Library of Congress is spending $1.5M on a public Congressional Research Service reports website. Is it worth it?
When President Donald Trump signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2018 into law, he put a legislative mandate behind a decades-old transparency initiative. Buried in the bill’s 2,232 pages is a section that directs the Library of Congress to build and maintain a new website — a public-facing home for the taxpayer-funded reports written by the Congressional Research Service.
In response, the library has crafted a plan for development, a schedule for deployment and an estimated price tag for the build. Fans of the CRS’s work, however, are wondering whether it’s all worth it.
The library’s plan
The Congressional Research Service has been called “Congress’ think tank” — it’s a public policy research group within the Library of Congress that churns out thousands of nonpartisan reports a year on issues as varied as U.S. policy in Kuwait, next generation 911 technologies and violent crime in American cities, to name just a few. Congress, however, has been keeping the reports out of the hands of most regular citizens, initially by arguing that the cost for reproducing copies would be too high, since 1954.
On Sept. 18, if all goes according to plan, that will change. The CRS’s non-confidential “R” series reports — which currently circulate to the public only if someone in a congressional office shares them — will be officially available to more than just lawmakers and aides for the first time.
According to the library’s website implementation plan, which was obtained by FedScoop, the new site will publish the reports in PDF format with a digital signature to ensure data integrity and will keep a version history as reports are updated. At launch, the library estimates that 500 of the approximately 2,700 active R-series reports will be available to read and download, and staff will continue to add new reports to the site “as soon as is practicable.” The whole thing will cost the library’s Office of the CIO about $1.5 million — most of that in labor costs.
Much of the work hinges on a modification that is being made to the CRS’s backend publishing system, known as the Authoring and Publishing (A&P) Tool. Library developers are building in an option that will allow A&P to send reports to both the internal congressional site, CRS.gov, and the new public-facing one.
The public-facing website will have the “same look and feel” as CRS.gov, John Rutledge, the library’s customer engagement director, told FedScoop. This not only will save time and money for the library, Rutledge argued, it also means that the new site will be intuitive for the congressional staffers who might need to use it in a pinch.
So what’s the problem?
‘Unreasonably expensive’
Daniel Schuman is the policy director at Demand Progress, a transparency organization that runs a site called EveryCRSReport.com, currently home to nearly 14,500 of the agency’s reports. Schuman is concerned that the library’s planned website does not meet the requirements of the law, will lack functionality and is too expensive.
The EveryCRSReport.com site, Schuman told FedScoop, cost less than $20,000 to build and maintain and has much of the same functionality that the LOC is looking for (like redactions of author contact information). What’s more, the website’s code is available, open source and free to use, on GitHub.
In light of such open source resources, Schuman said, the $1.5 million figure, even considering that government tech expenses are always higher than similar private-sector work, seems “unreasonably expensive.”
But Schuman’s concerns don’t end at cost. In a formal written response to the library’s implementation plan, a copy of which was obtained by FedScoop, Schuman and two other observers lay out additional critiques. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack.us, a transparency initiative tracking legislative activities on the Hill, and Kevin Kosar from the R Street Institute, a free-market public policy think tank, joined him in the letter.
The library should commit to publishing more than just the R-series — insights, infographics, testimony and more should also be included on the site, the group wrote. Additionally, the library should publish reports in HTML as well as PDF format, and look into automatic processing to speed up the work of transitioning reports from CRS.gov to the public site at Congress.gov/crsreports.
Above all, Schuman argues, the LOC could be doing a better job of leveraging outside expertise. After all, a number of civil society groups, including his own, are already doing this work. “We’d be more than happy to chat with [the library],” Schuman told FedScoop. “We’ve tried.”
“My goal is not to stick it to them,” he said. He truly wants the project to be a success, he argued. “My real concern is that they’re not going to accomplish this by the end of this Congress… and then it will lose steam.”
‘It has become almost redundant’
Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists, doesn’t think the cost of the website is such a red flag. “It’s not a shockingly high cost, as far as I can tell,” he told FedScoop.
What worries him is the potential redundancy — most non-confidential CRS reports are already in the public domain if you know where to find them. Groups like the American Library Association have advocated for around 20 years to give the public easy access, and players like EveryCRSReport.com have stepped in to fill the void in the interim.
So while the library’s website will be new, it won’t exactly be novel.
“I feel a little puzzled that it took such a long time to accomplish this move,” Aftergood said. “You could even say that it is taking place at a time when it has become almost redundant.”
“The net increase in ‘transparency’ resulting from the new legislation is less than it would have been years ago,” Aftergood wrote in a blog post about the news. This isn’t to say that Aftergood thinks the forthcoming LOC site is a waste — it has the potential to grow and become more valuable, he said, especially if it expands beyond the R-series.
Both Aftergood and Schuman acknowledge that there is a value in finding CRS reports at a government domain. It’s an “implicit acknowledgment” by Congress that CRS reports should be public, and that’s new, Aftergood said.
“Congress is the authoritative source for this information,” Schuman said. “If Congress or the Library of Congress is the information publisher, then you know that what is being published is accurate, complete, authentic, and unaltered. Any secondary source (like us) means that you cannot have that level of assurance.”
At the end of the day, Schuman and Aftergood’s critiques boil down to a desire for the site to be as good as it possibly can be: more transparent, more user-friendly, less expensive. It’s a quintessential tension in civic tech — this isn’t the first time the dynamic has played out and it won’t be the last.
“I have no criticism of it,” Aftergood said. “I’m just sorry it took so long.”
To drive modernization, CIOs urge adoption of Technology Business Management practices
The time has come to refresh federal IT budget policies, top CIOs said Wednesday.
Agencies have been leveraging the Capital Planning and Investment Control, or CPIC, process to track IT spending since it became law as part of the Clinger-Cohen Act in 1996. If IT budget policies were fashion trends, then the federal government would still be sporting the JNCO Jeans and snap bracelets of the 1990s.
But Deputy Federal CIO Margie Graves said Wednesday that it’s time for agency executives to start updating those processes with the Technology Business Management framework.
“Nothing, I believe, stays valid over a 20-year process without some substantial change that is necessary,” she said at the TBM Public Sector Summit. “Technology has changed. The way we look at our business outcomes within the federal government has changed. So we need to evolve the CPIC process from where it began and, I would argue, where it evolved to over the last 16 or so years to something that’s more modern and appropriate.”
Federal leaders think they have found that more appropriate plan in TBM — a taxonomy designed to help enterprise leaders track IT spending and discern where savings and value can be found.
But incorporating TBM governmentwide and merging it with established practices won’t be easy because it requires collaboration across traditionally stovepiped offices like those of the CIO and CFO.
“That historically has been a very difficult conversation to have because we haven’t been able to draw a straight line between 50 spinning drives and 25 spinning drives and the transaction time committed necessary for acquisition in the federal government,” said General Services Administration CIO David Shive. “With TBM, we are able to see that and show that. So I can then say going from 50 to 25 spinning drives allows me to shut the transaction down by 50 percent, that’s the value to us.”
For Graves, TBM represents a refreshing way for the federal government to assess the value its IT brings to the mission.
“The opportunity I see here with TBM is the ability to start driving away from questions that are conglomerated in a document that evolved over time for different purposes to a specific purpose of driving a business case and showing a business outcome,” she said.
But beyond a best practice, TBM is a lynchpin for the President’s Management Agenda. The PMA has set a target for governmentwide adoption of TBM by fiscal 2022, and Federal CIO Suzette Kent said the taxonomy’s visibility on spending will drive administration goals like IT modernization, data management and shared services, making its adoption essential for agencies.
“The real work here is how this gets implemented and how we move from where we are today into an environment that is aligned with our TBM goals,” Kent said. “That’s not a simple task. It takes a lot of participation across the agency.”
The PMA aids officials seeking that cooperation, Shive said, but he also encouraged those officials to press C-suite leaders on the taxonomy’s advantages.
“If you are trying to increase adoption, be consistent with your messaging to your internal teams,” he said. “Co-opt your CIO and your CFO and get them to do a whole lot of telling instead of asking. Don’t make it an option.”
GSA adds login.gov to its ongoing bug bounty program
The General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Service is asking friendly hackers to test the security of login.gov, the agency’s single sign-on platform for government.
The GSA bug bounty program, the first for a civilian agency, began in August last year as part of a broader effort to draw upon outside expertise to increase the security of a variety of services. Commercial bug bounty platform HackerOne, which has handled similar projects for the military, is managing the effort. At first all of the focus was on the 18F-built Federalist website publishing service, but TTS has opened up additional domains as “targets” over the intervening months.
Login.gov is a government single sign-on project built cooperatively by 18F and the U.S. Digital Service — it allows users to sign into multiple government websites with the same email address and password combination. The service is currently used by government job application site USAJobs; by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection for its jobs site, its Trusted Traveler Program and its Outlying Area Reporting Stations app; and by the USDS for an internal tool.
When USAJobs signed on in February, the job board’s program manager Michelle Earley cited Login.gov’s security as a decisive element in its favor. “A major reason USAJobs will be transitioning to login.gov is because it uses two-factor authentication, which will give users an extra layer of security to help protect their USAJobs profile against password compromises,” Earley said in a statement.
TTS will award bounties of between $150 and $5,000 for vulnerabilities found and disclosed in login.gov code.
TTS will continue to expand the domains included in the prize competition too — vote.gov, analytics.usa.gov and the main 18F domain are all still to be added.
Defense CIO Dana Deasy conducting ‘full review’ of JEDI cloud acquisition
In the few weeks since being placed in charge of the Department of Defense’s cloud efforts, CIO Dana Deasy has launched a “full top-down, bottom-up review” of the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud acquisition.
Deasy told attendees Wednesday at the Defense Systems Summit he is assessing the Pentagon’s landmark, multibillion-dollar commercial cloud acquisition “to ensure we provide clear messaging from the department on our cloud adoption strategy, and the transparency on our approach with both industry and Congress,” according to his prepared remarks.
JEDI’s request for proposals — currently in the draft state — was slated to release in May but has been delayed now by more than a month. Deasy expressed Wednesday that he’s not as concerned with meeting that deadline as he is getting the contract right.
“This is not about making a certain date to get an RFP out,” he said, adding that the final solicitation shouldn’t be “a long ways off” and there is “a bit more work to do before we release.”
The main focus, Deasy said, is a final RFP “that truly represents what any smart intelligent company in private industry would do in seeking to put an enterprise cloud in place.”
Many from industry might hope that it means Deasy’s team is reconsidering the single-award strategy for the acquisition — a frequent topic of contention since the draft RFP was released. Deasy said in his prepared remarks that the Pentagon operates in multiple clouds currently, leading it to be “disparate and disjointed.” DOD doesn’t “have the true enterprise cloud that will deliver the efficiencies of scale the department needs,” the remarks said.
Deasy was placed in charge of JEDI and all other DOD enterprise cloud efforts June 22.
The new CIO, in the role since May, is a big fan of cloud transformation. In one of his first public speaking engagements with the DOD, Deasy called the cloud age of IT “a brilliant opportunity to re-engineer.”
“Cloud allows you to do amazing things you simply haven’t been able to do historically — the idea of just self-healing, awareness, the attributions of being able to get more services on the fly,” he said. “It gives us as IT professionals a whole new way to operate our estate and build the future of how we want IT to run.”
FCW first reported Deasy’s decision to review the procurement.
What role should government play in setting a ‘vision’ for AI innovation?
With the creation of a White House Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence in May, the Trump administration unveiled its philosophical approach to AI innovation: The United States should lead the world, and the way to get there is by keeping any regulations at bay.
“We didn’t roll out the red tape before Edison turned on the first lightbulb. We didn’t cut the lines before Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call,” U.S. Deputy CTO Michael Kratsios said in his remarks at the select committee kickoff meeting. The unknown, he argued, “is no excuse for preemptive government intervention.”
Even so, there are important roles the government can play in helping to shape the future of this technology, panelists said at a Wednesday morning Politico event.
The government, the diverse group agreed, can and should aid in the creation of a national AI strategy, continue investing in early-stage AI research and work to foster international norm cooperation.
“Very similar to the way the United States kind of responded to Sputnik with kind of a national strategy around building the space program… I think that would be very, very useful right now,” said Rep. John Delaney, D-Md.
Technological competitors like China and others have a strategy, and the U.S. also needs to set out its “vision” and goals around AI. The government certainly has a role in helping to craft this approach, he said.
Walter Copan, director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and a leader on the White House AI committee, said there are a “series of roles” that are “appropriate” for the government to hold in this area. First, he said, the government should sponsor early-stage research and development through government grants.
Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, agreed that investing in early-stage research is key. When it comes to the global race to AI dominance, he said, “the best case scenario is that we’re tied [with China].” The way to change that is to invest in research and “unlock data,” he said.
Second, Copan said, the government can use its convening power to find “synergy” between private sector and public sector actors — something the select committee arguably exists to create. Rashida Richardson, director of policy research for the AI Now Institute, offered one note of criticism on the select committee — while it includes government, industry and academia, she said, it does not yet include civil society groups. The diverse privacy, security and bias issues that AI brings up, she argued, indicate that civil society groups should have a seat at the table.
Dean Garfield, president and CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council, added that the federal government can also help lead international agreement on AI standards. Given all the work that countries around the world are currently doing, “it is an opportune time,” he said, to decide on what “the rules,” so to speak, should be.
“When the U.S. shows leadership on this, then that sets a framework for the rest of the world,” Hurd said.
Collectively, Delaney said, governments, the private sector, civil society groups and even individual citizens have a journey of choices ahead. “We’re not going to go to bed one night and wake up in the ‘Terminator’ movie,” he said, to laughter in the room. But the investment and regulation and collaboration decisions we make, he added, will have an impact on what kind of world we do wake up to.
The White House is playing the long game on quantum computing, deputy CTO says
U.S. Deputy CTO Michael Kratsios is thrilled by the potential of quantum information science (QIS) in the United States. But he acknowledged Tuesday that it could be some time before any of the White House’s efforts to support quantum development begin to impact the nation.
Kratsios called recent work that the White House has done on the inceptive technology “critically important” and said he hopes to see some perceptible results within the next six years.
“Sometimes, we, especially at the White House, can kind of get caught up in a lot of the day-to-day or the short-term work that needs to be done. And QIS is a very long-dated issue that we need to ensure American leadership on,” he said Tuesday at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s AI summit.
The Trump administration placed a greater emphasis on quantum technology this summer with the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s recent creation of a subcommittee within the National Science and Technology Council to help coordinate quantum research efforts across the federal government.
Congress has also followed suit with a slate of legislation to foster public- and private-sector cooperation on QIS research and development.
Quantum technology commands such attention because of its theoretical potential to dramatically increase computing power by entangling particles — allowing the distinct “ones and zeros” of classical computer bits to be superimposed into a single state. The resulting increase in computing power could crack modern cryptography protocols and provide secure communications that can’t be hacked.
Even though current quantum technology has yet to overtake classical computers, Kratsios said the innovations developing in the private sector, combined with increases in federal research, could soon produce perceptible breakthroughs.
“It’s not something that we are going to have tangible, commercialized results in this term,” he said. “But certainly in our second term and going forward, there may be opportunities where you can see a more [formed] product.”
But given QIS’s potential to be a transformational technology, the challenge of fostering it with research conducted by the federal government’s science and technology communities is a top draw for Kratsios.
“Those are the types of problems I like to think about more than any others,” he said. “It’s how we can set the right foundation and the right path forward to ensure that there’s iteration and coordination on these really hard national problems that we need to make sure we lead on.”
Energy has a new central access point connecting investors, innovators to national labs
The U.S. Department of Energy has launched a new web portal for connecting industry investors and innovators with the work of the agency’s many and varied national labs.
The Laboratory Partnering Service (LPS) basically streamlines and combines what used to be a bunch of disparately held information. It is a project of DOE’s Office of Technology Transfer that gives interested users “direct access to the vast array of expertise, research, and capabilities” at the agency’s 17 labs. It also acts as a single portal where innovators or investors can inquire about technology transfer, using the LPS to send questions to each lab’s tech transfer office.
And all this, Energy hopes, will aid in encouraging agency tech transfer — the shift of early-stage federally funded research to the private sector for eventual commercialization.
“The launch of the Lab Partnering Service represents a big step in reducing barriers that often limit energy investors from partnering with our National Labs,” Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said in a statement. “The LPS consolidates information and capabilities at the National Labs to increase public access.”
LPS includes an “expert search” section that “provides customers a direct conduit to experts from the DOE’s national laboratories,” a technical summaries section and a visual DOE patent search tool.
“DOE is one of the largest supporters of technology transfer in the federal government,” a press release on the new LPS reads. And tech transfer is a priority for the Trump Administration — in fact, it is among the cross-agency priority goals (or CAP goals) that the Office of Management and Budget has instituted as a way to operationalize the President’s Management Agenda.
CAP goal number 14, in fact, seeks to “improve the transfer of technology from federally funded research and development to the private sector to promote U.S. economic growth and national security.” Successful tech transfer, as shown by commercial success, is the return on the government’s R&D investments.
“Our country is used to leading the world in technology innovation and service delivery,” Margaret Weichert, deputy director for management at OMB, said at an event in April. “And at one time, the U.S. government was the catalyst of much of that innovation.”
The administration, she went on to suggest, is committed to getting back there.
White House continues push for public-private collaboration on AI
The Trump administration wants to leverage a coalition of the public, private and academic sectors to ensure the U.S. has the lead in artificial intelligence development.
Michael Kratsios, U.S. deputy CTO and the current de facto head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said that while the administration is pushing for agencies to make AI a priority in their research and development spending, it also wants to partner that with the private sector and academia to help outpace competitors like China on development.
“I’m always going to bet on the American innovation ecosystem,” he said Tuesday at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s AI Summit. “What has made the United States an engine or the home for the greatest technological innovation over the last 100 years? My answer to that is our R&D ecosystem. What is our ecosystem? It’s one part federal funding, one part private sector and one part academia.”
To help drive that ecosystem, the Trump administration is pushing for agencies to spend more R&D dollars to help drive basic research breakthroughs in AI, a technology that could have a near-limitless impact.
“The federal government spends about $150-plus billion a year on R&D and it’s critical that we prioritize AI as a research area,” he said. “So actually getting agencies to be allocating dollars towards a specific research area is a little trickier than you would imagine. The best to do that is you have to send very strong signaling from the White House to agencies that they should be thinking or prioritizing AI.”
Kratsios said the fiscal 2019 budget, as well as the Office of Management and Budget’s memo of the fiscal R&D priorities, laid out the administration’s game plan on spotlighting AI. Now agencies are starting to develop their investments, including the June debut of the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.
That innovation also has to be matured through a cyclical cooperation with the private sector, the deputy CTO said. So the White House is also looking at streamlining the federal regulations in areas that could present barriers to emerging technology innovation, such as the Federal Aviation Administration’s rules on drone use.
But while the private sector can drive breakthroughs on the application side of R&D, Kratsios added that the federal government has to be the leader in promoting basic research into the core concepts behind AI technology by leveraging its national labs and providing research funding to the nation’s colleges and universities.
“Our greatest inventions don’t happen because the president or an agency, by edict, decide that we shall do this. It is a collaborative, creative, free and open environment for scientific discovery,” he said. “You kind of see this zig-zag of progress through technology. It’s done through the creative, innovative spirit of America, rather than this top-down, heavy-handed industrial approach. For us, that’s what we are kind of doubling down on.”
In May, Kratsios and the White House hosted a meeting with industry and academic stakeholders to discuss the future and promise of artificial intelligence.
SBA wants $40M in IT services help to meet 5-year modernization goals
The Small Business Administration issued a solicitation Monday worth up to $40 million for IT professional services to support the Office of the CIO’s modernization initiatives over five years.
SBA hopes to make up to three awards to 8(a) small businesses on the multiple-award indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract “to provide the SBA’s OCIO with technical professional services to support the Chief Information Officer (CIO)’s strategic planning and engineering efforts for FY 2018-2022, architecture and engineering expertise in the implementation of CIO initiatives and technologies, and other support as may be required for mission accomplishment.”
While the contract would give the SBA OCIO — currently led by Maria Roat — broad help to achieve the objectives laid out for it in the agency’s strategic five-year plan, the request for proposals specifically keys in on things like architecture and engineering services for cloud, cybersecurity and mobility, as well as program management, enterprise data management and business intelligence services, among others.
SBA already has its first task order ready, which it plans to award at the same time as the IDIQ contract spots, for cloud migration and data center closures.
“The Small Business Administration (SBA) Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) is seeking Professional Services and support to the CIO’s strategic initiatives in evaluating, assessing, architecting, engineering and providing operational support for the continued development and implementation of SBA’s cloud environments (Azure and Amazon Web Services),” the task order says. “The services will also include providing technical support to the SBA’s Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) to close existing physical data centers and migrating those locations to the SBA cloud.”
SBA will consider responses to that first task order as part of its evaluation process for spots on the greater IDIQ contract.
The contract will have one base year and four one-year options. Proposals are due July 31.
SBA Administrator Linda McMahon tasked the OCIO in her 2018-22 strategic plan with implementing enterprisewide IT modernization and “cost-effective technology” to strengthen SBA’s ability to serve small businesses.
As the plan says: “The SBA will take an enterprise approach to modernize, innovate, and test new capabilities to optimize meeting the business needs of its customers. SBA’s information technology infrastructure is the foundation that enables SBA programs and operations. Delivering a consistent, reliable, and secure infrastructure is imperative to achieving this mission. The SBA will upgrade its core infrastructure to become current with existing technologies, and will improve the reliability and availability of services that will help improve the Agency’s security posture.”
DISA awards $49M OTA for background check system
The Defense Information Systems Agency is moving forward with its background investigation platform, selecting a Herndon, Va.-based contractor to help build the prototype.
DISA officials said in a release “Enterprise, LLC” secured a $49 million other transaction agreement (OTA) on June 22 to design the prototype for its National Background Investigation Services (NBIS) Investigation Management Shared Service.
However, the release is likely referring to the company “Enterprise Services, LLC,” a subsidiary of the newly formed IT contractor Perspecta, which launched in June when DXC Technology spun off its public sector arm, combining it with Vencore Holding Corp. and KeyPoint Government Solutions. The Enterprise Services brand itself was created under Hewlett Packard before a merger in 2017 with CSC to create DXC.
DISA was tasked with building the NBIS system in 2016 as part of the creation of the National Background Investigations Bureau, an agency stood up in the wake of the Office of Personnel Management hack to modernize the security clearance process.
The NBIS Investigation Management Shared Service system will leverage automation to help optimize the time it takes to complete background investigations. The platform “is the integrated case management solution that will bring together the core functions of the systems and provide the interface for investigative users.”
DISA elected to use an OTA — which allows agencies to develop and scale prototyped technology without going through a full contract acquisition process — to incorporate leading-edge technologies from a “non-traditional defense contractor base.”
“We’re building a first-of-its-kind enterprise system that brings together the complex integration of a number of disparate systems on an unprecedented scale,” NBIS program manager Raju Shah said in a statement. “We needed to hear from as wide a selection of vendors as possible to understand what was possible and be able to narrow to what’s probable.”
The advantage of the OTA process is the speed at which DISA and Enterprise can stand up the NBIS prototype, which is being built on a cloud-based architecture using scaled agile framework methodology, officials said.
Speed is something NBIB is desperately looking to apply to its background investigations process, as a backlog has reached into the hundreds of thousands and is counted among the Government Accountability Office’s “high risk” list.