James Gfrerer: VA to Measure Digital Transformation Progress With Scorecard
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James Gfrerer: VA to Measure Digital Transformation Progress With Scorecard
James Gfrerer
James Gfrerer

The Department of Veterans Affairs is developing a set of metrics to evaluate progress in digital transformation programs across the VA enterprise, FedScoop reported Wednesday.

James Gfrerer, chief information officer of VA, said at a health information technology summit Wednesday the scorecard under development is nearly 80 percent complete and designed to monitor the status of modernization work on various IT platforms.

"We're going to get a lot more focused around those measures, those metrics, those outcomes around the specific projects and start to be a bit more deliberate on what programs are succeeding or not," Gfrerer added, according to report.

He plans to discuss the scorecard development effort with members of Congress later this week. Gfrerer noted he expects VA to migrate 350 systems and applications to an enterprise cloud computing infrastructure by 2024.

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HHS Issues Draft Strategic Plan for Federal Health IT
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HHS Issues Draft Strategic Plan for Federal Health IT
HHS Issues Draft Strategic Plan for Federal Health IT

The Department of Health and Human Services has released a draft strategic plan that outlines goals for the use of federal health information technology to facilitate patients’ access to their electronic health data.

The office for the national coordinator for health IT within HHS worked with more than 25 federal agencies to develop the draft 2020-2025 Federal Health IT Strategic Plan, HHS said Wednesday.

“The draft federal strategic plan supports the provisions in the 21st Century Cures Act that will help to bring electronic health information into the hands of patients through smartphone applications,” said Don Rucker, national coordinator for health IT.

The draft plan sets several strategies and objectives to meet four goals: promote health and wellness; enhance the delivery and experience of care; build a secure, data-driven culture to accelerate research and innovation; and connect healthcare and health data through an interoperable health IT infrastructure.

Public comments on the draft are due March 18.

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Ryan McCarthy Offers Preview of Army’s Future Budgets Following FY 2021
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Ryan McCarthy Offers Preview of Army’s Future Budgets Following FY 2021
Ryan McCarthy
Ryan McCarthy

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said the service is likely to make large cuts to current programs and fleets after fiscal year 2021 since it has a clearer view of the progress of its modernization programs, Defense News reported Wednesday.

“There were some hard choices, there were some cuts,” McCarthy said of the Army’s FY 21 budget request. He added that those reductions “were refinements” to previous decisions and that “harder choices are coming again” in the couple of years.

He noted that the service will see prototypes and demonstrations transition to development and evaluation phases in the next 18 months as part of modernization efforts.

The Army’s FY 2021 budget request is expected to be released on Feb. 10.

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DHS S&T Backs Stranger Labs for Digital Credential System Dev’t
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DHS S&T Backs Stranger Labs for Digital Credential System Dev’t

DHS S&T Backs Stranger Labs for Digital Credential System Dev't

Cambridge, Mass.-based information technology firm Stranger Labs has received $197K in funds from the Department of Homeland Security’s science and technology directorate through the Silicon Valley Innovation Program to build a tool that will enable the online verification of digital credentials.

The planned tool will potentially protect digital credentials and lower any compromise on their usability, DHS said Tuesday. The company will issue, validate and transmit the credentials within an isolated location to maintain their integrity and allow control via multiple devices.

“Stranger Labs is developing technology that directly tackles this problem end-to-end while supporting broad interoperability based on emerging World Wide Web Consortium standards such as decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials,” said Anil John, technical director of SVIP at DHS.

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Pete Gaynor Confirmed as Full-Time FEMA Chief; Chad Wolf Quoted
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Pete Gaynor Confirmed as Full-Time FEMA Chief; Chad Wolf Quoted
Pete Gaynor
Pete Gaynor

Pete Gaynor, acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency since March 2019, has been confirmed by the Senate to lead FEMA on a full-time basis.

“Throughout 2019 and into 2020, Gaynor led the agency’s recovery efforts for many devastating disasters, including the California wildfires, tornado outbreaks, severe storms, flooding in the Midwest and the Puerto Rico earthquakes,” Chad Wolf, acting secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement released Tuesday.

Gaynor received Senate confirmation as FEMA chief nearly four months after the White House announced his nomination. He previously served as deputy administrator of the agency.

Prior to FEMA, he directed the emergency management agencies of the state of Rhode Island and the city of Providence.

He also served in the U.S. Marine Corps for 26 years.

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Gen. James McConville: Automation May Impact Army Logistics
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Gen. James McConville: Automation May Impact Army Logistics
James McConville
James McConville

Gen. James McConville, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, has said that the Army’s move towards automation may result in changes to the service branch’s logistics, Army Times reported Tuesday.

He noted that artificial intelligence has been beneficial in cutting costs in helicopter preventive maintenance and that the service branch is looking into additive manufacturing to minimize the need for the transport of spare components.

“What I see, especially in the near term, is where we’re going to be able to go to maybe more minimum manning — where we have less people in aircraft, less people in some of our armored vehicles,” he said.

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Bryan Ware to Focus on CISA Modernization, Data Mgmt
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Bryan Ware to Focus on CISA Modernization, Data Mgmt
Bryan Ware
Bryan Ware

Bryan Ware, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s new assistant director for cybersecurity, said he will focus on the modernization of CISA’s infrastructure, Fifth Domain reported Tuesday.

The effort will largely involve updates across the agency’s artificial intelligence technologies and data management tools, Ware said at FedScoop’s Data Cloud Summit.

Ware also noted that CISA must provide more context in cybersecurity indicators to more accurately determine whether a cyber activity is malicious. This approach aims to address the rise of false positives in the agency’s data.

“We see trends increasingly where more and more visibility is required sooner,” Ware said.

The assistant director also noted an effort to improve the agency’s information sharing amid challenges in privacy and secrecy.

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Navy Chief Adm. Michael Gilday Asks for Higher Budget to Pursue Plans
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Navy Chief Adm. Michael Gilday Asks for Higher Budget to Pursue Plans
Michael Gilday
Michael Gilday

Adm. Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations, said the U.S. Navy needs a higher budget to comply with the Trump administration's demands, Defense News reported Tuesday.

He said at the Surface Navy Association's annual symposium that the service branch's Columbia-class submarine program has been taking too much a percentage of the budget.

The Columbia class of submarines is Gilday's top priority. He said the Navy will use the submarines over a span of 42 years after the service begins to retire Ohio-class vessels.

The Trump administration's strategy seeks to overcome the speed of China’s development and deploy ships across a wide range under the Distributed Maritime Operations plan.

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Sen. Mark Warner Writes to Mike Pompeo on State Dept. Cybersecurity
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Sen. Mark Warner Writes to Mike Pompeo on State Dept. Cybersecurity
Mark Warner
Mark Warner

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., wrote a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo regarding the ability of the latter's department to protect information systems amid the conflict with Iran. Warner, also a 2019 Wash100 Award recipient, listed five questions addressed to Pompeo, and referenced the state department's cybersecurity weaknesses found in inspector general reports, as seen in the letter issued Tuesday.

Iran has been growing its cyber capabilities and poses a threat to information systems of the department and U.S. embassies across the globe. The five questions tackle the state department's cybersecurity personnel handling, chief information security officer reporting, security-related training for employees, malware security and U.S. embassy auditing.

Warner asked Pompeo to submit answers by the end of January.

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Mercury Systems, Tortuga Logic Announce Partnership to Support DARPA GAPS Program; Scott Orton, Jason Oberg Quoted
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Mercury Systems, Tortuga Logic Announce Partnership to Support DARPA GAPS Program; Scott Orton, Jason Oberg Quoted
Mercury Systems, Tortuga Logic Announce Partnership to Support DARPA GAPS Program; Scott Orton, Jason Oberg Quoted

Mercury Systems has partnered with Tortuga Logic, a cybersecurity company specializing in hardware security, to provide secure processing subsystems for The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Guaranteed Architecture for Physical Security (GAPS) program, Tortuga announced on Wednesday. 

"Mercury Systems is developing hardware and software architectures for DARPA with physically provable guarantees to isolate high-risk transactions," said Scott Orton, vice president and general manager of Mercury's Trusted Mission Solutions group. 

Tortuga Logic and Mercury Systems will provide secure processing subsystems, which are used in numerous Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (C4ISR), Radar, Electronic Warfare (EW) and other mission-critical applications. 

The integration of Radix-S will help DARPA GAPS detect and prevent security vulnerabilities in next-generation  application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and System-on-Chip (SoC) designs.

"As GAPS aims to develop hardware security and software architectures with provable security interfaces, Tortuga Logic's Radix security verification solution helps us effectively deliver the security guarantees we need to be successful in this program," Orton continued.

Additionally, Mercury Systems’ technology and analysis will help DARPA address security issues before the device is manufactured, saving on redesign costs and system failure due to an attack. 

"Mercury's solutions power a wide variety of critical defense and intelligence programs that have the highest standards for security," said Jason Oberg, CEO of Tortuga Logic. "Our collaboration with Mercury helps us develop the best-in-class security offerings for DARPA's GAPS program and other future programs."

The partnership recently followed the appointment of Orlando Carvalho, a 38-year veteran of Lockheed Martin, who has joined the board of directors Mercury Systems, announced on Tuesday.

“Orlando has extraordinary experience from his many years in senior executive roles across numerous major defense programs," said Mark Aslett, president and CEO of Mercury Systems.

He previously served EVP and general manager of the F-35 program. Prior to F-35 program leadership, he led company units that worked on mission systems, sensors and surface-sea based ballistic missile defense systems.

About Mercury Systems

Mercury Systems is the leader in making trusted, secure mission-critical technologies profoundly more accessible to the aerospace and defense industries. Optimized for customer and mission success, our innovative solutions power more than 300 critical aerospace and defense programs. 

Headquartered in Andover, Mass., and with manufacturing and design facilities around the world, Mercury specializes in engineering, adapting and manufacturing new solutions purpose-built to meet the industry's current and emerging high-tech needs. Our employees are committed to Innovation that Matters®.

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