The Navy makes its CIO official

The Department of the Navy announced Tuesday that Barry Tanner will serve as the chief information officer for both the Navy and Marine Corps on a permanent basis. Tanner enters the role having served as the department’s acting CIO following Jane Rathbun’s departure from the position in 2025. Prior to taking on that job, he served as the Department of the Navy’s deputy CIO beginning in 2024 and has held a number of IT leadership posts in both the military and private sector. As CIO, Tanner will be tasked with overseeing a number of ongoing modernization efforts within the Navy and the Marine Corps. He will primarily focus on the department’s enterprise-wide adoption of artificial intelligence, implementation of zero-trust cybersecurity, securing cryptographic modernization and improving overall cyber readiness, according to the DON. While serving as deputy and acting CIO, Tanner was instrumental in several Department of the Navy efforts to modernize its IT infrastructure — including Operation Cattle Drive and the Naval Enterprise Networks program.

An electronic health records modernization contract between the Department of Veterans Affairs and Oracle is getting a nearly $17 billion boost, according to an award notice posted Wednesday. The massive contract to overhaul how the department tracks health information for veterans will raise its current almost $10 billion ceiling to nearly $27 billion, the notice said and the VA confirmed. This new estimated value is “based on historical work executed to date, the standard deployment model, and all other requirements necessary to deploy and sustain the EHR under the approved accelerated deployment schedule, which is required to meet VA requirements and Veteran’s needs,” proposed contract modification documents released last week said. The documents cited “unanticipated complexities in deploying this system, extensive site-specific customizations, as well as the other factors … VA has reached the current contract ceiling sooner than originally planned.” The modification would not make any changes to the nature of the work, the documents said, and would add three one-year firm-fixed-price optional ordering periods, allowing for the contract to extend to May 16, 2031.

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