The Wrap: EHRM Help on the Way; More White House AI Pledges; Senate AI Forum Preview

Welcome to The Wrap for Tuesday, September 12!?

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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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EHRM Help on the Way

The Department of Veterans Affairs’ ongoing effort to straighten out its Electronic Health Records Modernization (EHRM) program got a boost today from the Senate’s vote to confirm the nomination of Tanya Bradsher to serve as VA deputy secretary, with a portfolio that includes the EHRM program. Bradsher, who has been serving as the agency’s chief of staff, told senators at her?confirmation hearing?earlier this year that her top priority at the agency would be to help fix the troubled rollout of the program. She pledged to take a “boots on the ground” approach when addressing issues that have cropped up at the five VA facilities where the Oracle-Cerner EHR system has already been deployed. “We need to have enterprise-wide changes and ensure that we hold Cerner Oracle accountable so that those changes actually happen,” Bradsher said.

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White House Gathers More AI Commitments

The White House has gathered in another eight AI private sector heavyweights with voluntary pledges to “help drive safe, secure, and transparent development of AI technology.” The new joiners to the pledge – Adobe, Cohere, IBM, Nvidia, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability – follow similar commitments in July from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Each of the firms is committed to: ensuring products are safe before introducing them to the public, building systems that put security first, and earning the public’s trust. The White House is gathering those pledges as it continues to work on an AI executive order that it says aims to “protect Americans’ rights and safety.” While there’s no firm timeline for the coming order, the Office of Management and Budget is set to release draft policy guidance in the near term that drives in the same direction.

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Senate AI Forum Preview

The Senate is preparing to kick off its own members-only AI education program tomorrow, and Sens. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D. – who co-chair the Senate AI Caucus – today offered a preview of the closed-door session by underscoring that the effort will serve to put senators on the same page in advance of coming AI legislative efforts. “We all recognize that in this kind of a divided Congress, if we’re going to legislate effectively on AI, it really has to be a bipartisan team effort,” Sen. Heinrich said during a Washington Post Live event. “It’s an effort to make sure that our colleagues are getting information directly from some of these leaders,” he said. Tomorrow’s session is the brainchild of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who announced plans for a series of?AI insight forums?earlier this summer. Expected at the teaching lectern tomorrow: X’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, among others. Sen. Heinrich said today he does not foresee the Senate taking up major AI legislation this year, but does hope for passage of a legislative package next year.

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CISA’s Open Source Security Roadmap

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released its new?Open Source Software Security Roadmap?today that lays out the agency's path forward to help ensure a secure open source software ecosystem within the Federal government. The roadmap lays out four goals to help secure the open source software ecosystem: establish CISA’s role in supporting the security of open source software; drive visibility into open source software usage and risks; reduce risks to the Federal government; and harden the open source ecosystem. Key to CISA’s ongoing efforts to push software bills of materials (SBOM) rules, the agency said the roadmap released today will help advance that goal for open source software supply chains.

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Newest FCC Commissioner

Congrats to Anna Gomez, who is heading to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) after the Senate last week voted 55-43 to confirm her nomination and give Democrats a majority of commissioner seats at the five-member agency. “With today’s bipartisan vote confirming Anna Gomez as its fifth commissioner, the FCC has gained an extremely qualified, thoughtful leader who will bring her expertise and consumer-focus to deliver on these priorities,” said Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., chair of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.?Gomez is a communications policy vet who most recently served as a senior advisor in the State Department’s Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy, and was deputy assistant secretary of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration during the Obama administration.

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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.

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