The Defense Department in December selected Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle for the closely watched JWCC contract, a follow-up to the failed $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure arrangement.

The rival tech giants are expected to compete for work tied to JWCC, which spans unclassified, secret and top-secret designations. Secret-level bidding opportunities, “where the warfighter operates,” will be made available in the coming weeks, said Sharon Woods, director of DISA’s Hosting and Compute Center. Top-secret opportunities will come sometime early this summer.

“We have the first batch of task orders, if you will, that are in the pipeline and getting closer and closer to award,” Woods said March 14 at an online event hosted by Defense One. “And then we have other task order packages that are fast followers.”

“As the demand to learn more about the contract just keeps growing larger, more and more task order possibilities come out from that,” she said. “One of the things we did was stand up a hybrid cloud broker office. It is the single point of entry, the front door, into HACC to understand the full breadth of all of our capabilities and to learn about JWCC. And, I will say, those folks are really busy right now.”

The four companies are each guaranteed only $100,000, though potential orders could total billions, according to terms of JWCC. The contract comprises a three-year base and one-year options, meaning work could be done through 2028.

The cloud capability is meant to serve as a backbone for the Pentagon’s connect-everything-everywhere campaign, known as Joint All-Domain Command and Control, or JADC2. It is also designed to complement cloud initiatives already underway among the military services. The Air Force, for example, has Cloud One and its prospective successor, Cloud One Next.

“By having that unification, I think it starts opening up doors on ‘what does JADC2 to look like’ globally. How do we move applications and data around? How do we achieve the interoperability?” Woods said. “How do we leverage things like APIs and data portability, and all of the things that we talk about, to achieve that interconnected web of all of our applications and data?”

“I think using JWCC as a foundational contract starts moving toward that unification,” she added.

Woods previously said task order competition should take weeks or “maybe a few months,” depending on the details and what officials learn along the way.

The recommendation for the new position comes from the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, a group that tasked by Congress with recommending changes to the federal government’s cyber strategy. The national cyber director would be a Senate-confirmed position who would be housed within the Executive Office of the President and have budget and policy authority to coordinate cyber policy across the federal government.

The commission’s members have touted the bipartisan nature of its work and the executive branch’s participation in meetings. But the White House’s receptiveness to a new to cyber official is also in question. In 2018, the White House eliminated the cybersecurity coordinator position and it has not been reinstated since, much to the chagrin of some lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Asked during a May 29 webinar hosted by the German Marshall Fund if the White House was receptive to a national cyber director, Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., acknowledged it could be a difficult path.

“No president … likes the idea of being told how the executive branch will be organized,” Langevin said. “So I expect that that’s going to take some work.”

The cyber coordinator position, eliminated under John Bolton’s tenure as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, served an advisory role and lacked strong authority. The cyber director position, as recommended, would have the authority to direct national-level coordination of cyber strategy, defensive cyber operations, crisis response, and serve as the spokesperson on cyber issues and crises management. As envisioned, the nomination would be considered by the Senate Armed Services Committee and Homeland Security Committee, until the chamber creates a select cybersecurity committee, another one of the commission’s recommendations.

Though the White House could be reluctant, Langevin said the position was needed to ensure federal agencies were adequately protecting themselves. For example, Langevin said, the Office of Personnel Management, whose breach in 2014 exposed the personal information of more than 20 million people, is focused on federal employees, not cybersecurity.

“You have all these different departments and agencies — cybersecurity is not their primary mission,” Langevin said.

Solarium commissioners have pointed to the fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act as its target vehicle for codifying at least 30 percent of its recommendations that are germane to the bill.

Some members of the Senate have asked for more details on the role of the national cyber director. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said at a Senate hearing in mid-May that Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., had sent him a letter asking for more details on the role.

“We need somebody at a very high level who can oversee, coordinate and work on the planning with all these different disparate parts of the federal government that are working on this,” King said. “I think that’s an absolutely critical need.”

Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., said on a German Marshall Fund webinar May 29 that he wants Congress to provide that in an upcoming coronavirus relief bill.

A record number of Americans have filed for unemployment in the United States as businesses furlough and lay off employees due to disruptions caused by the pandemic. But the unprecedented waves have crashed antiquated IT systems in states across the country, as reported by The Washington Post.

“Every state in the country has been hit by a tsunami of claims for unemployment insurance, and it’s been very difficult to respond,” said Langevin, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities.

New unemployment numbers released by the Labor Department on May 28 show that more than 2 million Americans filed for unemployment last week, bringing the total number of jobless claims up to 40 million since mid-March.

Congress is considering another aid package, as several safety net programs established early on in the pandemic are set to expire in the coming weeks. Langevin said previous rescue packages provided funding for states that could be used for IT modernization, but gave states wide “latitude” for how they could spend it.

“There’s a clear need for IT modernization and incentivize the move to the cloud,” Langevin said. “I’m hoping that when we do take up the next one that we’ll see funding … for IT modernization.”

Langevin’s effort comes amid calls from 16 of his fellow Democrats in the Senate, who wrote a letter to congressional leadership in late April urging Congress to modify regulations preventing federal innovation hubs at the General Services Administration and U.S. Digital Service to provide assistance to states.

“During this national emergency, when speed is vital for millions of Americans, red tape is preventing the federal government’s skilled technologists from helping the state and local agencies that need them most,” the senators wrote.

Trade associations have also pushed Congress on the issue. A mid-April letter to Congress from the Alliance for Digital Innovation, the Center for Procurement Advocacy, CompTIA, the Cybersecurity Coalition, the Information Technology Industry Council and the Internet Association called on Congress to provide funds for IT modernization at all levels of government.

“Outdated government IT systems and processes already hinder some federal and state agencies’ ability to deliver aid to new applicants for small business loans and unemployment insurance,” the groups wrote. “The COVID-19 pandemic also exposes the need to redouble efforts to digitize federal forms and reduce reliance on hand-processing paperwork for high priority response and relief efforts.”

House Democrats have signaled interest in expanding IT funding in previous rescue packages that didn’t pass, including one that would’ve provided $3 billion for the GSA’s Technology Modernization Fund, which funds modernization projects across the federal government.

The report, mandated by the Federal Information Security Modernization Act, found that email-related cybersecurity incidents among federal agencies dropped from 6,930 in last year’s report to 4,388 in FY19. Overall, the federal government saw an 8 percent decrease in cyber incidents, from about 31,100 in FY18 to 28,600 in FY19.

“This FISMA report reflects improvements in areas of focus under the President’s Management Agenda and Federal Agency elements of the National Cybersecurity Strategy,” reported Federal Chief Information Officer Suzette Kent. “It shows Agencies are making significant progress in managing risk and also highlights that focused efforts to secure government mobile devices have been especially important in today’s expanded telework environment.”

Though the decrease is good news for the federal government, spear-phishing continues to be the most significant vulnerability among federal agencies, the report said. Security reviews of agencies’ high-value assets completed by the Department of Homeland Security identified spear-phishing, patch management, administrator password reuse, insecure default configuration and weak password policy as the top five risks faced by federal agencies, respectively.

The report also said DHS conducted 71 security assessments of high-value assets in FY19, up from 61 in FY18. It found 448 cybersecurity issues, up from 356 the previous year.

“These assessments revealed that the Federal Government continues to face challenges mitigating basic security vulnerabilities,” the report said.

Several Cabinet-level agencies experienced significant reductions in incidents related to spear-phishing since the FY18 report. The State Department saw the largest reduction, dropping from 3,082 email incidents in FY18 to 1,043 in FY19. The Department of Health and Human Services saw a drop to 603 in FY19 from 885 in FY18, down significantly from 1,120 in FY17. Phishing incidents at the Commerce Department dropped by half, from 660 in FY19 to 330 in FY18.

Greg Touhill, the former first federal chief information security officer and current president of AppGate Federal, said the results are a positive sign, but warned that adversaries are pivoting to other areas of weakness to infiltrate federal networks.

“They’re just picking other targets,” Touhill said. “They’re phishing at home. They’re phishing on social media. They’re phishing against our weak underbelly with our contracts and our supply chains.”

The Department of Education reported zero phishing incidents — the only Cabinet agency to do so. In the CIO self-assessment, the department wrote that it has employed “increasingly complex phishing scenarios” and improved its spam filtering and anti-phishing policies through its email provider.

The Commerce Department cited an investment in an anti-phishing training tool as one of the CIO office’s main accomplishments in FY19. Overall, federal agencies spent $16.9 billion on cybersecurity in FY19.

The Small Business Administration reported a drastic increase in phishing incidents, with reported incidents rising from 135 in FY18 to 1,100 in FY19. SBA’s section of the report didn’t give any explanation for the rise in incidents. A spokesperson for SBA did not return a request for comment.

The May 26 request for information from NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering and the National Cancer Institute comes as states and cities across the country are in various stages of phased reopening. At the same time, President Donald Trump has been calling on states to reopen as quickly as possible, but experts warn that doing so too quickly could lead to a second wave of the disease. The NIH wants digital health tools to analyze public health data to prevent any future spread.

“At present, we have only the blunt tools of social distancing and quarantine to contain the epidemic,” the RFI read. “Being able to precisely deploy containment efforts only where needed may allow larger segments of the population to return to less restricted living and reduce the risk of recurrence of devastating local outbreaks.”

The NIH is looking for a broad range of digital technologies. According to the RFI, the NIH is seeking information on industry’s contact-tracing capabilities as well as its ability to quickly integrate commercial COVID-19 diagnostic tests and other patient data in order to determine if a patient has the illness but is asymptomatic, and to identify a person’s risk of contracting the disease — in addition to strong privacy protections.

The NIH is also interested in technology that can identify movement patterns that could lead to contracting, spreading or containing the disease. Solutions also must be able to integrate new data quickly.

The effort also wants to focus on underrepresented populations and areas with lower access to health care.

“Novel digital health solutions have the potential to improve care, understanding of health outcomes, and risk factors related to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the RFI read. “This is especially important in underserved populations, which are disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and often have limited access to healthcare services. This is also important in its potential to broaden the geographic understanding of factors related to exposure, spread, and containment.”

The effort will be implemented through a “hub-and-spoke” model, in which the spokes, or the digital health solutions, share de-identified data with the NIH data hub.

“This will enable researchers, for example, to apply a risk classification algorithm developed in one spoke to individuals’ health data that was collected by other spokes,” the RFI read.

The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering and the National Cancer Institute are hosting a virtual meeting with industry on May 29.

“This is something that we will continue to consider for quite a while,” Kent said during a keynote at the Adobe Digital Government Symposium.

She added later: “In the future it will be mandatory to have a workforce that is technology-enabled, constantly connected and where human interactions can occur potentially without human contact.”

According to Kent, several agencies have 95 percent of their workforce working from home, inspiring several changes at agencies. Digital signatures are one example. Kent said digital signatures are used for on-boarding, off-boarding and for official documents, including those of senior leaders within the government.

Kent also highlighted that the Social Security Administration and Department of Veterans Affairs shifted from in-person interviews to phone interviews. She added that many agencies also have COVID-19 information “easily accessible” on their websites, following similar templates, and said that interagency data sharing has increased to ensure agencies are on the same page.

“Many agencies are thinking about previously on-site activities and ways that they can now use digital tools to spread those across a distributed workforce,” Kent said.

Kent, the top IT official in the federal government, also confirmed what several Cabinet-level agency CIOs have said in recent weeks: that productivity hasn’t dropped since telework began about two months ago. Earlier this week, Department of Transportation CIO Ryan Cote said on a webinar that productivity at his agency has actually increased. Many department CIOs have been surprised by the spike in demand for collaboration tools, like Microsoft Teams and other platforms, and have expanded the availability of those platforms.

“In this case, whether you measure it by user numbers, by number of minutes, by [virtual private network] traffic, we’ve hit historic use levels and expanded adoption of tools across every single agency,” Kent said.

The government’s ability to maintain its delivery of services and efficiency with a scattered workforce will drive decisions in the future, she said.

“That gives us real data and real feedback — not ‘what if’ scenarios. Federal teams can now reconsider what their physical footprint needs to look like,” Kent said. “But more importantly for all of us, what continued investments we need in our technical infrastructure and what our future road map looks like of digital capabilities.”

According to the chief information officers at the departments of Agriculture and Transportation, the productivity hasn’t fallen since employees there began working from home, raising questions about what the future of work looks like for federal employees when they return to the office.

“We are preparing for a different kind of work environment,” Gary Washington, CIO of the Department of Agriculture, said May 19 during a webinar with the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council. “We will see what that is, but we have proven that it is possible to support” the telework environment in the future.

According to Ryan Cote, CIO of the Transportation Department, his agency has “absolutely seen an increase” in productivity, but he hasn’t been able to pinpoint why.

“I can’t really say if it’s one specific thing or another,” Cote said. “Whether it be people who commute from around D.C. who no longer have to spend hours in their car, or whether they’re more relaxed at home. … There’s no question that every employee at the Department of Transportation is more productive than ever.”

Both Cabinet-level CIOs expressed surprise at the amount of demand they received from employees for access to collaboration tools — a reality described by other agency CIOs as well — such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom, the videoconferencing platform.

Washington can tell that the productivity of Agriculture Department employees hasn’t dropped; he collects data on network and collaboration-tool use. He said the department’s use of data analytics has become more important during the pandemic to inform decisions on resource deployment, among other scenarios. Meanwhile, the department’s need to ensure continuity of operations during the pandemic has increased the focus on IT infrastructure.

“There’s more of a focus on the infrastructure and a dependence on the infrastructure because, as you know, during your day-to-day activities in a normal environment, that may be an afterthought sometimes,” Washington said. “But now there’s really a nod toward making sure we set up an environment where everybody can work and there’s not performance degradation and we’re all secure and safe.”

Agencies were told in March by the Office of Personnel Management as well as the Office of Management and Budget to maximize telework flexibilities. In mid-April, OPM and OMB released a plan for reintroducing federal employees to the office. That plan took into account public health assessments in office localities and allowed for a slow return.

The move to telework wasn’t an extraordinary lift for the Department of Transportation, according to Cote, who said the department’s network was already set up to handle 40 percent of the workforce teleworking. So when the spread of coronavirus sent employees home, the department only had to scale up its current environment by signing new licenses and increasing capacity.

One challenge the agency faced was that many employees hadn’t previously worked from home, so calls to the help desk spiked as employees got used to the remote environment.

Federal IT officials constantly discuss the need for cultural change to improve IT practices. The coronavirus pandemic is proving to be no different.

“We have to prepare our workforce to think differently, not just about how we deliver IT services, but how we maintain them as well and how we address our customers,” Washington said.

Under the contract award, announced by the General Services Administration and the JAIC on May 18, Booz Allen Hamilton will provide a “wide mix of technical services and products” to support the JAIC, a DoD entity dedicated to advancing the use of artificial intelligence across the department.

The contracting giant will provide the JAIC with “data labeling, data management, data conditioning, AI product development, and the transition of AI products into new and existing fielded programs,” according to the GSA news release.

“The delivered AI products will leverage the power of DoD data to enable a transformational shift across the Department that will give the U.S. a definitive information advantage to prepare for future warfare operations,” the release said.

The contract will support the JAIC’s new joint warfighting mission initiative, launched earlier this year. The initiative includes “Joint All-Domain Command and Control; autonomous ground reconnaissance and surveillance; accelerated sensor-to-shooter timelines; operations center workflows; and deliberate and dynamic targeting solutions,” said JAIC spokesperson Arlo Abrahamson told C4ISRNET in January.

The joint warfighting initiative is looking for “AI solutions that help manage information so humans can make decisions safely and quickly in battle,” Abrahamson said. The award to Booz Allen Hamilton will push that effort forward, Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, the center’s director, said in a statement.

“The Joint Warfighting mission initiative will provide the Joint Force with AI-enabled solutions vital to improving operational effectiveness in all domains. This contract will be an important element as the JAIC increasingly focuses on fielding AI-enabled capabilities that meet the needs of the warfighter and decision-makers at every level,” Shanahan said.

DoD CIO Dana Deasy told Defense News in December that the JAIC would embark on its first lethality project in 2020, which Abrahamson said would be part of the joint warfighting initiative. According to an April blog post from the JAIC, the initiative’s first RFP released in March included the ethical principles DoD adopted this year, an effort to quell concern about how the Pentagon uses artificial intelligence.

The award to Booz Allen Hamilton was made by the GSA through its Alliant 2 Government-wide Acquisition Contract, a vehicle designed to provide artificial intelligence services to the federal government. The GSA and JAIC have been partners since last September, when the pair announced that they were teaming up as part of the GSA’s Centers of Excellence initiative, a program meant to accelerate modernization with agencies across government.

“The CoE and the JAIC continue to learn from each other and identify lessons that can be shared broadly across the federal space,” said Anil Cheriyan, director of the GSA’s Technology Transformation Services office, which administers the Centers of Excellence program. “It is important to work closely with our customers to acquire the best in digital adoption to meet their needs.”

In a May 18 announcement, HackerOne announced it achieved an authorization through the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program known as tailored low impact-software as a service. FedRAMP is a program inside the General Services Administration that approves cloud tools for use in the federal government.

HackerOne’s authorization is a significant step for the company, as agencies want to create vulnerability disclosure programs for their public-facing websites under a draft mandate released in November 2019 by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security.

Vulnerability disclosure programs allow ethical hackers to legally probe public-facing websites as long as they report vulnerabilities to the agency for remediation.

HackerOne’s FedRAMP authorization was sponsored by the GSA, which started using the company’s services in 2017 and later awarded it a multiyear contract.

The company’s credentials are also well-established inside the Department of Defense, where it runs a vulnerability disclosure program for the department’s outward-facing websites. So far, more than 12,000 vulnerabilities have been discovered.

It’s also provided several bug bounty programs for the military services, in which ethical hackers search for security gaps in specific service platforms and compete for prizes. The company previously partnered with the Air Force, Army and Marine Corps, as well as other internal DoD components.

“Achieving FedRAMP Tailored LI-SaaS authorization is a testament to HackerOne’s long-standing commitment to ensuring a secure environment for our U.S. government clients,” Lynn Chia, director of federal business at HackerOne, said in a statement. “This authorization underscores the momentum that HackerOne has achieved in the federal government and demonstrates our ability to help make our public sector customers’ digital transformations into security transformations.”

The RFI is part of the agency’s Pilot IRS program, an IRS initiative aiming to improve the agency’s acquisition speed.

In its RFI, the IRS’ Office of the Procurement Executive wrote that it is seeking to automate its grants management system, provide access to grantees, increasing the simplicity reporting, as well as receive an estimate of the cost of the overhaul relative to the agency’s return on investment.

The grants modernization push may be needed, the RFI read, because a funding boost for an IRS program may lead to a spike in grantees. The IRS runs a program called Volunteer Income Tax Assistance, which provides grants to organizations that train volunteers to help taxpayers file their taxes. A law passed in July 2019 provides $30 million each fiscal year for the program.

“With the increase in funding the IRS anticipates an increase in the number of organizations to support,” the RFI read. “Providing proper oversight, timely correspondence, administering the award timely, and ensuring the funds are available as soon as possible to the organizations are major concerns for the program. The IRS is looking for an end to end automated solution.”

In early April, the IRS released an RFI asking for industry’s ability to deliver a mission-specific version of “The Sims” video game, a popular life simulation game. That solution would help the IRS simulate real life events using artificial tax data.