Carter Farmer tapped as next Federal CIO

Carter Farmer, the Environmental Protection Agency’s chief information officer, is said to be the White House’s pick for the new federal CIO, according to several sources familiar with the matter. Farmer replaces Greg Barbaccia as the federal government’s top IT official. Barbaccia left government and returned to Palantir at the end of August. Barbaccia told FedScoop: “I’ve always enjoyed working with Carter, and I think he’s a great fit for the role. We share a very similar culture and approach to getting things done, and he knows his competencies exceptionally well.” Farmer was added to the Technology Modernization Fund Board as a fully voting member last month, a position he would hold permanently as the federal CIO, along with General Services Administration CIO David Shive. The EPA posted its open CIO position on USAJobs-dot-gov on Monday.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is looking to build out its AI ecosystem by assigning software development work to AI agents and expanding existing platforms, per a request for information published Friday. An agentic software factory, which ICE wants to build, has AI agents handling a significant share of the planning, implementation, testing and review process of the development lifecycle. ICE’s IT shop wants help across three layers of the agentic software factory, which are “desired future-state capabilities, not existing ICE implementations,” the unit explained in its documentation. The first layer is an enterprise control plane that will include the governance, architecture, infrastructure, shared services and cost-reporting mechanisms. The next layer contains the agentic orchestration, allowing ICE to coordinate AI agents and map out protocols for tool access, human escalation and stop conditions. The third layer that’s top of mind for ICE is its independent assurance boundary, which will provide cybersecurity, accessibility and mission ac ceptance testing before production. The STELLA platform, which stands for Secure Technology Environment for Large Language Agents, was implemented earlier this summer, FedScoop previously reported. Documents obtained via a public records request outlined ICE’s plans to use the platform as a way to develop, test and deploy AI use cases. At least a dozen fully deployed, production-ready AI applications are already live on the platform, per ICE’s background documentation provided in the RFI.

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