Weekly Roundup: June 9-13, 2025

Submitted by on Fri, 06/13/2025 - 14:55
Friday, June 13, 2025
Michael J. Keegan
Articles & insights of interest in public management & leadership for the week ending June 13, 2025

Emerging Tech

Agentic AI – Both Pros and Cons – Gets Capitol Hill Grilling. Agentic artificial intelligence services – those that are designed to act with more autonomy than their generative or predictive AI forebears – drew a mixed reception today from lawmakers and witnesses who talked about the advantages of the latest AI flavor along with cybersecurity concerns during a hearing held by the House Homeland Security Committee’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection Subcommittee.

Organizations Aren’t Ready for the Risks of Agentic AI. As companies move from narrow to generative to agentic and multi-agentic AI, the complexity of the risk landscape ramps up sharply. Existing AI risk programs need to evolve for organizations to move fast without breaking their brand and the people they impact. The good news is that organizations don’t need to solve everything at once. They need to honestly assess where they are on the complexity curve, build the capabilities required for their current stage, and create the infrastructure to evolve safely to the next.

ICE Buying Blockchain Tools From TRM, Chainalysis. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Thursday that its U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) component plans to make further investments in blockchain technology to assist in criminal investigations.

Defense & Intelligence

Pentagon Plans to Release Final SWFT Framework in July. The Department of Defense (DoD) is getting ready to launch the final version of its Software Fast Track (SWFT) framework in July, marking a significant step toward replacing outdated software acquisition processes with a faster, AI-driven system. The SWFT initiative, which the department announced earlier this year, is designed to accelerate software deployment across DoD \while improving cybersecurity and cutting red tape in the approval process.

Arrington Teases DoD ‘Mission Network as a Service’ Program. Katie Arrington, the acting chief information officer (CIO) at the Department of Defense (DoD), previewed a new program on Wednesday from the Pentagon’s tech shop called “Mission Network as a Service” that aims to enhance data interoperability across DoD components. Arrington said the coming program aligns with other recent efforts from the DoD CIO Office such as the overhaul of the DoD’s Risk Management Framework (RMF) and the launch of the Software Fast Track (SWFT) program.

White House Order Seeks to Boost Drone Integration, Smooth Military Use. On June 6, the administration signed an executive order that seeks to expand the approved use of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) – better known as drone aircraft – in United States airspace, employ AI technologies in reviews of drone applications, and smooth the way for the military to make more extensive use of drone craft.

Gabbard: AI Tools Are ‘Game Changer’; AWS Sets New ‘Secret’ Region. Artificial intelligence tools have been a “game changer” for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), with Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard saying that AI is helping the intelligence community (IC) to get after its core mission. Gabbard explained that AI is helping her office to deliver quality intelligence that’s relevant, timely, and objective to those who need it. Gabbard said her team is looking into tools that are the most effective for the IC, noting that it can “save a lot of money” if ODNI is purchasing AI tools that can be used across all 18 intelligence community elements.

Oversight

GAO: IRS Has an AI Oversight Problem With Vendor. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a new report that the Internal Revenue Services (IRS) is falling short on overseeing its identity verification vendor’s use of artificial intelligence, even as it earns high marks for protecting taxpayer data. ID.me, the IRS’s single vendor for identity verification, helps to ensure that people are who they say they are when doing business with the IRS. The GAO said that the IRS hasn’t set documented performance goals and hasn’t recorded the vendor’s use of AI to ensure it meets the agency’s AI policies. 

GAO Flags CDM Program on Guidance, Data Quality Issues. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program has made progress in meeting some of its key goals, but a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report says the program lacks sufficient guidance for managing network security and data protection. GAO made four recommendations to the Department of Homeland Security and its CISA component: issue guidance on implementing network security and data protection capabilities; address data quality issues; implement an endpoint solution; and issue updated guidance on cloud asset management.

GAO Warns DoD: Readiness at Risk Due to Acquisition, Cybersecurity Issues. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has issued a stark warning to the Department of Defense (DoD) by urging it to confront long-standing and unresolved challenges that threaten the U.S. military’s readiness and its strategic edge against global adversaries. In a June 2 letter addressed to Defense Secretary, GAO stated unequivocally that DoD has yet to fully tackle critical issues necessary to “rebuild and preserve force structure and operational effectiveness.” At the center of GAO’s concern are persistent failures in managing the Pentagon’s most expensive and technically complex weapon acquisition programs, as well as vulnerabilities created by weak cybersecurity practices. Those are issues, GAO said, that left unaddressed could compromise the U.S. military’s agility and superiority.

Leadership

You Should Be Able to Boil Your Strategy Down to a Single Clear Visualization. In this article the professors explain why visualizations are so important to the communication of strategy and describe how to create one that will win buy-in from employees and investors alike. By combining insights from research on how the brain processes information with their study of deal presentations and experiments testing people’s responses to various visual approaches, they have identified five critical design principles: Group ideas into three or four main concepts, create layers with increasing detail, use color and shading only to distinguish the layers, indicate a clear sequence of relationships among the elements, and present information horizontally.

Management

Agency Financial, Performance Report Writers get their Moment in the Spotlight. At a black-tie event, 26 federal agencies received a Certificate of Excellence in Accountability Reporting award for their fiscal 2024 reports that were determined to be complete, informative and candid. Agency financial reports aren’t known for being page turners, but Ann Ebberts, a former federal consultant and CEO of AGA, formerly known as the Association of Government Accountants, said she likes to show particularly “slick” ones to her in-laws. “It's a financial report, so it pulls all the financial information together, but it's really [answering] why does the agency exist? What are the key things they're trying to get done this year?” she said. Additionally, AGA gives out special awards that vary yearly and recognize features of individual reports. 

WH Plans to Overhaul Disaster Agency Post Hurricane Season.  Trump, who has been targeting FEMA since the start of his second term, said he wants to “wean off” the agency. “These governors can handle it. And they'll work in conjunction with other governors. They'll give each other a hand,” he said during an Oval Office briefing on hurricane and wildfire preparedness. “But the FEMA thing has not been a very successful experiment. Very, very expensive and it doesn't get the job done.” FEMA is statutorily authorized, so it’s unclear what changes the president could unilaterally make to the agency without congressional approval. Trump’s overhauls in other parts of government have faced numerous court challenges. 

FAA Nominee Pledges Safety Culture Overhaul. Bryan Bedford, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), told senators at his confirmation hearing today that he will work to overhaul the FAA’s safety culture if he is confirmed, and indicated that any move to privatize the FAA is not in the government’s near-term plans.

FedRAMP 20X Sees Speedy Pilot Timelines Through Year-End. Officials with the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) said on June 11 that they envision rapid progress through the rest of this year on several pilots that are aiming to harness automation to speed FedRAMP’s ability to approve cloud-based service offerings for government agency use.

Workforce

Job Cuts could Throw a Wrench in the IRS’s Plan to Modernize. Treasury Department leadership says they will modernize the IRS within two years, but workforce cuts, contract changes and operational uncertainty for the IRS tech team could make that difficult.

“It's unfortunately the case that for the last 35 years, we have been five years away from the IRS being modernized. We will not say that in the 36th year,” Michael Faulkender, acting IRS commissioner and deputy treasury secretary, said. “We are working to complete the vast majority of our modernization efforts in the next two-to-three years,” he said. The tax agency has already shed over 20% of its workforce since President Donald Trump took office. That includes about 2,000 technology employees, Nextgov/FCW first reported last month, as well as over 50 fired IT executives and the departure of the tax agency’s tech leadership.

THIS WEEK @ THE CENTER 

RECENT BLOGS

 ICYMI – Leveraging IT and Technology in State Governments: A Conversation with Mark Raymond, Chief Information Officer, State of Connecticut.  This week Michael Keegan welcomed Mark Raymond, CIO of the State of Connecticut to discuss his IT vision and strategy and how states are leveraging emerging technologies to meet mission.