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Medicaid chief visits Silicon Valley

The head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services visited the West Coast this week to pitch Silicon Valley startups to innovate for his agency and the huge program it runs for low income Americans.

Andy Slavitt, acting administrator of CMS, took the trip out west to convene “states, innovative tech companies, and federal Medicaid officials on how to collaborate to improve the delivery of Medicaid health coverage in states,” a CMS blog he penned says.

The trip out west is one more and more federal agencies, like the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, are taking to connect to cutting-edge technology from the Valley.

The meetings in Silicon Valley, Slavitt writes, “will help in getting two very different cultures – state government and tech companies – speaking the same language and exploring opportunities to work together to continue to improve care delivery within Medicaid.”

Medicaid, jointly funded by federal and state governments, is administered by the states.

In conjunction with his trip, Slavitt announced CMS is developing a playbook “to help companies translate states’ requests for proposals into work they believe can move the needle.”

Likewise, CMS is recruiting a Medicaid-focused entrepreneur-in-residence to further serve as a sherpa for startups interested in getting involved with the program.

While CMS is the federal agency responsible for doling out funds for Medicaid and Medicare, states — the recipients of those funds — are ultimately responsible for administering the programs and purchasing modernized IT systems to improve provision.

CMS invests more than $5 billion in Medicaid IT annually and matches up to 90 percent of state spending on new systems. In January, it introduced new resources to make it easier for small, innovative tech companies to get a piece of that cash.

“While there are 56 different state, district, and territorial Medicaid programs, there is a lot of commonality in their IT needs,” the blog says. “There is always new IT procurement and opportunities for new, innovative vendors in this space. This industry is primed for a new era — Software as a Service software — that has real time capabilities and requirements and Federal sponsorship for a 90 percent match on qualifying IT investments.”

Contact the reporter on this story via email at Billy.Mitchell@FedScoop.com or follow him on Twitter @BillyMitchell89. Subscribe to the Daily Scoop to get all the federal IT news you need in your inbox every morning at fdscp.com/sign-me-on.

Why you can’t decide (And what to do about it)

There it sits on your desk, awaiting your decision. As a key executive, you have difficult news to deliver to the board, and a recommendation to make. But how will you advocate for a solution when you can’t decide which to choose?

Of the alternatives before you, several would almost certainly be effective, but also expensive. On the other hand, doing less, while easier on the budget, could cost even more in the long run.

What are you going to do? You’ve been asking yourself this question for too long. Everyone is waiting for your decision, but you feel stuck.

Who among us hasn’t struggled with indecisiveness from time to time? In the rapidly changing world of technology, however, delay can be disastrous. No one knows this better than the executive — so why the paralysis?

Often, according to researchers, the reason for indecision is fear. Whether fear of failure, or of the unknown, or conflict, or something else, fear not only keeps us from making good decisions, but can stop us from deciding anything at all, researchers have determined.

Why does fear inhibit decision-making? Neuroscience tells us that a specific area in our brains, called the amygdala, processes fear. When the amygdala gets stimulated, we respond in one of three ways: fight, flight or freeze. It’s fairly easy to understand how these reactions benefited our ancestors, who had to worry about being eaten by predators. We might even be able to see how they could serve modern-day humans in dangerous situations. But for the executive trying to choose a strategy, these responses likely do more harm than good.

When the brain’s fear system activates, it switches off exploratory activity and risk-taking — both essential to good decision-making, according to Dr. Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University.

“Just when we need new ideas most, everyone is seized up in fear, trying to prevent losing what we have left,” Berns wrote.

Cybersecurity, in particular, can cause fears that distort decisions. Sometimes, this can work in the CISO’s favor. What’s known in the profession as FUD, or “fear, uncertainty and doubt,” may convince a board reluctant to invest adequately in security measures.

JR Reagan writes regularly for FedScoop on technology, innovation and cybersecurity issues.

But one survey found that security professionals themselves may be victims of FUD. Fear may cause some to shift away from time-tested enterprise risk management and risk-based information security strategies, and embrace, instead, less-proven IT and technical security measures — potentially increasing risk to their organizations.

Fear can cause an excess of caution, as well, a clinging to the status quo instead of making the changes needed to keep pace with cybercriminals’ ever-shifting tactics. For instance, a recent survey found that nearly every organization is at risk of a data breach, but most lack the response capabilities to mitigate the damage should one occur.

According to another study, nearly 90 percent of IT professionals think wearables and the Internet of Things pose a danger to workplace security, yet only about one-third of organizations are taking steps to address these new threats.

Clearly, indecision regarding cybersecurity — and its sibling, inaction — can be hazardous to an organization’s health. How do we free ourselves from the paralyzing effects fear can impart? Here is what research suggests we consider:

Face your fears. When indecision strikes, acknowledging its source — fear — can be an effective first step toward freeing ourselves from its power. What are we afraid of? A survey of 116 CEOs and other executives found that their top fears include being found incompetent (“imposter syndrome”); underachieving, which can spur bad risks as a way to compensate; appearing too vulnerable; being politically attacked by colleagues; and appearing foolish. The next time you feel unable to decide, ask yourself if any of these apply to you, or if it’s something else.

View the “big picture.” Rather than focusing on what bad outcome your decision might cause, try thinking about what you want to achieve. What are your organization’s goals? What strategies do you have for helping to meet those goals? Looking toward the horizon — beyond your fears — may enable you to link the problem to the strategy, which may allow the best solutions to rise naturally to the top.

Trust your intuition. “Trust your gut” is almost a cliché, but intuition can often be overlooked — or disregarded. Not merely instinct, intuition is the synthesis of our feelings, beliefs and experiences. In her book “Women Who Run with the Wolves,” psychologist Clarissa Pinkola-Estes explores a folktale in which a girl becomes lost in the woods. When the doll in her pocket begins to move around, the girl removes it from her pocket and the doll points the way. At first, the doll’s movements are difficult to discern — like the small, quiet voice in our heads telling us what we should, and shouldn’t, do. The more the doll is heeded, however, the stronger it becomes, helping the girl find her path more quickly. Intuition — also known as wisdom — can work the same way, the author writes.

One thing you shouldn’t do: stifle or ignore your fears. Emotion, we now know, is as important to good decision-making as reason. The “gut” and the intellect both play key roles in the best decisions — and may help you not only to make the most reasonable choices today, but also to argue your case passionately, and persuasively, to the board tomorrow.

JR Reagan is the global chief information security officer of Deloitte. He also serves as professional faculty at Johns Hopkins, Cornell and Columbia universities. Follow him @IdeaXplorer. Read more from JR Reagan.

Elevated CISO would strengthen HHS cybersecurity — panel

Elevating the Department of Health and Human Services’ chief information security officer to an equal of the CIO would eliminate an institutional conflict blamed for a series of department data breaches in recent years, a panel of nongovernment health IT experts said.

“A CIO is typically concerned about availability and uptime of IT, as opposed to privacy or sensitive information,” Josh Corman, director of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council and self-described “staunch advocate of the CISO role,” said before the House Energy and Commerce Committee’ Subcommittee on Health Wednesday.

No officials from HHS were present at the hearing, although lawmakers promised to consult with the department.

The full committee introduced a bill in April that would elevate HHS’ CISO to a presidentially appointed position no longer subordinate to the CIO. The bill came as the result of the committee’s December 2013 investigation into HHS cybersecurity, particularly at the Food and Drug Administration, which had faced a breach of its internal network months earlier.

That investigation revealed several other breaches across HHS agencies. It found that all of them were due in some part to an organizational structure that sacrificed security for operational efficiency.

Several of the panelists had experience, both in and out of government, with this sort of conflict between CIO and CISO.

Corman said it’s pretty much the job and a requirement of security teams to “interrupt uptime” of systems — to “do security assessments or do healthy security patching.”

That can cause a tension between the CIO and CISO, and because of the hierarchy, “it usually leads to the CIO winning,” he said.

Many times, breaches stem from very minor vulnerabilities that could have easily been corrected but are left alone for months or years, the panelists said.

Often with breaches, “there was a fix, there was a patch that somebody could have applied, there was a configuration somebody could have made, there was a port somebody could have closed, there was a policy somebody could have pushed out, and those things weren’t done,” said Mac McMillan, CEO of CynergisTek Inc and a former Defense Department information security official.

“They put off the ‘blocking and tackling’ … because they’re too operationally focused on the number of projects they have.”

He added, “Then somebody says, ‘Oh by the way, you have to do this patching and fixing and hardening and all of these other things that take care of systems day in and day out.’ And unfortunately what happens is the pressure is on them so intensely to roll systems out, to roll services out, to roll productivity out, that unfortunately it does create conflicts, they do make choices, and sometimes those choices are not the best ones from a security perspective.”

Because of the particularly sensitive information that HHS and other entities within the health care infrastructure hold, the significance of information security in those organizations is much greater, panelists argued.

“For health care providers, a significant security incident or breach may lead to a disruption in patient care,” said Samantha Burch, senior director of congressional affairs for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society in North America. “As such, it is clear that health care organizations need a cybersecurity leader to manage, as well as mitigate, security risks.”

But this problem isn’t unique to HHS, the panelists said; and if elevating the CISO is passed into law and at all successful, it could be used as a model for other agencies.

“There’s a tremendous value in experimentation, and I really applaud the spirit of this bill to try an alternative reporting structure in one agency, and if successful it could be replicated across other agencies,” Corman said.

Some subcommittee members were concerned by the absence of HHS representatives.

“I’m disappointed we couldn’t ensure that HHS had an opportunity to be here today to express their own views,” said Frank Pallone, D-N.J. “HHS should be able to testify to whether this organizational chance makes sense from their perspective and if could potentially exacerbate the problem it’s trying to solve.”

Pallone said HHS couldn’t attend because “the majority rushed this hearing.”

Chairman Joe Pitts, R-Pa., said the subcommittee will be consulting with HHS.

Congress pushes for answers on outdated agency IT

An eight-inch floppy disk was the center of attention during a House hearing Wednesday, used to illustrate lawmakers’ argument that federal IT systems are woefully outdated and the people responsible for running them have mismanaged the money given them by Congress.

For Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the disk was an example of how agencies are using the majority of their IT budget to maintain out of date systems, including some that are more than half a century old.

“The federal government cannot rely on 930 million lines of code using more than 70 legacy programming languages,” Chaffetz, the committee chair said in his opening remarks. “That includes over 155 million lines of COBOL and 135 million lines of Fortran – coding languages first used in the 1960s. In fact, 50 years ago — 50 years ago — Dartmouth University described Fortran as ‘old fashioned.’ So 50 years ago, they thought it was old fashioned, and it’s still in use today.”

Floppy disks like the one displayed at Wednesday’s hearing are still in use in the Defense Department’s Strategic Automated Command and Control System — among a number of systems highlighted in a scathing Government Accountability Office report released prior to the hearing.

The report listed several systems in use at Defense, Treasury and Department of Veterans Affairs that are decades old.

“Many of these systems are tied to mission critical functions, not just administrative or financial management systems,’ said Dave Powner, GAO’s director of IT management issues. “Not only are these old systems difficult and expensive to maintain because agencies have to rehire retired programmers or pay a premium to vendors for such services, they often pose significant security risks.”

When pressed about the defense system, DOD CIO Terry Halvorsen said the aging command and control center — which coordinates operations for U.S. nuclear forces — is a backup to the backup system currently in place and is not among the most pressing updates needed inside DOD.

“No one is saying we should continue to use the eight-inch disks much longer,” Halvorsen told Rep. Ted Lieu, R-Calif. “While I want to fix it, in the priority of things I need to fix, that will probably be in year three of my next five-year plan. It is not in the top priority of things I want to fix or things you would want me to fix.”

Federal CIO Tony Scott was among the witnesses Wednesday, telling the committee how the Obama administration’s proposed IT Modernization Act would drive civilian agencies to use modern enterprise technology, migrate away from older, less secure systems and coalesce around a small number of common platforms that can be used across the entire federal government.

“We are making progress, just not fast enough,” Scott said.

“It takes too long to put together the money to do the replacements or harvest savings to put together in one place to fix things. There’s a broader set of issues that the fund tries to address. It marries management, money and different mode of operating than the pattern we’ve been in.”

Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., told Scott that for the fund to pass Congress, the Office of Management and Budget must lay out a roadmap for how that fund makes agencies more efficient.

“I think the chairman has expressed that it is counterintuitive that we would actually need to add more money and I think you can sell that plan to Congress if you can demonstrate ‘here will be the payoff, here’s the return on that investment,’” Connolly said.

In the case of IRS, CIO Terry Millholland called for lawmakers to reinstate streamlined critical pay, which would allow the agency to quickly hire top-notch cybersecurity professionals. The IRS used this authority to hire senior IT officials until the provision expired in 2013. The last 10 senior IT officials hired this way will be leaving next year, as the hires are limited to four-year appointments.

This pay was also brought up in a Senate Finance Committee hearing last month, where the IRS commissioner called for the provision to be renewed.

Chaffetz said be it through the IT Modernization Act or the committee’s continued oversight of the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act, both sides of the aisle need to come together to find a solution to the massively aging systems still in use.

“Taxpayers deserve a government that leverages technology to serve them, rather than one that deploys unsecure, decades old technology that places their sensitive and personal information at risk,” Chaffetz said.

“We have a long way to go to get from COBOL to the Cloud, but I am committed to helping get us there.”

Contact the reporter on this story via email at greg.otto@fedscoop.com, or follow him on Twitter at @gregotto. His OTR and PGP info can be found here. Subscribe to the Daily Scoop for stories like this in your inbox every morning by signing up here: fdscp.com/sign-me-on.

USDS’ Meyer on mobile: Listen to your users

Building a mobile experience doesn’t automatically equate to spinning up a new mobile app — it might even end up with a paper form, if that’s what the user wants.

That was the message founding U.S. Digital Services member Erie Meyer delivered at FedScoop’s sixth annual MobileGov Summit, explaining how user experience trumps fancy widgets when it comes to serving the public’s civic needs.

Meyer explained how USDS used an extremely iterative process that focused on user feedback and constant redesigns when building two projects for the Education Department: the College Scorecard and a guide for repaying student loans.

Meyer said the teams focused more on creating a problem statement to figure out who they were trying to serve and how they could build prototypes that could test the riskiest assumptions.

“It is agnostic of what will accomplish the goal,” Meyer said of problem statements. “Regardless of what we are going to use to do it, it focuses on what are we trying to do.”

She also described how teams will take user feedback and pump it into low tech prototypes — cardboard and construction paper “garbage” as she described it — to figure out how users will interact with something before devoting any time or money to coding out a product.

“The point of a prototype is to test your riskiest assumption,” Meyer said. “That gave us the opportunity before we went anywhere else, before we spent one second writing code or one second doing a high-fidelity design, to test what we had heard in the field.”

This work eventually steered USDS away from building mobile apps and toward a mobile website. However, users aren’t beholden to just a mobile experience. In the case of the scorecard, users can replicate their experience on a desktop. With the student aid guide, users can have directions emailed to them to finish a paper-based process.

“When you are building mobile experiences, look at the entire experience,” Meyer said. “Maybe it ends in paper. Don’t lock people in mobile if that’s not where it should end.”

Meyer also stressed the idea that agencies should look outward if they have data that can be useful but don’t have the resources to build something on top of it. She used the example of the non-profit news outlet ProPublica building their own college scorecard on top of the Education Department’s data, including the option to translate the page into Spanish and Chinese.

“By working with these third parties and making sure the open data got to them, and they we’re able to bake [the data] into their mobile products, we were able to get to a much larger audience,” she said.

In the end, Meyer stressed that the success of any mobile-first product needs to focus on how people can quickly and easily get the information they desire.

“I don’t care if someone goes to a specific URL,” she said. “I care if a student is able to make an informed choice to know what going to a certain school has done for other students in their situation.”

Government deserves credit for mobility progress, leaders say

Government mobility doesn’t get the credit it deserves, a panel of federal mobility leaders said Tuesday.

“Not enough credit is being given to government when it comes to recognizing” how much progress has been made in federal mobility in recent years, Jon Johnson, enterprise mobility team lead at the General Services Administration, said at FedScoop’s MobileGov Summit.

“We need to realize how far we’ve come in such a short period of time,” Johnson continued, referencing that it’s been less than 10 years since the first Apple iPhone was released and about five years since the first smartphone that met agencies’ security standards was introduced.

“Just recently we’ve had these tools that have been able to come into the federal space that actually meet federal spec,” he said.

“It’s hard in a regulated environment … all these things have to come together — security has to come together, the availability of the services, the availability of the systems, and it’s finally here,” said Tommy Petrogiannis, president of eSignLive by VASCO, a Canadian e-signature and identity management software company.

Prior to the release of smartphones that met the federal agencies’ security needs, the government’s mobile presence was largely dominated by BlackBerry. So the transition meant a total backend transformation, Johnson said.

“At the same time, we’ve also transitioned our entire backend infrastructure to account for the security as we went from a primarily single-platform environment to a multiplatform environment,” he said. “Within three years we’ve transformed our entire infrastructure in a way so that [agencies] can now go ahead and create efficient applications.”

The federal government is beginning to see this success largely because agencies are breaking out of their silos to share best practices in mobility, said Samson Teffera, chief of software-as-a-service at the Labor Department.

“You don’t have to reinvent the wheel,” Teffera said, pointing to collaborative working groups in which many agencies are learning from one another about mobile device management deployment, security and other deployment issues. “This is how we overcame [those] challenges.”

That cross-agency collaboration is the idea behind the federal CIO Council’s Mobile Technology Tiger Team, and it’s also helping push forward a new policy from U.S. Chief Acquisition Officer Anne Rung’s office on how agencies can more efficiently and effectively procure mobile products and services as one government through category management.

DHS launching app for online citizenship

The Department of Homeland Security plans to launch an online app in the next few weeks for people applying to become U.S. citizens, said agency Digital Services Executive Director Eric Hysen.

As it stands, the process to apply for naturalization can be labor intensive, paper-based and confusing, he told a standing-room only crowd at FedScoop’s sixth annual MobileGov Summit Tuesday. Hysen said the agency has been working on redesigning and digitizing existing documents to make it is easier for the 700,000 people each year who choose to apply for citizenship to get their forms filed and processed.

“We’ve launched online forms before, but for something of this significance, we realized we had to redesign this process from the ground up,” he said.

To start, the team looked at the current application: Applicants currently can navigate online to a densely written government information page. From there, they can study an eight-page PDF flow chat to determine whether they are eligible for citizenship. Then, they have to read 18 pages of instructions before filling out the required N-400 form, which is 20 pages long.

Once they’re finished, applicants have to print their application, sign it, attach the right evidence, write a check for the nearly $700 fee and mail the whole package.

“If you’re anything like most people we talked to, that’s quite a lot to do on your own,” he said.

An immigration lawyer might offer additional help, he said, but too often immigrants who are confused by the process fall victim to scams and lose hundreds of dollars to fake immigration advisors.

The new agency’s app translates the PDF flow chart into a few questions, and directs applicants to the current form based on their answers. It provides an overview of the process and indicates what materials an applicant might need to gather.

Then, it guides users through the application, reusing information so applicants don’t need to enter the same things multiple times. For example, he said, applicants have to re-enter their address on two pages’ worth of space within the 20-page paper application. This app automates that step.

Hysen said it’s built on an open source stack and resides on a commercial cloud, allowing the agency to scale up and down, depending on the site’s traffic.

“Given the news cycle lately I think resource elasticity around the naturalization application is probably going to be pretty important as we get closer to November,” he joked.

The naturalization app is part of a larger effort to transform online offerings from the department. Currently, a quarter of the immigration system is processed electronically, he said, and that number is due to increase to 40 percent by the end of the year.

Now, the team is focusing on digitalization — rethinking what the forms themselves should look like in the new digital era. With that in mind, the agency last year launched MyUSCIS, a portal to streamline U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ offerings. Currently, the portal allows users to prepare for civics exams online, navigate the agency’s benefits options and perform a few other tasks.

More than a million people have used MyUSCIS on smartphones, tablets and desktops in the year since it launched, he said.

Hysen mentioned that DHS has worked on modernizing its services for several years and recently ramped up its efforts. Indeed, DHS came under fire late last year when the Washington Post reported the agency had spent $1 billion to digitalize its 100 immigration forms and, at that point, had only digitized one. At the time, DHS hit back saying the story hadn’t factored in its more recent work, including its efforts to team up with U.S. Digital Service in 2014. Hysen himself started working with DHS as a member of USDS before coming to the agency full time.

Looking ahead, ideally the government won’t need massive roll outs like the one he’d just described, Hysen said. That’s because the government should be continuously updating its systems to respond to users’ needs.

“While immigration reform is a deeply political issue, what shouldn’t be politically at all is that those … people deserve a system that is effective an efficient,” he said.

Contact the reporter on this story via email Whitney.Wyckoff@fedscoop.com, or follow her on Twitter @whitneywyckoff. Sign up for all the federal IT news you need in your inbox every morning at 6:00 here: fdscp.com/sign-me-on.

TSA app shows how mobility must wrestle with red tape

TSA’s Guy Cavallo with his roll of “government red tape.” (FedScoop)

When the Transportation Security Administration developed a mobile app that could channel internal agency information to its huge workforce of screeners, two-thirds of whom don’t have a government-issued device, they encountered an unexpected problem.

“We couldn’t deploy it,” said Guy Cavallo, executive director of IT operations for the agency.

There was no way to get the app onto the personal phones of the 40,000-plus screeners that lack TSA-issued devices.

“We couldn’t use our internal app store,” because that is only for software that runs on government-owned devices, he told FedScoop’s sixth annual MobileGov Summit Tuesday. And nor, at first, could they use the Apple app store. The company’s normal procedure for vetting apps in the store involves their engineers logging in to check the app’s functionality — something that requires a TSA employee account login. “Quite properly, the security people wouldn’t allow that,” Cavallo said afterwards.

In the end, Apple allowed TSA personnel to video themselves logging on and demonstrating the app’s functionality. Once that workaround was agreed, Cavallo said, the app was up on the store within 48 hours.

Still, he said, “It took us longer to deploy than to develop” the TSA app, which pushes out information about job openings, rule changes for scheduling vacation and other internal information to the agency’s workforce in the field at hundreds of U.S. airports.

Cavallo’s dramatization of his difficulties — in which he wrapped a smartphone first in several layers of paper, representing policies, and finally in a sticky mess of “government red tape” — brought a spontaneous round of applause from the standing-room only audience at the Newseum.

“I can build it quickly, but with all this red tape, I can’t get it deployed,” he said to laughter.

But he quickly turned serious: “I advise all of you, don’t build it without knowing how to deploy it,” he said.

Contact the reporter on this story via email at Shaun.Waterman@FedScoop.com, or follow him on Twitter @WatermanReports. Subscribe to the Daily Scoop to get all the federal IT news you need every morning in your inbox at 6 a.m. www.fedscoop.com/subscribe

AT&T names Anthony Robbins global defense VP

AT&T has named former Brocade exec Anthony Robbins vice president for global defense on its public sector solutions team.

In his new role, Robbins will lead AT&T’s business with the Defense Department and other defense organizations worldwide.

“AT&T is an innovative technology and communications company,” Robbins said in a release. “I look forward to contributing to its highly respected public sector solutions leadership team and serving the mission needs of global defense customers.”

Robbins comes to AT&T after heading Brocade’s federal division for more than four years. Prior to that, he served as a senior vice president with Oracle.

“Anthony’s customer-first approach makes him a great fit for our public sector solutions leadership team,” Kay Kapoor, president of global business for AT&T, said in the release.

FedScoop awarded Robbins an Industry Leadership award in 2015 at its annual FedScoop 50 awards.

Senate bill would reshape Defense CIO’s office

The annual defense policy bill the Senate is taking up this week if passed would recast the job of Pentagon CIO — one of a series of changes lawmakers say are designed to cut down on waste and inefficiencies, streamline the defense secretary’s office, and improve the oversight and management of the department’s cybersecurity.

Currently, the Senate Armed Services Committee says in its summary of the bill’s provisions, “responsibility for cyber is split between three different organizations” in the office of the secretary of defense: a deputy assistant secretary in the policy shop; the the warfighting responsibilities of the Cyber Command and the NSA; and the CIO’s office itself.

The Senate bill in section 903 “would attempt to reduce these seams by establishing an assistant secretary of defense for information,” states the summary. “This position would not be an intelligence function. It would oversee the security of the Department of Defense information network, as well as defense space policy and cyber warfighting activities.”

“This Assistant Secretary would also serve as the Department’s Chief Information Officer,” the summary concludes.

The bill — S.2943 — is slated for the Senate floor this week. Defense Secretary Ash Carter has said he would recommend a veto if the bill moves ahead with a provision to split up the job of under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, a position currently responsible for more than $160 billion in procurement annually.

As the bill is currently written, some of that office’s acquisition duties would pass to the newly created under secretary of defense for management and support, while most would be carried out by the assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering. That official would have an acquisition policy subordinate in charge of “setting defense-wide acquisition and industrial base policy and overseeing the development of weapons and national security systems by the military services,” according to a committee press release earlier this month.