Potential Government Shutdown Looms Large: With Congress back in town, the talk of a potential government shutdown has really picked up in the last few weeks. House Speaker Boehner put together a short term continuing resolution to fund the government through December 15th, with a companion resolution to defund Obamacare but was forced to pull it from the schedule amid concerns by some republicans that the Obamacare provision was not included in the bill itself. That puts the issue back to the drawing board with less than two weeks to go before the end of the fiscal year. It seems like the situation is changing daily or in some cases hourly as Speaker Boehner and other leaders in Congress try to find a way to avoid a shutdown while battling over Obamacare, spending cuts and the debt ceiling. Reuters has a good report from Wednesday on the latest plan.
NIST Recommends Not Using NSA-Influenced Standards: The National Institute for Standards and Technology is now strongly recommending against using encryption standards that leaked documents show were effectively weakened by the NSA. NIST has also now launched an effort to revise the standards, published in Special Publication 800-90A, 800-90B and 800-90C, by reopening them for comment. The original standards were published in 2006. FCW has a good report.
DOD to Mandate Move to Enterprise Email: DOD CIO Teri Takai, in a memo to component agencies on September 5th indicated that the time had come for them to stop running their own email systems and move to an enterprise environment. According to the memo, components have 120 days to draw up plans to migrate their current email to enterprise email. Prior to the memo, DOD agencies had been allowed to make their own determination as to whether or not they would move email to the department’s private cloud, operated by DISA. DOD has potentially more than two million email users. Here’s Takai’s memo.
Obama to Nominate New Deputy Director for Management: President Obama finally got around to announcing a new Deputy Director for Management at OMB, a position that has been filled in an acting capacity by Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel since May when Jeff Zients left the government. The nominee, Beth Cobert, comes to the Administration from McKinsey and Company where she has been for nearly 20 years. On another personnel note, Zients is already on his way back into government, being named as the replacement for Gene Sperling as Director of the National Economic Council. Here’s the latest on the Beth Cobert announcement via Federal Times.
New CIOs to be Nominated for DHS and FEMA: FCW is reporting that President Obama is set to name Luke McCormack, currently CIO at the Justice Department as the new CIO at DHS and Adrian Gardner, currently CIO at NASA Goddard as the CIO at FEMA. McCormack would be filling the spot left vacant earlier this year when Richard Spires left DHS amid some confusion over the reasons for his departure. Here’s the FCW report: http://fcw.com/articles/2013/
GSA Official to be FTC CIO: In other personnel news, Bajinder Paul, currently Deputy Associate Administrator in GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies will be leaving GSA to become CIO at the FTC. A long time government technology official, Paul had previously been CIO at the OCC and Deputy CIO at HUD. Fedscoop has the scoop.
Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG. Sign up for the Public Sector Innovation Roundup email newsletter for weekly updates.