Experts urge OMB to ensure agencies budget for evidence-based policymaking

The Office of Management and Budget should ensure agencies budget for evidence-based policymaking in their fiscal 2023 requests to Congress to address national crises, said members of the evidence-building community Wednesday.

Agencies can use set-aside authorities, working capital funds and recaptured unobligated balances to implement OMB‘s June memo, which outlined a process for developing learning agendas and annual evaluation plans.

While the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act established critical leadership positions and activities to facilitate a culture of evidence, it amounted to an unfunded mandate that only applied to the 24 CFO Act agencies and still has guidance outstanding. OMB’s latest memo applies to all agencies and establishes evaluation as a “central function” of government, on par with budgeting and human resources, but doesn’t fully address the “long-underfunded” evidence-building community, said Nick Hart, president of the Data Foundation, during an event it hosted.

“Having just issued this memo saying agencies need resources, I might even lean in here and say it’s incumbent on OMB to make sure that’s part of budget requests that are sent to Congress,” Hart said. “It’s also incumbent on Congress, having authorized the Evidence Act, to ensure agencies have the resources to make it real.”

The Evidence Act required agencies to appoint a chief data officer, evaluation officer and statistical official, but the teams of the latter two are often small or nonexistent and under-resourced. For that reason they need to strengthen collaboration with each other, which OMB’s memo doesn’t address, said Melissa Chu, deputy director of the Committee on National Statistics at the National Academies and a former Department of Veterans Affairs and Census Bureau staffer.

Statistical agencies can help evaluation offices by determining what data is useful, promoting data stewardship and scientific integrity, providing technical assistance for quantitative efforts, and strategizing around evidence use. Collaboration is especially important because the Evidence Act directs statistical agencies to expand data access for evidence building, but Phase 3 guidance hasn’t been released by OMB — nor has Phase 2 guidance for the OPEN Government Data Act.

“There is an entire [Evidence Act] title around data governance and open data, for which there is not currently guidance,” Hart said. “There is an entire title around confidential data, protection of statistical information for which the regulations and guidance have not yet been issued, so if we want the ecosystem to succeed, we also need to keep those pieces moving along as well.”

Meanwhile evaluation offices can help boost the social and policy relevance of statistical agencies, Chu said.

OMB did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

While CDOs, evaluation officers and statistical officials serve as the pillars of evidence building, they may lack the expertise needed to form partnerships for additional resources. For that, additional team members are needed to address stakeholder engagement and also equity, said Lisa Aponte-Soto, a board member at the American Evaluation Association.

“One thing I would caution is there seems to be a lot of intentionality around providing clarity in operationalizing certain terminology but not around diversity and equity,” Aponte-Soto said. “And I would like more clarity around that.”

DOD budget request includes 8% IT spending boost — Govini

The Department of Defense requested a 7.8% increase in its fiscal 2022 budget for IT, according to new analysis from data science company Govini.

According to the company, the increase comes mostly from the “general IT” spending subcategory, which would get an 8.4% boost to $5.6 billion, and “enterprise comms,” where spending rose by 23% to $2.3 billion. In total, the department requested $34.8 billion for IT, according to the analysis of the president’s budget request and other data published as part of Govini’s 8th annual “Federal Scorecard.”

Govini uses propriety machine learning to churn through massive data sets to inform its budget crunching. The 88-page document compares multiple years of DOD budget requests that outline different administrations’ defense spending against their stated priorities.

“I would’ve dearly loved to have this type of information readily available to me,” Bob Work, former deputy secretary of defense in the Obama administration and chairman of Govini’s board, said during a media roundtable unveiling the report. During his tenure, Work was a key strategist in developing the department’s new thinking on technology like artificial intelligence, and he said that the report showed progress in increasing AI spending.

For now, the fiscal 2022 budget request that the report analyzes is just that: a budget request that Congress still needs to approve before money can actually flow to the DOD. It does, however, serve as a blueprint for the budget and shows where the administration wants to put money. Lawmakers have criticized DOD’s own budget request summary on its IT spending, saying it was vague and lacked consistency in what counted as cyber and IT spending.

In the IT and Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) budget breakdown, other categories of increase include naval tactical comms by 2.8% to $2.6 billion, medical IT by 6.9% to $2.2 billion and an “other” category by 12.5% to $18.3 billion. SONAR, ground tactical comms and ISR sensors all decreased.

Jim Mitre, chief strategy officer at Govini, said that the increases continue a trend from the previous year that shows the importance of IT in war.

“The future character of warfare will be defined more by information than by hardware,” he said.

Inside DOD’s JEDI replacement, the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability

After years of pursuing a single-vendor model for its general-purpose, enterprise cloud under the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) acquisition and failing to move it into operation, the Department of Defense announced this week it will pivot to a multi-vendor enterprise cloud acquisition called the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC), issuing a presoliciation notice to industry.

While details of the forthcoming JWCC are limited for now, DOD acting CIO John Sherman revealed some key changes for the procurement. The department will look to issue multiple direct awards with cloud service providers and is also intending to seek proposals from JEDI-winner Microsoft and its main competitor Amazon. Several years down the road, DOD will also pursue a “larger, full-and-open” multi-cloud procurement.

Sherman said the new program will “fill our urgent unmet requirements for a multi-vendor enterprise cloud spanning the entire department in all three security levels, with availability from [the Continental U.S.] to the tactical edge at scale. JWCC will enable us to fulfill the promise of transformational activities such as Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2, and the Artificial Intelligence and Data Acceleration or AIDA initiative.”

While the continued protests of JEDI undoubtedly impacted DOD’s decision to cancel the beleaguered contract Tuesday, Sherman said even if it had gone into operation as intended after award, “we would have been having this multi-cloud discussion right about now anyway” due to the evolving needs of the department.

Though the DOD has a variety of existing vehicles to work with each of these cloud providers in place, like milCloud 2.0 and others, Sherman said there is “nothing to the extent and reach that the enterprise capability we’re seeking to acquire from this will provide through JWCC — truly from the headquarters to the tactical edge in all three security levels at scale.”

Where JEDI was a potential 10-year, $10 billion contract with an open competition, JWCC will be a maximum five-year vehicle worth multiple billions. The new contract also differs in that only those providers that the DOD believes meet its requirements will receive “direct” solicitations to submit proposals for contracts. While Sherman said Amazon and Microsoft both qualify, he clarified that they will not automatically be awarded anything; rather, they will be asked to submit proposals.

Each cloud provider will need to be able to offer services at the unclassified, secret and top-secret security levels, with parity across each of those levels. On top of that, the procurement’s basic requirements call for integrated cross-domain solutions, global availability including at the tactical edge and enhanced cybersecurity controls.

On the topic of price, that will be determined later in the procurement, Sherman said, emphasizing that people shouldn’t get fixated on a certain figure.

Over the next several months, the DOD will conduct market research and industry outreach to confirm its plans for the procurement and the companies that qualify to submit proposals, launching a final solicitation by mid-October, Sherman said. The hope is to issue final awards by “about April 2022.”

“Over the next roughly three months, we will conduct this additional research and direct engagements with other U.S. hyperscale cloud service providers or CSPs to ensure our assessments are accurate and based on the company’s latest information,” he said, noting that the department will be in close touch with other providers like IBM, Google and Oracle to see if they qualify to participate. “If we determine that additional vendors can also meet our requirements, then we will extend solicitations to them as well.”

Asked for his thoughts if there may be companies left out that may inevitably protest, forcing the JWCC acquisition to drag out like JEDI did, Sherman said if a provider is interested in participating, he and his team will be working with them to “hear fully their company’s capabilities.

“We’re going to be asking for artifacts and engagement to ensure that if they’re able to meet the level we need, that we get all that information and keep that door open through October,” he said. “That’s how we’re going to approach this. And whereas we can never control for every factor, our openness of this is going to be critical on that point.”

The direct awards with the providers will be indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contracts that span a three-year base period and two optional years.

“We believe this contract period is both appropriately brief for a direct award but long enough for us to start to leverage the new enterprise capabilities as we fully develop our longer-term plan,” Sherman said.

Based on the timeline, as soon as 2025, the department could then move into a full-and-open competition that would follow on this initial acquisition, if the department deems it’s ready, Sherman said. “Once the second year of this direct award phase starts, roughly in 2023, for the next two years, we’re going to be working on the scoping and other activities to get ready for that larger, full-and-open competition.”

While the DOD Office of the CIO has ultimate oversight of the acquisition strategy, the Cloud Computing Program Officer within the Defense Information Systems Agency will lead the management and operation of any activities under JWCC and integration among providers.

Former Air Force procurement leader Roper named CEO of drone firm Volansi

Former Air Force Assistant Secretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, Will Roper, has been named CEO of a drone company that specializes in medium-sized autonomous drones.

Roper will lead Volansi, which makes autonomous drones that can carry medium- and heavy-sized payloads. While in the Department of Defense, he was one of the biggest public advocates for the adopting of military technology, often saying that it was critical for services to work more closely with the private sector.

“The company’s [vertical take-off and landing] designs are well-suited for a range of commercial and military applications,” Roper said in a release about his new job. “It felt like a natural fit for me to bring my industry knowledge as well as operations and logistics experience to help create disruptive solutions for the transportation of medium to heavy weight payloads. It’s an exciting opportunity.”

Roper had said autonomous drones would be a critical part of the Air Force’s future operations when he was leading the service’s procurement efforts. He spearheaded a drone program called “Skyborg” and others that incorporated the tech.

“Attracting Dr. Roper, first to our Board of Directors and now as CEO, will help us surpass even our most ambitious goals,” founding CEO Hannan Parvizian said in the release. Parvizian will move to be chief technology officer upon Roper’s joining.

IBM $265M software fraud case moved forward by DC appeals court

A former senior sales representative for IBM, who says the company used a false audit to pressure the IRS into a $265 million software license agreement, may reargue his case in D.C. District Court, the Circuit Court decided Tuesday.

Paul Cimino appealed his False Claims Act (FCA) case against IBM to the higher court, which found the District Court was wrong to fully dismiss his complaint in October.

The FCA holds companies liable for fraud against the government and allows whistleblowers like Cimino to prosecute that fraud on the government’s behalf, in return for 10% to 30% of the money recouped. The federal legislation has existed since 1863.

“On the facts alleged at the pleading stage, along with the reasonable inferences drawn from those allegations in Cimino’s favor, we find Cimino plausibly alleged that, but for IBM’s false audit, the IRS would not have entered into the license agreement,” wrote Judge Neomi Rao in the court’s opinion. “Whether Cimino can prove those allegations remains to be seen.”

Cimino said the IRS paid between $23 million and $30 million annually for IBM software from 2007 to 2012. When it became clear the IRS would only seek a license agreement extension for the software it was using, IBM conducted an audit looking to charge the agency compliance penalties for overuse, he said.

Deloitte performed the audit but only found about $500,000 in penalties, so IBM included software licenses on discontinued servers as being in constant use to bring that number up to $292 million, Cimino said.

Adam Kravitz, then an IRS senior manager, rejected the audit, but IBM came back with a $91 million figure in November 2012 that he also rejected, Cimino said.

IBM waited until Kravitz was on vacation to approach other IRS officials like his boss, then-Deputy CIO Jim McGrane, threatening legal action over the penalties, but offered to waive them in return for renewing the software license agreement, Cimino said.

The IRS took the deal and even extended the license another six months for $16 million in 2015, nearly two years after Cimino first filed his complaint.

The government conducted a four-year investigation based on Cimino’s complaint but declined to intervene. So IBM moved to dismiss the case in District Court. That court did on the grounds that Cimino never said the IRS accepted the audit’s findings and that it was implausible the IRS “sat idly by” and paid for the software knowing fraud was possible.

But when Cimino appealed his case, the government filed in support the second time.

In reversing the lower court’s dismissal, the Circuit Court found Cimino didn’t say IRS officials accepted the audit but “came close.”

“[T]he IRS may have felt obligated to pay until it received a legal determination that it was relieved of the agreement’s terms,” Rao wrote.

Cimino also said IBM disguised the penalties the technology company presented to McGrane as an $87 million fee for prospective licenses and support it never delivered, a plea the District Court also dismissed. The Circuit Court upheld that dismissal on the grounds Cimino never said when IBM made those claims, who made them and simply believed the services hadn’t been rendered.

Cimino’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

The case returns to District Court for further proceedings, and IBM could owe up to $10,000 per claim and treble damages if found to have committed fraud.

An additional wrinkle in the case is that Rao also wrote a concurring opinion. It says that although the FCA imposes liability for fraudulent claims, the act does not explicitly state anything about fraudulently induced contracts. Congress “easily could have employed more expansive language” had that been its intent, Rao wrote.

“The plain meaning of the FCA, the Supreme Court’s recent FCA decisions, and the lack of clarity in the precedents recognizing fraudulent inducement are all reasons for reconsidering, in an appropriate case, whether fraudulent inducement is a separate cause of action under the FCA,” Rao wrote.

Army launches personnel records app

The Army has launched its first app that allows soldiers to access personnel records without the need for a Common Access Card.

Called the Integrated Personnel and Pay System-Army (IPPS-A), the app is available on Apple’s App Store and is expected to have roughly 1 million users among active-duty personnel and members of the Army National Guard and Reserve by December when the third update of the app.

It will serve as a modern hub for the Army’s human resources system, allowing users to send in help requests on personnel matters, updating records and monitoring personnel actions.

“The IPPS-A mobile app is a force-multiplier. Access and situational awareness of personnel transactions will be delivered at your fingertips, giving the total Army more transparency than ever before,” said Col. Gregory Johnson, IPPS-A functional management division chief.

It’s the first paperless app where soldiers can connect to Army HR systems and avoid a trip into a personnel office. It will also be available from the Google Play store. Android users can also download the app through the Army Training and Doctrine Command App Gateway.

The app claims to have “the same level of sophistication and security that secure banking and personal service apps have today,” according to its website.

The Federal Procurement Data System shows several companies having contracts for work related to the app, including Booz Allen Hamilton, ASM research, IBM and others.

Pentagon office left military designs for body armor, vehicle gear open to hackers, watchdog finds

The office in charge of the U.S. military’s 3D printing left designs for defense technology vulnerable to theft by hackers and adversaries, according to a watchdog report made public on Wednesday.

If left unfixed, the security gaps could lead to a number of nightmare scenarios, including adversaries stealing military designs, compromising Department of Defense networks or even introducing flaws into design data that could make its way into battlefield products, the report’s authors concluded. Designs included blueprints for protective body armor, tactical vehicle gear, weapons systems brackets and prosthetic body parts, according to the report.

The report found that officials were unaware that the systems connected to local networks and the internet. Because the systems were miscategorized, the office failed to conduct a risk assessment required by the department altogether. Officials also failed to monitor removable media entering the systems.

The security gaps would have left a plethora of entry points for hackers. As DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warns, removable media such as USB drives provide hackers an inexpensive and portable way to infect computers with malware.

Although the Defense Department’s chief information officer disagreed with several recommendations, actions planned by individual offices sufficiently meet the intent of the recommendations, according to the office of the Inspector General. The DoD office in charge of the components manufacturing agreed to update all computer operating systems to the most recent version required by the DoD.

Pentagon officials also missed basic maintenance on systems, including failing to patch a 2019 vulnerability that would have allowed attackers to use unauthorized access to a single computer to jump into others within the network, according to the report. Of the 46 computers attached to the printing tools, 35 hadn’t been updated for more than five years putting the computers and printers connected to them at risk.

Part of the problem was that individuals working with the technology failed to understand how the printers, which the military has ramped up investments in over the past five years, differed from traditional production tools.

“Navy FRC‑SW engineers stated that they treated the AM systems as other manufacturing machines, such as milling and welding machines that did not require consideration of cybersecurity,” the report noted.

The report recommends that the DoD chief information officer require the systems to establish and immediately implement security controls.

Air Force opens bidding for $4.8B NOVASTAR contract vehicle

The Air Force has published a request for proposals for services related to research, development and sustainment of hardware and software capabilities to support the Department of Defense and intelligence community.

The proposed vehicle is called NOVASTAR and will employ about six vendors on an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract worth up to $4.79 billion over its 10-year term. It will consolidate roughly 25 separate contracts under one larger acquisition vehicle.

According to a notice on the Sam.gov website, the National Air and Space Intelligence Center requires contract support for intelligence production through collection, planning, processing, analysis dissemination, and archiving.

The solicitation comes a year after the service issued a request for information for the contract vehicle. Proposals are due by Aug. 31.

Earlier this month, the Air Force announced it would issue an IDIQ contract for IT and technology services for an operations center that is dedicated to flying a squadron of drones.

That contract has a $750 million ceiling and would be to service network and data curation for the Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Squadron Operation Center Enterprise at Joint Base Langley-Eustis. 

DHS procurement chief Correa to retire

Department of Homeland Security Chief Procurement Officer Soraya Correa is set to retire from the government.

Correa will step down from the role at the end of July, a spokesperson at DHS confirmed.

She has held the role at DHS since January 2015 and steps down after 40 years in federal acquisition management. During her tenure in the role, Correa has been one of the preeminent thought leaders in federal acquisition reform and injecting innovation into procurement, particularly through the launch of the Procurement Innovation Lab at DHS.

In a 2019 podcast, discussing the importance of acquisition to IT modernization, Correa told FedScoop: “The role of procurement is the same whether it’s with IT modernization or supporting the overall mission of the department. We’re really there to enable folks to deliver on their mission. So when it comes to IT modernization, what we’re trying to do is collaborate and cooperate with our partners in [the Office of the] CIO, help them find the right solutions to meet their needs, try to understand what it is that they’re trying to modernize, how they’re trying to go about it, what are some of the complexities, what are some of the issues they have, what kind of flexibilities do they need, how are they going to fund these things, so that we can devise the right procurement strategy to meet their overall needs.”

Before working at DHS, Correa was associate director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Enterprise Service Directorate, a role in which she was responsible for delivering identity, immigration status and employment authorization information.

Earlier in her career she has also held leadership positions at federal agencies, including the Naval Sea Systems Command, General Services Administration, NASA, and Immigration and Naturalization Service.

DHS has yet to appoint an acting chief procurement officer.

Federal News Network first reported Correa’s retirement announcement.

Argonne’s machine-learning work may help ease US microchip shortage in time

Argonne National Laboratory researchers have used machine learning to rapidly optimize the application of thin films to semiconductors, a move that may eventually help ease the microchip shortage in the U.S.

The researchers spent a couple of months developing machine learning (ML) algorithms and custom software capable of finding the ideal conditions for achieving high, stable film growth in the least time and then refined the scalable process in a two-year project.

Researchers currently perform atomic layer deposition (ALD), the formal name for the process, by placing samples in a chemical reactor and then removing them to take measurements. But Argonne‘s new, closed-loop system can conduct experiments, learn from the results and suggest new experiments all on its own.

“I think that what we have learned from this project, and from other similar projects, is that there is a lot that you can do with machine learning to address problems involving manufacturing,” Angel Yanguas-Gil, a principal materials scientist at Argonne, told FedScoop.

Image and sound processing and text generation and mining still dominate ML projects, but researchers are increasingly applying the technology to others that require domain-specific knowledge and making similar breakthroughs, Yanguas-Gil said.

Argonne’s ALD breakthrough can help manufacturers save time and money creating nanoscale films, as thin as one atom, to electrically insulate components of semiconductor devices, microchips, solar cells and lithium batteries. During ALD two chemical vapors called precursors adhere to a surface inside a chemical reactor to create the film layer.

But researchers must get precursor chemistry, reactor design, temperature, pressure, and dose timing precisely right. That’s no easy feat with device architectures going 3D — meaning films can’t just layer but also need to infiltrate high aspect ratio features like memories using patterning — and getting smaller. 

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency‘s Electronics Resurgence Initiative views techniques like ALD and atomic layer etching as foundational to developing leading-edge nodes in the semiconductor industry, which the U.S. wants to do to regain a competitive edge over China in everything from microchips to exascale computers.

Argonne funded its ALD work through its Laboratory Directed Research and Development project, which is focused on accelerating emerging technologies in areas like manufacturing before transferring them to the private sector.

Yuangas-Gil was part of an interdisciplinary team that included ALD and ML experts and was focused on developing leading-edge, super-fast nodes that require more ALD steps to produce and incorporating new materials not part of the standard portfolio. ML can experiment with new materials a hundred times faster in a lab, Yuangas Gil said.

While the global microchip shortage was one “inspiration” behind Argonne’s work, it’s a “longer-term” problem that using ML to optimize ALD won’t alone solve, he added.

Industry has already expressed interest in Argonne’s work, and companies that have the proper tools could replicate the closed-loop, ML system and be testing new capabilities within a week of development.

“The good thing is that everything that we’re doing can be done with commercial equipment,” Yuangas-Gil said. “It’s just a matter of putting it together.”