The Wrap: Capitol Hill’s DOGE Division; ServiceNow Meeting the Moment; Sandia Cost Cutting

Welcome to The Wrap for Wednesday, February 12!?

From the newsroom at MeriTalk, it’s the quickest read in Federal tech news. Here’s what you need to know today:

Capitol Hill’s DOGE Division

The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is rapidly staking out “love it or hate it” status in the minds of many Capitol Hill lawmakers as it becomes the sharp blade of The White House efforts to neuter some Federal agencies in the name of cutting costs and creating efficiencies. The binary nature of that opinion was in full view today at the first hearing of the House Oversight and Reform Committee’s?Delivering on Government Efficiency subcommittee where Chair Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said the panel was ready to help DOGE efforts to trim the national debt. “The legislative branch can’t sit on the sidelines,” she said, adding, “in this subcommittee, we will fight the war on waste shoulder to shoulder with President Trump, Elon Musk and the DOGE team.”?On the opposite side were lawmakers including Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., who said, “we can’t just sit here today and pretend like everything is normal and that this is just another hearing on government efficiency.” In particular, Rep. Stansbury pointed to DOGE’s?access?to?sensitive?data and information?at Federal agencies and cybersecurity risks posed by?accessing Federal systems. The congresswoman said DOGE access to Treasury Department payment systems poses a threat “because of the size and the significance of these payments, because it is an invasion of the privacy and security of the American people … and because it contains highly classified information that our foreign adversaries are trying to cyber attack us regularly for.” Please do click through for the whole story on today’s debate.

ServiceNow Meeting the Moment

As the DOGE impact rapidly spreads through Federal agencies, workflow automation provider ServiceNow is meeting the moment through the launch today of its new Government Transformation Suite. ServiceNow officials said today at the company’s?Federal Forum?conference in National Harbor, Md., that the new product suite leverages agentic AI capabilities to further the goals of increasing visibility, accelerating return on investment, and driving efficiencies for Federal government customers. The Federal government’s focus on “improving programs and policies through transparency, efficiency, and accountability is a critical imperative,” said Steve Walters, ServiceNow’s senior vice president, public sector. Chris Bedi, the company’s chief customer officer, said at the Federal Forum today that “the demands [on government customers] are enormous … We are being asked to improve efficiencies, drive effectiveness, and improve productivity, all at an incredible pace.” Bedi added, “the words that come to my mind are incremental to exponential … We are being asked to deliver from incremental outcomes to exponential outcomes, and that’s going to require shifting from incremental thinking to exponential thinking.”

Sandia Cost Cutting

John Zepper, CIO and executive director for information and security engineering at the Energy Department’s Sandia National Laboratories , explained today how Sandia is using ServiceNow to cut costs and drive efficiencies through a new-idea portal and workflows that fall in line with the lab’s tech modernization goals. Zepper said Sandia was able to set up an idea portal through ServiceNow within three months. The portal, known as the Unleash Excellence (UE) Crowdsourcing Tool, helps to drive ideation around specific problems Sandia wants to solve. “We have two major goals at Sandia that we’re working on. One is around innovation, and the other one is around digital engineering. So, we used ServiceNow to launch this whole methodology and to do it quickly,” Zepper said.

NAVSEA’s Two-Year Drive

The US Navy ’s Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) has a short window – two years – to ensure that the organization’s warfare centers are positioned to deliver ships on time and ready for tasking, an agency official said today at the ServiceNow Federal Forum. Michael C. Sydla, command information officer for Enterprise IT at NAVSEA, explained that in the next two years his team will be looking across its warfare centers “to get rid of legacy environments that have been there for years, … and eventually get the tool sets,” needed to accelerate mission needs that align with the U.S. Navy’s “north star” agenda set in 2024 with the aim of transforming Navy operations readiness for sustained high-end joint and combined combat by 2027.?“We’re taking a very strong look at all our processes [and] all our key elements to see how we can increase effectiveness and efficiency,” Sydla said, adding that the agency’s current complex environment “does not let us get that force generation that we need in place.”

Once again, let’s “call IT a day,” but we'll bring you more tomorrow. Until then please check the MeriTalk breaking news website throughout the day for the latest on government IT people, process, and policy. And finally, please hit the news tip jar [with leads, breaking news, or simply your two cents] at [email protected].