The Wrap: FITARA Ace Tells All; Cyber Reciprocity Pilot; CISA, DHS S&T Budget Trims

Welcome to The Wrap for Tuesday, June 4!

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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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FITARA Ace Tells All

How does a big Federal agency pull an “A” grade on the FITARA Scorecard that ranks IT performance across several evolving categories? For the answer to that question, we caught up with Jason Gray, CIO at the United States Agency for International Development, who offered some top-level advice from one of the few agencies to ever clinch an overall “A” grade on the semi-annual grading. Here are some of the biggies: first, get a close working relationship with top agency leadership, then cultivate the “full embrace and support” of leaders across bureaus, missions, and independent offices, and finally, gather all of the support possible from Congress and the Federal CIO Council and run with it. Please do click through for Gray’s full recipe for success, and as a bonus, how a missed airplane flight can end up opening the path to the top ranks of Federal IT leadership.

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Cyber Reciprocity Pilot

The White House’s 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy set Federal agencies off to explore several dozen avenues to improving cybersecurity, but none of those are as vital as one of the big end goals of the strategy: finding a way to harmonize often conflicting and overlapping security regulations. Getting to that point is at the heart of today's news from the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) which is building a pilot reciprocity framework to be used in a critical infrastructure subsector which will give ONCD “valuable insights” into how to best design a harmonized cybersecurity regulatory approach. The pilot approach is just one of the headlines from a?summary report?ONCD released today on the responses from its?July 2023 request for information?(RFI) seeking stakeholder input on creating better regulatory harmony in the security arena. “The purpose of this pilot, which projects to complete next year, is to surface insights on how to achieve reciprocity when designing a cybersecurity regulatory approach from the ground up,” the report says. NCD Harry Coker said today that his office also will “need Congress’s help to bring all the relevant agencies in the government together to develop a cross-sector framework for harmonization and reciprocity for baseline cybersecurity requirements.”

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CISA, S&T Budget Trims

The House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee today advanced a?spending bill?for fiscal year (FY) 2025, which cuts down on the Biden administration’s requests to fund the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) science and technology efforts, and to fund DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) component. The numbers are far from a wipe-out versus last year’s levels but did take a bite out of the administration requests: the bill approved today would give CISA $2.9 billion, or $78.2 million below the administration’s?original request. And the bill would allocate $744.6 million for science and technology efforts across DHS, which is $91.5 million below the administration’s budget request. Committee Democrats howled, Republican colleagues defended the budget numbers, and the action next moves to the full committee. In other words, it’s budget negotiation season.

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How FBI Uses AI

With Federal agencies awash in AI use cases, the head of the FBI’s Cyber Division explained one use of the technology at the bureau that doesn’t take an advanced degree to understand. Cynthia Kaiser, director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, walked through the deployment of AI and natural language processing to improve operations of the bureau’s tip line, which she said will continue to be manned by humans, but assisted by AI tech for the simple reason that “people miss things” that the technology can catch. “After it’s looked at by a human, after it’s flagged one way or another, we’re using natural language processing models to also go over the synopsis of the text of what that phone call or online tip then details to see did we miss something,” Kaiser said at the GDIT EMERGE event in D.C. today. “That AI is trained on the expertise of people who’ve been … taking in these tips for years and years and years and know what it is to flag.” She added, “there’s always a human in the loop with FBI when we’re doing that, but it helps us fill in the cracks.”

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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].