FCW Insider: November 1, 2021
The latest news and analysis from FCW's reporters and editors.
White House pick for DOD CIO eyes tweaks to CMMC
The Biden administration's pick to be the Pentagon's tech chief wants to make it easier for small businesses to adhere to the Defense Department's cybersecurity standards and expand network optimization across the entire enterprise.
GAO backs Microsoft's protest of $10 billion NSA cloud award to AWS
The Government Accountability Office agreed that aspects of the National Security Agency's evaluation of a major cloud award were "unreasonable."
ICYMI: Billions in tech funding proposed in Build Back Better
An effort to put $3.5 billion into key governmentwide tech modernization accounts appears to have come up short in the Build Back Better bill, but there's still a lot of technology spending on the table.
Quick Hits
*** Agencies need to grant feds leave to get their COVID-19 booster shots, according to new guidance from the Safer Federal Workforce Taskforce. Updates also clarify that feds need to give documentation to prove their vaccination status and detail what documents are acceptable. The task force also gave directions for any feds that have lost their vaccination card.
*** The Partnership for Public Service announced the winners of the 2021 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America medals, known as Sammies, last week. The federal employees of the year award went to Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett and Barney Graham, both from the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health. Their research and work developing of the basic structure of the COVID-19 vaccines laid the foundation for COVID-19 vaccine development.
The COVID-19 response medal went to Drs. Gary Gibbons and Eliseo Pérez-Stable, also of the NIH. On the tech front, Callie Higgens of the National Institute of Standards and Technology received the Emerging Leaders Medal for work developing new tech to find and fix flaws in 3D-printed products.
*** The Department of Labor isn’t following best practices for federal risk management to assess the risk of fraud in its unemployment insurance program, which has faced an onslaught of fraud since the onset of the pandemic, according to an Oct. 27 report from the Government Accountability Office.