In a Thursday statement, managing associate general counsel for procurement law at GAO Kenneth E. Patton said the agency’s decision to not advance those proposals was “flawed”, citing NIH’s inability to show that it both reasonably evaluated phase one proposals and determined which would move on to the next stages of the competition.

“GAO recommended that the agency reevaluate proposals consistent with the decision, and make new determinations of which proposals advance past phase 1 of the competition based on the results of these new evaluations,” Patton said, echoing previous statements from the organization.

Patton also said the GAO found the agency “unreasonably evaluated specific aspects” of a phase one proposal from Sky Solutions LLC. GAO denied remaining arguments the protesters raised, which included challenges to other aspects of the evaluations and untimely challenges, he said.

The decision was issued under a protective order because it “may contain proprietary and source selection sensitive information,” according to Patton. It addressed protests by entities represented by outside counsel who were eligible for a protective order. Protests filed by entities not represented by counsel will be addressed in a separate, forthcoming decision, Patton added.

CIO-SP4 is the fourth iteration of a contract vehicle for acquiring commoditized IT products and specialized services that has been dogged by pre-award protests since the agency first requested proposals in May 2021. The CIO-SP4 vehicle has a $50 billion ceiling.

Entities seeking inclusion in National Institutes of Health Information Technology Acquisition and Assessment Center (NITAAC)’s 10-year solicitation have made multiple challenges through bid protests over the last two years. Those challenges have focused on the process and criteria by which the awarding agency was using to select awardees. They’ve been both dismissed and sustained, as the agency pushes forward with the solicitation.

In March, the GAO dismissed a round of bid protests after the agency agreed to voluntary corrective action to make a new phase one determination on highest rated offerors. GAO previously dismissed 117 complaints in November 2022 over the use of a points based scoring system used to analyze prior performance of the entities bidding. The agency agreed to voluntary corrective action in that case as well.

Both of those decisions came after GAO partially sustained a pre-award protest arguing the procurement unfairly disadvantaged large companies in mentor-protégé arrangements in November 2021.

Commenting on the bid protest decisions, founder of federal procurement consultancy ProcureLinx, Mark Hijar, said: “This is a sign, to me, that they have some very serious retooling to do before they move to the next phase of evaluation. And for this to happen at this late date is not a good sign.”

Hijar, who has worked with contractors who were awardees under past iterations of the vehicle, said he’ll be watching how the agency addresses the recommendation efficiently “without materially changing the evaluation criteria that were originally provided.”

Editor’s note, 6/29/23: This story was updated to add further context about prior CIO-SP4 bid protests and to include comment from ProcureLinx.

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While this proposed rule has received less attention, the inclusion of algorithms represents an important example of how Biden administration regulators are hoping to rein in AI. ONC wants to get that final rule out as soon as possible, “perhaps as early as later this year,” an ONC spokesman said in an email.

The proposal — the comment period closed earlier this month — would require electronic health record systems using predictive tools like AI and algorithms to provide users with information about how that technology works, including a description of the data it uses. That would add to a certification process already overseen by ONC.

“The idea is that you should have a standardized nutrition label for an algorithm,” Micky Tripathi, who leads the health IT division housed within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in an interview with FedScoop.

ONC’s certification program for health IT — which includes electronic health record technologies — is voluntary. It’s incentivized, however, by requirements that hospitals and physicians use certified systems when participating in certain Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services payment programs.

While ONC hopes that more transparency will help avoid unintended consequences of algorithmic bias, the rule has received some pushback from medical professionals, health IT companies, and associations for both not going far enough and being too hard to comply with. The division will next review those comments and work on finalizing the rule.

The AI and algorithm requirements are part of ONC’s proposed rule titled “Health Data, Technology, and Interoperability: Certification Program Updates, Algorithm Transparency, and Information Sharing” (HTI-1), which includes a variety of updates for the division’s Health IT Certification Program.

Specifically, the artificial intelligence portion of the rule would build upon its existing certification requirements for clinical decision support (CDS) systems by defining a new category for predictive tools, which includes AI and algorithms. 

Artificial intelligence presents “a whole new dimension in this area of clinical decision support,” Tripathi said. There are things about AI that are “fundamentally different” and require ONC to again weigh in on how these technologies are incorporated into electronic health records systems, he explained.

ONC doesn’t want to be in the position of telling people they can’t use a particular algorithm, Tripathi said, which is why it’s pointing to transparency as a way to help people “navigate” the technology.

For example, Tripathi said, a user in San Juan, Puerto Rico, might learn that an algorithm in an electronic health record system was trained on data from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and question whether that would be appropriate for their patient population. 

ONC’s emerging approach to AI regulation has won support from a variety of healthcare industry stakeholders, public comments revealed. For example, the College of American Pathologists — a nonprofit with thousands of members — has said that more information about the datasets AI systems are trained on would boost transparency, and also help pathologists with their “AI-related responsibilities.”

Ron Wyatt, the chief scientist and medical officer at the Society to Improve Diagnosis in Medicine, said the rule didn’t go far enough, and argued that the information that’s made available to “end users,” like health systems and patients, should also be shared in the public domain — so that it’s “exposed to the expert academic research and developer communities that now are sensitized” to the problems with using AI in healthcare. 

Unsurprisingly, there’s also been pushback. The HIMSS Electronic Record Association, on behalf of 30 companies, has suggested that ONC’s requirements for “decision support interventions” would be hard for electronic health record developers to implement, since — they argue — these tools are often created by third parties. 

The American College of Cardiology, a nonprofit association that credentials cardiovascular professionals, said the algorithms proposal was “overly broad,” could potentially cover “thousands of technology solutions utilized in health care,” and may also be confusing for clinicians dealing with software that’s defined differently by other agencies. 

It’s not yet clear how ONC will incorporate this feedback. Still, the proposal and the feedback it received show the mounting effort to regulate AI across the Biden administration. 

The Office of Science and Technology Policy, for example, has emphasized fighting algorithmic discrimination in the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, which was released in October. The Department of Justice and the Department of Housing and Urban Development have looked at algorithmic bias in systems used to screen tenant applications. Senator Charles Schumer highlighted fighting bias in the SAFE Innovation Framework he introduced earlier this month. 

ONC’s own work on artificial intelligence isn’t limited to the proposed rule. Separately, Tripathi said the ONC is working on the department’s broader efforts to develop AI regulatory strategies and is exploring how to make sure a type of application programming interface (API) used for healthcare interoperability — known as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) — is able to interact with AI. 

“As ONC, and as the HHS, and as the federal government, we want to balance the ability to allow us to continue to have innovation in a really — what we recognize is — a really important space that could offer tremendous benefit at the end of the day,” Tripathi said.

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The 2023 leave year ending Jan. 13, 2024 will have 27 pay periods, OPM said in a memo sent on Monday to human resource directors of U.S. government agencies. That means most federal employees will receive an additional pay period’s worth of leave in 2023, which could be four, six, or eight hours depending on their accrual rate, according to the memo.

The change doesn’t apply to agencies whose first pay period was Jan. 8, 2023, as they will have 26 pay periods, the memo said. 

While most federal workers will get more leave time, the maximum carryover amount for annual leave – 240 hours for most employees and 360 hours for overseas employees – won’t change, OPM said. It encouraged agencies to remind affected workers to use any time over that limit before the end of the leave year so they don’t lose it.

OPM also clarified that while there are 27 leave pay periods for most workers, there will still be 26 pay days in the 2023 calendar year. The number of pay periods affects leave accrual, not pay days, the agency said.

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The agency, which is the medical research arm housed within the Department of Health and Human Services, hasn’t “fully implemented” practices for workforce planning that are established in federal guidance, such as identifying staffing gaps, the Government Accountability Office found.

A dearth of data science experts means the agency risks not having the workforce needed “to administer tens of billions of dollars in annual research grants,” the GAO said. Increased data collection and research advances will only add to the importance of data in the biomedical field, the report said.

The watchdog agency made eleven recommendations that were mostly aimed at NIH building a strategy to address the issue and monitor its progress. In a response to the report provided to the GAO, the agency said it agreed with nine of the recommendations and already implemented two others related to data management.

While NIH set a goal to enhance its data science workforce in a June 2018 Strategic Plan for Data Science, GAO said the agency’s work wasn’t linked to filling the gaps in its workforce because it hadn’t identified those gaps in the first place. 

Efforts the agency made included launching a Data Fellows program and creating a “Data Science at NIH” webpage with related training resources and information, the GAO said.

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The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AO), the arm of the federal courts that deals with non-judicial business, wants information about a product that regularly simulates threats to test cybersecurity, known as a “Breach and Attack Simulation,” according to a request for information posted online.

The AO is looking for a product that “will enable continuous and consistent testing of multiple attack vectors against the Courts’ assets, including external and insider threats, lateral movement, and data exfiltration,” the solicitation said.

The courts’ Information Technology Security Office would use a Breach and Attack Simulation product to “identify the levels of risk that may not be readily apparent,” the solicitation said. 

The judiciary, like other federal entities, has been the subject of cyberattacks in recent years, and those attempts are expected to become more acute. 

In its fiscal year 2024 budget request, the judiciary disclosed its cyber-defenses halted “approximately 600 million harmful events from reaching court local area networks in 2022.” It previously reported those defenses stopped 43 million “harmful events” in 2020. 

The judiciary, in the most recent budget request, said it expected cyberattacks to “continue to intensify as hackers become increasingly proficient.”

The Administrative Office didn’t immediately have more details on the solicitation.

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“Cybersecurity is a national security matter,” Matthew G. Olsen, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said in a Tuesday event at Stanford’s Hoover Institution announcing the new section.

The section, which will be known as NatSec Cyber, will allow the National Security Division to “increase the scale and speed” of their disruption campaigns and prosecutions of cyber threats from nation-states and state-sponsored cybercriminals, Olsen said. The section already has congressional approval.

The creation of the new section is a response to findings from a cyber review in July 2022, DOJ said in an accompanying release. That report from Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco found the department needed to have personnel in place that are well-versed in understanding the intricacies of cyber breaches and attacks. 

Adding the section puts cyber work on “equal footing” with the other sections within the National Security Division, Olsen said. Leadership will be organized by geographical threat actors, which mirrors the structure of the FBI’s cyber division in an effort to aid their integration, he said.

The section will also be a resource for U.S. attorney offices around the country, Olsen said. 

“Responding to highly technical cyber threats often requires significant time and resources, and that’s not always possible within the demands of these individual U.S. attorney’s offices,” he said. 

Olsen said his goal for the new section is that it will “serve as something of an incubator” for cyber cases, investing time and energy early on to “ensure they’re properly handled.”

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The meeting was slated to include eight technology experts, including Jennifer Dounda, known for her pioneering work on gene editing, Khan Academy CEO and Founder Sal Khan, and former CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence Oren Etzioni.

“These experts include those who have been outspoken on the impact of AI on jobs, children, bias and prejudice, the risks posed by AI if it isn’t properly regulated, and also those who understand the benefits it provides for education and medicine if this technology is built safely from the start,” the White House official said in an emailed statement.

The Biden administration is exploring a regulatory approach to AI, as generative tools, like ChatGPT, have exploded in popularity in recent months. 

According to the White House official, the office of White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients is supervising the development of “decisive actions” the administration can take over “coming weeks.”

The White House‘s work on the issue has also included discussions two to three times a week among White House principals and getting AI companies to commit to addressing public and private sector challenges, the official said. 

Other expected participants at the Tuesday event were:

• Tristan Harris, executive director and co-founder of the Center for Human Technology
• Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media
• Rob Reich, professor of Political Science at Stanford University
• Joy Buolamwini, founder of the Algorithmic Justice League
• Fei-Fei Li, co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute

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Customers using the complaint process are often already in a vulnerable state, facing eviction, homelessness, or retaliation from a housing provider, Amber Chaudhry, a customer experience lead at HUD, said at a virtual Data Foundation event Thursday. 

Chaudhry said her team pitched a design concept that includes embedding trauma-informed roles and training and guidance on emotional support to senior leadership in the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity on Thursday morning. She said she’s hopeful her team will soon be working on next steps, like piloting those trauma-informed roles and capabilities at the department.

“Our ultimate goal is to reduce the emotional burden on both the end customer — the participants — and FHEO staff involved in the housing discrimination complaint process,” Chaudhry said.

The effort at HUD reflects the Biden administration‘s government-wide push to improve customer experience for programs that was launched in a 2021 executive order. That order provided guidance on how impactful, large-scale government programs — termed High Impact Service Providers — should manage customer experience.

The event, titled “Improving the Government Experience: Building Trust with the Public Sector’s Customers with Better Services,” focused on success stories in improving government customer service. It included speakers from the Office of Management and Budget, the National Parks Service, and professionals focused on technology in the public sector. 

Sean Reilly, chief of budget formulation and strategic planning in the National Park Service’s Office of the Comptroller, said the agency has been able to leverage its designation as a high-impact service provider under the executive order to focus on a consolidated NPS app and improvements Volunteer.gov. 

The changes across the government, one official said, are already making a difference. Amira Choueiki Boland, federal customer experience lead at OMB, highlighted customer satisfaction metrics for the federal government as other industries have struggled.

There was a trend last year in lower satisfaction with customer experiences across industries, Boland said, but the federal government’s score statically didn’t change. That the government “absorbed” some of that trend is a “testament” to the improvements being made, she said.

“We’re seeing at least that we’re going in the right direction,” Boland said, adding there’s still “a lot to do.”

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The U.S. Government Accountability Office, in a Monday report, said it found the NNSA and its contractors are still in the early stages of inventorying the operational technology systems used in the production of nuclear weapons and the IT systems used within those weapons. The agency is also in the early stages of assessing and mitigating the risks those systems might pose, the report said.

The findings come after a September 2022 GAO report that found the agency didn’t have a cybersecurity risk management strategy for nuclear weapons IT systems. The new report focuses on the two areas where the most additional work was still needed: operational technologies and nuclear weapons IT. 

Allison Bawden, a co-author of the report and a director of GAO’s Natural Resources and Environment team, said what the team behind the report found was “they’re really pretty early on in terms of identifying those system risks, so that they can develop appropriate risk mitigation strategies.”

Bawden described those two issues explored in the report as “substantially different.”

With operational technology, there could be tens of thousands of systems that need to be identified, Bawden said. Whereas in the nuclear weapons area, there isn’t a large amount of IT in existing current nuclear weapons designs and therefore is a more “manageable environment” from a system risk perspective, she said.

The Department of Energy, under which the NNSA sits, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the findings.

The report found NNSA’s work on creating an inventory of operational technologies, which encompasses things like building safety systems, has “been limited in scope.” The agency has identified the systems “associated with the most critical capability at each site” and is conducting assessments, the report found.

Bawden said that process is “really going to need concerted attention going forward in order to get that inventorying process complete so that system risks are well understood and can be mitigated.”

On nuclear weapons IT, the agency had still yet to define the term as of May, the report said. The GAO said agency officials told them they will identify systems that fit that category once the term is formally defined. 

While nuclear weapons IT is a more manageable risk environment right now, modern technologies could present new challenges, Bawden said. 

As most of the systems are undergoing modernization, she said, “it could be feasible that additional components will be introduced into new systems designs that present cyber risks.”

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Borkowski, in a Friday interview with FedScoop, said he believes change in leadership is important for bringing about new ideas and felt it was the right time to leave after the volatility of the pandemic has settled.

“I’ve been here too long, so it’s time to go,” Borkowski said.

His decision caps a roughly 17-year career at CBP and more than 40 years in government service. He will officially depart the office on June 30. CBP didn’t immediately have details on a successor.

Among the fresh ideas that Borkowski said people are looking into at CBP is a digital process for acquisition management and system engineering. He also pointed to an initial phase of a “futures lab” that aims to help people think like futurists to identify signals and trends and project what consequences those could have, particularly when comes to evolving threats that could affect CBP.

“​​That’s pretty advanced, modern, open-minded thinking that I’d like to think I could do, but I’m not so sure I’d be any good at it,” Borkowski said.

Prior to his roles at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Borkowski served more than 23 years in the U.S. Air Force, retiring in 2004 as a colonel, and worked for NASA as the program executive for the Lunar Robotic Exploration Program, according to his biography on CBP’s website.

Speaking with FedScoop, Borkowski said that when he started at CBP in 2006, the agency was growing and realized that it couldn’t pull an agent out of the field to work on administrative functions. He said leadership brought him in to help fill that role as executive director of mission support, and he became the first person in the senior executive service at U.S. Border Patrol that wasn’t uniform.

He went on to lead the Secure Border Initiative at the agency and later became the assistant commissioner of the Office of Technology Innovation and Acquisition. In June 2016, he became the leader of the Office of Acquisition, a newly established office. 

Borkowski said he returned to acquisition somewhat reluctantly when leadership at CBP approached him about the opportunity. He said he was enjoying working on border security at the time but eventually agreed to take on an acquisition role.

“The effect of that was that the leadership of Customs and Border Protection started to recognize that when you are doing what we call Big ‘A’ acquisition of complex programs, there’s actually a whole set of skills and competencies that are built by training and experience,” Borkowski said.

Among the things Borkowski said he’s proud of are the “world-class” people at CBP and having strengthened core competencies like system engineering. He also said he’s proud of a course he helped develop to train people in program management at CBP. That course is currently being instructed by the Federal Aviation Administration Academy.

“I’m really enjoying watching a lot of the rest of the organization say, woah, this program management thing is really important, and it helps us do our jobs better and we need to do more of it,” he said.

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