FCW Insider: Feb. 25

The U.S. Army is expected to announce its implementation plans for moving to enterprise-as-a-service model in March. Lauren C. Williams has the story.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said countries that fail to heed warnings about Chinese telecommunications provider Huawei are putting their security and information-sharing relationships with the U.S. at risk. Derek B. Johnson reports.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) wants to partner with the health care industry to develop a strategy for dealing with an unprecedented wave of cyberattacks over the past year. Derek has more.

The Federal Communications Commission wants to see if extremely high bandwidth spectrum can be tamed for use. Mark Rockwell explains.

Quick Hits

*** In a court filing unsealed Feb. 22, the Department of Defense acknowledged it was investigating "possible conflicts of interest" involving former Amazon Web Services executive and Defense Digital Services employee Deap Ubhi with regard to the Pentagon's $10 billion cloud procurement.

Oracle is suing the DOD over the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative procurement in part because of ties between DOD officials and AWS, which is widely seen as having an inside track on the contract.

The DOD sought and received a stay in the Oracle case last week. The stay gives time for a contracting officer who initially determined that Ubhi's participation in JEDI didn't violate DOD rules to reevaluate that assessment. According to the filing, new information has come to light as of Feb. 12 that requires the reevaluation – although the precise nature of the information is redacted in the filing.

*** The Trump Administration issued its first national action plan for open government last week. The plan is the fourth overall and is largely promotes existing government initiatives most notably the federal data strategy. The document also promotes the creation of chief data officers at the agency level – a move called for by the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act.

The plan was due in September, but the deadline passed with no public action from the administration.

*** Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, reintroduced a bill to restore the National Council on Federal Labor-Management Relations, which was disbanded by the Trump Administration in Sept. 2017.

"President Trump's order disbanding labor-management panels was short-sighted and ill-advised," Cummings said in 2017. "Ensuring that front-line workers and management personnel engage in constructive dialogue is vital to a well-managed federal workplace. That is what this bill would do."