John Landwehr, vice president and public sector chief technology officer at Adobe, has said he believes the new administration should adopt five strategies to help establish a digital government and one of those is to prioritize the passage and enforcement of the Modernizing Government Technology Act.

Landwehr wrote in an FCW commentary piece published Monday the MGT Act seeks to support the modernization of legacy information technology systems through the creation of two working capital funds.

He also called on government agencies to implement electronic signature platforms and other digital technologies to help streamline processes and change the way agencies deliver services to citizens.

Landwehr said the U.S. government should work to incorporate the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program into the acquisition process in order to facilitate the adoption of cloud platforms by agencies.

The new administration should accelerate the fiscal 2017 budget request for the fourth phase of the Department of Homeland Security’s Continuous Diagnostics & Mitigation program in order to provide data-centric security platforms and capabilities to all federal civilian agencies, he noted.

“Agencies should consider the total cost of ownership and commercially proven technology as the first choice when making procurement decisions,” Landwehr added.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has introduced a new program that seeks to develop a platform designed to stop the spread of viral infections in less than two months through the use of nucleic acid sequences.

The Pandemic Prevention Platform seeks to “create a technology platform that can place a protective treatment into health providers’ hands within 60 days of a pathogen being identified, and have that treatment induce protection in patients within three days of administration,” Matt Hepburn, P3 program manager at DARPA, said in a statement published Monday.

The four-year program will focus on three technology areas that include the growth of virus to facilitate evaluation of treatments in laboratory tests, evolution of antibodies outside of the body to build up potency and development of delivery methods for nucleic acid-based therapies.

Program participants will demonstrate their platforms in five simulations through the use of their preferred and DARPA-selected pathogens and will be required to test their technologies through a phase I clinical study.

DARPA will host Proposers Days on Feb. 22 in McLean, Virginia, and on March 2 in San Diego.

The agency will accept proposal abstracts for the program through March 13 and full proposals through May 1, according to a FedBizOpps notice posted Monday.

Janice Haith, former deputy chief information officer at the Department of the Navy, has said that DoN saved approximately $450 million in the last three years through a software consolidation initiative that began in 2011, Federal News Radio reported Friday.

Haith told Jason Miller in an interview that the department switched to enterprise software licenses and bought licenses from more than one vendor as part of efforts to address visibility issues.

The former CIO added the department worked to standardize product choices to lessen customization and use more commercial off-the-shelf products without modification.

Haith said the Navy aims to further optimize its efficiency through cloud and data centers and that the department expects to issue a new cloud-first strategy this month, Miller wrote.

The Navy could reduce its planned data centers from 10 to three in a push to migrate all applications to the cloud, Haith told Miller.

The House on Tuesday passed a bill that seeks to increase cooperation between the U.S. and Israel on cybersecurity initiatives.

Reps. John Ratcliffe and Jim Langevin (D-Rhode Island) introduced the U.S.-Israel Cybersecurity Cooperation Enhancement Act in a push to establish a cybersecurity grant program for joint research-and-development ventures between U.S. and Israeli organizations, Ratcliffe’s office said Tuesday.

The introduction of the bill came after the two lawmakers took a congressional delegation trip in May 2016.

“After Jim and I traveled to Israel last year to discuss this important aspect of our national security with top officials, we defined key areas where we could boost our collaboration to strengthen our countries’ cybersecurity posture,” Ratcliffe said.

The bill would require the secretary of Homeland Security to determine research requirements for the proposed cybersecurity grant program with the help of an advisory board comprised of members from the the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation and the U.S.-Israel Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation.