Inside the federal CIO’s culture-first approach

The federal chief information officer is ready to tackle the culture behind government technology. 

A former intelligence sergeant in the U.S. Army and IC analyst, Gregory Barbaccia has been the government’s CIO for over a year. 

His gig within the Office of Management and Budget may not be common household knowledge, but Barbaccia is in charge of overseeing, managing and setting policy for the federal government’s technology. 

In his second year on the job, Barbaccia has a long list of to-do items. He’s helping with the new U.S. Tech Force and he wants to build a “digital front door” to the government for taxpayers, among other priorities, he told Nextgov/FCW.

Before last year, Barbaccia hadn’t worked in the federal government since 2009. He worked for Palantir for ten years, did a stint at a blockchain intelligence company and, most recently, worked at a financial technology company. 

Since taking on the federal CIO position, his understanding of the role has changed. 

“I came into the job thinking this would be much more of a technical undertaking about deep diving into technical systems and technical architecture,” he said. “I'm understanding changing the culture and the way we think about tech and the government is a way more effective means of making change, so that's what I'm focused on — primarily changes across culture, tech and then the compliance regime.”

Barbaccia views tackling culture as a way to make change at scale. 

“CIO meetings from my organization used to be OMB putting out boring information,” he said. “Now we're engaging. I work for the [agency] CIOs. It's my job to make them successful, so we need to kind of reverse that information flow. I need to be able to get information from the field to understand who's doing interesting things policy-wise, and what makes sense for me to deploy as policy across the government.”

Desk officers from Barbaccia’s office in OMB are being deployed into the field to meet in-person with agencies. He himself has gone to five different agencies around Washington, D.C., in one week for listening sessions.

Last year, the Trump administration encouraged federal agencies to convert those CIO roles that were reserved for career staff to positions that political appointees can occupy. Many agencies got new CIOs in 2025, some of whom came from private sector companies like Palantir and SpaceX. Many previously hadn’t worked in government agencies.

Now, Barbaccia is considering taking some of the best practices seen at the Transportation Department with its CIO Pavan Pidugu and putting them into government-wide policy. That involves better enforcing the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Act, or FITARA, a 2014 law that put CIOs in control of their agencies’ IT investments.

“FITARA requires that the CIOs sign off on all technology projects, so we're going to enforce that,” he said. “Then I'm interested in a mechanism where things that the CIO sign off of come up to my level, so I can see how we're spreading things out across government.”

Another dynamic the CIO is trying to change is the culture of developing tech solutions in-house. Buying technology, not building it internally, should be the default, he said, given the amount of commodity IT that exists.

Barbaccia also wants to move away from the “rip and replace” model of modernization.

“It's time to re-engineer how work is done, not simply recreate legacy processes in a digital format,” he wrote on LinkedIn last year, saying that this means automating repetitive tasks, making data actionable and changing behavior.

“We do these 10-year modernizations. It's crazy. And then we get to a point where now we're locked in with a new system that we can't update,” Barbaccia told Nextgov/FCW, explaining that cloud-based commercial technology is often updated regularly and keeps government from getting “locked in.”

Barbaccia is also working across major tech vendors — starting by meeting quarterly with Google, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft — to talk about renewals and contracts going on across agencies. He’s getting information from CIOs at agencies before these meetings, he said, and wants to be a better customer to these vendors, in part by helping their brand through deploying their products at commercial parity.

He’s also said on social media that the government needs to be a smarter buyer, declaring, “no more paying top dollar for tools we don't use or can't connect.”

Talent search

To get all this done, the government will need talent. Enter the Tech Force, an early-career tech talent program Barbaccia helped launch at the end of last year.

The administration is working with around 30 private sector companies, which are offering training opportunities for participants and also providing managers for the Tech Force — a setup that’s raised still unanswered ethics questions about conflict of interest, as these managers can keep stocks and stay connected to their prior companies while working for the government.

For Barbaccia, culture is, yet again, a priority. He wants the members to have a shared identity as part of the Tech Force, as opposed to the agencies they’re working within, so they can share lessons learned across the government. 

The new hiring push comes after the government suffered a net loss of nearly 220,000 employees between Trump’s inauguration and November 2025, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management, as limited hiring paled in comparison to the more than 322,000 people that left the government in that period. 

The government’s IT management occupational series, which includes many but not all tech and cybersecurity roles in the government, lost over 14,600 employees, the vast majority by quitting or retiring. 

Some of those losses were due to the controversial Department of Government Efficiency, which swept through agencies in 2025, asking for control of data and systems that such employees wouldn’t normally have access to, helping to lay off employees and more. DOGE’s push for data was the subject of lawsuits arguing that agencies were violating privacy protections enshrined in law in the process.

Now, many DOGE associates are agency employees, said Barbaccia, noting that the philosophy of the organization is still alive.

Asked if it was a mistake for so many tech employees to leave the government, Barbaccia acknowledged, “there was quite a bit of disruption, obviously."

“Disruption is not intrinsically a bad thing,” he said. “It remains to be seen. We haven't seen major system disruptions across the board.”

Barbaccia — who also holds the title of federal chief AI officer — previously told Nextgov/FCW in mid-2025 that AI will be key in making up for staffing shortages across the government. 

“The purpose of AI in the government is to free up human bandwidth to be deployed otherwise,” he reiterated in the January interview.

A ‘digital front door’

The federal CIO is also the federal government’s service delivery lead under the Government Service Delivery Improvement Act, which former President Joe Biden signed into law weeks before leaving office.

Barbaccia said he is interested in a “digital front door” for the government, asking “why do taxpayers have to supply the government with the same information across multiple agencies? Why don't I have, again, a single pane of glass, where I could see my veterans benefits, my tax responsibilities, other grants and programs I'm getting in one place?”

Trump established the National Design Studio, a White House team, last summer to address some of these challenges. So far, it’s been rolling out websites associated with top administration priorities, like the Trump “gold card” and Genesis Mission.

“I am very focused [on this], and I love working with the National Design Studio on this. It is good for the taxpayer to understand how their money is being used to make their life better,” Barbaccia said.

Parts of the “digital front door” concept have been around for decades. Former President Bill Clinton announced a website called “FirstGov” in 2000, with the idea that it would be “one-stop access to all federal government on-line information and services.” Barbaccia’s vision appears to involve more sharing behind the scenes, not just presenting a single website to the taxpayer that still requires them to navigate across agencies. 

“This goes back to responsible data sharing,” Barbaccia acknowledged, noting that the setup for such exchanges needs to be reevaluated, given that lawmakers created them before the digital age took off. For example, emails are often considered personally identifiable information, meaning that they are subject to certain protections despite their ubiquity.

Getting the single front door done may also require Barbaccia to work on identity proofing — an issue that’s long been a sore spot for the government — because that one door would be the defense between bad actors and the entire portfolio of a person’s government services. 

Despite its importance, policy questions still remain on how best to do identity proofing, such as whether government uses private sector solutions or an in-house one. 

Some agencies use commercial solutions, while government-created Login.gov uses vendors on the back end in addition to some government data to validate identity. It was the subject of a bombshell watchdog report during the Biden administration that its program leaders misled other government agencies about the level of security met by the service. 

Private sector options haven’t been immune to pushback, either, especially around privacy concerns and the use of biometric technology.

“It's a sensitive cultural issue and sensitive political issue,” Barbaccia said. “It's getting others around the agencies and the administration comfortable with, ‘This is something we just have to do really well.’ Login.gov has been in an interesting state for a decade, so we need to make very tough decisions about resourcing, and we just need to do this well. It's just time to do the damn thing.”