The House has passed the 2019 Government Employee Fair Treatment Act that will provide back pay for furloughed employees and enable workers to take previously scheduled leaves without consequence, Government Executive reported Friday.

The bill, introduced by Maryland’s Democratic Sens. Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen, was created to guarantee back pay for furloughed federal workers in future shutdowns.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., introduced a similar legislation called the 2019 Low-Wage Federal Contractor Employee Back Pay Act which will provide compensation to retail, custodial, food and security personnel working during the shutdown.

Thirty-three Democratic senators sent a letter to Russ Vought, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, requesting him to mandate agencies to coordinate with contractors to ensure that the firms’ workers receive back pay when the partial government shutdown ends.

President Donald Trump has previously stated that federal workers will have to “make an adjustment” and take actions such as asking their landlords for payment relief.

The U.S. Air Force Network Integration Center aims to complete cloud migration of USAF enterprise services soon, following the first phase’s conclusion in November. AFNIC intends to move all USAF enterprise services within continental the U.S. to Microsoft Office 365, the U.S. Air Force said Friday.

The first phase, that concluded on Nov. 8, 2018, involved the transition of 555K accounts to the cloud. Military components including the 24th Air Force, Air Force Life Cycle Management Center and the Defense Information Sytems Agency worked with Dell and Microsoft to address newly discovered vulnerabilities.

“We didn’t create these issues, but it was our responsibility to work with experts across the Air Force to correct them before moving ahead,” said Dennis Polansky, lead program manager at AFNIC.

The integration center also expects to implement SharePoint Online and OneDrive in the foreseeable future, and is working to extend the same cloud services to USAF commands outside the country. AFNIC, AFLCMC and industry partners are developing a roadmap to guide future collaborative activities.

The Air Force Installation and Mission Support Center opened a new office in November to facilitate and support the service branch’s innovation efforts. The AFIMSC innovation office consists of a new branch dedicated to innovation and analysis efforts, with Marc Vandeveer serving as chief innovation officer, the U.S. Air Force said Friday.

“This innovation office is dedicated to tying together the vast innovation ecosystem with our Airmen at our installations as a whole,” Vandeveer said. “We will strive to take an idea from conception, through collaborative innovation, and most importantly, through implementation.”

The office, now a full-time federal component, will work on efforts in partnership with other innovation groups including the Defense Innovation Unit, the Air Force Institute of Technology and the Air Force Innovation Hub Network. AFIMSC invested $150K in a partnership with AFWERX’s Austin, Texas-based hub to develop unmanned aerial vehicles.

Lt. Gen. Bruce Crawford, chief information officer of the U.S. Army, has said the service formed in September a new task force that aims to integrate artificial intelligence into the battlefield and business operations, Federal News Network reported Friday.

He said in an interview on Ask the CIO that Brig. Gen. Matt Easley, a signal officer, oversees the new AI task force and directly reports to Army Futures Command.

Crawford noted that his office supports the new task force across six areas and one of those is ensuring the security of data in the cloud.

He also mentioned his office’s other tasks in support of the new AI organization such as efforts to build up the certification process based on the risk management framework and improve the identity credentialing and access management through two-factor authentication.

The Army has begun to work with defense and intelligence community partners to develop a streamlined RMF process.

“It is one of the fundamental things that we have to do in order to achieve the vision of the Army 2028,” Crawford said.

“We’ve got to figure out how to streamline the RMF process so that we can get the speed that is required to be able to get things connected to the network and get weapons systems and technology to the soldier.”
 

David Norquist, acting deputy secretary of defense, said Wednesday during a Center for the National Interest event in Washington, D.C. the Department of Defense is developing a financial audit database, FCW.com reported Wednesday.

Norquist said the pilot program aims to resolve issues cited by the DoD inspector general’s first ever audit issued in November 2018. The program will utilize the DoD IG’s audit findings and enable budget analysts to view the department’s transaction history to foster accountability and take corrective actions.

Norquist noted that the department doesn’t have a projected cost for repairing its information technology systems throughout the multi-year effort. He added that the Pentagon has begun working through its second financial audit.

Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., introduced a legislation to modernize the process through which federal grant recipients report to the government. The Grant Reporting Efficiency and Agreements Transparency or GREAT Act would enforce data standards for reported grant information, the congress said.

The bill would define core data elements for the management of financial assistance awards, and apply technologies designed to reduce compliance costs.

The GREAT Act would also leverage consolidated collection and access of open data to support the monitoring of federal grants and agreements.

House Rep. Robin Kelly, ranking member of the subcommittee of information technology, warned that the ongoing government shutdown might lead to challenges in attracting IT talent for federal agencies. The temporary closure of agencies expects to have “massive short-term impacts” on more than 800K federal workers, Kelly said in a statement posted Wednesday.

The democrat from Illinois’s 2nd congressional district also warned the shutdown adds to the factors that might discourage workers to enter the government. Kelly cited that as the government cannot compete on salary with the private sector, the chance of working without pay with the government might also lead IT talent away.

“How can we ever hope to recruit or maintain IT talent when hardworking government workers are told: ‘sorry, you aren’t getting paid, but you still need to come to work’ or ‘sorry, but no paycheck this week because of politics?’ Large private sector companies never say this to their employees and these are our competitors when it comes to IT talent recruitment,” she said.

Kelly called on Senate Leader Mitch McConnell to support the bills recently passed by House lawmakers to reopen the government.