Government-wide security clearance processes, and the half million-plus backlog in the clearance applications pipeline, made the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) High-Risk report last week as a contributing factor to the larger problem of ensuring IT security, generally. […]

OPM Office of Personnel Management
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OPM Office of Personnel Management
OPM Office of Personnel Management

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) today issued a memo rescinding previous guidance it gave to Federal agencies to enforce certain provisions of three executive orders (EO) issued by President Trump regarding the Federal workforce, after those provisions were deemed unlawful by a U.S. District Court Judge last Saturday. […]

Charles Phalen, director of the National Background Investigations Bureau (NBIB), said today at an event hosted by NextGov and Equifax that he supports a proposal in the President’s government reform and reorganization plan to move NBIB “in its entirety from the Office of Personnel Management into the Department of Defense.” […]

While some aspects of the Trump administration’s government agency reorganization proposal released in June have flown into moderate headwinds in Congress over jurisdictional and workforce issues, the proposal found a friendlier–if still somewhat cautious–audience at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committees’ subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs and Federal Management Thursday. […]

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee (OGR) on Tuesday approved by voice vote a bill which would allow Federal agency heads to limit access to certain websites or deploy cybersecurity measures if they feel that it is necessary to secure their IT systems, but not before strong vocal dissent about the scope of the legislation. […]

Department of Justice Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd said Monday in a letter to Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., that DoJ reached a premature conclusion in stating that stolen personal information used in a credit fraud case in Virginia was acquired from the 2015 Office of Personnel Management (OPM) data breach. […]

Federal agencies are expected to begin implementing new enforcement policies today related to President Trump’s three workforce executive orders (EO) signed on May 25. […]

cyber workforce

The current cybersecurity workforce shortage in the United States is daunting and only due to get worse over the next few years, the Departments of Commerce (DoC) and Homeland Security (DHS) reported to President Trump in a document released Wednesday. […]

The Office of Personnel Management released the Federal Human Capital Business Reference Model (HCBRM), a tool that establishes a common human resource (HR) experience for Federal employees across agencies. The HCBRM provides a simplified view of operational functions and policy ownership and a common structure intended to align HR operations, finance, and acquisition. […]

Jeff T.H. Pon, the nominee for director of the Office of Personnel Management, said that his top priority for the agency will be IT modernization. “Outside of work, Federal employees are able to access nearly any piece of information they need, from their bank accounts to student loans to car insurance, all on their phone,” he said. “We need to work toward providing the employees of the Federal government with the same conveniences with regards to their employment within the Federal government, with appropriate attention to information security.” […]

The Office of Personnel Management named David Garcia its new chief information officer, agency officials confirmed to MeriTalk. Garcia started at OPM on Oct. 2. Garcia has also served as the chief of information technology for the State of Maryland and secretary of the Department of Information Technology (DoIT) from 2015 to 2017. Garcia oversaw […]

The Federal government is working on improving its inter-agency information sharing process during cyber threats, but Greg Touhill, former Federal CISO, said that information sharing is useless if recipients of the information don’t act on it. “You can share all day long but if people aren’t listening and they aren’t acting on it, bad things are going to happen,” Touhill, president of Cyxtera Federal Group, said at the AFCEA Homeland Security Conference on Sept. 12. […]

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