The Wrap: CIRCIA Tops House Cyber Agenda; TMF Bill Flies in House; OMB CX Director?

Welcome to The Wrap for Wednesday, May 22!

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

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CIRCIA Tops House Cyber Agenda

With the calendar soon due to turn to June and the congressional legislative season already crimped by the 2024 elections, House cybersecurity leaders are performing some necessary triage on their priorities. What's rising to the top of the to-do list for the rest of this year and through January 2025 when the next Congress begins? The chair and ranking member of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection said at today’s Workday Federal Forum?in Washington that they are pushing on implementation of the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA) to the top of this list. Subcommittee Chairman Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., put it this way: “I don’t want it just to be another reporting rule. I want it to be?the?rule, and I think industry wants that too.” Ranking Member Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., said that he and Rep. Garbarino are keeping in mind the law’s impact on small and medium sized businesses, who he said, “don’t necessarily have the hygiene and the training and the awareness of how to protect their systems.” Implementation of CIRCIA is currently in process by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Rep. Garbarino said the subcommittee is looking to draft its own comments to be submitted in the proceeding. He also said that the subcommittee’s hearing?on CIRCIA earlier this month convinced CISA Director Jen Easterly to extend the rulemaking’s comment deadline to early June.

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TMF Bill Flies in House

Similarly, House lawmakers are not sitting still with other important pieces of legislation impacting the Federal tech sector. The House voted on Tuesday to approve the?Modernizing Government Technology Reform Act?(MGT Reform Act), introduced late last year by Reps. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Gerry Connolly, D-Va. The bill aims to reauthorize the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) until 2031, require Federal agencies to offer up lists of their high-risk legacy IT systems that need modernizing, and revise criteria by which agency proposals for TMF funding are evaluated to include the extent to which they address the greatest security, privacy, and operational risks. “The MGT Reform Act will ensure the future fiscal solvency of the TMF by requiring adequate reimbursement of project costs, and it will create an inventory of federal legacy IT to keep the fund focused on its essential mission,” said Rep. Mace after the House vote.

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OMB CX Director?

And last but far from least, the House also approved by voice vote on Tuesday the Government Service Delivery Improvement Act that would create a new senior management position at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) devoted to improving customer experience. The legislation – which would build on the 21st Century IDEA Act – was?introduced?last October by Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., Byron Donalds, R-Fla., Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., and William Timmons, R-S.C. In addition to creating the new position at OMB, the legislation would put Federal agency heads on much the same hook for boosting CX by declaring them “responsible for improving government services, building better trust with the public, and designating a senior agency official to drive changes.” The Biden administration has been heading down the same path for three years by putting CX improvements high atop the President’s Management Agenda and issuing a CX improvement executive order in December 2021.

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AI for FedRAMP

Count in the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) as a fan of artificial intelligence technologies to help the program speed up approvals of cloud-based product and services for Federal government use. That was the word from Ryan Palmer, senior technical and strategic advisor at FedRAMP, at the AI/Automation Workshop hosted by Nextgov/FCW on Tuesday. He explained that FedRAMP approval processes often drag out because they have to go through multiple reviews, but said that use of two AI large language models could reduce that span. He said that one of the models could be a private LLM that’s trained on reviewer feedback data, and the other could be a public LLM that’s trained on published FedRAMP policy and guides, knowledgebase articles, and examples of actual implementations, among other public resources. “I’m really excited about the potential of AI in FedRAMP,” Palmer said.

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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].