White House looks to fund DOD’s Joint AI Center

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated with information from the Pentagon’s budget proposal.

President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2020 budget proposal calls for $208 million to build out the Pentagon’s newly established artificial intelligence program.

It’s just a fraction of the $927 million the military has requested in 2020 for the development of AI and machine learning for use in the field, to also include advanced image recognition through Project Maven.

The funding would be the first big investment in the Department of Defense’s Joint AI Center (JAIC) but only about half of the $414 million that DOD first projected it’d need in 2020 to scale the program. JAIC has received less than $90 million in funding since its establishment in June 2018 and is staffed by military detailees.

Still, it’s a good sign for the Pentagon’s AI efforts, as the proposed funding suggests the administration is ready to back JAIC as a program of record and as the federal government’s highest-profile use of “operationalized” or applied AI, as DOD calls it, to support a mission in the immediate- or near-term.

JAIC is central to the Pentagon’s recently published National AI Strategy. It is built around “national mission initiatives” (NMIs) — which are broad, cross-functional programs that impact more than one mission or agency — as well as “component mission initiatives” (CMIs), which “are specific to individual components who are looking for an AI solution to a particular problem,” Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, the head of the program, told reporters in February.

JAIC is currently piloting two NMIs — one focused on predictive maintenance and another on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. Others are in the works, such as a project with U.S. Cyber Command on a “cyberspace-related NMI,” Shanahan said.

Pentagon CIO Dana Deasy added that the first year of JAIC was about starting small and that the big transformation and scaling of the organization will take place in its second year. Deasy and Shanahan were optimistic in February that the administration would request a sizable chunk of funding for the program’s growth.

However, JAIC isn’t the department’s only venture into AI — nor would the proposed funding, if passed, be its biggest investment into the technology. The Pentagon’s research arm DARPA launched a $2 billion campaign called AI Next last year to investigate “Third Wave” AI technologies, moving AI beyond the mode where it needs lots of high-quality training data in myriad situations to develop an algorithm. That program is complementary but different from JAIC in that it invests in long-term research of AI rather than the near-term military use cases. Deasy has said that as DARPA’s long-term AI research bears fruit it will fuel the work of JAIC in the future.

White House sticks with TMF, but scales back its 2020 budget request

After two years of receiving less than what it sought for the Technology Modernization Fund, the White House is requesting $150 million for fiscal 2020 — a proposal that would provide a robust addition to the fund but still represent some tempered expectations about Congress’ support.

The request represents far more than the $25 million TMF was allocated for fiscal 2019 and the $100 million it received in its inaugural year, fiscal 2018. The White House had requested $220 million and $228 million, respectively. Although there has been bipartisan support for the TMF, there has been some skepticism about it among appropriators.

A White House summary of the president’s fiscal 2020 budget notes that the fund — which takes proposals for IT projects from agencies and then allows winners to repay the money over five years — has awarded $90 million across seven projects so far. The Trump administration says it’s a “key component” of the Modernizing Government Technology Act, which also allowed agencies to create IT Working Capital Funds with their own money.

Supporters of the TMF, including prominent members of the new House Democratic majority such as Gerry Connolly, D-Va., say it’s a vital tool for updating federal IT. The congressional skeptics have argued that the TMF’s board, which makes decisions about which projects receive funding, needs more transparency about its decision-making process. The seven-member board includes Federal CIO Suzette Kent.

The big winners so far from the TMF are the Department of Agriculture and General Services Administration, which have been funded for two projects each. The departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, and Labor each have received funding for one project.

The Working Capital Funds, meanwhile, don’t require a specific budget request, but the White House said it will be working with Congress to streamline how agencies use them. “The Budget requests necessary transfer authority to better enable agencies to operationalize these IT WCFs and fully implement flexibilities of the MGT provisions,” the summary document says.

Lawmakers haven’t been happy with agencies’ use of the Working Capital Funds. The MGT Act was signed into law in late 2017, but since then, just one agency, the Department of Labor, has deposited money into its CIO-managed fund, according to a December 2018 FITARA scorecard. The Department of Agriculture, Department of Homeland Security and the Small Business Administration plan to launch such a modernization fund in 2019 or 2020.

Despite OMB directive, budget justifications are hard (and sometimes impossible) to find online

President Trump’s 2020 budget request is coming soon, and with it the yearly debate over what gets funding and what doesn’t.

Congressional Budget Justifications — plain-language documents in which federal agencies explain how they plan to spend any appropriated money — are supposed to be public documents posted to the open internet. But a recent review of 456 executive branch agencies and entities found that CBJs are difficult to find at best, and at worst, they appear to be completely unavailable.

The survey, conducted by transparency advocacy group Demand Progress, found that 6.1 percent of all 456 agencies have either a fiscal 2018 or 2019 CBJ published online, but not both, as is the case for most other agencies.

Among this group with irregular posting habits is the Executive Office of the President — Demand Progress found a 2018 CBJ for EOP, but failed to find one from 2019. This is ironic because an entity within EOP, the Office of Management and Budget, is responsible for the directive that CBJs be published online. OMB Circular A-11 (section 22.6) sets this out.

“Make your full congressional budget justification materials, including your performance plan submission, available to the public and post the materials on the Internet within two weeks after transmittal of those materials to the Congress,” the directive reads.

Of course, 6.1 percent of agencies failing to consistently post CBJs isn’t a huge statistic. And this went down to just 3.1 percent, or 10 of 318 agencies, when Demand Progress excluded subordinate agencies whose reports are traditionally included in a superior agency’s report. CBJs for all 24 of the CFO Act agencies were available.

So is this a big deal?

For Daniel Schuman, policy director at Demand Progress, it’s the overall lack of transparency around these useful documents that is the issue. Which agencies or entities are required to publish a CBJ? Which have their CBJs included as part of the CBJ of a parent agency? Where can these documents be found? What about last year’s version? The answers to these questions often aren’t immediately clear.

Circular A-11, while it does say CBJs should be posted online, doesn’t specify where. This creates an understandably fractured environment. However, Congress has now twice, in 2018 and 2019, “encouraged” OMB to maintain “a central online repository where all Federal agency budgets and their respective justifications are publicly available in a consistent searchable, sortable, and machine-readable format.”

“We shouldn’t even have to go through this process,” Schuman said, of the lengthy Googling exercise through which Demand Progress acquired their list of available CBJs. Because agencies must submit their CBJs to OMB before sending them to Congress, OMB could easily post all to a single location for the use of the general public, watchdogs and members of Congress alike, he argued.

In an era when the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 is driving the availability of more and more useful information about federal spending, Congressional Budget Justifications, which are unique because they’re “useful to normal people,” Schuman said, have thus far been left out of the narrative.

Demand Progress recommends that Congress mandate that OMB make agency CBJs available in a central location. The report also suggests that each agency maintain a budget page on their websites, with all budget information for any sub-agencies, and holds up the Department of the Treasury as one good example of this.

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

What to watch for in the 2020 budget

All signs point to the Office of Management and Budget issuing President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2020 budget request Monday or soon after.

Typically, the IT budget is broken out into its own featured section, illuminating the administration’s priorities around digital government, innovation, and IT acquisition and management. This year should be no different.

The budget, though only a request, is a good barometer for the major governmentwide programs and policies the Office of the Federal CIO will continue from years past and introduce new in the coming fiscal year. And at the department level, it shows a framework for how agencies plan to use IT to drive their missions.

If the past year is any indication, there are a few items the federal IT community should be closely watching when the budget request drops.

What’s the topline request for 2020 IT spending?

In recent years, federal IT spending has trended slightly upward, and the 2020 budget request should reflect that growth.

Bloomberg Government analysis estimates a topline IT budget request of about $93.5 billion for 2020, up from its estimate for 2019 of $91.7 billion. Analyst Chris Cornillie told FedScoop that about $46 billion will go to civilian agencies, and the other $47.5 billion will be for the Department of Defense, $10.5 billion of which will be classified.

Deniece Peterson, director of federal market analysis for Deltek, agreed that 2020 will likely show the same growth as in years past. “IT tends to be fairly stable and have some kind of increase,” she said.

How much TMF money?

The Tech Modernization Fund has been one of the administration’s key initiatives to drive IT modernization across government. But to the dismay of the White House, appropriators have been hesitant to dole out cash for the central fund.

The fiscal 2018 budget requested $228 million in the fund but Congress allocated only $100 million. Appropriators were even more stingy for fiscal 2019, giving just $25 million of the $220 million requested. For a period of time, though, it looked like the fund might not get any money in 2019 as lawmakers sought more data from OMB on whether the program was working as intended.

So what will the White House ask for this time around, mindful that appropriators aren’t willing to just throw money at the TMF?

“I’m tempering expectations for that,” Peterson said. “It may be that they request somewhere between the $25 million from FY19 and the 2018 number of $100 million.”

Does cybersecurity continue to get increases?

Cybersecurity is one area that will continue to get increased investment, Cornillie believes.

The 2019 budget set aside about $15 billion for federal cybersecurity efforts, and that should increase to about $16 billion, particularly at agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, where the National Protection and Programs Directorate is rounding out the renamed Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and “will oversee the modernization of security programs like Trusted Internet Connections and EINSTEIN to make them more cloud-friendly,” he said.

Will the Pentagon be transparent about IT spending?

The 2019 IT budget request was uncommon in that it failed to give a combined topline request for both civilian and defense agencies, as has been done historically. This is because, as Peterson puts it, “They’ve been taking more and more of DOD’s IT budget behind the veil,” for national security reasons.

That’s likely to happen again, taking away from the transparency of DOD’s IT spend.

But, Peterson and Deltek expect that spending to stay flat: “We don’t expect to see any significant declines because even when the larger discretionary budget is cut, IT tends to be pretty stable — it’s really about where the priorities are.”

Bloomberg’s estimates, on the other hand, account for a bit of growth in defense IT spending.

Buried in the murkiness of DOD’s IT spend is another question about whether we’ll see any mention of the department’s push to the enterprise cloud, particularly through its highly controversial, single-award Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud contract, worth $10 billion over 10 years.

Will the administration put its money where its mouth is, regarding AI?

The administration has positioned itself to make headway around artificial intelligence, particularly with the White House’s recent issuing of the American AI Initiative directive. But to promote significant achievements in AI — both as a government and as a nation — the White House will need to put some investment behind that policy.

“With the American AI Initiative fresh, it’s possible we’ll see the first governmentwide estimate of its investment in AI-related R&D,” Cornillie said. “The Pentagon’s fiscal 2019 RDT&E budget included about $1.9 billion, with some civilian agencies like the Energy Department reporting investments in AI and ‘advanced computing.'”

He thinks AI investment across the government will be “in the neighborhood of $3 billion, with the Pentagon accounting for about $2.3 billion of that.” DOD also recently stood up the Joint AI Center at the heart of its AI strategy, but that isn’t yet a program of record. Leaders of the program will look for funding in this year’s request.

Peterson agrees that whether AI will receive funding is a big question to watch.

“Is there funding that’s actually being put in place for that?” she said. “Cause we see quite a bit of policy, and some pilots here and there, but we actually want to see how that’s evolving.”

Now’s the time to think about the workforce impacts of automated trucking, GAO says

What impact might a future filled with self-driving vehicles have on the country’s 1.9 million “heavy and tractor-trailer” truck drivers?

GAO identified two main possibilities in a new report published Thursday: Either trucks are going to be fully automated and won’t need drivers at all anymore, leading to a decrease in the amount of work available for drivers, or they’ll be partially automated and still need operators, but operators with different skills.

In any case, the future seems to be a good five to 10 years out. And this, GAO argues, presents an opportunity for the government. The departments of Transportation and Labor, in particular, the report states, have the luxury of some time to decide how they’re going to respond to these changes on the roadways and in the workforce — and they should start thinking now.

How will automated trucks impact driver employment? How about driver wages? If automated trucks do indeed decrease the number of jobs available for truck drivers, will they also create other jobs as specialized operators or engineers? How many such jobs will be created?

These are some of the questions that GAO says DOT and DOL should be considering, with the help of stakeholders like tech developers, truck drivers, state transportation agencies and more.

GAO admits that DOT has taken some steps in this direction. “However, these agencies have not made plans to continue to convene stakeholders to gather information on an ongoing basis or update their analysis as the technology evolves and the effects become more apparent,” the report states.

So GAO has four recommendations for the two agencies impacted, which boil down to the overall suggestion that DOT and DOL do more thinking about what the workforce impacts of automated trucks will be and start planning policy responses. The agencies agreed with all suggestions.

“Federal agencies have an opportunity to prepare truck drivers for the possible workforce effects of automated trucking,” the report states — but they’ve got to start now.

DISA transfers background check IT work to Defense Security Service

The Defense Information Systems Agency has transitioned the team that is responsible for building out the systems that will serve as the backbone for the revamped federal background check process.

The move had been in the works for several months, and David Norquist, the Pentagon’s Chief Management Officer who is performing the duties of the deputy secretary of Defense, issued a memorandum in late January transferring the “authority, direction, and control” of DISA’s National Background Investigation Service (NBIS) to the Defense Security Service (DSS).

The move sends the entire NBIS team of 40 DISA and 12 Joint Service Provider personnel to the Defense Security Service, which will take over federal security clearances for the Office of Personnel Management’s National Background Investigation Bureau.

“DSS gains a tremendous brain trust with these individuals,” DISA Director Vice. Adm. Nancy Norton said. “I want all the personnel who are transferring to know that they will always be a part of the DISA family and we look forward to working with them in their new DSS roles. The entire DISA workforce takes great pride in how professionally they advanced the security vetting program for the nation and the DOD.”

Norquist ordered the moved to happen within 180 days, or by late July.

DISA had been leading the development of the NBIS, in conjunction with OPM’s NBIB, since 2016. Shoring up the background-check process has been a priority for the Trump administration, but the Government Accountability Office included it on its 2019 list of programs that need to see improvement.

Terry Carpenter, NBIS’s program executive officer who will move over with the office, said he will continue the organization’s partnership with DISA.

“The continuing partnership between DISA, the Army Analytics Group, and the Defense Personnel and Security Research Center to develop artificial intelligence algorithms for analyzing big data will further improve the overall investigative and adjudicative quality while reducing processing time,” Carpenter said in a statement.

DOD gets first shared supercomputers for classified research

The Air Force Research Lab recently unveiled a supercomputing environment for the use of the entire military to conduct classified research.

Located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, the new capability consists of four separate supercomputers — the unclassified Mustang, and Voodoo, Shadow and Spectre, which “support higher classification levels.” It’s the first time the entirety of the Department of Defense will have access to such a supercomputing resource, the Air Force says.

“This creates an environment for Air Force, Army, and Navy researchers to quickly respond to our nation’s most pressing and complex challenges, while also accelerating new capabilities to the warfighter at lower level costs to the taxpayer,” Jeff Graham, AFRL DOD Supercomputing Resource Center director, said in a statement. With higher levels of classification, the security needs are greater “to prevent adversaries from leveraging DoD knowledge and expertise,” says a release.

Graham described the new environment as a huge resource for the entire DOD. “The ability to share supercomputers at higher classification levels will allow programs to get their supercomputing work done quickly while maintaining necessary security,” he said. “Programs will not need to spend their budget and waste time constructing their own secure computer facilities, and buying and accrediting smaller computers for short-term work. This new capability will save billions for the DoD while providing additional access to state-of-the-art computing.”

The Air Force is also building out 7,000 square feet of additional space to continue expanding its classified supercomputing capabilities. The facility is one of five DOD Supercomputing Resource Centers, which until this point only operated at the unclassified level providing “DoD scientists and engineers with the resources necessary to efficiently solve the most demanding computational problems.”

USCIS is fighting immigration fraud using data science

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) recently awarded a $49.5 million contract to support the work of the agency’s Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate.

Excella, an Arlington, Virginia-based tech consultancy, will help USCIS detect potential immigration fraud through advanced data analytics.

“This is a significant step for Excella and our partnership with DHS to enhance USCIS data capacity across the board, helping the agency better meet its mission and serve its millions of customers,” Dave Neumann, a partner at Excella, said in a statement. “This is a terrific opportunity to expand our work to create modern digital experiences with great federal partners like DHS.”

USCIS’ Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate exists to determine “whether individuals or organizations filing for immigration benefits pose a threat to national security, public safety, or the integrity of the nation’s legal immigration system.” To do this, FDNS must comb through a lot of data. For the next three years, Excella will be offering data scientists, machine learning algorithms and natural language processing capabilities to streamline this process.

Immigration fraud made the news recently in a much more made-for-TV fashion when eight suspects were indicted on charges of student visa fraud. USCIS caught these alleged fraudsters by setting up a fake university, the University of Farmington, as part of an undercover operation.

GSA, Air Force open bidding for $5.5B 2nd Generation IT contract

The General Services Administration, on behalf of the Air Force, kicked off a multiple-award acquisition this week that could be worth up to $5.5 billion.

Last fall, GSA and the Air Force announced their intent to create a blanket purchase agreement to provide hardware, software and IT services to replace the expiring NETCENTS-2 contract with one called 2nd Generation IT (2GIT).

The five-year contract will be split among five line item categories: data center, end user, network, radio equipment, and order level material. In a presolicitation document, GSA said it estimates spending of between $850 million and $1.1 billion on the contract annually. Public solicitation documents did not reveal if that estimate has changed.

Through GSA’s Cooperative Purchasing program, the contract is open to all federal, state, local and tribal agencies “to purchase IT, security, and law enforcement products and services offered through specific Schedule contracts.” GSA will award spots on the contract to several vendors that those agencies can purchase from.

In a message on GSA’s Interact website, the agency champions the savings the BPA will drive governmentwide. “The forthcoming 2GIT BPAs will provide the Government a fast and effective way to order IT hardware and software commodities, ancillary supplies and services at discounted prices with prompt, cost-effective delivery, while capturing economies of scale, fostering markets for sustainable technologies and environmentally preferable products, while simplifying data collection.”

GSA will host a virtual conference on the solicitation March 14 to answer questions from industry. Bids are due by April 18.

How governments can streamline users’ online experience using IAM

As government agencies look to deliver a growing number of online services to citizens, they face additional challenges in managing user identity and security risks. This is driving more IT leaders to look to centralized identity and access management platforms, according to a new report.

Integrating modern, cloud-based IAM systems to centrally identify users and manage their access privileges also provide citizens the kind of single-sign on user experience they are accustomed to receiving in their personal lives.

It also has the advantage of helping agencies streamline complexity by replacing the identity suites that come with various applications and managing access privileges centrally instead through a single IAM platform, according to IT experts in the report.

The report, “A Modern Approach to IAM,” produced by FedScoop and underwritten by ForgeRock, shares examples of how different organizations are implementing IAM solutions to manage the complexity of different login credentials for different services, giving end users a single-sign-on experience.

One case comes from the state of Texas, and its partners at Deloitte, who are currently rolling out an IAM platform as part of a larger initiative to modernize the state’s IT systems. Once complete, the platform will give residents single-sign-on access to all 52 government services into a single statewide government portal.

According to Chris Keel, principal on the Texas project with Deloitte Consulting, having a modern, centralized IAM platform that easily integrated with the back-end systems of Texas’ multiple agencies was essential to moving from “a stove-piped experience to a customer experience solution.”

The report acknowledges the challenge agencies often face in adapting more modern IAM systems is how best to evaluate and integrate them with existing applications.

Jeff Brooks, vice president, U.S. public sector at ForgeRock, suggests that agencies should explore solutions that work with both legacy systems and emerging technologies, and can scale easily in the future. A modern IAM platform that also supports open standards, he says, “will save agencies time, money and resources over the long run” and help to future-proof their technology upgrades.

Brooks cites how HSBC, a global financial group, reduced nearly 200 internally managed identity management systems down to less than a dozen using ForgeRock’s platform.

One of the reasons centralizing identity and access has become a more pressing need for organizations stems from the growing demand to move workloads to the cloud, says Jessica Morrison, vice president for product and industry marketing at ForgeRock. She cited a Gartner estimate that 75 percent of organizations will deploy to a multi-cloud model by 2020.

The report concludes with several recommendations to agency leaders who are weighing the pros and cons of moving to a centralized IAM solution and what to look for in an IAM solutions provider.

Read the special report “A Modern Approach to IAM,” and find out more about how IAM solutions can improve user experience to websites.

 This article was produced by FedScoop for, and sponsored by, ForgeRock.