The Federal Drive with Terry Gerton

With the planned launch of its new heavy rocket and a payload headed to orbit the moon, it's a red letter day for NASA. Lots of contractors are working-on and behind-the-scenes and will be doing so for the duration of the mission. On Friday, Federal Drive host Tom Temin caught up with Nate Apodaca of Leidos, a company that has several information technology support contracts to help NASA keep the lunar enterprise going. The conversation took place before Nate, a Leidos vice president and division manager, departed for Florida.

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You might have heard, mid-term elections are only a few months off. Questions persist about the security and integrity of the ballot-casting and counting process. For what the threats actually are and what officials can to do mitigate them, Federal Drive host Tom Temin spoke with Mike Hamilton, chief information security officer at Critical Insight.

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The latest tax-and-spending bill provides nearly $80 billion for the IRS. But that's over 10 years. More than half of the money is designated for enforcement, but there's also a few billion for what the bill calls taxpayer services. For with what they're anticipating, Federal Drive host Tom Temin spoke with Chad Hooper, the president of the IRS centered Professional Managers Association.

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The Department of Homeland Security is preparing a rule to ensure contractors are meeting cybersecurity requirements, with DHS touting a process for evaluating its vendor base through self-assessments rather than relying on a third-party certification program like the Pentagon.DHS has spent the past year conducting multiple “pathfinders” to test out a method for ensuring companies are meeting cyber hygiene clauses in their contracts. DHS issued a self-assessment questionnaire to a subset of its contractors last fall. The questionnaire was geared at measuring whether the companies were complying with a 2015 Homeland Security Acquisition Regulation for safeguarding sensitive information.Ken Bible, DHS’ chief information security officer, says the work has convinced DHS it can use the approach more broadly.

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After years of work and study, the Defense Department is finally releasing a cohesive action plan for all military services to follow regarding brain health and traumatic brain injuries.Medical professionals in the military have previously described the plan as a “paradigm shift” in the way the Pentagon approached brain health. The plan moves the military away from the old way of addressing dangerous impacts to the head as single, standalone incidents and instead considers those exposures in a broad spectrum over a service member’s career.

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The Defense Department is ready to get serious about transitioning its network defenses to zero trust principles. The Pentagon expects to release a formal zero trust strategy by mid-September, wants to have an enterprise-wide zero trust implementation in place by 2027, and is already in talks with commercial providers about how to implement zero trust in the cloud. Last year’s White House executive order on cybersecurity told all federal agencies to draw up plans to move to a zero trust architecture. DoD published its first reference architecture shortly before the EO, and has since updated it to a 2.0 version. But Defense officials said the strategy set to be released next month will lay out the specific steps DoD components and their vendors will need to take to implement zero trust.

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The debates continue over the abrupt departure of American forces from Afghanistan a year ago. It's a done deal, but it still rankles many veterans of the warns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Federal Drive host Tom Temin got one view about this from Cole Lyle, the executive director of the veteran advocacy group Mission Role Call.

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Sometimes the key to what you want is right under that flowerpot on your windowsill. Many agencies are working to improve customer experience. An important element of that is convenience in identification and verification of those accessing digital services. Now the Veterans Affairs Department has expanded its use of login.gov. Federal Drive host Tom Temin spoke about all of this and more with John Rahagi, the VA's digital services expert.

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Procurement power is a major pillar of the Biden administration’s Federal Sustainability Plan. As the country’s single biggest landlord and one of its largest energy consumers, the federal government’s purchasing power can either drive markets toward energy efficient innovation, or maintain the status quo. Dorothy Robyn has worked at the two largest real property holders in federal government, as a former commissioner of the Public Buildings Service at the General Services Administration, and as a former deputy undersecretary for Installations and the Environment at the Defense Department. When making federal facilities more energy efficient, she said the experiences differed in that, GSA sees buildings as its mission while DoD does not.

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The Veterans Affairs Department has been concentrating on improving service to its veteran constituents. And its had some success. Surveys show a 24% jump in trust in VA over the past few years. One career manager who gets a lot of the credit is the VA's deputy chief veterans experience officer. For her work, Barbara Morton is a finalist in this year's Service to America Medals program.

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