The Wrap: TMF’s IDEA Act Funding; SDA Satellite Buys; Cyber Policy Harmony
Welcome to The Wrap for Tuesday, August 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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TMF’s IDEA Act Funding Window
If you’re a Federal agency that has been slow to enact all of the requirements of the 21st?Century Integrated Digital Experience (IDEA) Act and needs some help to get there, then the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) wants to hear from you. What’s the IDEA Act? It’s a 2018 law that gave agencies a year to meet minimum functionality and security standards for all public-facing Federal agency websites and digital services. Progress on that mandate since then has been slow and uneven across the government. The TMF is stepping in and issuing a special call for funding proposals that focus on two big aspects of the law: improving website accessibility, and digitizing public-facing forms. No idea yet on how much TMF intends to spend on IDEA Act help, but the fund does have several hundred million dollars to deploy for its wider mandate of helping agencies jumpstart tech modernization projects. The deadline for applications is September 22. Federal CIO Clare Martorana, who chairs the TMF board, said back in May that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) would issue more guidance this summer for agencies to further implement the IDEA Act. It appears that the TMF cavalry has arrived on the scene…
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SDA Satellite Buys
The U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency (SDA) is wasting little time in cutting deals to build out infrastructure necessary for its Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture (PWSA) program – its layered network of military satellites that will support the Pentagon’s Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) infrastructure. The latest news: SDA?announced?a $1.5 billion award to Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to develop and operate 72 satellites making up the Tranche 2 transport layer of the PWSA. The deals are no small potatoes – $816 million to Lockheed Martin, and $733 million to Northrup Grumman. The SDA launched its first wave of satellites of its Tranche 0 satellites earlier this year, and aims to launch its Tranche 1 wave of satellites in late 2024, which will be slated to provide warfighters with satellite capabilities by 2025.
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Cyber Policy Harmony?
The cyber tenors and altos must not be quite ready to go, as the White House?extended the deadline?for public comments on its request for information (RFI) to further cybersecurity regulatory harmonization and regulatory reciprocity. The new deadline for comments is Oct. 31, versus the original Sept. 15 date. While that original date was still weeks away, the comment proceeding had only received?one comment in the proceeding thus far (that’s far from unusual in government comment proceedings, where parties often hold off filing until the last minute). The goal of the proceeding begun by the Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD)?last month is to seek crucial input from stakeholders on existing challenges with cyber policy regulatory?overlap and inconsistency. That input will used by ONCD to create a framework that represents a reciprocity of baseline cyber requirements that are aligned across all critical infrastructure sectors; ONCD defines harmonization as “a common set of updated baseline regulatory requirements that would apply across sectors.”
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DevSecOps Teaming
In order to reap the benefits of the DevSecOps (Development, Security, and Operations) technology systems design discipline, experts recommended last week that DevSecOps teams build a collaborative culture to break down silos, and prevent those silos from reemerging, Federal and industry officials said at a Carahsoft DevSecOps conference on Aug. 17. “I think it’s bringing in people who have a very collaborative spirit and who focus on going and talking to other groups and understanding their pain points and understanding why they do things the way they do,” said Andrew Fichter, deputy director of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) Lighthouse Application Programming Interface (API) program. “But, talking to them in a way that builds trust, where they want to come along with you and help make things better,” he added. “It’s very challenging, it’s a hard problem.”
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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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