air Force Research Lab has turned to a Silicon Valley-based company to develop new cybersecurity architecture for satellites.

The new U.S. Space Force will work with Xage Security on prototyping a zero trust-style security system that is “rooted in tamperproof blockchain technology” to protect space systems in a new deal announced last week.

The Air Force and Space Force have recently been ramping up satellite protections, mainly through events like “Hack-A-Sat” and other bug bounty-type programs that enlist private researchers to disclose vulnerabilities. Xage told FedScoop its work will focus less on specific vulnerabilities and more on monitoring network activity to ensure a secure system.

“What Xage is doing is proving a much more fine-grained security solution,” Xage CEO Duncan Greatwood said in an interview. He added, “you can think of what Xage does as a means of blocking [attacks], it is very much zero trust architecture.”

A top concern for space leaders in the military is ensuring communications integrity and data protection. Everything from GPS to command and control systems relies on space operations, an arena that doesn’t yet have the cybersecurity maturity as those on the ground.

Greatwood said another critical part of the work Xage will be doing is preparing for “coordinating many different systems” in a secure way. With the number of satellites and other space systems growing, putting them under a common security architecture will be a challenge for the Space Force, he said.

“The connectivity environment is constantly changing,” he said.

Space Force will also have a large amount of data to work with. In April, the service inked a deal with the big data company Palantir to help use data from space. Now with Xage, it is working to secure that data and its integrity. Greatwood added that Xage will work on allowing “fine-grained access control” on data management to ensure its integrity.

Senators say 17,000 community care providers also impacted in VA breach

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with a statement from the VA denying Senate Democrats’ claims.

A recent breach of veterans’ personal information may have also compromised the information of 17,000 community care providers, a point the Department of Veterans Affairs didn’t initially disclose when it announced the incident Tuesday, according to some Senate Democrats.

The additional 17,000 providers involved in the incident came to light in a letter Democrats on the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs sent Wednesday to VA leadership. In the letter, the senators expressed “serious concerns” over the VA’s cybersecurity and its lack of full transparency as to who was impacted by the data breach.

But a VA spokesperson pushed back on the senators’ allegations as not accurate. “17,000 community care providers used the application involved in the incident, but only 13 of those were impacted by the breach and just six had payments diverted,” said press secretary Christina Noel. “VA is working with those vendors to compensate the lost funds.”

The VA’s original disclosure earlier this week revealed 46,000 veterans a victims of the incident. The breach appears to have stemmed from unauthorized users accessing an application within the Financial Service Center (FSC) to steal payment away from community health care providers, the VA announced Tuesday.

“This incident raises numerous concerns not just for this incident, but more broadly with how VA is approaching protecting the [Personal Identifiable Information] and other important data within its vast data systems and networks,” states the letter, signed by Democratic Ranking Member Jon Tester of Montana and others. “This is not a new vulnerability for VA. Rather, it is a long-standing weakness of the Department as identified by independent reviews conducted by the VA OIG and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) for more than 10 years.”

The letter indicates that VA staff told the Senate the compromised FSC system operates under the same authority to operate as 84 other systems, raising the possibility that other systems could be vulnerable to further data breaches.

“It appears the Department remains in a reactive posture, waiting for cybersecurity or business rule vulnerabilities to arise,” the letter states. Many previous recommendations on how to improve the cybersecurity of the VA remain open and unresolved, the letter notes.

The VA, however, contends that “it has made steady progress in improving cybersecurity by taking numerous actions to bolster VA’s security posture, including revising policies, adding additional monitoring capabilities, and improving workforce incorporation of cybersecurity and privacy habits,” Noel said.

The letter also raised concerns about how impacted community care providers and veterans can get help. The VA’s initial press release directed those impacted to email or mail questions to the VA at a time when postal services have been overwhelmed and some veterans lack internet access.

“This most recent data breach is unacceptable. It also exposes the fact that VA has not taken the necessary steps to ensure oversight, accountability, and security of the vast financial, health, and other personal data it collects and processes to perform its critical services for America’s veterans,” the letter states.

Hurd, Kelly make final push to create a national AI strategy

Reps. Will Hurd, R-Texas, and Robin Kelly, D-Ill., proposed creating a national artificial intelligence strategy, based on four white papers from the Bipartisan Policy Center, in a concurrent resolution they introduced this week.

Hurd and Kelly’s resolution consists of 78 actions leading to responsible AI innovation and is the culmination of nearly a year of stakeholder meetings discussing policy challenges arising from AI, as well as research and development spending, workforce training, streamlined immigration for experts, and ethical issues. More than once Hurd said he wanted to create a national AI strategy solidifying the U.S.’s economic and national security leadership in the space before he leaves office in November.

“America leads the world in innovation, but to keep up we must embrace AI in the government, private sector and education,” Hurd said in the announcement Wednesday. “This means preparing America’s workforce, countering our adversaries’ commitment to AI, investing in R&D and shaping the ethical guidelines and rules of AI based on America’s values, not that of an authoritarian regime, like Russia or China.”

The Bipartisan Policy Center white papers informing the resolution cover workforce, national security, research and development, and ethics issues.

Education actions within the resolution include increasing technology education funding, restructuring computer and data science education so it begins sooner, improving workforce diversity, and supporting work-based training programs.

With respect to national security, the actions involve leading international forums establishing AI standards, engaging China and Russia on safety and crisis communications, ensuring ethical use at national security agencies, and partnering with allies to prevent foreign adversaries’ misuse.

On research and development, the resolution moves to significantly increase funding, develop voluntary standards alongside industry and academia, create a national computing and data resource, and increase access to supercomputing at the National Laboratories.

The ethics section of the resolution covers mitigating bias in AI, enacting privacy legislation and conducting oversight.

Reps. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, Gerry Connolly, D-Va., Marc Veasey, D-Texas, Seth Moulton, D-Mass., Michael Cloud, R-Texas, and Jim Baird, R-Ind., all co-sponsored the resolution.

The two goals with AI should be establishing U.S. global leadership and moral responsibility, Connolly said in a statement.

“The important legislation we’re introducing today addresses those goals by calling for a unified national plan with respect to artificial intelligence that will place the United States at the forefront of this groundbreaking research both scientifically and ethically,” Connolly said.

‘Incremental changes’ not enough for AI workforce development, commission tells Congress

The Pentagon-housed advisory panel on artificial intelligence urged Congress on Thursday to take “bold” action on improving the government’s technical workforce and senior leadership’s understanding of AI.

One such recommendation from the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence is a “digital academy” that would require civilian government service in exchange for free tuition, similar to the military academies.

The idea seemed to connect with some members of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence and Emerging Threats and Capabilities, which held Thursday’s hearing. Other recommendations including improving the means to track digital talent in the government to more efficiently use limited resources.

“Incremental changes are not going to make a difference,” said José-Marie Griffiths, president of Dakota State University, who leads the NSCAI’s workforce subcommittee. The commission was created under the fiscal 2019 National Defense Authorization Act to provide governmentwide recommendations on improving U.S. AI development for national security.

The digital academy was first brought up during the commission’s meeting in July, but was formally presented to Congress in a hearing for the first time Thursday. The academy would be fully accredited and independent from the government, but with an inter-agency oversight board of government officials and private sector executives.

Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., called the idea “really intriguing” and one that Congress should “take a very hard look at.”

Another scholarship-for-service recommendation from the commission is a digital reserve corps that would require at least 38 days a year of government technology work in exchange for tuition at a private university. Eric Schmidt, the commission’s chairman and former Google CEO, described it as a “watered down” version of the digital academy which would require full-time work after graduation.

“We need a next generation of talent, and they need to be in the government,” Schmidt said during his opening statement.

Griffiths added that every challenge the commission works on is inevitably tied to workforce improvements. Data management, international partnership and other key issues all rely on a expert workforce of employees that understand AI, she said.

There have been other initiatives to built AI workforce strategies from Congress. Reps. Will Hurd, R-Texas, and Robin Kelly, D-Ill, published a national strategy for AI workforce in and out of government that focused on early and continual education opportunities to develop AI talent.

SBA scaled rapidly to administer pandemic relief. Scaling down will be harder on its IT

After nearly quadrupling the number of personnel supporting COVID-19 loan assistance programs, the Small Business Administration must now prepare its IT infrastructure for the possibility of workforce downsizing, said CIO Keith Bluestein.

SBA will “ostensibly” contract at some point and needs a cloud-based platform capable of not only scaling down but up, in the event of another crisis, Bluestein said during an ATARC webinar Thursday.

The White House solicited industry for laptops and other mobile devices that allowed SBA to rapidly onboard about 6,000 employees in less than 60 days to support the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loans efforts. But scaling up is easier than scaling down, and potentially back up again.

“Now that we know we’re here, how do you backfill to make sure that you have that infrastructure that is elastic and resilient?” Bluestein asked.

The cloud is the answer. But the Office of Management and Budget‘s Cloud Smart strategy directs agencies to migrate to the cloud wisely.

SBA is currently in the process of deciding how best to harmonize its siloed business activities, which aren’t yet optimized for the cloud, so it can ultimately contract and expand its IT infrastructure as needed, Bluestein said.

Only with a solid cloud-based platform in place can SBA build out IT workflows quickly in the event of a disaster like a hurricane, rather than standing one up mid-crisis.

“I will tell you I don’t have that,” Bluestein said. “I’m looking to build that at SBA.”

The Defense Digital Service played a novel role in securing the Navy’s COVID-19 relief missions

When the Navy docked ships off the shores of New York City and Los Angeles in March to help with surging cases of COVID-19, some drone hobbyists from the surrounding communities were naturally curious.

During the months when the “floating hospitals” U.S. Naval Ships Mercy and Comfort were caring for patients on both coasts, civilians frequently flew their drones over the ships into what is considered restricted airspace to get a bird’s-eye view of the rare sight. Though seemingly not a direct threat to the doctors and other personnel on board, the curious hobbyists created an airborne hazard that could potentially interfere with operations.

So, the Navy called on the Defense Digital Service‘s Rogue Squadron counter-unmanned aerial systems team to provide its suite of counter-UAS technologies to detect and monitor the drones and provide a deeper picture of their flight patterns to determine if action would be needed to ground them.

“They’re not people that are, you know, terroristic. They’re not threatening us, but they’re still dangerous, just from the perspective of we don’t know they’re there,” said Dan Flack, a program manager for DDS’s Rogue Squadron. “And we have people that we’re trying to protect on the ground, we have assets flying through the air.” While the ships are considered mobile, floating no-fly zones, the restricted areas are not programmed into the devices like other FAA regulated areas —such as airports, stadiums, military bases and Washington, D.C. — which would outright prohibit drones from entering that airspace.

The Navy and DDS had worked together before on counter-UAS operations, and the Navy thought it would be helpful to have a deeper general awareness of the airspace around the ships. It’s no easy task to look up into the sky and spot a very small UAS flying in the surrounding airspace, Flack said in an interview with FedScoop. New York City, in particular, has had an incident in the past in which a drone collided with a helicopter flying over New York Harbor.

“Is there a drone there, is something flying? Is it safe for us to send this [helicopter] off the deck?” Flack said.  “All of those sorts of questions that previously would have to be, you look up there in the sky with your eyes, and you kind of squint a little bit and say, ‘I don’t see anything, we’re good to go.'”

The curious drone pilots might think their actions harmless, but in reality, they could be interfering with operations. “They don’t realize that by being curious with a drone, they’re actually derailing efforts to make those ships operational or impeding the ability for regular daily operations,” said Angela Cough, a DDS digital services expert.

Windtalker and Dowding

DDS provided its Windtalker and Dowding systems to the Navy for the job. Windtalker is the sensor detection platform modified from commercial hardware. Dowding is the backend user interface to provide situational awareness for the data pulled from Windtalker.

The exigency of a military counter-UAS pilot program came about several years ago with the surge in commercial drone production. Most often, the DOD is concerned by what drone use means in forward-deployed, hostile locations.

“We started seeing a large emergence of the use of small aircraft, specifically, DJI aircraft back in early 2017 in deployed locations. It’s $1,000, you can go online, buy it, have it shipped to wherever you want,” Flack said. “If you’re a terrorist organization … you can get this capability, you can modify it and use ingenuity and come up with a way to have effects. And it’s really, I wouldn’t call it air superiority, but our bases are threatened from the air again, with just something as simple as $1,000 toy drone or professional photography drone.”

Both of DDS’s c-UAS platforms have the “capability to pretty much outperform everything else that there is available, both in the commercial sector and in the end in the military sector,” Flack said. And because they’re custom-built with DDS values in mind, the systems are agile, user-friendly, and the data is owned by the government. In particular, the Rogue Squadron wanted to make it so DDS could deliver the systems to a partner — in this case, the Navy — that could begin using them in a matter of hours or days.

“Let’s go to the user. And let’s see what the user wants. Right? It’s not our problem, it’s theirs. So we went to them. And we started with some small groups. And we eventually started scaling up more and more and more,” Flack said of the platforms’ development.

Combined, Windtalker and Dowding give users a common operating picture of the airspace roughly 30 kilometers out, Flack said. “Nothing else can quite do that.”

Building a pattern for the future

The engagements with the Mercy and Mission, again, are quite different than those DDS typically supports abroad, where an unidentified drone poses a much bigger threat. In those cases, users could default to drones as a threat — but in a domestic scenario, they can’t jump to the same conclusion.

“You know when there’s a drone flying over in Iraq, Afghanistan, it is almost certainly a threat. It shouldn’t be there,” DDS Deputy Director Katie Olson said. “So it’s really challenging from a domestic perspective to know when something is a threat, and when something is just recreational and sort of how to know when to be on point for that.”

For this reason, DDS’s support of the naval ships in NYC and LA was as much a learning opportunity as it was to provide situational awareness. “Let’s put the sensors out there and let’s learn the most that we can about them,” Flack said. (Though there were at least a few cases in which local law enforcement was brought into to further investigate, the DDS team said. They couldn’t comment further, due to the sensitivity of the information.)

During the operations with the Navy, DDS learned quite a bit. In NYC, the team tracked 464 flights from 231 unique aircraft, about half of which were repeat fliers. “We had one drone that we repeatedly saw 16 times,” Flack said.

Similarly, in LA, during what was a slightly longer engagement, DDS saw 940 flights from 375 unique drones, with about half of those, again, flying more than once. The top repeater entered the airspace 21 times.

In both cases, roughly 18% of total flights were from the same handful of drones coming back to the spaces on different days, DDS officials told FedScoop.

What does this mean to DDS? It’s all about building understanding and awareness of drone activity in a domestic environment.

“They’re just numbers, you don’t really know what the operator was doing each time it took off, and why were they flying that day?” said Flack. “But ultimately, you know, it’s still interesting in that you have about 18% of the detections we got sparking some sort of interest from our perspective. It becomes a question of is that somebody that’s doing something else? Or are they just taking photos? And that’s when we can dig a little bit deeper in our data and do analysis to help us understand other threat mechanisms.”

And hopefully, over time, this data will give DDS and military services a better sense of what’s threatening drone activity, and what’s just a hobbyist being nosey, so that during future domestic engagements — perhaps during a major protest or a presidential rally — they know what patterns to look for.

“There’s a tremendous amount of activity that I think just provides us with that much more data to then evaluate and really review to see what kind of activity occurs but to also start to create a picture that we can understand what’s normal drone behavior in the area,” Cough said. “How can we use that data to then provide some level of situation or decision making … so we don’t have somebody who’s all of a sudden getting ready to shoot a drone out of the sky when it’s not necessary.”

If Trump wins reelection, his management agenda will emphasize data, emerging tech

The President’s Management Agenda (PMA) will place greater emphasis on agencies’ use of data to make decisions and replacing outdated systems with emerging technologies, should President Trump win reelection, says the acting deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Michael Rigas said the next PMA would include a Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) Goal of having data inform decisions like how agencies interact with the private sector. Current data shows businesses either engage “very little” with the government or do the bulk of their work with the government, a sign the cost of contracting is “too high” relative to many business plans, Rigas said during the Shared Services Summit hosted by ACT-IAC and the Shared Services Leadership Coalition on Thursday.

“We need to do a better job of leveraging data like this to improve our engagement with the private sector and, more broadly, the use of data should inform all or our actions,” said Rigas, who has been nominated to assume his role permanently, on top of serving as acting director of the Office of Personnel Management.

Another CAP Goal would be expanding the use of technologies like robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence to reduce the burden of legacy systems.

RPA and AI have the added benefit of allowing agencies to shift how they use their funds and human capital.

“We see reskilling and upskilling playing a major role in the human capital life cycle,” Rigas said. “And this is the reason we think this work under the President’s Management Agenda is so important to our success.”

The next PMA would aim to boost competition during procurements, giving agencies more options at lower cost and higher quality, Rigas said. A CAP Goal of streamlining federal contracting requirements to be more innovative and commercially friendly would reduce barriers small businesses and startups face to working with government.

Government also needs a CAP Goal to better manage risk, like it’s doing through security clearance reform, said Rigas, who was involved with that effort.

The National Background Investigations Bureau, which transferred its work to the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency a year ago, had a backlog of 700,000 cases at its peak, which has since been reduced to a steady state of 200,000. Top secret clearances now take 79 days instead of 411, and secret clearances 56 days instead of 173, Rigas said.

Improved processing time of clearances ensures fewer top job candidates take jobs elsewhere, and the old process introduced “too much” risk into the workforce.

“Past efforts had chipped away at the problem, but we didn’t need to chip away at a miles-long backlog,” Rigas said. “We needed to take a big, bold step toward eliminating it.”

Navy moving to single-tenant Microsoft 365 cloud environments

The Department of the Navy is moving to single-tenant cloud services from Microsoft 365.

The Navy and Marine Corps will each adopt their own single-tenant instances of Microsoft 365’s software-as-a-service business email and productivity applications, according to a memo from the DON CIO Aaron Weis announcing the shift. The move is a “foundational step” in implementing the Navy’s identity, credentialing and access management (ICAM) strategy and moving users closer to “one email for life.”

A single-tenant cloud service is one that is dedicated to a sole user group, keeping data storage and services separate from any other organization. The move, Weis said in his memo, would save money and improve the security in a department that in the past has suffered from high-profile breaches and has been working to improve its IT modernization and security.

“Moving to single tenancy is the most expeditious way to ensure users are accounted for and migrated to the cloud-based office suite of services offered by Microsoft 365,” the memo states.

The move will not preclude the department using collaborative services across multiple networks. The Navy, like the rest of the DOD, recently jumped to a Commercial Virtual Remote environment using Microsoft Teams to support teleworking during the Coronavirus pandemic. The CVR environment will expire in December and be replaced with a more “enduring” environment for the department, officials have said.

To carry out the vision for a single-tenancy cloud service, Weis and the deputy CIOs for each service in the Department of Navy are reviewing all procurement and implementations of cloud environments.

Microsoft made recent DOD-cloud news winning the re-award of the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract.