Nextgov/FCW - Digital Government

GSA joins White House’s fraud prevention task force

Edward Graham — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:59:00 -0400

The General Services Administration announced on Thursday that it is joining the White House’s anti-fraud task force, a move that enlists a key federal acquisition agency into President Donald Trump’s self-described “war on fraud.”

The unit, led by Vice President JD Vance, was created by a March executive order and is tasked with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse across federal benefits programs.

GSA said in a press release that it is “uniquely positioned to help the Task Force detect irregularities, accelerate investigations, and safeguard taxpayer dollars,” with members of the anti-fraud unit “now leveraging GSA’s unmatched reach in acquisition, shared services, technology modernization, and federal real estate.”

Although the order establishing the task force emphasized efforts to identify federal benefits fraud, GSA said it will support the unit’s work by identifying waste, fraud and abuse across government contracting programs.

“GSA sits at the center of the federal acquisition and contracting ecosystem, making us a critical force in the fight against fraud,” GSA Administrator Edward Forst said in a statement, adding that the agency “will bring advanced analytical capabilities, investigative support, and cross-government coordination to help expose high-risk fraud patterns and stop bad actors from exploiting taxpayer-funded systems.”

Trump’s directive establishing the task force also granted it the authority to withhold funds from states and local jurisdictions “that do not have adequate anti-fraud requirements.”

The effort has been clouded by allegations of political bias, however, with the order creating the unit notably calling out Democrat-led states and accusing public officials of intentionally failing to police benefits programs so migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border can receive assistance.

Vance said earlier this month the unit was “deferring” $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements to California and threatened to withhold payments from other states if they do not adequately enhance their efforts to combat fraud in federal benefits programs. That came after the White House kicked off its anti-fraud push in February by announcing that it was withholding over $240 million in Medicaid funds from Minnesota following claims about the misuse of funds in the state’s social services programs.

]]>

The White House is ordering agencies to place its new app on all employees’ government phones

Eric Katz and Natalie Alms — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:31:00 -0400

Updated May 23 at 10:19 a.m.

The White House recently unveiled a new app to give the public “unfiltered” access to “key priorities,” “historic moments” and “policy breakthroughs.” Now, it’s directing agencies to help install it on the government phones of federal employees.

The Trump administration launched the app, which promises to “[keep] you connected to President Donald J. Trump and his administration like never before,” in March.

The push to install the app on the devices of millions of government employees drew surprise from current and former federal officials, who called the move highly unusual and even dangerous.

The White House launched its new app in March 2026.

In at least one agency, the automatic downloads will start next week in a move directed by the White House itself, according to internal communications obtained by Government Executive. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Earlier this week, agency chief information officers got orders from the federal CIO, Greg Barbaccia, to help the White House understand the mechanics of installing the app across all government-furnished mobile phones in the executive branch, according to an internal email obtained by Government Executive.

“The White House App gives all Americans direct access to White House live streams, breaking news alerts, new policy initiatives, social media posts, and more,” said Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson. “Government devices typically include pre-installed apps that provide value to government employees’ day-to-day work.”

The move is “dangerous,” Sonny Hashmi, a former longtime government IT executive, told Government Executive.

Cybersecurity researchers warned about vulnerabilities in the app soon after it debuted, like how it shares the IP addresses, time zones and other data of users with third-party services. The app also raised initial concerns about its potential GPS tracking capability, but the White House has since removed that functionality.

Forcing agencies to install it on employee’s government furnished phones should be “cause for alarm,” said Hashmi, who worked at the General Services Administration for years, most recently as a Biden administration appointee. “Any app that is installed on government issued devices can potentially create backdoor access to government networks behind the firewall.”

The Federal Aviation Administration told employees on Friday that its IT team “will automatically install ‘The White House’ application on all FAA-issued iPhones and iPads, as mandated by the White House,” adding the process would occur automatically and employees “do not need to take any action.”

“The application will grant access to breaking news, policy updates, livestreams, videos, photos, social media content, and exclusive early-access information,” it said.

The app includes official statements and policy announcements from the administration, as well as a feed of social media posts from White House accounts and the president.

A button gives the option to “text President Trump,” which, when clicked, opens a text message to a pre-selected number with the default text “Greatest President Ever!” Sending the text signs the user up for alerts, which individuals can also do through the app itself.

While the instructions to install the administration’s app on government phones may sound like a way to simply communicate with the government workforce more directly, “this isn’t really operational,” former government tech official David Nesting told Government Executive, pointing to the fact that it’s the same app available to the general public.

“It's just making sure all federal employees are forced to see the same propaganda they push out to the public,” said Nesting, who previously worked in career, civil service government roles as the deputy CIO at OPM and also did stints at the federal Office of the Chief Information Officer and U.S. Digital Service before it was DOGE.

The app includes videos and messaging that are overtly political or directly related to campaigns, the type of material with which employees are typically discouraged from engaging while on the clock due to the non-partisan nature of their work.

Barbaccia’s email to government IT executives suggests that how to force the app to install across phones wasn’t immediately apparent to the White House, as it requested help with the “mechanics” of pushing the app out across government phones.

This marks at least the second time the administration has sought to make it easier to communicate with the entire federal workforce all at once.

In the days after Trump moved back into the White House last year, the Office of Personnel Management set up a new, first of its kind governmentwide email system – something that didn’t previously exist. It later used the new system to send out the administration’s “Fork in the Road” deferred resignation offer to get hundreds of thousands of federal employees to resign from their roles.

This story has been updated with comment from the White House.

]]>

DOGE is about making government services easier to access, its head says

Natalie Alms — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:41:00 -0400

Department of Government Efficiency acting Administrator Amy Gleason says that efficiency — the tagline billionaire Elon Musk heralded during his involvement in the early days of DOGE — is about making accessing the government easier.

Although that message ties back to much of the history of the Obama-era office that President Donald Trump reshaped into DOGE, the U.S. Digital Service, it diverges somewhat from what DOGE has made itself known for, like dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, pressing for unprecedented, high-level access to sensitive government data and pushing thousands of government employees out of their jobs.

Musk and his allies also emphasized reducing government spending as part of their mission, although they were ultimately largely unsuccessful.

Gleason told an audience at a government IT industry event Wednesday that the group’s priorities today are improving government services, modernizing government systems, combating fraud and hiring tech talent after the administration pushed 20,000 technology-focused government employees out of their jobs last year.

“I think of efficiency really as reducing that friction, administrative burden, both from our public users as well as our federal workforce, and even state users that we're working with,” she said. “Our citizens have come to expect their government experience to feel like the private sector experience, where it's modern and easy to use.”

When Trump moved back into the White House last year, he quickly transformed USDS — set up in the wake of the botched healthcare.gov launch to prevent future such failures — into the U.S. DOGE Service.

Many of those on the existing team were laid off or resigned in protest. Some stayed and continued to work on the types of citizen-facing projects the Obama-era team was known for, although experts have told Nextgov/FCW that DOGE made these types of good-government projects more difficult by souring what the public thinks about when it hears the words “government modernization.”

Gleason herself was relatively unknown to the broader public when the White House named her acting administrator of DOGE last spring, after Trump evaded the question of who was in charge for weeks. She previously worked at DOGE’s precursor during Trump’s first term and during the Biden administration.

Despite her title, it’s not clear how much sway Gleason had over DOGE during its zenith. Some on Musk’s government-cutting team have since said that she never led a DOGE meeting they attended, and that they didn’t know what her job was.

DOGE’s social media still appears to be rooted in the Musk days. Recent posts on the team’s X account include images of a doberman on the White House lawn with the text, “DOGERMAN.” Another post simply reads, “America loves DOGE.”

Public polling from last year says otherwise, with more Americans opposing DOGE than rating it positively.

Gleason, who also works at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, spoke Wednesday about her inspiration working in the healthcare tech space because of the experience of her daughter, who was diagnosed with a rare disease when she was 11. Gleason said she wants to improve the access patients have to their own healthcare data.

Asked to expound on the biggest challenges in government AI, Gleason said that trust is the “biggest thing.”

“We have to figure out how to overcome the trust barrier,” she said.

]]>

Senators ask watchdog to probe IRS Free File program

Natalie Alms — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:54:00 -0400

Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Angus King, I-Maine, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., want the Government Accountability Office to conduct a review of Free File, the IRS program run in partnership with private tax prep companies to offer most Americans a free way to file their taxes online.

Created in exchange for the IRS not competing with the tax prep industry in offering its own free, online tax filing service for Americans, the program has long been the main, free tax filing option provided by the government for taxpayers.

For two years, some Americans also had a government option via a program established under the Biden administration, known as Direct File, but the Trump administration canceled that offering last fall and pinned the decision on the cost of the service and low participation rates.

During its existence, tax prep companies had lobbied against Direct File, and many Republicans opposed the program, which provided eligible taxpayers with relatively simple tax situations in 25 states a free way to file online, directly with the IRS.

Free File — which the IRS is now relying on as the primary free option for Americans to file their taxes online — is provided via eight tax prep companies for most Americans.

Leading up to Direct File’s creation, both GAO and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration had urged the IRS to offer free, online options beyond Free File, as only a sliver of those eligible for the service actually used it in recent years.

The IRS said that it planned to do a communications campaign for Free File and other free IRS options, including the largely in-person VITA program offered to low-income taxpayers, after it eliminated Direct File.

The trio of senators wants GAO to update its previous report on Free File, in which the watchdog also outlined concerns about heavy-hitters like Intuit and H&R Block departing the program. Those companies had previously served most of the program’s users before their withdrawal.

Intuit and H&R Block also reached settlements for pushing users toward products they’d have to pay for, even when they could’ve used free options, and for deceptive advertising, respectively.

“The Free File program has a nearly two-decade long record of underperformance,” the lawmakers wrote in their new letter to GAO. “We have serious concerns that Free File cannot efficiently, effectively, and securely serve the taxpayers who are statutorily entitled to free tax filing services.”

The senators want GAO to investigate a host of details, including how the IRS oversees companies participating in Free File, a subject at the center of a 2024 TIGTA report that found the tax agency doesn’t have sufficient oversight over the program partners to make sure that they’re protecting tax data from unauthorized disclosures.

Tim Hugo, executive director of Free File, said in a statement that “the IRS Free File Program, with virtually no promotion by the federal government, has provided more than 3.2 million free federal tax returns to date this past tax-filing season – a more than 5.4 percent increase from the year before.”

Hugo also noted that Free File accounted for 10 times the number of accepted federal returns as Direct File last year.

The latter program, however, was canceled before it had expanded past 25 participating states. Media reports casting doubt on the future of the program after billionaire Elon Musk, former leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, posted on X that the team powering the program had been “deleted” may have also impacted its use last year.

“Rather than cast inaccurate aspersions on the IRS Free File Program, we would urge policymakers to work with us to promote the a [sic] program that serves million[s] each year, and with effective promotion could serve millions more,” Hugo said.

A GAO spokesperson confirmed that the agency had received the request and was working through its internal process for determining whether or when it conducts work.

]]>

Advocates pledge action to restore digital equity grants

Chris Teale — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:45:00 -0400

Just over one year ago, President Donald Trump announced via social media he was ending digital equity grants, which he called a “racist and illegal $2.5 billion giveaway.”

Twelve months on, a coalition of lawmakers, nonprofits and other advocates are pledging to fight back, restore funding and prevent similar rescissions in the future, even though the odds are stacked against them. And they promised to continue their fight in the courts.

Following Trump’s May 2025 declaration that he would be ending digital equity grants, states quickly received letters informing them their grants had been terminated, while the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which administered the program, quickly scrubbed references to the program from its website.

That decision prompted a furious reaction from advocates, who filed a lawsuit in October looking to reinstate those grants. And at a virtual press conference held last week to mark one year since Trump’s rescindment, those advocates promised to do even more, as the digital skills the law was designed to build are just as important as the network infrastructure that the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program promises to build.

“We cannot declare victory by counting miles of fiber made or dollars spent,” Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Anna Gomez said. “True progress means asking whether people are actually online, whether they have the skills to navigate the digital economy, whether they can access telehealth, apply for jobs, help their kids with homework and participate fully in modern life. If we only measure deployment, we will build a lot of digital bridges to nowhere and leave a lot of people behind.”

The press conference marked the official start of what organizers — including the National Digital Inclusion Alliance — billed as a “DEA Month of Action.” Groups pledged to raise awareness about harms caused by the grants’ cancellation, ensure Congress ignores Trump’s FY 2027 budget request to eliminate funding altogether, and remind policymakers of the importance of such programs.

Trump’s May 2025 rescission killed three programs under the Digital Equity Act: the $60 million Digital Equity Planning Grant Program; the $1.44 billion Digital Equity Capacity Grant Program; and the $1.25 billion Digital Equity Competitive Grant Program. The nonprofit Benton Institute for Broadband and Society noted that states’ digital equity plans had already been approved by NTIA, while the agency had also approved states’ implementation strategies, which meant they could receive capacity program grants. NTIA had already recommended 66 applicants for awards and was set for more funding rounds, Benton added.

“This was simply a unilateral action, which is why we're asking the appropriators and the members of Congress to forcefully reject any effort to rescind the prior funding, and also we want them to fight to restore the funding that has already been canceled,” said Marc H. Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League. “Digital equity matters because every pathway to opportunity now runs through technology.”

The groups, however, received something of a setback in court as part of their ongoing lawsuit against the rescissions. NDIA had filed a motion to put its lawsuit on pause, pending the decision in another case over whether the Trump administration illegally froze grant funding from the Environmental Protection Agency designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

However, a decision from District of Columbia District Judge John D. Bates rejected that motion and said the lawsuit must proceed. In his decision, Bates said the plaintiffs had “failed to show that the jurisdictional issues presented in this case necessarily overlap with those in Climate United, the Government offers independent grounds for dismissal, and the cost of potentially submitting supplemental briefing is minor.”

Lawmakers promised to keep fighting against what they deemed the “unlawful” termination of digital equity grants, including during the ongoing appropriations process.

“Let's remember Congress holds the power of the purse,” said Rep. Grace Meng, a New York Democrat. “The Appropriations Committee will continue to assert that authority to ensure that funds already allocated by law are used as intended to serve the American people. We cannot afford to go backward. We must continue moving forward together to close the digital divide once and for all.”

The fight continues, advocates said.

“Let me say this plainly: the executive branch cannot repeal a law via social media posts,” said Chris Lewis, president and CEO at Public Knowledge. “Beyond that being a blatantly unconstitutional act, stalling or halting the Digital Equity Act is bad for consumers and it is bad for business.”

]]>

White House withholds $1.3B in Medicaid payments to California amid broader fraud crackdown

Edward Graham — Thu, 14 May 2026 13:28:00 -0400

Vice President JD Vance announced on Wednesday that the federal government is “deferring” $1.3 billion in Medicaid reimbursements to California and said the administration would withhold payments from additional states if they do not ramp up their efforts to root out fraud in federal benefits programs.

The notice came as part of President Donald Trump’s “war on fraud,” which Vance is leading as the head of the White House’s anti-fraud task force.

The unit, established in March by executive order, was granted the authority to withhold funding from state and local jurisdictions “that do not have adequate anti-fraud requirements,” per the order, although the effort has been somewhat clouded by allegations of political bias. The directive establishing the task force noticeably specifically called out Democrat-led states for failing to address fraud in their benefits programs.

The White House kicked off its fraud prevention efforts by announcing in February it was withholding more than $240 million in Medicaid funding from Minnesota following allegations of misuse of public funds in the state’s social services.

Vance said the move to withhold Medicaid payments from California, in particular, was because the administration believes the state “has not taken fraud very seriously.”

He downplayed any partisan undertones for the administration’s broader fraud prevention push, saying “we have red states and blue states that go after fraud aggressively,” although he added that “we also unfortunately have some states — mostly blue states, unfortunately — that do not take Medicaid fraud very seriously.”

During Wednesday’s news conference, Vance also said the federal government plans to review every state’s federally-funded Medicaid Fraud Control Units — or MFCUs — and will “turn off” funding for those watchdogs if their fraud prevention efforts are deemed insufficient.

“And if we continue to find problems, we can turn off other resources within their state Medicaid programs as well,” he added.

The Wall Street Journal first reported on Wednesday that attorneys general in all 50 states received a letter from Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General Thomas Bell stating that the administration will be conducting “a robust review” of their MFCUs to ensure they are effectively combating Medicaid fraud.

“We want to help you use technology and other tools to get rid of the fraud, to get to the root of the fraud,” Vance said during the news conference about working with states to bolster their fraud prevention efforts. “We want to help you, but we can only help these state programs if those state programs are willing to help themselves. So these letters are the first step — the first effort — to try to force these states to get serious about prosecuting fraud, and that's exactly what we're doing.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services also announced on Wednesday that it is implementing a six-month freeze on all new Medicare enrollments for hospices and home health agencies to halt what it called “high-risk categories” for fraudulent activity.

Since the start of Trump’s second administration, CMS has touted its use of new tools and technologies, including artificial intelligence, to better identify improper payments.

During a March interview with Nextgov/FCW, Kim Brandt — deputy administrator and chief operating officer at CMS — said the agency was using many of these capabilities in its Fraud Defense Operations Center to help “detect spikes or aberrancies in current claim submissions.”

Brandt said at the time FDOC’s work, including the use of AI and enhanced data analysis, allowed the agency to save over $2 billion that would have otherwise gone toward improper Medicare payments. She added that CMS was looking to expand out its new technologies to identify further waste, fraud and abuse in the Medicaid program.

]]>

A NOAA-backed tool shows the hidden value of healthier shorelines

John Breeden II — Wed, 06 May 2026 14:51:00 -0400

A long time ago, when I was a local newspaper reporter in Calvert County, Maryland, I got a close look at marsh restoration projects after covering a visit by the EPA administrator and the governors of Maryland and Virginia to one such effort. After the officials left, I stayed in touch with some of the volunteers and wound up joining them on smaller weekend projects. We planted marsh grass, cleaned up trash and tracked turtles and other wildlife. It was easy enough to see the local impact as the marsh grass took hold and the shoreline became more stable, but much harder to understand the broader effect of that work.

That is part of what makes SHORE-BET so interesting. Developed by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) with support from a NOAA Fisheries Chesapeake Bay Research Program grant, the interactive calculator is designed to estimate the community benefits of marsh restoration and living shoreline projects in Virginia’s Middle Peninsula. NOAA says it can help landowners, communities and resource managers make shoreline decisions by translating ecological and economic benefits into something more concrete. VIMS describes it as an interactive web-based tool that lets users enter project details and receive both annual benefits and a 30-year total community benefit value.

It tries to answer a question that often gets lost in shoreline policy debates. Everybody understands the basic case for healthier marshes and more resilient shorelines. They can buffer storms, support habitats and improve water quality. But local officials and property owners still have to decide what kinds of projects to support, where to put them and how to weigh their value against more traditional interventions. SHORE-BET tries to give those decisions a little more context.

To get a feel for the tool, I tried a modest restoration scenario myself: 100 feet of shoreline in a somewhat remote area. That most closely resembled the kinds of projects I worked on years ago in Calvert County. After picking a location for my project on the SHORE-BET map, I entered all the relevant details.

A screenshot of the author's proposed project in the SHORE-BET model. (Photo courtesy of John Breeden II)

SHORE-BET estimated that my proposed small project would generate about $37,300 in community benefits over a 30-year period. The benefits were led mostly by reduced storm impacts, with additional gains tied to fish habitat, nutrient storage, carbon storage and recreational fishing.

That number was not enormous, and that was actually reassuring. It suggested that even a small project can produce measurable value without the tool having to exaggerate the case. The calculator also let me see some of the conditions shaping that estimate, including high storm exposure, low public access, high social vulnerability and a population density of 167 people per square mile. Moving the project to other areas produced slightly different results depending on conditions, population, habitat and public access. That makes it possible to experiment and see where small projects might have the greatest impact.

The ability to perform hands-on testing is part of what makes the tool feel useful rather than theoretical. It does not just celebrate restoration in broad terms. It breaks the potential value into categories that a planner, grant writer or local official could actually discuss. In the case of my little test project, reduced storm impacts accounted for the biggest share of the projected value, followed by smaller but still meaningful returns tied to nutrient removal, fish habitat, carbon storage and recreational fishing. That kind of breakdown helps explain why a project may be worthwhile even when the total does not look dramatic at first glance.

NOAA’s description of the new tool highlights that same idea. As VIMS associate professor Andrew Scheld put it, “Shoreline management decisions can have important impacts on communities in the region, such as supporting recreation and protecting property. By translating those benefits into dollars, it helps us better understand tradeoffs and make informed management decisions.”

That may be the best way to think about SHORE-BET. It’s not a flashy climate-tech dashboard, and it isn’t trying to settle every policy argument. It is a quieter kind of government-backed tool, one that helps make a category of environmental work easier to evaluate in practical terms. NOAA says the calculator can estimate benefits from reduced storm impacts, improved fish habitat and carbon removed or stored as part of the projected benefit mix.

The broader numbers help explain why that matters. NOAA says a recent VIMS study estimated that marshes and living shorelines provide roughly $90 million in annual benefits to local communities in Virginia’s Middle Peninsula, with reduced storm damage representing the largest share. The VIMS FAQ adds an important note of restraint: SHORE-BET likely underestimates the full value of marshes and living shorelines because it does not capture every use and non-use benefit. In other words, even this attempt to put restoration into dollars does not tell the whole story and could never track every local benefit.

That would certainly be true of my modest efforts to help out down in Calvert County. Over time, it was clear to see that our efforts were improving conditions in the local area. For one, we started to notice more little feeder fish in the area, an important part of the ecosystem and an anchor for the lower part of the food chain. Later on, two turtles moved in and appeared to make the area their new permanent home. Finally, when a huge coastal storm hit the area, I drove back down to the project area expecting to find devastation, but the plants had taken hold, and the shoreline looked relatively stable. A few hundred feet away from the project area, there were clear signs of erosion, plus none of the telltale signs of wildlife habitats.

So, I felt pretty good that our little project was making a difference, but we never had any way of knowing how it might also be improving the surrounding area or the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem in general. A shoreline project can involve lots of volunteers planting marsh grass, hauling away debris and watching for wildlife returning to an area. But from the ground, it can seem like a small and local effort. SHORE-BET does not change that. What it does is widen the lens, giving communities a way to see how those small projects can translate into stronger habitats, better water quality and a degree of protection that adds up over time.

John Breeden II is an award-winning journalist and reviewer with over 20 years of experience covering technology. He is the CEO of the Tech Writers Bureau, a group that creates technological thought leadership content for organizations of all sizes. Twitter: @LabGuys

]]>

The State Department looks to build on the success of online passport renewal

Natalie Alms — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:58:00 -0400

In 2024, the State Department opened its online passport renewal platform, upending the paper-based, 1970s process the department had been intending to revamp for over a decade with little success.

The department has now issued over 7.3 million passports through the online system. Compared against a general discourse about government systems being old, clunky and frustrating, the online renewal tool appears to be a bright spot, as 94% of users have rated it positively in government surveys, according to Matt Pierce, deputy assistant secretary for passport services, consular affairs.

And unlike some of the other recent stories of successful digital government rollouts that did not survive into a new administration, most notably the IRS Direct File program, State’s system is still going well into President Donald Trump’s second term, and the department is planning for more.

State wants to pilot online applications for those seeking their first passport, and it’s looking into issuing digital travel credentials, too, said Pierce, who recently spoke with Nextgov/FCW about what made the online renewal process work and what’s next.

Up until 2024, the process for renewing a passport was largely the same as it had been for decades, even as the number of people getting passports has been increasing. In 1990, only 5% of Americans had a passport. Now, that number sits at around 50% — and that figure is expected to continue to grow, said Pierce.

State debuted its first attempt at an online system in 2022, in the lead-up to record passport backlogs the following year, as Americans looked to travel again following the COVID pandemic. At the time, the department was still grappling with staffing shortages caused by a hiring freeze instituted during Trump’s first term.

That pilot worked for some people but was ultimately unsuccessful, one former State Department employee who worked on online passport renewals told Nextgov/FCW. They requested anonymity for fear of retribution.

In technical terms, the first system was made in a waterfall development style. State made a list of requirements and chucked them “over the fence” to technologists who built a tool, they said.

Passport adjudicators weren’t consulted in the design process and had a really difficult time using the system. Applications would get lost because of how work queues were set up, the former employee said.

The department paused, pivoted and eventually opened the system that’s still running now in 2024.

What changed? For one, the department switched to a human-centered, agile design process.

There are thousands of employees who handle over 24 million passports a year, Pierce said, adding “that system has to work for them.”

In the lead-up to the second launch, the team tested the system with frontline employees and worked to make sure that the understanding of those building the new system matched up with the needs of those actually handling the day-to-day passport work. That included considering not only technology alone, but also processes and policies.

And while the department attempted to replace the entire system in the first rollout, for the second, they replaced only the front end portion that Americans see. On the backend, enhancements were made, but the system is largely as it was before, meaning employees didn’t have to make changes, said Pierce, while the department continues to work on a larger overhaul.

Moving forward, Pierce is looking to use the same dialogue with employees that made the second online passport renewal effort successful to find improvements to prevent future backlogs along with a staffing baseline. It’s an organizational transformation, he said, driven by employees to change processes and procedures.

One big shift for the department, he said, has actually been a cultural one in how it responds to risk.

“In the past, we would spend a lot of time thinking about something, working on something, and then here it is. Now you’ve got to live with it for 10 years,” Pierce explained.

Now, employees are more open to taking calculated risks with the understanding that they can pilot changes and adapt as needed, he said, noting “that has been a huge change.”

More improvements ahead

Over a year out from the second, more successful launch, it takes 20 minutes to renew a passport on the new, online system, as opposed to the 40 minutes it took through the old process, said Pierce. The department estimates that it’s saved Americans over a million hours.

The online system currently handles over half of renewals. Some people aren’t able to apply online depending on their situation, although the goal is to eventually make it so that anyone renewing can do so online, said Pierce.

The team is also planning to pilot letting Americans that want to get their first passport apply online in the coming years. That’ll require the department to work through some wonky issues, like how it will digitally validate proof of citizenship documents that State itself doesn’t house, like birth certificates — something that will likely require the department to work out data-sharing agreements with states, said Pierce.

State is also in the early stages of looking into digital travel credentials.

“A lot of people call it the digital passport,” said Pierce, but it’s different from the ID that digital wallet users can create with a passport, for example, which can’t be used for international travel or border crossings.

“I mean something that can ping against the database, like the passport, to validate that it is a valid passport issued by the United States government, and this is the person’s information,” he said.

The department is also working to add Trump’s face to a limited number of commemorative passports, although that news broke after Nextgov/FCW’s interview with Pierce.

New challenges

As it pursues new changes, the department will be working with a different team than the one it used for online passport renewal.

Last year, Pierce won what’s considered the Oscar of government service, a Sammie, alongside another key leader in the passport modernization effort, Luis Coronado, the former CIO for the Bureau of Consular Affairs at State. But Coronado and others have since left the department.

The Bureau of Consular Affairs wasn’t spared from layoffs last year as the Trump administration sought to downsize the federal workforce, although some affected employees were later reinstated.

Other offices that worked on the online passport renewal project have also been shuffled around as part of a reorganization. Consular Affairs’ tech office, led by Coronado, was moved to the central IT department within State, and also was affected by layoffs, said the former employee, who has also left federal service.

“The intent of the reorg is to become a more responsive, a more relevant State Department,” said Pierce, adding that he’s seen “a lot of positives.”

Other departments, including Interior, have also been centralizing their technology operations.

The team behind the online passport renewal launch also included 18F, a digital services consultancy inside the government that the Trump administration shuttered completely last year, as well as the U.S. Digital Service, which was renamed to house the Department of Government Efficiency as the U.S. DOGE Service.

“We lost a lot of the folks that had been integral to getting that online passport renewal successfully stood up and out the door for the 2.0 version,” said the former employee.

These teams helped other agencies adopt different models of modernizing, such as the IRS with Direct File.

“The federal government has lost a lot of that,” the former employee said. “How is the government — absent those organizations — going to continue to transform how the government improves services?”

]]>

House votes to make IRS publish call metrics online

Natalie Alms — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:18:00 -0400

The House on Monday passed a set of bipartisan proposals meant to improve IRS customer service and technology.

The Taxpayer Experience Improvement Act, backed by Reps. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., and Don Beyer, D-Va., requires the tax agency to publish detailed, real-time and monthly metrics online like call volume, wait times and callback availability for major IRS phone lines.

The proposal also instructs the IRS to make more information on refund status available to taxpayers through online IRS accounts, where the agency would be required to allow taxpayers to respond to IRS letters online.

Similar legislation has been introduced in previous sessions of Congress but not made it into law. The Senate has yet to pass the bill, which Sens. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., introduced in February.

The IRS replaced its telephone customer service metric earlier this year. The National Taxpayer Advocate had called that old metric misleading because it measures the percentage of calls answered by a person among those sent to IRS employees, not the proportion of callers who reach a person. In fiscal 2025, the level of service was 60%, but only 26% of callers spoke with an IRS employee, according to the internal watchdog.

The IRS will now track average speed of answer, call abandonment rate and time spent on the phone line, IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank Bisignano told The Washington Post earlier this year.

Before replacing the metric altogether, the agency lowered its level of service standard from 85% of calls answered to 70%. Last year, the IRS pushed thousands of employees out of their jobs, mostly through voluntary incentives. It then struggled to hire employees for tax filing season and eventually moved human resources and tech employees to fill in taxpayer service roles.

Bisignano is also the head of the Social Security Administration, another federal entity with metrics that have been in the news since many of them were removed from the agency's website last year. SSA’s inspector general released a report on the agency’s phone line metrics late last year that showed SSA’s new wait time metric is lower than the amount of time it actually takes for callers to speak with an SSA employee.

Lawmakers in the House also passed the BARCODE Efficiency Act on Monday. Like the Taxpayer Experience Improvement Act, it’s also been introduced in a prior Congress but didn’t become law.

The bill, which has yet to move through the Senate, would require the IRS to use barcodes and scanning technology to digitize paper federal tax returns and convert the data into an electronic format. The tax agency would also be tasked with using optical character recognition technology to transcribe paper returns and paper correspondence received by the IRS.

Reps. Brad Schnieder, D-Ill., and Rudy Yakym, R-Ind., introduced the House version, and Sens. Todd Young, R-Ind., and Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., are backing it in the Senate.

The IRS has been trying to rid itself of paper for years, and the National Taxpayer Advocate has long recommended that the IRS use barcode and OCR technology.

]]>

Congress tries again on national preemptive data privacy law

Chris Teale — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:59:00 -0400

House Republicans rolled out yet another proposal for national data privacy legislation that once again would preempt existing state laws, drawing a torrent of criticism.

Leaders on the House Energy and Commerce and Financial Services Committees unveiled two pieces of legislation last week: the Securing and Establishing Consumer Uniform Rights and Enforcement over Data Act, known as the SECURE Data Act, and the Guidelines for Use, Access, and Responsible Disclosure of Financial Data Act, known as the GUARD Financial Data Act.

The SECURE Data Act would establish a national data privacy standard that lawmakers said would build on the “proven framework” adopted by the “overwhelming majority” of states with comprehensive privacy laws. Consumers would have new rights and companies would have new obligations for privacy, all enforced by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general. Lawmakers said they held a slew of meetings in working groups with different organizations before releasing the texts.

These new proposals represent another attempt by Congress to implement a national privacy standard, which so far has been unsuccessful. In the absence of federal action, states across the country have stepped up with their own laws and regulations, which would be preempted if the federal bills pass.

“This bill establishes clear, enforceable protections so that Americans remain in charge of their own data and companies are held accountable for its safe keeping,” Republican Reps. Brett Guthrie and John Joyce, the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the leader of the Energy and Commerce Data Privacy Working Group, respectively, said in a joint statement.

Under the new bill, consumers have the right to know when their data is being collected and used, can access it and delete it, as well as opt out of targeted advertising, the sale of that data and other automated decisions. Sensitive data would only be processed with their consent, while parents would be required to give consent before their child or teens’ personal data is processed.

Businesses would be required to limit the personal data they collect to what is deemed “adequate, relevant and reasonably necessary,” and disclose the personal data they share to others, including data that is processed in or sold to China, Russia or other foreign adversaries. Companies also must implement security practices to protect data. In addition, data brokers must also comply with various data minimization, disclosure and security requirements and register with the FTC, which would establish a public registry.

The national effort, then, has much in common with the comprehensive data privacy legislation signed into law in more than 20 states. And while some experts have warned continually that having so many state privacy laws creates a compliance nightmare, others said states cannot be preempted from protecting their residents when Congress has failed to step up.

“[The] bill would entirely destroy the work that states have been doing for years to protect their residents,” Cody Venzke, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech Privacy, and Technology Project, said in an email. “Instead of building meaningful guardrails for data and AI, this bill instead opts for letting Big Tech and the government continue to invade our privacy and profit from even our most personal information.”

In an analysis of the bill, nonprofit IAPP’s Washington, D.C. Managing Director Cobun Zweifel-Keegan and Westin Fellow David Botero noted its similarities with laws passed in Virginia, Kentucky and Washington state and said it “preserves the essence of the current state patchwork” of laws. But they noted that it would “embrace a strong preemption regime,” which would likely impact state consumer privacy laws, data broker registries and potentially some sectoral laws.

A fact sheet accompanying the bills said having a national standard would mean “ending the confusing and ineffective privacy patchwork currently in place,” and that it “integrate[s] rights, requirements, and definitions from state comprehensive laws” while maintaining enforcement.

Given how new the legislation is, other stakeholders are in a holding pattern. Alex Whitaker, director of government affairs at the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, said during the group’s Mid-Year Conference in Philadelphia this week it is going to “wait and see” how the legislative process plays out, especially given it is a partisan bill with no Democratic co-sponsors.

A previous NASCIO report found that a number of states have established privacy programs and have empowered a chief privacy officer or similar role, albeit with a lot of work still to do and a need for more funding. Whitaker said anything that raises the issue of preemption is a “concern.”

“We want to make sure that states have the flexibility that they need to meet the demands of their constituencies,” he said. “They develop these regulations in conjunction with state legislatures and regulators, so to come in and prevent states from maintaining certain standards is always a problem for us, and that's writ large, that's on cybersecurity, that's on privacy, that's on anything.”

]]>

Treasury missed security controls in giving DOGE system access, GAO finds

Natalie Alms — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:54:00 -0400

Congress’ watchdog reported on Tuesday that the Treasury Department gave a Department of Government Efficiency associate access to the government’s payment systems last year without fully following all of its own security controls — and the DOGE team didn’t always hew to Treasury’s protocols, either.

The findings are among the first reports the Government Accountability Office has released about DOGE’s work, and GAO is working on more audits focused on DOGE access to government systems, a spokesperson confirmed with Nextgov/FCW on Tuesday.

The new report on Treasury zeroes in on atypical access to the government’s payment systems given to DOGE associates.

DOGE access to sensitive government data and systems across agencies has been a flashpoint since the early days of Trump’s second term. DOGE associates said in court testimony earlier this year that pushing for high-level access to government systems was “operating procedure” for the group.

At Treasury, soon after Trump took office last year, individuals on billionaire Elon Musk’s team reportedly began pressing for officials to hand over system access to DOGE employee Tom Krause so that the department could freeze foreign aid payments. A top Treasury official was eventually pushed out of his job after refusing to provide access to the systems.

GAO found that Treasury handed over access to view, copy and print data from the Bureau of Fiscal Service’s three payment systems to an unnamed DOGE associate, who could also see the systems’ source code.

But that member of Musk’s team never completed required security training while working at the department or signed Treasury’s “rules of behavior” policy for IT security while working there.

GAO doesn’t name this DOGE employee in its report, but other details provided by the watchdog match with public reporting on Marko Elez, like the day he resigned, Feb. 6, 2025, following reporting about his racist social media posts. He later went on to work for DOGE at other agencies.

At one point, Treasury accidentally briefly gave that same DOGE employee the ability to make changes in one of those systems, something GAO said was due in part to the agency’s lax procedures and the fact that the access being requested was changed several times before it was approved. The DOGE employee didn’t use the system during this time, GAO says. According to reporting on court records, this was also Elez.

GAO also found that Treasury’s data loss prevention tools didn’t track or block Elez from improperly sending unencrypted information on foreign aid to two DOGE associates at the General Services Administration. Elez did this without getting agency approval for sharing the information on U.S. Agency for International Development payments.

Treasury didn’t discover that incident until it conducted a forensic review of the laptop after Elez had left the department. The department didn’t find the incident sooner in part because its tools aren’t set up to look for information being sent to other government agencies, the report says.

GAO included several recommendations regarding the department’s IT security processes in the audit, only some of which Treasury formally agreed with.

The top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., said in a statement that “GAO has confirmed our worst fears,” and called on the Treasury to implement all of GAO’s recommendations.

Among those the department didn’t formally agree or disagree with is one urging it to conduct exit interviews and get signatures on post-employment documentation from those with access to sensitive payment systems who leave the department without doing so — including the DOGE employee discussed in the report with access to systems.

The watchdog will be issuing additional reports on DOGE access to Treasury payment systems, it says in the report. The topic has also been working its way through the courts. A district court judge granted a preliminary injunction limiting DOGE access to Treasury systems with sensitive information last year, although that was later modified to allow some access to systems.

GAO also released another report Tuesday on DOGE’s access to systems at the NLRB. Just over a year ago, a whistleblower in the agency said that DOGE had extracted troves of data from the agency using secretive methods during March 2025.

The NLRB’s inspector general has an ongoing investigation into the whistleblower’s declaration, the office confirmed to Nextgov/FCW.

GAO’s new report, however, focuses only on the period after DOGE was detailed into the agency in mid-April, so “to not overlap with the NLRB Inspector General’s Investigation.”

Whistleblower Aid, which is representing the NLRB whistleblower, noted the significance of GAO beginning its review period after their client’s disclosed events took place.

“Because the GAO did not investigate any matters that fell within the timeframe disclosed by our client — in fact scoping it out of their investigation — the report cannot address our client's detailed accounts,” Whistleblower Aid told Nextgov/FCW. “Accordingly, the timeframe investigated by the GAO has no relationship to the wrongdoing witnessed by the whistleblower in February to early April 2025.”

GAO found that the DOGE team asked for access to NLRB systems, but didn’t use the access it was granted. DOGE didn’t even pick up NLRB laptops before their detail agreements expired in July, according to GAO.

]]>

GSA taps Greg Hogan as head of government’s identity proofing service, Login.gov

Natalie Alms — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:56:00 -0400

The General Services Administration has installed Greg Hogan as the new director of Login.gov, the government's identity proofing platform, Nextgov/FCW has learned.

Hogan previously worked as the chief information officer at the Office of Personnel Management, an early stronghold for the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency. He replaced the agency’s existing CIO on the second day of President Donald Trump’s second term. Since he left the role in September, Hogan has been working in Trump’s National Design Studio, housed in the White House.

A newcomer to public sector work before last year, Hogan previously worked at startup Comma.ai. He will now be in charge of a government-wide program that agencies use to verify that someone is who they say they are, often via facial recognition.

The Login.gov website, which allows members of the public to create a single, identity-proofed account and then use it to log in to various government websites, has over 150 million users. Trump appointees have called the identity proofing service critical to their anti-fraud agenda.

The previous director of Login.gov left the post last fall for a job with Microsoft.

Hogan will be working with the federal CIO, Greg Barbaccia, who is double-hatting as the acting head of TTS in addition to his gig at OMB. Hogan is now detailing into the agency as “acting assistant commissioner,” Barbaccia wrote in an email viewed by Nextgov/FCW.

“[Hogan] will be focused on expanding the number of people and agencies successfully using Login.gov, enhancing the user experience, and improving the cost-effectiveness while continuing to meet the highest expectations for security, privacy and reliability,” wrote Barbaccia. “All with the vision to support Login.gov truly becoming a world-class identity platform recognized beyond the federal government.”

Commercial companies have lobbied in the identity proofing space over the years, pushing their products as alternatives to Login.gov and jockeying to help power the government-run service as contractors behind the scenes.

During Hogan’s time at the government’s HR agency, OPM was sued for its handling of data.

At the center of one of those lawsuits is a government-wide mass email system set up in the early days of the administration and used to send out an initial delayed resignation offer to federal employees.

Hogan signed off on a privacy impact assessment issued for the government-wide email system after the agency was sued by anonymous federal employees alleging that OPM violated the law by not publishing a PIA before deploying the new system. His signature set the document apart from other PIAs at OPM, which are typically signed by privacy officials at the agency.

A district court judge denied an ask for a temporary restraining order preventing the government from using that system last year, finding that those suing hadn’t proved that they’d suffer irreparable injury without one, or that they had standing to sue.

Another judge did grant a preliminary injunction in a case centered on the access of DOGE associates to OPM agency records.

At Login.gov, Hogan’s work will have the potential to touch Americans who interact with the government across a swath of programs in 50 federal and state agencies.

The program is one of the core priorities for GSA’s Technology Transformation Services, which has shed 70% of its staff since Trump took office.

“We are ushering in a new era for the Technology Transformation Services as the government’s premier technology provider,” Barbaccia wrote in his Monday email. “This is about restoring confidence in how government serves the taxpayer, and delivering technology that Americans can take pride in as an expression of the nation’s strength and capability.”

]]>

Agencies doled out $186B in improper payments last year, GAO says

Natalie Alms — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:28:00 -0400

The federal government made at least $186 billion in improper payments in fiscal 2025, according to a report released Monday by Congress’ watchdog.

The Government Accountability Office’s new estimate comes as the Trump administration continues to doggedly pursue its “war on fraud” to hunt out fraudulent government spending.

The latest numbers offer a point-in-time look at how the government is doing with preventing payments that shouldn’t have been made or were made in the incorrect amount. The category is broader than fraud, which is defined by willful misrepresentation. Although the majority of the $186 billion evaluated by GAO are overpayments, at least $10 billion of the total is money that should’ve been sent out, but wasn’t.

The government’s improper payments total is up by about $24 billion from the prior fiscal year, although that’s largely because of changes in what programs reported data, GAO said. The watchdog audited the improper payment data from 15 agencies’ financial statements across 64 programs.

Most of the improper payments are concentrated in five programs, GAO found, including Medicare, Medicaid, the earned income tax credit and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

The Trump administration has been zeroing in on fraud in Medicare and Medicaid already, as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz announced last week that the Trump administration will require all states to revalidate Medicaid providers.

Oz has also announced state-level Medicaid probes, mostly of blue states, as part of his effort to stamp out fraud, although that rollout hasn’t been flawless. Last month, CMS admitted to an error in the fraud analysis of Medicaid in New York that it used to justify the scrutiny into the state program.

The White House is also working across federal agencies to comb through government programs as part of Trump’s anti-fraud task force being led by Vice President JD Vance.

The crackdown is happening as midterms loom, with voters saying that they’re concerned about healthcare affordability.

Critics of the administration’s anti-fraud work say the administration is using the issue as a pretext for political goals and that false claims and the dismantling of government watchdogs are worsening the problem.

“As someone who has spent my career fighting fraud, I welcome any renewed attention on ferreting out fraud,” Mark Lee Greenblatt, formerly the inspector general at Interior Department, told Nextgov/FCW. But he said some of the administration’s moves have been “puzzling.”

“They’ve proposed slashing OIG budgets markedly. And that is counterproductive to the fight against fraud,” said Greenblatt. “If you want to fight fraud, fund the fraud-fighters.”

Trump fired Greenblatt and about 20 other watchdogs soon after taking office last year. He also issued nearly three dozen pardons and commutations for people accused of fraud last year.

Lawmakers have also taken on the mantle of fraud fighting. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is planning to mark up nine bills tomorrow focused on the issue. Among them is a proposal to create a permanent anti-fraud data platform for OIGs. Oversight officials have long recommended that lawmakers improve data sharing within the government.

The bills being considered are a “huge bright spot,” Linda Miller, an anti-fraud expert who worked at GAO for years, told Nextgov/FCW. They remove “a ton of barriers that I have been talking about for a decade.”

]]>

NIST is giving fingerprint examiners better tools for a messy job

John Breeden II — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:21:00 -0400

Americans have spent generations watching detectives in dark trenchcoats pore over complex crime scenes in movies and on television. They examine the room, snap photos and break out the familiar blue powder to dust for fingerprints. The ritual is so familiar that it can seem almost automatic.

What those scenes rarely capture is how much effort goes into making fingerprint examination more accurate, more consistent and easier to teach. That quieter work is exactly what the National Institute of Standards and Technology is trying to strengthen.

NIST recently released two resources aimed at helping forensic fingerprint examiners do their jobs better. One is a fully annotated version of NIST’s Special Database 302, a collection of roughly 10,000 latent fingerprint images. The other is what NIST calls OpenLQM, newly created open-source software that helps assess the quality of latent fingerprints and sort them according to how much useful detail they contain. NIST says the two releases are meant to improve forensic fingerprint examination, which remains an important part of many criminal investigations.

Fingerprint analysis is one of those forensic tools that many people assume was perfected long ago. In reality, examiners often work with partial, smudged or otherwise imperfect prints recovered from real-world objects. Training people to evaluate those prints well takes experience, repetition and good examples. It also increasingly requires better ways to train software systems that can assist human examiners without replacing them.

NIST says the newly completed dataset will help train both human examiners and machine learning algorithms to distinguish important features and weigh their value as evidence.

The most vivid part of the NIST fingerprint accuracy project is how ordinary the source material really was. As NIST computer scientist Greg Fiumara explained, “The prints are from people we recruited to come in and do things like write a note, pick up a circuit board, handle a dollar bill, that sort of thing. Then we recovered the prints they left behind using different methods that crime scene investigators commonly use.”

So the new collection is not made up of idealized prints from a textbook. They are the kinds of latent impressions that people leave behind all the time while moving through everyday life.

That realism has been part of the project from the beginning. When NIST first released SD 302 in 2019, it described the database as a set of latent fingerprints left on everyday items by a few hundred volunteers in a lab setting, with other personal information stripped away. The point was not to create a neat archive of perfect examples, but to give researchers and examiners a more realistic way to measure accuracy and test methods against the kinds of prints they actually encounter.

What is new now is that the entire collection has been annotated. Those annotations mark details about fingerprint quality, including regions where ridge patterns are clear, smudged or incomplete.

NIST says those markings make the dataset much more valuable as a teaching tool because they show both humans and algorithms what to look for and what to avoid when evaluating a print. The annotations add structure and interpretive guidance to a dataset that already had broad global use. NIST says more than 1,000 research organizations in more than 90 countries have downloaded the collection since its initial release.

The second part of the project is just as practical. OpenLQM gives examiners a way to score the quality of a latent print on a scale from zero to 100. And it can run as a standard executable or be embedded inside another program or application for maximum portability. The new software can help investigators sort through large volumes of prints and focus their attention first on the ones most likely to contain useful identifying details.

As Fiumara put it, “you give OpenLQM a fingerprint and it returns a number from zero to 100 that is an assessment of the print’s quality.” NIST says the software was adapted from a tool once limited to U.S. law enforcement. It is now being made openly available in a form that can run on Mac, Windows or Linux.

Since the software is open-source and available for anyone to download, NIST is not just improving a government tool for internal use; it’s pushing better forensic resources into the wider scientific and practitioner community. The agency’s biometrics resources page now lists both Special Database 302 and OpenLQM among its available forensic databases and software tools, reinforcing the point that this is part of a broader effort to build reproducible, shareable infrastructure around forensic biometrics.

What makes the fingerprint accuracy project especially useful is that it focuses on the less glamorous side of forensic work. Instead of chasing some dramatic new breakthrough, NIST is improving the underlying tools that fingerprint examiners rely on every day. Better data, clearer annotations and a faster way to assess print quality may not look dramatic from the outside, but they can make difficult work more consistent and efficient.

That is what gives this release its value. It strengthens one of forensic science’s oldest disciplines without pretending to reinvent it. Human judgment still matters, and fingerprint work will probably always involve a measure of skill and interpretation.

So all those movies and TV shows with investigators (still wearing stylish black trenchcoats) dusting for prints will still be accurate — at least for now. But with better training material and advanced tools, that work can become more consistent and easier to teach while also producing more trustworthy results.

]]>

IRS lacks transparent plans to leverage tech in the face of staffing cuts, GAO and employees say

Natalie Alms — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:16:00 -0400

The IRS is banking on using technology to do more with fewer employees. But staff inside the IRS say that how the agency will do that — considering that its own IT shop has lost personnel — is still unclear, and Congress’ watchdog says that the IRS still isn’t being transparent about its long-term tech plans.

The IRS continues to rely on some systems that date back to the 1960s. It’s been trying to modernize them for decades, and was using some of the money from the Inflation Reduction Act to do so under the Biden administration. Congress has since clawed back most of that funding, and the remainder is set to run out in fiscal year 2028.

A few months after President Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office, the IRS paused its modernization work to re-evaluate its strategy. IRS leadership said they wanted to rely more on generative artificial intelligence to convert legacy code into modern programming languages, and the agency set a goal to finish most of its tech modernization efforts within two years.

Over a year later, the IRS still hasn’t provided the Government Accountability Office with details on its new modernization plan, said David Hinchman, director of IT and cybersecurity at GAO, during a recent roundtable on the IRS.

“Recent changes to IRS' long-term plans have also cast uncertainty over what the agency's modernized end state will look like,” said Hinchman, explaining that the IRS has published “very little” on its new approach.

That’s despite the fact that technological progress is a lynchpin in the IRS’ bigger, overall strategy. After already pushing out over 28,000 employees since Trump took office, the tax agency is aiming to shed more staff and use technology to make up the difference, it said in its recent budget request.

“Without modernization, the IRS would be unable to sustain performance with a reduced headcount,” the budget request said.

Compounding the lack of transparency is a pause in strategic workforce planning, said Hinchman, which would help ensure that the IRS has the right workforce to get the job done.

The IRS didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The IRS hasn’t spared its IT shop from the workforce upheaval that has taken place over the last year. The IRS lost over 2,600 IT employees between January 25 and December 18 of last year, a 31% reduction, according to the National Taxpayer Advocate’s 2025 report.

The IRS also moved over 1,000 IT staff to the office of the chief operating officer last winter, and transferred some of those to jobs helping with filing season, along with human resources specialists.

Agency IT leadership recently told staff that the agency plans to hire 175 IT employees, a tech employee at the agency said.

Even so, IRS leadership isn’t sharing much information internally on the agency’s current plan for its technology, a second tech employee told Nextgov/FCW. Detailed IT strategic plans used to be available within the agency, they said. What’s now available is very abstract.

“It’s hilarious,” they said of the claim that the IRS can use tech to make up for fewer employees.

Using technology to do more with less might be possible in the long run, but “not right now,” the first IT employee told Nextgov/FCW. “We are so short-staffed.”

Despite the staffing shortages, the IRS is planning to capitalize on updates to the online accounts it offers for taxpayers to give Americans access to more self-service options.

The agency is also building a single interface for customer service representatives to allow them to see data about taxpayers that’s currently stored in disparate systems in one centralized place. The IRS thinks this will cut down on call times by speeding up the work of those manning the phone lines. The agency has been trying to build this system since the second Obama administration.

The IRS has also long been working to modernize its core system for individual tax account data, called the individual master file.

The tax agency did put its long-awaited new processing engine for the system into production last year, it said, but more work needs to be done. The effort is one of the most complex modernization efforts in the federal government, and the individual master file touches hundreds of other IRS applications.

“They are shoving AI at us and they think that with that, things can be converted super quickly,” the first employee said of efforts to modernize legacy systems. “But they don’t have the right tools for us yet.”

Frank Bisignano — the head of the Social Security Administration who is also helming a new chief executive officer role at the IRS — told senators earlier this month that data and AI are helping the tax agency with enforcement, even as it’s lost staff and is set to lose more under the Trump administration’s recent budget request.

But GAO reported recently that the agency is facing a skills shortage that could hamper its ability to roll out AI, including systems to prioritize audits.

Among the things that aren’t clear to Congress’ watchdog are how the IRS’ new plans relate to its old strategy to modernize, as well as how and if certain endeavors are continuing, said Hinchman. This isn’t the first time that watchdogs have dinged the IRS for a lack of IT planning.

Leadership under the new administration has altered at least some efforts started during the Biden years. The IRS launched an initiative to digitize paper with funding from the Inflation Reduction Act in 2023 by developing an in-house system. Last spring, leadership directed the IRS to stop working on the project, despite spending $61 million on it already, and shifted to a new approach using contractors, according to a watchdog report.

The IRS also shuttered the Direct File program, launched in 2024 to help certain eligible Americans file their taxes with the government online for free.

]]>

Sessions introduces bill to set up a new Treasury fraud watchdog

Natalie Alms — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 16:29:00 -0400

Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, introduced a proposal this week to create a permanent inspector general for fraud, accountability and recovery in the Treasury Department.

The bill would require that the new watchdog establish an anti-fraud data platform like the one housed in the government’s Pandemic Response Accountability Committee. It would also expand Treasury's financial and program integrity services.

The hope is that the legislation will push the federal government from a pay-and-chase paradigm of recovering stolen funds from bad actors to preventing fraudulent payments from happening at all, Sessions said during a hearing this week.

“During COVID, we learned that it is far too easy to commit fraud in federal programs,” he said in a statement. “We also learned that once the money goes out the door to a fraudster, the vast majority is gone for good.”

Congress set up the PRAC in early 2020 to oversee relief spending during the pandemic, when an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars was doled out to fraudsters as the government rushed to get aid to those that needed it.

The PRAC — lauded for its data analytics center — was set to sunset last year until Congress extended its life through 2034 last summer.

Under Sessions’s proposal, the new IG would incorporate, to the extent it can, the existing data platform maintained by the PRAC and occupy a government-wide role in helping other agency watchdogs find fraud in government awards over $50,000.

Robert Westbrooks, a former inspector general and the first head of the PRAC, said during Wednesday's House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Government Operations hearing that data is crucial to anti-fraud efforts. Sessions is the chairman of that subcommittee, in addition to serving as co-chair of the House DOGE Caucus.

“It’s absolutely critical that we’ve got a centralized repository for government information that has the legal authorities to share that data with state and local partners,” he said. “I think that was the secret sauce that we had with the PRAC.”

The new bill would also task Treasury’s Bureau of Fiscal Service with maintaining a government-wide data analysis program to help government agencies and states disbursing federal funds to detect and prevent improper payments and fraud.

Treasury already maintains another system, called Do Not Pay, a no-cost service for government agencies to verify claim eligibility before issuing loans, benefits, and vendor and grant payments.

The proposal from Sessions comes after President Donald Trump fired nearly 20 IGs last year. The administration has also requested an average of 12% less in funding for Cabinet-level IGs in its fiscal 2027 budget proposal as compared to fiscal 2024, according to a recent analysis.

]]>

VA has touted appointment wait time reductions, but new data shows a more mixed reality

Eric Katz and Natalie Alms — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:23:00 -0400

The Trump administration has frequently said that appointment wait times at the Veterans Affairs Department are improving despite widespread reductions to its workforce, but internal data reveal a varied picture of how long patients are waiting for health care in some facilities and specialties.

Many VA facilities are struggling to provide veterans with timely access to care in areas like neurology, post-traumatic stress disorder treatment and oncology, according to data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Some facilities and some specialties have fared better, allowing veterans to access appointments more quickly, but the data does not show consistent, comprehensive progress toward faster care for new patients.

“Our wait times were going up,” VA Secretary Doug Collins told lawmakers at a House hearing in February. “So we decided to do something a little unique in this town, we decided to do something about it. We've actually seen over the past year our wait times stabilize or go down.”

The reality of the situation is more complicated.

VA provided wait time data to American Bridge, a Democratic group that gave the raw data to Government Executive.

That data included information from 134 of VA’s 170 medical centers across 10 key specialties with significant data, which collectively make up the bulk of appointments out of dozens of specialties—primary care, mental health treatment individually and in a group setting, substance abuse treatment, PTSD, neurology, physical therapy, pulmonary, oncology and urology.

Government Executive analyzed average wait times for new patients in the first four months of fiscal 2026, October 2025 to January 2026, and compared it to the same period of fiscal 2025, which marked the final four months of the Biden administration. The data did not include appointment volume, which VA does not publish publicly, but instead illustrates how the department is performing on a facility-by-facility basis across different lines of care. The focus of this report is on how the surge of veterans newly seeking VA care are faring given the changes it is undergoing.

VA itself maintains an access standard for how long veterans should wait for direct care conducted by VA itself—20 days for primary and mental health care, and 28 days for specialty treatment—after which point veterans are eligible to seek care outside the VA on the government’s dime.

At the start of fiscal 2026, five of the 10 practice areas saw a majority of facilities met that standard. That’s the same number as a year prior.

For three specialties—physical therapy, substance use disorder and oncology—the number of facilities meeting the VA’s standard actually declined from the previous year, although for seven others, the number of facilities meeting the standard increased.

For neurology, just 7% of facilities met the goal to get veterans an appointment within 28 days, which actually marked a slight improvement from the prior year. Wait times for neurology appointments in the VA’s medical center in Omaha saw the biggest increase, from an average of 27 days to 127 days. In Dallas, wait times jumped from 87 days to 130.

Quinn Slaven, a VA spokesperson, disputed Government Executive’s analysis, saying it relied on incomplete data that fails to account for all of the department’s areas of care and the volume of appointments at each facility, “regardless of whether they serve a few patients or thousands.” VA did not make that data available.

The information at the basis of this report shows how department facilities in the dataset are performing around the country. Slaven also took issue with the focus on new patient data, noting existing patients “make up more than 80% of patients seen by VA staff, and that for this group, average wait times are lower now than they were in FY2024 for primary care, specialty care and mental health care."

In Trump’s second term, Slaven said, “average patient wait times have fallen in four of six major categories of care, after they rose in five of six categories under Biden.” The six broad categories are primary, mental health and specialty care for both new patients, and the same for existing patients. He did not say which categories changed or provide data on those changes.

Collins has consistently beat the drum to highlight improvements in VA wait times. In February he told Fox News that “by better focusing our resources…our wait times in hospitals are improving.” In March he tweeted “it’s a new day at VA” and the department is “slashing wait times.” This week he told Newsmax that he changed the culture at VA to focus on veterans, which led to a “great transformation” and bringing down wait times.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle told Government Executive, however, the data showed VA has yet to make the consistent strides that department officials have suggested it has already achieved.

“While it is encouraging to see wait times improve in certain specialty areas at the Department of Veterans Affairs, there is still more work to be done,” said Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., who chairs the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. “No veteran, especially those facing cancer, addiction or mental health conditions, should have to wait days, weeks or months to receive the care they have earned through their service.”

Progress on wait times is mixed across different specialties. Although about 36% of locations taking new urology patients saw improvements in average wait times, the wait times at half of the VHA’s locations in the dataset got worse. Wait times for the remainder were stable.

Half of the locations offering oncology appointments also saw worsening wait times, with only 31% improving.

For VHA locations offering treatment for substance use, PTSD and neurology, about 48% of facilities saw deterioration in wait times, with only 35%, 45% and 44% seeing improvements, respectively.

Staffing changes

Collins last year put forward a plan to slash VA by 80,000 employees through layoffs and various incentives, but pared back the plan after it received bipartisan pushback. He boasted that VA successfully reached his stated goal of shedding 30,000 employees in fiscal 2025.

As of February, VHA had lost a net 18,626 employees since Trump took office, when accounting for hiring, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management. VA has seen a net loss of around 1,100 physicians and nearly 3,000 nurses, as well as 800 medical support assistants who handle appointment scheduling.

One senior VHA official who spoke to Government Executive on the condition of anonymity to openly evaluate the data, said it showed the department may have been getting ahead of itself in flaunting its accomplishments.

“I also think there is a danger in celebrating too soon or overreacting too soon,” the official said. “There really is a lot of movement based on normal change in the organization.”

Across each specialty at all 134 facilities, VA saw 486 specialties experience worsening average wait times of at least two days. The department saw 427 specialties with wait times improving by at least two days. The remainder stayed fairly stable.

In total, about 42% of specialties on a per facility basis saw patients waiting longer for an appointment, while 37% saw improvements.

Among those with wait time changes of more than two days in either direction, eight specialties saw more facilities with increased wait times rather than decreases. Primary and pulmonary care were the only areas that saw more facilities demonstrate significant improvement.

The data did not offer insights into overall average wait times on a per specialty or department-wide basis.

Dr. Steven Braverman, who led multiple VA medical centers and regional offices before becoming the VHA chief operating officer from late 2024 through September 2025, said that “it is clear from these data that there is a mixed picture of improvement and worsening despite VHA’s efforts toward improvement across the board.”

He noted that larger facilities are facing more difficulties in meeting primary and mental health care standards and are more vulnerable to increases in demand for basic services. Smaller facilities, meanwhile, struggled to keep pace with specialty wait time standards and are particularly vulnerable to the departure of staff in those fields.

Without personnel data and veteran enrollment data, it can be difficult to assign causation for changing wait times, said Braverman, who previously served for nearly 30 years in various Army medical roles.

That said, “very few facilities currently failing to meet wait time standards demonstrated improvement over the past year,” Braverman said. “That suggests a demand versus capacity mismatch that won’t be fixed by efficiency or productivity improvements. That requires increase in hiring or clinical infrastructure to meet growing demand.”

Strains on capacity

Capacity has become a more acute concern after Biden signed the PACT Act into law in 2022, which made millions of veterans exposed to burn pits and other toxins newly eligible for care and precipitated the hiring surge VHA oversaw in the previous administration. The law has both boosted enrollment of new patients and made existing patients eligible for increased level of care.

VA has noted it delivered more appointments than ever before in fiscal 2025 and earlier this month highlighted that 100,000 veterans have newly signed up for health care through VA in 2026, with signups happening at a faster clip than in recent years.

“In FY2025, VA completed 82,083,918 direct care appointments, up 4.1% from FY2024. This overall improvement in average wait times has occurred even as VA is making more direct care appointments than ever,” Slaven said. VA did not provide any data on overall wait times.

The department has highlighted that it has opened 34 new health care facilities across the country since Trump took office, much of which was authorized and funded by the PACT Act. It has allowed for more flexible appointment scheduling at off hours, which it said has led to improved service.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the veterans panel, said that staffing cuts are leading to worse outcomes at VA.

“These findings contradict the Trump Administration’s continued claims that its draconian workforce cuts and hemorrhaging of frontline VA staff have no impact on veterans’ care,” Blumenthal said. “The resulting harm is visible in the increased wait times at many VA facilities nationwide.”

The senator noted VHA has implemented new restrictions on hiring, with special permission required to cross established staffing ceilings, and eliminated many vacant roles. He also called on VA to tap into its statutory authority to pay some doctors more than the $400,000 salaries at which they are currently capped.

Wait times at VA are a longstanding area of concern and they received particular attention in 2014 following a nationwide scandal in which the department was found to have been manipulating its data. That led to widespread reforms, including two efforts to boost veterans’ ability to receive private sector care on the government dime. The Trump administration has sought to boost the use of “community care” after saying its predecessors made the process overly onerous. Moran and others are looking to codify those changes.

VA officials recently told lawmakers that veterans are waiting between four and 54 days for an appointment when referred out to the private sector, depending on where they are and what service they are seeking.

In a January Senate hearing, some lawmakers accused Collins of bringing chaos to VA. The secretary told senators the results spoke for themselves.

“It’s amazing to me that we’ve actually lowered wait times,” said Collins. “It’s amazing to me that through this process we’ve made it easier for our veterans to get this healthcare service they need. If that’s chaos, maybe we’re in the right direction.”

]]>

Appeals court removes limits on DOGE access to SSA data despite ‘alarming’ revelations

Natalie Alms — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:39:00 -0400

A federal appeals court vacated a court order limiting the Department of Government Efficiency’s access to sensitive data at the Social Security Administration on Friday, handing the Trump administration a victory in its quest to reverse the restrictions.

A majority of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit said that three organizations suing SSA weren’t able to show that irreparable harm was likely without action from the court, reversing a lower court’s preliminary injunction from last year that had blocked DOGE from accessing data.

This follows a January court filing in which the government conceded that DOGE associates may have improperly accessed sensitive data at the agency.

A DOGE employee signed an agreement to share SSA data with an unnamed political advocacy group that wanted to overturn election results in certain states, the government said in a correction to the record. That filing also revealed that much of DOGE’s data access occurred outside of official protocols — and that SSA still doesn’t know the full scope of DOGE’s data access and sharing, which included the use of an unauthorized server.

“The government’s recent acknowledgments are alarming and raise serious questions about its earlier conduct before the district court,” the Friday opinion reads.

The court called recent reports about another SSA whistleblower accusing an ex-DOGE associate of planning to take sensitive data on U.S. citizens with him to his job at a government contractor “even more alarming” in its majority decision written by Judge Toby Heytens.

The court made its decision to reverse the limit on SSA’s data access based on the record before the district court at the time it issued the preliminary injunction, Heytens wrote, noting that the new revelations can be considered by the lower court down the line.

The Supreme Court already temporarily gave DOGE access to SSA data again last summer in an unsigned decision. On Friday, the Fourth Circuit deferred to the Supreme Court and sent the case back to the district court.

Judge Robert King argued in a partial dissent that the court should have assessed the merits of the preliminary injunction on the basis of the new, corrected record.

“We now know that SSA and the other defendants provided patently false information to the district court in the preliminary injunction proceedings,” wrote King. He said prior rulings were “rendered on a materially erroneous record. And we know that, going forward, we should not accord the defendants any benefit of the doubt or readily trust in anything they say.”

The government also admitted in its correction to the record that two DOGE associates were also granted access to sensitive data after a court issued a temporary restraining order last March blocking DOGE’s access to SSA data.

SSA houses sensitive information like the addresses, Social Security numbers and dates of birth of millions of Americans.

The coalition of unions and retiree advocates suing SSA argues that DOGE got unauthorized access to this information, violating privacy laws and putting Americans at risk.

“We look forward to continuing this case in the district court, seeking discovery, and getting to the bottom of this harmful conduct, including demonstrating the harms of DOGE’s actions that now appear to extend to the integrity of U.S. elections,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which is representing the plaintiffs in the case.

]]>

Treasury is creating a database with pandemic aid recipients’ sensitive information

Natalie Alms — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:44:00 -0400

The Treasury Department is pooling information about people who received benefits from pandemic-era relief programs in a new, central database it says will be used to conduct program audits.

It’s the latest front in the Trump administration’s efforts to centralize government data, including information typically held by states about people who receive nutrition benefits and jobless aid. Many of the administration’s previous attempts have been subject to lawsuits.

Critics say the department’s required notice for the system is imprecise, overly broad and runs afoul of privacy laws governing the federal government. Treasury is amassing addresses, financial data, Social Security numbers and other data in the new system, which it says it may cross-match with other government data.

Typically, these types of notices are “routine matters that do not warrant comment,” Steve Sharpe, senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, said in a statement. “But the scope of this notice is an astonishing and dramatic departure from prior Treasury practice.”

The NCLC, a nonprofit focused on economic justice, called the new system a “baseless violation of privacy” in a comment on the February notice that it submitted with over 40 other organizations, including many state and local legal aid groups.

Treasury’s plan “could be construed to reach millions of individuals,” the comment reads.

The database will include information about the individuals and entities, like small businesses, receiving benefits from eight department programs, Treasury’s notice says. Congress created many of these during the pandemic to provide emergency relief.

Other programs feeding data into the new system, like one created to rebuild the Gulf Coast after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, have no relation to the pandemic. The new system could also include other programs administered by the Treasury in addition to those listed in the formal filing, the notice says.

Local governments administer some of these programs, and they’re already required to report subrecipient and vendor information, the National League of Cities, the United States Conference of Mayors and National Association of Counties say in a comment, which also emphasizes the cost that reporting new data would entail, especially after some of these programs have been shuttered following the end of the pandemic.

Treasury did not respond to a request for comment. But if it moves forward with the new system as described in the notice, it will be saving information about a long list of people — not only those who receive assistance, but also people “associated” with the nonprofits, small businesses and other entities that received or delivered aid. The system will also house application information, which could include sensitive financial information.

The nonprofit Association of Public Data Users wrote in its comment that the notice “seems designed particularly to obfuscate the purpose of the collection and potential uses of the data.”

Although the stated purpose of the system is for audits, “we suspect the unstated purpose of the system of records is not to audit at all, but to get access to the information held by states that Treasury cannot otherwise directly compel them to submit to the federal government,” continues APDU’s comment, which it submitted with nine other organizations.

The Trump administration has pressured a range of state and local entities to share data with the federal government since the beginning of last year, including voter files.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center argues in its comment, which got sign-on from other organizations like the Center for Democracy and Technology, that the new system runs afoul of the Privacy Act’s principles of minimizing data collection, calling the proposed program “illegal and reckless.”

The notice signals more of the same “data grab playbook” from the administration, John Davisson, litigation director for EPIC, told Nextgov/FCW.

“Time and again we've seen this administration exploit personal data to construct wildly exaggerated narratives of waste and fraud, to carry out brutal immigration enforcement tactics, and attempt to undermine the right to vote,” he said.

]]>

Social Security delays launch of new nationwide caseload system

Natalie Alms — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:48:00 -0400

The Social Security Administration is delaying its rollout of new systems to centralize claims processing and appointment scheduling and pivoting to a pilot approach, according to internal emails obtained by Nextgov/FCW.

SSA had intended to debut these new systems early this month. They were expected to be a major shift in how the agency operates, moving from processing claims locally to a national system.

The optics of such a change factored into SSA Commissioner Frank Bisignano’s decision to delay the rollout of the new systems — “particularly where customers may expect access to their local office,” read an internal email sent Monday.

It also outlined the importance of the agency moving slowly to make sure the effects on customer experience are fully understood before the National Appointment Scheduling Calendar and National Workload Management system are implemented broadly. Bisignano had touted the plans as coming improvements to staff just last week in an internal email.

The new case management system was going to centralize claims processing by replacing local workload systems with a centralized system that automatically would distribute work from a nation-wide pool to the next available technician based on their availability and skillset, according to an internal document viewed by Nextgov/FCW.

The move from claims processing happening locally to nationally had caused anxiety among SSA staff about the future of field offices, especially given that SSA is aiming to drastically cut down the number of people it receives for appointments in its field offices, as Nextgov/FCW has previously reported.

The changes also presented logistical challenges, like how to deal with state-specific rules if claims were going to be distributed to employees centrally, instead of handled geographically.

SSA was still working out the kinks just weeks before the systems were to debut. An internal FAQ, dated March 24, stated that a process to handle how to transfer physical documentation for a claim in a field office other than the one handling the claim was still being worked out.

The scheduling system was intended to shift appointment scheduling to a national system, too, offering appointments to customers based on national availability, not the availability of local field offices.

It was meant to allow customers to schedule initial claim phone appointments online, as well as change how employees scheduled appointments on their end. Eventually, the goal is for the system to become the central scheduling tool for the agency, although the rollout was set to start with scheduling initial claim phone appointments only.

SSA said that these changes would better match up workloads with open capacity, improve appointment timeliness and allow the agency to see workloads centrally.

The decision to pilot the changes will allow the agency to test if the expected efficiencies are realized and “ensure we maintain customer confidence” before a wider launch, the email announcing the change said. Details on the pilot are forthcoming, it said, after the agency has spent months preparing for the national rollout.

An SSA spokesperson told Nextgov/FCW that the implementation of internal-facing technology would start this year.

“Customers will not notice any changes aside from expanded appointment availability. Field offices are, and will always remain, our front-line, serving the more than 330 million Americans with Social Security numbers,” they said.

“This is one of the digital-first changes we are implementing that will empower field office staff to focus on what they do best, resolving customers’ needs in-person with care, accuracy, and efficiency, while directing more complex cases and time-intensive tasks to specialized teams in a centralized environment,” they continued. “Leveraging our national scale, improved workflows, and modern technology, SSA continues to focus our strategy and goals to match our customers’ evolving service preferences.”

Although centralizing and standardizing work at SSA had potential advantages, it likely wouldn’t make up for the staffing shortages the agency is dealing with after losing over 7,000 employees last year, Kathleen Romig, director of social security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, previously told Nextgov/FCW.

The day after the agency announced the change, its chief of field operations, Andy Sriubas, was replaced by Tom Holland, who had been serving as the agency’s chief financial officer. Sriubas is now in a new role as the chief of strategy and marketing. Sean Brune, who has long worked at SSA in technology leadership roles, is now SSA’s chief financial officer.

]]>

Trump signs executive order setting rules for mail-in voting and eligibility lists

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:48:00 -0400

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order targeting nationwide mail-in voting rules, including directing his administration to implement trackable mail ballot identifiers and to create a list of U.S. citizens confirmed eligible to vote in their respective states.

The order, which will certainly face legal challenges, comes as consequential midterm elections approach in November. It represents some of the most significant moves the Trump administration has taken to date to exert more control over the election administration process.

The directive mandates that the Department of Homeland Security collaborate with the Social Security Administration to create a comprehensive list of verified U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state. It also directs the U.S. Postal Service to start a rulemaking process that would require states to inform the agency about voters requesting mail-in ballots, as part of a measure that would prohibit voters from getting a mail-in ballot unless they are on a USPS-approved eligibility list.

Beyond the citizenship provisions, the order also directs requirements for barcoded ballot envelopes, state-submitted voter participation lists and centralized tracking of mail-in ballots.

The president’s distrust of mail-in voting is rooted in a mix of longstanding concerns about voter fraud, which were sharply amplified during the pandemic-era expansion of mail voting in 2020 and reinforced by his post-election legal fights.

It’s unclear how the administration would reliably determine which state a voter resides in using federal datasets that are not designed for real-time address verification.

The order also leaves open a range of technical questions, including how records from DHS, SSA and the Postal Service would be matched and updated across systems, what security standards would govern those data streams and how officials would prevent errors, manipulation or unauthorized access to newly created voter-related datasets.

“This executive order is part of a familiar playbook: use baseless attacks on our elections to lay the groundwork for future election challenges,” Voting Rights Lab CEO Samantha Tarazi said in a statement. “But the facts are clear: mail voting is a secure and reliable voting method that millions of Americans — including Trump himself — rely on to make their voices heard.”

The order “is clearly illegal,” Larry Norden, vice president of the Elections & Government program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Nextgov/FCW, adding that Trump “has no authority to set the rules for our elections. It will certainly get struck down, just as his attempt to set rules on elections through executive order last year was struck down."

The administration made a similar effort to reshape election rules via a March 2025 executive order that sought to require documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration and direct federal election officials to change registration procedures. It was partially struck down in October when a federal court blocked provisions of it.

The president has recently involved Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in his election integrity efforts, where she was seen during an FBI raid of a Fulton County, Georgia elections office that was at the center of his false claims of election fraud in 2020. Her team also seized voting machines in Puerto Rico last year and has since said the systems contain cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

The efforts, broadly speaking, underscore Trump’s continued focus on challenging the 2020 election results, despite having made a comeback to the White House in 2024. His recent call to “nationalize” election processes also runs counter to constitutional standards that place states at the center of election administration.

Cybersecurity specialists, election experts and former Trump administration national security officials have for years said there is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

“Like Trump’s first executive order on elections, this unconstitutional power grab will be challenged in the courts. But it hands his allies in the states a blueprint to push his extreme and unpopular agenda forward,” Tarazi said.

]]>

Trump moves to pay TSA agents as shutdown talks stall in Congress

Jennifer Shutt, States Newsroom — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:47:37 -0400

President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he will sign an order allowing the Department of Homeland Security to pay airport security workers who have gone without a full paycheck since the shutdown began in mid-February.

The order does not appear to include pay for other federal employees working for DHS, including those at the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Secret Service.

“It is not an easy thing to do, but I am going to do it! I want to thank our hardworking TSA agents and also ICE for the incredible help they have given us at the airports,” Trump wrote on social media. “I will not allow the Radical Left Democrats to hold our country hostage any longer.”

Trump’s decision will give both chambers of Congress, which are controlled by Republicans, a bit of cover to leave for their two-week spring break without actually reaching bipartisan compromise to fund DHS. The Transportation Security Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are both part of DHS.

Democrats have held up the department’s funding bill in the Senate to demand new constraints on federal immigration actions after officers shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minnesota in January.

Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee ranking member Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said talks over funding the department continue with Republicans.

“There's an active negotiation going on. I hope they don't unilaterally decide to walk away. But that's their decision,” he said. “They ultimately take orders from a higher power.”

Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz said “it’s just not true that we’re not in a negotiation.”

“It may be that one person or the other has lost patience and that would be too bad,” he said. “But we’re still talking.”

Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said Trump made the right decision to choose to pay TSA agents as the shutdown drags on.

“I just got off the phone with the president,” he said. “The president is doing absolutely the right thing. He's showing leadership.”

]]>

CMS rule looks to kill faxed, mailed claims in favor of e-submissions

Edward Graham — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:35:00 -0400

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced on Friday that it has finalized a new rule that will phase out the use of fax machines and paper mail to submit healthcare claims documentation in favor of electronic submissions.

In a fact sheet, CMS said the final rule establishes the first HIPAA-adopted standards “for health care claims attachments, enabling the secure electronic exchange of health care claims-related supporting clinical documentation such as medical records, x-rays and imaging, clinical notes, telemedicine visit documentation and laboratory results.”

The proposed rule was first released in December 2022 by the Department of Health and Human Services during the Biden administration. CMS said its final rule is expected to save the healthcare industry approximately $781 million annually by creating national standards for the exchange of electronic claims documentation, as well as through the adoption and use of electronic signatures.

The rule goes into effect May 26, although covered entities have two years from the effective date to comply.

“This new rule will modernize American healthcare by standardizing electronic claims attachments and enabling secure electronic signatures,” CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said in a statement. “Because every minute providers save on paperwork is another minute they can spend caring for patients.”

Since the start of the second Trump administration, CMS has placed a greater emphasis on technology to streamline healthcare services and outcomes. The agency, in particular, has been using artificial intelligence and other emerging capabilities to crack down on waste, fraud and abuse across the Medicare and Medicaid systems.

During a keynote session at the HIMSS conference in Last Vegas earlier this month, Oz said clinicians need to help combat a sense of “AI nihilism” so that the agency can adopt further tech capabilities — such as agentic AI — to support Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries.

]]>

Trump’s anti-fraud task force poised to scrutinize benefits programs

Natalie Alms — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:46:00 -0400

The White House is kicking off President Donald Trump’s “war on fraud” with a focus on federally-funded benefits like housing, food and cash assistance programs.

Among the tactics that a new anti-fraud task force will be pursuing is withholding government funding to state and local jurisdictions whose anti-fraud controls for benefits are deemed inadequate and increasing data-sharing between states and the federal government, according to the Monday executive order establishing the task force.

Both moves, already deployed by the White House in the name of fighting fraud, have at times been blocked by courts.

Anti-fraud experts have long wanted the federal government to take a more coordinated approach against fraud in government programs. But some worry that the Trump administration is using fraud as a pretext for political goals, including immigration enforcement.

The new task force, which will be drafting an anti-fraud strategy, will be chaired by Vice President J.D. Vance and vice-chaired by the head of the Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller will also serve on the task force as a senior advisor.

It’s unclear why Ferguson is taking this position on the task force. The FTC doesn’t currently play a role in combating fraud in government benefit programs, although it does run a government portal for people to report identity theft.

The task force will also have an executive director, who has yet to be named, to direct the day-to-day operations of the task force, as well as representatives from various government agencies.

Those agencies will have to identify what parts of their benefit programs are most susceptible to fraud and adopt anti-fraud requirements like identity verification, increased documentation and better back-end data checks within 60 days.

Government agencies will also be maximizing enforcement of eligibility requirements for government benefits and looking across agencies and programs for fraud risk indicators.

“The ‘war on fraud’ is long overdue, but the real question is whether this is a true shift in strategy or, worse, another moment of over-politicization without changing the underlying system,” said Jordan Burris, the head of public sector at identity verification platform Socure. He previously worked on cybersecurity in the White House.

Pre-payment controls, stronger data sharing and centralized coordination are all “encouraging signals,” he said, although “this has to become more than a finger-pointing exercise between federal, state, and local actors.”

Since taking office, Trump has fired nearly 20 inspectors general, whose very jobs are to combat waste, fraud and abuse in the government. He and his top officials have also cited fraud for a variety of their most controversial actions, such as shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development last year. Many of those claims of fraud at USAID were false or misleading.

As many government benefit programs are delivered by states, the executive order notes that the task force may recommend “any ways that Federal funds may be withheld from jurisdictions that do not have adequate anti-fraud requirements.”

The text of the order name-checks four blue states, “reinforcing the suspicion that the war on fraud is effectively a war on blue state safety nets,” wrote Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, in a recent blog. “The Trump administration seems to think if it succeeds in pushing its fraud narrative, it can justify what are, in reality, just cuts to the existing program that individual beneficiaries rely on.”

Editor's note: This article has been updated to note that Stephen Miller is also serving on the anti-fraud task force.

]]>

Inside DOGE’s early days of pressure campaigns, rule breaking and ‘chaos’

Eric Katz and Natalie Alms — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 18:37:24 -0400

In the span of 77 minutes on a late-March Monday in 2025, an associate of the government-slashing Department of Government Efficiency sent Michael McDonald, the acting head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, three emails asking for his cellphone number.

“Mike - Call me when you get the chance. We need a game plan for effectuating [reductions in force], final grant terminations and contract cancellations by tomorrow AM. We will carry these plans out before the end of the week,” wrote that associate, Justin Fox, in the last one.

“We're getting pressure from the top on this and we'd prefer that you remain on our side but let us know if you're no longer interested,” the email read.

It had been a few weeks since Fox and Nathan Cavanaugh, also an employee inside DOGE, had first met with McDonald. They’d been sent into the agency by Steve Davis, the operational head of DOGE at the time and key ally of billionaire Elon Musk, to make cuts after President Donald Trump fired the former head of the agency.

In the coming days, NEH, which primarily funds research and preservation projects at universities and museums, would issue termination letters for about 1,400 grants and send layoff notices to 116 of its employees—two-thirds of its workforce.

A coalition of humanities organizations has since sued NEH over the grant cuts. Clips from depositions done in the course of the lawsuit have gone viral for what many see as Cavanaugh and Fox’s disdain for NEH work, and for their inability or unwillingness to define diversity, equity and inclusion, given that DOGE cancelled many grants under the banner of ridding the government of DEI.

At one point, Fox said that a grant for a documentary about the Colfax Massacre, believed to be the deadliest incident of racial violence during Reconstruction, represented DEI because it “focused on a singular race,” meaning that “it’s not for the benefit of humankind.” He later said that wasn’t what he meant after being read back his testimony, noting that it’s “very subjective.”

McDonald, a long-tenured career employee who Trump tapped to lead NEH on a temporary basis, made clear in his own deposition that his “political views align with those of the administration.”

He sought to work hand in glove with DOGE, but even he expressed reservations about its sweeping approach and disregard for agency rules. In the more than 20 years he had worked at NEH, the agency had canceled fewer than six grants, he said.

A Manhattan judge ordered that the videos be taken down on Friday after the government said that Fox had been harassed and gotten death threats because of them.

Government Executive had already reviewed all of them, more than 23 hours in total. They offer rare insight into how DOGE operated last year as it fanned out across government agencies, including details on its disjointed reporting structure, its chaotic decision making process and its zealous pressure campaign against career civil servants and Trump administration appointees alike.

Previous reporting from Government Executive and other media outlets demonstrated these tactics employed at NEH were similar to those DOGE deployed throughout government, though the depositions provide an unprecedented look at an entity that had gone to great lengths to conceal its operations.

‘A rather stressful period’

At NEH, Fox’s emails were a “time-pressure tactic,” Cavanaugh said during his deposition, admitting that he and Fox weren’t themselves getting any pressure from “the top.”

“Mike’s perception of where DOGE sat within the federal government was we had a direct line of communication with the White House,” he said of the acting chair. “We would tell Mike that we were getting pressure from basically the White House to effectuate these contract and grant terminations that were aligned with the [executive order], so it was a time-pressure tactic.”

The DOGE team went so far as to tell NEH leadership to disregard its internal rules and not question the legality of its actions.

“What I told them was that these are the procedures in place that we normally follow,” McDonald said of his conversations with DOGE at the time. “They said that there was no need to follow the procedures, and if there was litigation, which has since occurred, this would be addressed in the litigation.”

The acting chair made clear that the tactics DOGE deployed were effective.

"It was a rather stressful period and we were all under a lot of pressure,” McDonald said, adding Fox had insisted on an arbitrary deadline in March to issue the grant terminations. “So yeah, there was frustration over the overall process, the time constraints that were put upon us, or me in particular.”

Fox and Cavanaugh were at NEH as part of their work on the “small agencies team” at DOGE, of which Cavanaugh was the “informal” lead. Cavanaugh led the first meeting with McDonald, and Fox subsequently took the lead role in reviewing the agency’s books for cuts.

The goal was to identify wasteful spending within the “useless” small agencies in the federal government or effectively eliminate them altogether, said Cavanaugh. In doing so, he and Fox were “comfortable applying pressure to the extent we needed to,” he said.

“We wanted to try and get the agency heads to act quickly on their proposed plans,” he said. “I’ve done the same thing at other agencies.”

Cavanaugh, Fox and the others on their team worked out of the General Services Administration with other DOGE employees.

The team’s structure was loose—Cavanaugh said in the deposition that he reported to Davis, who he says wasn’t intimately involved in his day-to-day work. Fox, meanwhile, viewed GSA’s then-acting administrator Stephen Ehikian as his boss.

“DOGE felt more like a club of folks with a different mission than traditional folks that were career employees,” said Fox, who was being paid a $150,000 salary at GSA.

Other DOGE employees were based at different executive offices, although they often detailed out to additional agencies from those home offices, making it difficult to know who was from where, said Cavanaugh.

At the top of DOGE, Cavanaugh said he viewed Davis as the leader, despite the Trump administration repeatedly labeling Amy Gleason as the acting administrator of the cost-cutting enterprise. Cavanaugh noted during his deposition that he didn’t know how Gleason’s role related to Davis’ job, or even what her role was. She never led any of the weekly or biweekly DOGE meetings while he was in government.

The depositions also offer a glimpse into the ad hoc nature of the DOGE recruiting process.

A 2020 graduate of the University of Virginia who worked in private equity, Fox got involved in DOGE through a friend whose father, Anthony Armstrong, was a “mentor.” Currently the chief financial officer at Musk’s xAI, Armstrong himself worked at the Office of Personnel Management as part of DOGE.

Asked if he formally interviewed for his government job, Fox initially said that he “didn’t remember,” before saying that he talked to several then-leaders at GSA over the secure messaging app Signal before joining.

Cavanaugh joined DOGE after starting a series of tech companies. Before that, he attended Indiana University for one year. Venture capital fund manager Baris Akis, who he called an “informal” recruiter for DOGE, introduced him to Davis. Cavanaugh had no government or political experience and hadn’t taken any government-focused classes.

He joined DOGE after three conversations with Baris and Davis, went through a day or two of standard onboarding for GSA and got to work. He didn’t receive any specific training, he said. NEH officials testified that the DOGE duo possessed no expertise in NEH’s typical work.

Flouting rules

In January, government employees began combing through open grants at NEH to rate how they fared in terms of DEI, “gender ideology,” and environmental justice—all concepts Trump had tasked agencies with rooting out in a day-one executive order.

Fox conducted additional reviews once he and Cavanaugh landed at the agency, especially concentrating on the grants that NEH staff had marked as “NA” for DEI and, after that, all the grants awarded during the Biden administration.

He used ChatGPT to screen grant descriptions for DEI involvement, asking for responses under 120 characters.

This tactic was apparently not known to the head of the small agencies DOGE team at the time, as Cavanaugh said during his deposition that Fox didn’t use AI to come up with the DEI decisions, adding that it was “well understood” that “how we reviewed grants at DOGE for DEI is by reading them.”

The pair also cancelled grants under the mandate to rid the government of “waste” and reduce the deficit, said Cavanaugh.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told Government Executive that “President Trump was given a clear mandate to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse from the federal government” when asked to comment.

“In just a year, he has made significant progress in making the federal government more efficient to better serve the American taxpayer,” he said.

One of Cavanaugh’s first assignments at DOGE was to re-interview engineering, product management and design employees at GSA. Those conducting the meetings sometimes refused to identify themselves, Government Executive previously reported. DOGE also re-interviewed existing employees elsewhere.

“I believe my inputs on the interviews with employees were then provided to the head of GSA when eventual RIF plans were conducted at GSA,” said Cavanaugh during his deposition.

DOGE’s approach to assessing career employees appeared to flout federal statute and procedure. At NEH, Cavanaugh said that DOGE team members gained system administrator access that allowed them to view details about how employees were using their emails. It also enabled them to make changes without input from the agency’s head of technology.

Such email access was used “mostly in the context of conducting RIF plans,” he said, adding that he and his colleagues were monitoring employees’ email usage and levels of engagement.

Under federal law, agencies can use four factors for determining who gets laid off: the tenure of the employee — e.g. whether the individual is a permanent staffer or a temporary one — their veteran status, their length of service and their performance rating. The latter evaluation is determined through a set process involving the employee's supervisor. RIF statute does not provide for a process that would require employees to interview to justify their jobs, nor does it allow for the monitoring of employee account activity.

NEH ultimately laid off two-thirds of its staff, while GSA sent RIF notices to large portions of its human resources, IT and public buildings teams.

DOGE pushed for high-level access to systems at other agencies, too, another move outside of typical government procedure.

The approach was “part of our operating procedure” for DOGE, “discussed openly during all-hands meetings,” Cavanaugh said during his deposition. It “allowed us to operate as if we were an administrator within the agency for provisioning email accounts, access to critical systems, etc.”

This push for administrative access circumvents many of the cybersecurity policies followed by government agencies, where employees typically only have access to the systems they need to perform their work.

Having more employees with direct access to normally walled-off systems can increase the risk of data breaches, widen the attack surface for hackers and create insider threat risks. Whistleblowers have accused DOGE employees of exfiltrating sensitive data using secretive methods, planning to take sensitive government data with them to private employers and more at other government agencies.

DOGE makes its move

At NEH, more than 1,000 grantees received emails on April 2 from a Microsoft email account—not an NEH email—set up by DOGE, cancelling their grants. It was a “day of chaos,” one person familiar with DOGE’s time at NEH told Government Executive, as staff didn’t know what grants were being cancelled, or even that they were being cancelled that day at all.

NEH employees found out about grant cancellations when they began receiving emails from confused grantees wanting to know if the email was legitimate, they said. Some thought it was a phishing email. Employees themselves could not initially confirm the authenticity of the cancellations, as the notices had been sent by DOGE outside of official channels.

The next day, the agency put most of its staff on administrative leave. As with grantees, they also received this news from an external email address, “NEH_HR@nehemail.onmicrosoft.com.” A week after that, staff began receiving reduction-in-force notices.

NEH staffing has gone from 215 employees in 2024 to 57 as of January—about 75%—according to government data, and it has reorganized from seven divisions down to four.

The largest staffing cuts were to the program officers at NEH, humanities experts with advanced degrees hired to run peer review panels, read application drafts for potential grantees and more, according to the person familiar.

Adam Wolfson, a top NEH official who previously served as its acting director, said in his own deposition that DOGE called the shots on the layoffs.

“I believe they were the ones who said ‘you need to reduce by a certain amount,’” Wolfson said.

Since last spring, NEH has awarded handpicked projects that promote traditionalism and Western civilization, the New York Times has reported. Typically, the agency awards grants through a competitive process, though it now maintains a fraction of its previous capacity to do so.

‘Make decisions and act quickly’

In his testimony, McDonald said he made the final call on which grants to cancel, though he conceded he was following DOGE’s lead.

McDonald said Cavanaugh and Fox “instructed” him to cancel certain grants on a specific timeframe, and he did not feel like he could “disobey.”

“Either way, as you've made clear, it's your decision on whether to discontinue funding on any of the projects on this list,” McDonald said in an email about grants cancellations to the pair at the time.

Cavanaugh said that “the general pacing of DOGE was to try and make decisions and act quickly to avoid government employees dragging their feet on cancellations.”

McDonald noted that Fox directed him to identify a “core” team of employees who would not stand in DOGE’s way as it was executing its plans. The DOGE officials entered NEH with significant skepticism toward the career workforce, McDonald said, despite there being “no factual basis for [them] to believe that.”

That is why DOGE employees insisted on sending out the grant cancellation notices themselves, despite NEH maintaining its own process for doing so.

“The DOGE team was concerned about the degree of cooperation that they would get from the NEH staff,” McDonald said. “Therefore, they preferred to do it, to use their own process for doing it, to avoid the possibility that staff that was opposed to what we were doing would seek in some way to impede it.”

Wolfson agreed with McDonald that there was no cause for DOGE's paranoia.

“I'm a civil servant,” Wolfson said in his own deposition. “I try to be neutral and to assist the leadership of the agency in accomplishing what they want to accomplish.”

Asked whether he could have pushed back on DOGE’s aggressive tactics, McDonald—who is now under consideration to be the permanent nominee to lead NEH—demurred, noting the question was no longer relevant.

“We're going down a hypothetical road about what would have ensued if I had done that,” he said, “which we'll never know.”

Although troves of relevant emails have been made public as part of the lawsuit, some of the records of DOGE’s work at the agency won’t ever be available. Cavanaugh and Fox both said that they used the end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal and its autodelete feature extensively to communicate during their time in DOGE.

Fox said that Armstrong told him to download the app when he first approached him about DOGE.

“I remember him being very focused on switching to Signal to talk about anything,” said Fox.

DOGE adopted a records retention policy in late March telling staffers to preserve messages on Signal and on personal devices in compliance with the Presidential Records Act—and to turn off the app’s auto-delete feature—in the wake of the Signal scandal at the Pentagon.

But Cavanaugh appears to have continued using Signal, and he switched between his personal and government devices interchangeably for official agency work. He said that he sent Davis a spreadsheet of cancelled grants and contracts weekly via Signal, at Davis’ request.

Asked who else he communicated with at DOGE via Signal, Cavanaugh said, “it’d be a pretty long list.”

He and Fox left DOGE in August and September, respectively, and have been working at a company they co-founded.

Both testified during their depositions that they joined DOGE because they were eager to decrease the federal deficit, although Fox admitted it wasn’t an interest of his until Armstrong reached out to him.

“Did you reduce the federal deficit?” a lawyer asked Cavanaugh.

“No, we didn’t,” he replied.

]]>