What’s the status?  Congress has failed to enact any of the 12 annual appropriations bills for FY 2014 and the current fiscal year funding is set to expire at midnight on October 1, meaning funding for the entire federal government is at stake.  On September 20, 2013 the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government through December 15.  Also included in this legislation was language defunding the so-called Obamacare health care plan.  The Democrat-controlled Senate is expected to strip the language defunding Obamacare and send the bill back to the House.  This sets up a potential gridlock situation and it is unclear if either side is willing to budge.

Why does this matter?  As a government contractor you need to be prepared in the event of a shutdown, since funding for many if not all of your current contracts may be affected.  Your employees are reading the news and they know the potential and they want to know their leadership is making contingency plans.

What should you do?  OMB has sent a memo to government agencies telling them to prepare for a shutdown and prudent business planning suggests you need to be ready too.  Here’s a quick checklist of things you should be doing and thinking about related to a potential shutdown:

1. Be Proactive:  Don’t sit back and let the rumors swirl, take charge of the situation within your company.
2. Communicate:  Communicate honestly, early and often with your employees about what you know and what you expect will happen if the government shuts down.  Make sure your company speaks with “one voice.” This will keep misinformation (i.e. rumors of furloughs and layoffs) to a minimum.
3. Understand Your Contracts:  Review your current contracts to understand which will be affected in the event of a shutdown and which will continue.  Projects funded by revolving funds for example won’t be affected.
4. Gather Intelligence:  Gather as much intelligence as possible by talking to industry partners and trade associations and having your engagement managers talk to their contracting officers and COTRs, i.e. the client.
5. Set Up a War Room:  Set up a formal process inside your company to monitor developments related to the potential shutdown, a “war room” if you will.  Be ready to kick it into high gear if a shutdown occurs.

Let’s all keep our fingers crossed and hope that Congress and the President are able to work out an agreement that keeps the government open and operating beyond October 1, while preparing yourselves for a potential shutdown through effective communication with your employees and smart business planning. Contact me at mhettinger@siia.net or (202) 789-4456 with any questions.

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.

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/2013/09/17/mccormack-gardner-dhs-cio.aspx

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.

IBM Issues Guide to Federal Acquisition: Earlier this week the IBM Center for the Business of Government released a report by Trevor Brown of the Ohio State University entitled A Guide for Agency Leaders on Federal Acquisition: Major Challenges Facing Government. The report is viewed as a how-to guide designed to assist government executives with understanding the federal procurement process, one of the most complex processes in the government and one that has put more than one agency leader in an uncomfortable position. The report aims to answer eight key questions about federal procurement, believing that a better understanding of the process is the key to a successful tenure for agency leadership. Read the full report here.

NARA Focused on Email Archiving: The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) launched a new initiative for email management known as Capstone. The goal of the program according to NARA is to make it easier for agencies to archive the millions of emails generated annually by federal employees. Capstone will help agencies meet the requirements of the OMB Managing Government Records Directive including complying with the December 2016 deadline. FedNewsRadio has a report.

Budget Uncertainty Hurting Feds and Contractors Alike: Rep. Gerry Connolly told “In Depth with Francis Rose” this week that the budget uncertainty, and the prospect of a short term continuing resolution, coupled with issues like the debt ceiling and the long term impact of sequestration is having a strongly negative impact on the federal government as well as contractors, as agencies hold back on making long term contract commitments. The result is an overall slowdown in federal investment and a general nervousness in the contracting community over what the next few months will bring. See the full report from FedNewsRadio here.

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.

FedRAMP Adds Akamai Content Delivery to list of approved CSPs: FedRAMP announced this week that it had added another approved CSP to the FedRAMP repository, Akamai Content Delivery Services. This approval brings the number of FedRAMP approved CSPs to eight. Akamai’s globally distributed intelligent platform providing delivery benefits for all content types, including HTML, images, dynamic Web 2.0, SSL, live and on-demand streaming media is now available for agencies to leverage. Knowledge Consulting Group (KCG) acted as the 3PAO. More info.

Amazon to be major player in Interior cloud contract: While Amazon Web Services was not included as a prime contract holder in the recently awarded $10 billion foundation cloud hosting services contract at the Department of Interior they are still expected to be a major player. According to this report in FCW, AWS is part of the proposed contract offerings of no fewer than five of the 10 contract awardees, with two of the awardees — Aquilent and Smartronix — being premier AWS partners.

U.S. to hit debt ceiling in mid-October: The Department of Treasury announced this week that it had exhausted the extraordinary measures it has been using to delay hitting the debt ceiling and said that the Congress will need to increase the borrowing limit by mid-October or risk the U.S. government defaulting on its financial obligations. This sets up an expected fight between Congress and the Obama Administration over spending cuts and the need to increase the borrowing limit and will come quickly on the heels of Congress having to address the annual appropriations bills and/or the need for a Continuing Resolution to keep the government running past September 30th. This is sure to get interesting with Congress only in session for nine legislative days in September. Roll Call has a report.

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.

NASA Releases SEWP V RFP with China Sourcing Language: It’s been a fairly busy summer for big IT contract watchers, between EAGLE II awards, the OASIS RFP and now SEWP V. This week NASA released the long-awaited formal RFP for its Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V government-wide acquisition contract, expected to be worth at least $20 billion with a base term of 5 years and the potential for 5 option years. SEWP V will replace SEWP IV, which currently boasts 38 contract holders. Overall SEWP vendors provide wide range of advanced technology including tablets, desktops and servers, as well as network equipment, security tools, software products and cloud-based services. In an interesting twist, the RFP includes language extending Sec. 516 of the FY2013 continuing resolution which requires a risk assessment of IT hardware or software manufactured or assembled by “entities that are owned, directed or subsidized by the People’s Republic of China.” This provision would potentially extend that requirement through the life of SEWP (2024 if all option years are exercised) and is something that industry is concerned about and will be watching closely. Responses are due October 14th with questions due September 16th. See more on SEWP V including the full RFP here.

White House Adds Additional Detail to Open Data Policy: Earlier this week, the White House released a supplemental guide to its open data memorandum (OMB Memorandum M-13-13) originally released back in May. The new guide seeks to provide additional clarification to help agencies effectively implement the five main objectives of the earlier memo which include: creating an inventory of enterprise data assets, creating a listing of public data, creating a customer engagement process to help prioritize what data to release, documenting if data cannot be released and clarifying the roles and responsibilities for the effective release of data to the public. Under the memo, agencies have to meet these initial goals by November 1st. See the supplemental guidance here: http://project-open-data.github.io/implementation-guide/ Schneck Appointed to DHS Cyber Post: Former McAfee Vice President and Public Sector CTO, Phyllis Schneck has been appointed as the new Deputy Undersecretary for Cyber Security at DHS, filling a key position that has been without a permanent leader since Mark Weatherford left DHS for the Chertoff Group over a year ago. Schneck is expected to start sometime in September and will have her hands full as DHS is coordinating the implementation of the President’s Cyber Security Executive Order and trying to expand its internal cyber capabilities. See more here from Softpedia.

Government Shutdown Corner: Even though Congress is still out of town for the August recess, there continues to be talk of what will happen when they come back as it relates to funding the government beyond the end of the fiscal year. While no one knows for sure, if recent history is any judge it will come down to the last minute. That said, there’s a lot of speculation as to who wins and who loses if there is a government shutdown. Politico has the latest.

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.

Importantly for SIIA members, it is one that poses the following serious business challenges:  (1) enhanced privacy concerns among customers around the world, (2) policymakers around the world seeking to restrict the cross-border flow of data and enact technology localization requirements, and (3) conflation of private sector data collection with government surveillance as an inseparable public-private partnership that necessitates strict new commercial privacy legislation or regulations—FTC Commission Julie Brill has recently made this connection in an op-ed, which has also come from influential thought-leaders such as former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.

As a preliminary assessment, the Information Technology Innovation Foundation (ITIF) estimates that the U.S. cloud computing industry alone could lose up to $35 billion over the next three years if foreign customers decide the risks of storing data with a U.S. company outweigh the benefits.

SIIA has been very engaged in policy debates surrounding this issue for several months, and we expect to remain highly engaged to combat these challenges for months to come.  Recently, SIIA President Ken Wash was invited to a meeting at the White House in early August, which was one of several consultations leading up to the President’s call for reforms to NSA programs on August 9.

As a follow-up to the discussion with Administration officials and the SIIA this week joined with other leading technology trade associations in sending a letter to Administration officials urging that discussions about national security must be kept separate from conversations about commercial privacy issues, as the policy considerations in these two areas are distinct. In the letter, SIIA and industry partner organizations made the following recommendations for action that are likely to frame our priorities for the remainder of 2013:

1. Implement transparency with respect to national security programs – in order to separate fact from fiction regarding the intersection of private sector IT companies and the U.S. Government, it is critical that the Administration enhance transparency and enable companies to share information publicly about the scope and frequency of Government inquiries;
2. Promote policies that allow for unimpeded cross-border data flows such as the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor Framework – We are already seeing that longstanding and effective cross-border data mechanisms are being questioned in light of the recent disclosures about the U.S. government surveillance programs. For instance, recent statements by government officials in the EU indicate a lack of “trust” in the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor framework, which allows for the transfer of information from the EU to the U.S. for participating companies. This is one of many critical policies that facilitate digital trade for U.S. companies, and it is critical that U.S. government must vigorously engage with the international community to promote cross-border data flows while addressing privacy and civil liberties concerns; and
3. Support reforming the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) to enhance privacy in law enforcement investigations – SIIA has been a leading supporter of ECPA, seeking to update the outdated statue by correcting the double-standard that inappropriately provides for a lower level of privacy for communications stored remotely, or “in the cloud.” Currently, the law provides for a challenging legal environment for industry and a disincentive for customers to embrace hosted information and communications technology solutions as an alternative to on-premise solutions.

SIIA believes that these are critical steps to ensuring that concerns about U.S. Government surveillance do not impose an unnecessary impediment to U.S. information technology businesses.  We are also closely monitoring a range of proposals in Congress that would seek to enhance transparency surrounding U.S. Government surveilance.  The  Surveillance Transparency Act of 2013 (S.1452) was introduced by Senator Al Franken on August 1^st, 2013, and the Surveillance Order Reporting Act of 2013 (H.R.3035) was introduced by Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren on August 2^nd, 2013.  SIIA has not endorsed any bill at this point, but the Lofgren-Franken approach goes in the right direction by allowing companies to reveal how many national security requests they have received, how many they have complied with and how many users or accounts are affected.

We will continue to focus heavily on this critical issue to promote the ability of U.S. businesses to thrive in the U.S. and markets around the world.  To that end, we will provide further updates regarding new developments.

David LeDuc is Senior Director, Public Policy at SIIA. He focuses on e-commerce, privacy, cyber security, cloud computing, open standards, e-government and information policy. Follow the SIIA public policy team on Twitter at @SIIAPubPolicy.

DHS adds 18 to EAGLE II: DHS announced this week it has added 18 new companies to the EAGLE II contract, 11 for business and technical management and 7 for service delivery. Each EAGLE II contract comes with a 5 year base period of performance with 2 options years. Overall EAGLE II is expected to be worth approximately $22 billion over the life of the contract. See GovConWire for more.

OASIS RFP Protested: In procurement news, there have been two protests related to the release of the GSA OASIS RFP a couple of weeks ago, one filed with GAO challenging the terms of the solicitation and another filed at the agency level challenging the evaluation criteria. GAO said it will rule on the protest by October 18th and under the FAR agency-level protests must be dealt with in 35 days. Questions on the RFP are due August 20th and responses due September 17th. FedNewsRadio reports.

DHS awards continuous monitoring BPA: DHS award 17 companies a spot on the new continuous monitoring and diagnostics contract, which could be worth up to $6 billion. Under the terms of the award companies can provide tools, hardware and software, designed to implement continuous monitoring as a service (CMaaS) at civilian agencies. See FedNewsRadio for more, including a list of BPA winners.

MyUSA.gov moving forward: MyUSA.gov, a personalized web services portal for citizen interaction with government moved closer to reality as GSA released a notice in the Federal Register seeking comments regarding information collection related to the program. The program itself is being developed by the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program and was included in a July 8th speech by President Obama announcing his plans for a new management agenda, designed to leverage technology to drive government innovation. See the Federal Register Notice here.

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.

Senate Appropriations Bill Fully Fund E-Gov and Citizen Services Fund: The Senate Appropriations Committee approved its mark of Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill, which contains language fully funding both the E-Gov Fund and the Citizen Services Fund. The House counterpart legislation, approve earlier this year sought to combine the two funds and reduce the total amount of funding significantly. The Senate bill keeps the funds separate and includes the White House requested level of $20M for the E-Gov Fund and nearly $35M for the Citizen Services Fund. The $20M for the E-Gov Fund is significantly more than last years appropriated level of $12M. Differences between the House and Senate will have to be ironed out as the appropriations process moves forward. Fierce Government IT has more.

GSA Launches IT Solutions Navigator: On August 6th, GSA launched an online tool designed to help agencies determine which IT acquisition vehicles best meet their needs. The tool, called IT Solutions Navigator, is designed to make purchasing IT easier, by providing users with online tools and market research to match their needs to available solutions. See more here.

Government Shutdown Corner: With Congress out of town for the August recess, most of us will have to wait to see how the how the talks progress on a deal to keep the government operating beyond September 30th. Before leaving town, House Speaker John Boehner called on Congress to pass a short term continuing resolution to keep the government open, while continuing to work to pass the remaining individual appropriations bills that the House has not yet passed. Congress returns to work on September 9th and is only in session for 9 legislative days in September. Politico reports on Boehner’s statement.

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.

White House Releases Details on Management Agenda: The White House released a memo earlier this week, adding additional detail about their plans for what is now being called the “Evidence and Innovation Agenda.” In short, the new initiative directs agencies to develop evidence-based practices that draw on data, analytics and experimentation with the hope of driving agency investment toward policies and programs that work effectively and away from those that don’t. Agencies are expected to incorporate aspects of the Evidence and Innovation Agenda in their 2015 budget requests. Not sure how this will actually work in practice or how human evaluation of program effectiveness will be matched with the data driven analysis, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Here’s the full memo.

Federal News Radio Releases Survey on Effects of Sequestration: Federal News Radio released a survey this week on the effects of sequestration on government contractors and the results are about what you’d expect – many contractors have stopped hiring, furloughed employees, reduced travel and training, and cut back on their marketing budgets. Contractors are also seeing fewer RFPs and greater competition for those that are put out to bid. Over 1,000 vendor personnel responded to the survey conducted in July 2013. See the raw data from the survey and more here.

GSA Considers Adding Plug-In IT to FSSI OS3: GSA is flirting with the idea of adding certain “plug-in” IT products to the next version of the FSSI Office Supply contract. The items being discussed include printers, monitors, keyboards and other hardware. GSA will be soliciting feedback on the idea at its next Industry Day on Aug 6th in New York. GSA has often discussed extending FSSI to include IT but the question has always been: For what IT items does it even make sense and where do you draw the line? Laptops, often thought of as “commodity IT,” could be the next logical place to go, but those as we know can be highly customized depending on different agency and personnel needs. See more here.

Government Shutdown Corner: With football season approaching, as well as the end of the government fiscal year I thought I’d steal a football term to talk about the potential for a government shutdown. There’s more and more talk this week about certain members of Congress planning to shut down the federal government in order to prevent funding for the Affordable Care Act / Obamacare. We will be watching closely and offering our thoughts along the way. Thought for this week is that there are many ways to prevent funding for Obamacare (not that we support or oppose that), or any other program for that matter, without shutting down the entire federal government. Politico has coverage.

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.

GSA Awards Contract for Outsourced 3PAO Approval Process: In other FedRAMP news, GAO has awarded the Association for Laboratory Accreditation (A2LA) with the responsibility for reviewing and approving new 3PAOs. The contract is the result of GSA’s RFP earlier this year which sought to outsource the process by which 3PAOs were approved, freeing up GSA resources to focus on other aspects of the FedRAMP process. The program stopped accepting new applications for 3PAOs in the spring, and presumably this award will bring that to an end. At present there are 22 GSA approved 3PAOs and reportedly more than 50 potential cloud service providers in the FedRAMP approval pipeline. FCW has a story.

Cloud Spending Could Reach $7.7 billion by 2017: IDC Government Insights has a new report out saying that government spending on cloud computing could reach $7.7 billion by 2017, more than four times what is expected in 2014. This is good news for cloud computing contractors who have watched closely as government technology spending has leveled off significantly in recent years. See the full report here.

Army Awards ITES-2 to Six Firms: On July 19th the Army announced that it had awarded a $500 million IDIQ contract for hardware, software and related services to six companies – Dell Federal Systems, IBM, Unicom Government, CDW-G, Iron Bow Technologies and World Wide Technology – under the product portion of the Information Technology Enterprise Solution-2 (ITES-2) contract. These companies will now compete for task orders under the multi award contract. This award replaces the original ITES which was responsible for $4.6 billion in task orders over its lifetime. FCW has a brief recap.

Shutdown Talk Begins on Capitol Hill: With a little more than two months to go before the beginning of the new fiscal year and not a single appropriations bill signed into law, talk of a government shutdown has begun on Capitol Hill. This year, the talk seems to be centering around the fight over funding of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) with some members of the Senate believing that one way to prevent any funds from going to implement the health care program would be to hold up funding for the continuing resolution which is likely to be needed to keep the government open beyond the end of this fiscal year. I am sure we will hear more about this as we get closer to the September 30th deadline. For now, see what David Hawkings at Roll Call has to say about it.

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.