Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, in a letter to the Government Accountability Office, said there are lingering issues in federal IT management, in large part, because of confusion over the role of federal CIOs. The 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act mandated federal agencies appoint chief information officers [...]

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates — despite the administration’s entreaties to stay on for the remainder of President Barack Obama’s first term — will likely step down some time this year. The guessing game of who will take over has already begun, but Loren Thompson, a defense analyst and chief operating office off the Arlington, [...]

President Barack Obama will nominate Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to be the next U.S. ambassador to China, according to various media reports. Current ambassador Jon Huntsman, who is reportedly mulling a 2012 Republican presidential candidacy, will resign April 30, Reuters reported. Locke “has already racked up a lot of firsts as a Chinese-American,” The New [...]

Rather than imposing health IT fiats from on high, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT is instead beseeching early adopters  to encourage slower-adopting colleagues, according to a report in Government Health IT. The ONC plan calls for “physician champions,” those providers who are already making steady progress incorporating essential IT practices, such [...]

For years, the concept of cybersecurity centered on protecting computer networks from malicious outsiders bent on sneaking past or breaking through firewalls and gaining access to sensitive systems. But recent events in government and the private sector have pointed to the specter of the insider threat, which can be as damaging as traditional threats and [...]

Navy Department Chief Information Officer Terry Halvorsen is in charge of a sprawling but often unnoticed IT enterprise. “Who runs the single biggest integrated network in the world? The Department of the Navy runs it,” he said, according to a report on Federal News Radio. “I guarantee you if you go into the halls of [...]

New CIO/G-6 Says Network Modernization is Key Effort The Army announced late last week Lt. Gen. Susan Lawrence will take over as Army chief information officer/G-6, filling the Army’s top information technology post, which was vacated in November. As the service’s CIO, Lawrence oversees a $10 billion annual IT budget and a military service that [...]

The Obama administration has put forward a plan to close down unused federal facilities across the United States that relies upon an outside commission, similar to the one that helped create the policies for the Base Realignment and Closure plan. There are an estimated 14,000 “surplus” federal facilities, properties that are unused and unneeded. Selling [...]

The Department of Homeland Security will begin testing a portable, rapid DNA scanner this summer, according to a report on Nextgov. The scanner, about the size of a laser printer, will return results in less than an hour and will be used for a host of applications — determining family relationships of refugees and cracking [...]

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has always been at the leading edge of technology. For example, have you heard of a little thing called the Internet? But now, the agency says it’s taking the lead in putting the focus on execution along with vision. In testimony before the House Armed Services  subcommittee on emerging [...]