Rep. Walkinshaw on 3 Federal Tech Priorities: TMF, FITARA and FedRAMP | GovCast

Rep. James Walkinshaw

Well, I think we're at a critical inflection point. I obviously have strong views about Doj and the impact it had on federal workers and our government's ability to deliver for the American people.

Rep. James Walkinshaw

You know, I think we got to start with the workforce and if you want government to work, you got to have the right technology and you got to have the right talent.

Rep. James Walkinshaw

the acquisition workforce, I think is absolutely critical.

Rep. James Walkinshaw

we need to reauthorize, Congress needs to reauthorize the technology modernization fund. It expires, the authorization expires at the end of this year.

Rep. James Walkinshaw

because the federal government operates on an annual budget cycle, there isn't necessarily an incentive. In fact, you could argue there's a disincentive to make the kind of one-time upfront investment it often takes to retire an outdated legacy system and then reap the savings and improvements in performance and efficiency over time.

Rep. James Walkinshaw

I've had amendments to try to increase the payback period for TMF from five years to seven years to recognize the long-term value and benefits.

Rep. James Walkinshaw

We have now have a GAO report demonstrating that projects that have already been funded and executed are going to be generating savings starting in 2027.

Rep. James Walkinshaw

And many of the outdated legacy systems that we have really can't be secured against the cyber threats that exist today, the AI-based cyber threats that exist today.

Rep. James Walkinshaw

GAO has identified 37 projects that would improve our cyber posture, improve agency cyber posture, but not necessarily generate financial savings.

Rep. James Walkinshaw

when you think about some of the use cases obviously there's a forward-facing use cases, right? Using AI to better predict the flu season and understand what's happening each flu season, so we can get vaccines where they need to be, surge treatment where it needs to be, using AI to better predict weather, whether it's in the short term, predicting the path of a hurricane or long term predicting the weather for a season or for a year.

Rep. James Walkinshaw

I think if you go kind of behind the curtain operationally, one of the big challenges we've always had in the federal government is you have a policy goal or something you want to achieve and it requires data sets and data sources from different systems, different legacy IT systems that speak different languages and it has historically been sometimes impossible, sometimes very labor intensive and expensive to bring those data sources together so that they can speak to one another and help us get to a policy outcome.

Rep. James Walkinshaw

Advanced AI can do that very quickly, relatively inexpensively.

Rep. James Walkinshaw

But we in many cases can't do that today because there are bureaucratic barriers, there are policy and regulatory barriers, there are legal barriers. So I think one of our main areas of focus has to be understanding how we can peel back those additional barriers to allow the technology to do its job.

Rep. James Walkinshaw

but I think, maybe counter-intuitively, the traditional blocking and tackling is even more important than it ever was, right? Because it's still the case, even AI-powered cyber attacks, more often than not, succeed because of a failure of basic cyber hygiene, right?

Rep. James Walkinshaw

a real zero trust framework at every agency, holding agencies accountable for being able to track key metrics, right? Event logging, I have bipartisan legislation on event logging, agencies by and large aren't doing it. Can they determine, do they know their meantime to detect an intrusion, their meantime to mitigate an intrusion? If we don't have those metrics, there's no way that we in Congress can determine whether our cyber posture is improving or being degraded.

Rep. James Walkinshaw

The third would be Fed Ramp.

Rep. James Walkinshaw

A few things that will be priorities and this was a priority for Congressman Connelly is wherever possible establishing reciprocity.