More than a quarter of the federal workforce is feeling burnout, according to a recent study, making them more likely to leave their agency or feel less engaged in their work.

A recent Gallup study of more than 5,400 survey respondents finds 26% of federal employees say they “very often” or “always” feel burned out at work.

Rob DeSimone, associate principal of workplace initiatives at Gallup, says that level of burnout can lead to high attrition rates.

“When people are burned out, they’re much, much more likely to leave their agency,” DeSimone said.

The study also finds a high attrition rate can also lead to higher labor costs. Gallup estimates that in an agency of 10,000 employees, with an average salary of $50,000, low engagement contributes to $66 million in annual costs.

Gallup bases those figures on research from the Society for Human Resources Management, which shows it costs six-to-nine months of most employees’ salary to replace them — and that the cost is even higher for more senior-level vacancies.

Mike Ritz, executive director of Gallup’s Federal Government Initiative, said these costs also stem from burned-out employees feeling less productive and less engaged with their work.

“When you become actively disengaged, when you’re a person that literally feels miserable at their job, and you are disconnecting from your job, let’s face it, you might even take down the ship, if you had the opportunity — because you have that much contempt for the employer that they’re not meeting your needs,” Ritz said.

No ‘silver bullet’ solutions

The study takes a closer look at some of the federal employee stressors that agencies have anecdotally observed, but not fully quantified.

The Department of Veterans Affairs, for example, is addressing burnout among its health care workforce through its REBOOT task force. The VA, more recently, is looking at artificial intelligence tools to reduce administrative burdens on clinicians — a driver of burnout.

The Partnership for Public Service is also tracking a steady decline in work-life balance scores from federal employees, as measured by its Best Places to Work in the Federal Government rankings.

Ritz said there are no “silver bullet” solutions to address burnout across the entire federal workforce. But Gallup identified five root causes of these challenges — unfair treatment at work, unmanageable workloads, unclear communication from managers, lack of manager support and unreasonable time pressure.

“It seems like the more we learn, the more we realize that it’s very individual for each person, and what works for one might not work for another. So, this idea of, ‘Let’s just give everybody time off, that’ll work’ — well, that might work for some, but not for others,” he said.

The study also finds that employees sometimes cope with burnout in ways that only exacerbate the problem.

“[If] you’re a person that really is a high achiever — you like to [be] task-driven, and really achieve your tasks and get things done — a natural coping mechanism, when you’re feeling burned out is, ‘Let me just do more. Let me get to it faster’ … If those executing folks would stop and take their time to think through their situation, stop and pause, think through the situation there, they will reduce their burnout by 48%,” Ritz said.

Role of managers contributing to burnout

Management behavior plays a major role in a federal employee’s workplace experience. Gallup finds managers account for about 70% of their team’s engagement scores. The study also finds managers experience burnout at a higher rate (35%) than the federal employees they oversee (23%).

“If managers are burned out, that’s flowing down to all the employees within the agency,” Ritz said. “It’s the manager that can be the one that can help prevent and reverse burnout among the team, while also increasing productivity —  and that requires a very individualized approach to understand how can we manage workloads. How can we manage prioritization, alongside what the wellbeing of the team is, alongside what some of the pressures are coming from whatever the performance initiatives are? It’s really the manager that has that ability to juggle those three things.”

Jay Hoffman, chief financial officer for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, agreed that managers play a major role in combatting burnout within agencies.

“When managers are engaged, their employees are more likely to be engaged as well,” Hoffman said.

Effective managers also help employees manage workloads and communicate clear expectations. Gallup found that about 42% of federal employees said they know what’s expected of them at work.

“What that’s really saying is that managers themselves, oftentimes, might lack clarity — not so much about what it is they have to do — they’re usually very clear about that,” DeSimone said. “They might not know, ‘What are the relationships that I need in this organization? Who do I need to be collaborating with in order to achieve our bigger goal?’ And for some organizations, they may not even know what their bigger goal is, or where exactly they fit in.”

Gallup’s research into employee burnout also finds that the way people experience their workloads has a stronger influence on burnout than the number of hours worked.

“In the federal government, there are a lot of empty seats right now. A lot of folks have gone elsewhere, for a variety of different reasons. And of course, talent is at a premium across all sectors and industries,” Ritz said. “So, if you’re already feeling like your workload is tough, and then the guy next to you is no longer there, and the guy to your right is gone … did my workload just get even tougher? Who’s helping me manage that? Who’s the person that is having that strong influence of how I experienced that workload?”

A ‘game-changer’ for burnout? Meaningful conversations

Ritz said managers who have one “meaningful conversation” with an employee who reports to them at least once a week are a “game-changer” for burnout. That conversation can take as little as 15-30 minutes.

“It needs to be a conversation that talks about their goals, their personal development, things that have meaning to that person that is reporting up to that manager. And that can make a massive impact,” Ritz said.

James Egbert, branch chief for human capital strategy at the Department of Health and Human Services, meaningful one-on-one conversations with employees can make a huge difference in employee engagement.

“I’ve learned that if you want to improve employee engagement, you must engage with your people. Listen, ask and listen some more,” Egbert said.

Ritz said employees who strongly agree that their employer cares about their overall wellbeing are three times more engaged, and 71% less likely to report feeling burnout.

DeSimone the most important thing managers can do to address burnout is to provide “meaningful feedback.” That feedback, he added, is valuable for managers to give their supervisors, as well as the employees they oversee.

“Employees don’t want to wait three months or wait 12 months to figure out in their performance review what their mistakes are. They want to know, that minute, if not that day. They want to know, what did I do right? And also, what are my areas for improvement? They want to hear both,” DeSimone said.

The study finds that engaged federal employees are not just more productive — they’re also more likely to stay at their agencies.

“If you have somebody that is fully engaged, then you need 20% more in terms of higher pay, in order for that person to want to leave their current job. But if you have somebody who’s not engaged, then they’ll leave for a 0% increase,” DeSimone said. “They’re just looking for a better environment, and you can send it their way. They’re looking to be alleviated from that burnout situation they find themselves in.”

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Don Bauer, the chief technology officer of the State Department’s Bureau of Global Talent Management, said last month that the department recently obtained an Authority to Operate (ATO) to use AI on sensitive internal data.

“We’re literally looking at the next steps of how do we now leverage internal information and start making decisions that way,” Bauer said Feb. 29 during a Federal News Network-moderated panel at ATARC’s AI Summit in Reston, Virginia.

Before President Joe Biden’s sweeping executive order on AI in government last October,  agencies such as the Department of the Navy, General Services Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency had put limits on how their staffs could use generative AI tools in the workplace.

But Bauer said the State Department is taking a closer look at what generative AI means for its mission.

“The ability to summarize and pull data from multiple sources, and do a lot of information gathering really resonates with the diplomatic community,” Bauer said. “The State Department’s been very much forward-leaning on just telling everyone, ‘Go out and get an account and get familiar with the technology. Just make sure you don’t put any sensitive information into it.’”

The bureau is looking at generative AI to help develop career paths for State Department employees.

“We have a demonstration project to extract skills from resumes and start building out pipelines for civil servants, as far as career progression,” Bauer said. “If I identify a career path for you, then I’m using publicly available position descriptions, extracting those out, and then building up the ability for you to recognize skills you need. Then we’re going to tie that with our learning management system, so we can actually say, ‘If you want to be this person, here’s the skills you need and here’s how you can go get trained.'”

Along with this culture of experimentation, Bauer said the State Department is prioritizing workforce training around AI.

“We need training, we need to have a common understanding of what AI is to the organization,” he added.

Generative AI ‘on guardrails’ at DOE

Bridget Carper, the Energy Department’s deputy CIO for architecture, engineering, technology and innovation, and its responsible AI official, said the department is giving employees a sandbox environment to experiment with generative AI.

“We actually took the initial stance of, ‘Oh, ChatGPT, we’re going to block it.’ Then, we realized that everyone was just doing it on their personal computer. So, then we started putting in guardrails,” Carper said. “Now we’re going in it with the education aspects, or doing training across the board,” Carper said.

Carper said DOE is currently using AI for enhanced cybersecurity, and to improve the customer experience of individuals and organizations applying for federal grants.

“We were fortunate enough to have funding to be able to provide to different communities, but how do they access that? Most people don’t have the time to go through the different sites — is it EPA? Is it IRS, to be able to obtain that information? So we’re using AI to help put that out there, to make it more readily accessible for users.”

‘You have to have good data’

Bauer said the rise of AI use cases puts increased pressure on agencies to improve their data maturity.

“I’m under tremendous pressure for very accurate HR data — whether it’s positions , whether it’s where people are assigned, how the department moves around at large.

“We’re looking at opportunities, for use cases, around using AI to help us find bad data and clean it up,” he said. “When you have somebody that retires after 30 years and retirement tells them you’re in the wrong retirement code, and you owe the government $25,000 before you can leave — you say, ‘Well, how can that happen? It should be really easy to root those things out.’ But there’s so many different legal authorities and combinations of information that  human beings could probably do it, but we’re really honing in on the ability to actually start looking at that as a data cleanup exercise,  because we’re all under pressure now to have these very very robust data models that decision makers are all wanting. Everything’s decision data driven now, so you have to have good data.”

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The Agriculture Department is on a mission to make its workforce more data savvy.

That’s a key focus of its Data Science Training Program, and a key element of a department-wide data strategy released last year.

Chris Rottler, the chief data officer of the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), said the Data Science Training Program started as a pilot three years ago, with about 20 employees.

FNS launched the training program following a departmentwide data skills assessment. The assessment flagged skills gaps across USDA, and that the department needed to train its data workforce in open-source languages like R and Python.

In response to the assessment, Rottler said FNS developed custom training on how to utilize USDA’s suite of data science tools on the department’s Enterprise Data Analytics Platform (EDAP)

Rottler said his team developed a custom curriculum that gave employees hands-on training to use USDA data in the EDAP platform.

The training program started with 20 employees in its first year, but soon spread to other agencies within USDA. Now in its third year, the program has 160 employees.

“The program itself has become a major component of not just FNS’, but USDA’s upskilling strategy, because it’s working and there’s a huge demand to participate from across USDA,” Rottler said on a recent episode of All About Data. 

The training program now offers a beginner’s track, an intermediate track and an advanced track. Fredy Diaz said USDA employees also recently heard from experts talking about generative AI and its potential use within USDA.

“Programs like the USDA Data Science Training Program are really a key spotlight of what we can do if we work together, and really boost everyone together from a workforce perspective,” Diaz said.

Building up USDA’s data and analytics workforce is a key feature of the department’s FY 2024-2027 data strategy.  It’s the second enterprise data strategy of its kind at USDA.

“The first one, it was more about getting programs stood up, ensuring that we understood the value of data at USDA, and really building on that. Now that we have a lot of accomplishments and successes, it’s more about building on that and continuing that level of success and maturity,” Diaz said.

CDOs across the department are also working with USDA’s Digital Service, a recently created office focused on improving customer experiences.

Diaz said CDOs are working with USDA Digital Service, and its executive director Arianne Gallagher-Welcher, on ways to recruit, hire and develop the department’s IT workforce.

“We’ve partnered with her and her group, to see where we can find opportunities to really boost up the data and IT workforce together, where there are opportunities for collaboration and partnership, where there are opportunities just to pull resources together,” Diaz said.

The USDA Digital Service, he added, has launched a fellows program to bring IT and data experts into the agency

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It’s a full-time job making sure that sensitive information on federal employees and retirees gets to the right people at the right time, without falling into the wrong hands.

But that data privacy work is only going to get more complicated, as the federal government ramps up its use of artificial intelligence tools.

Kirsten Moncada, OPM’s chief privacy officer and a longtime federal privacy expert, said the rise of AI tools in government is sure to create more work for privacy officials across the government.

“The impact of AI on privacy and all information management work is huge. And it’s obviously only going to get bigger, because AI runs on data. And just as with any other kind of application, we have to ensure that we are using and processing that data in a way that’s fair and protects an individual’s privacy,” Moncada said in a recent interview.

President Joe Biden, in his AI executive order last October, called on the federal government to step up its use of this emerging technology — but also called on agencies to put guardrails in place that protect privacy and civil liberties.

“Artificial Intelligence is making it easier to extract, re-identify, link, infer, and act on sensitive information about people’s identities, locations, habits, and desires,” the executive order states. “Artificial Intelligence’s capabilities in these areas can increase the risk that personal data could be exploited and exposed.”

To combat this risk, the executive order directs agencies to ensure that the collection, use, and retention of data is “lawful, is secure, and mitigates privacy and confidentiality risks.”

Moncada, a career federal employee with more than 30 years of service, said the rise of AI will create more work for chief privacy officers in ways that may echo other tech innovations over the past few decades. But, in some cases, AI may introduce new and novel challenges.

“Boons in tech and data capabilities have always historically brought more work for privacy professionals,” Moncada said, adding that the rise of the federal government using computers in the 1970s gave rise to the 1974 Privacy Act. “AI is so new still, there will be new things, but we just don’t know yet even what they all are,” she added.

Federal privacy officials saw a similar spike in their work amid the dawn of the internet age in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

“We have a tech thing, and then it kind of levels off. Then something else happens. Now with AI, we might be on a constant, going straight up, in terms of increased work and complexity, but it’s really bringing that same privacy philosophy and analysis to a new application or environment,” Moncada said.

Before joining OPM last September, Moncada served as the privacy branch chief at the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) and served as chairwoman of the Federal Privacy Council.

Moncada said the council, which works with other interagency groups like the Federal Chief Information Officers Council and the Federal Chief Data Officers Council, is working to unpack the challenges and opportunities of technology like AI.

“We have to have data to do our job. And of course, now that we have increased data capabilities, we can really extract more value from the data. But, of course, we still have to comply with law and policy and be fair in our use, and ensure that we maintain the public trust in how we’re handling especially personally identifiable information.”

Moncada said bringing all of these groups together is essential to strike the right balance between easily sharing data between agencies, while making sure those data-sharing efforts meet legal privacy requirements.

“Sometimes I think people are worried that if we bring in privacy, they’re going to tell us we can’t do something. And what we really try to strive for is to say, ‘Well, yes, of course, if the law says you can’t do something, you can’t do something.’ But more often than not, it’s not ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ it’s, ‘Here’s how to do it in a way that is fair, and that preserves privacy, but that still allows you to gain value and innovate while protecting the people that we’re all here to serve.”

Moncada also served as the executive director at the Social Security Administration’s Office of Privacy and Disclosure, and as the first director of the Justice Department’s Office of Privacy and Civil Liberties.

“At the heart of it, what we as federal privacy professionals really see our work being is about ensuring trust in government, preserving the trust of the people we serve,” Moncada said.

OPM and the federal government more broadly, have doubled down their cybersecurity and data privacy efforts since 2015, when the agency suffered a major data breach.

The OPM data compromised the personally identifiable information (PII) of approximately 22 million current and former federal employees and job applicants.

A federal judge in October 2022 finalized a $63 million settlement for individuals affected by the OPM data breach.

“It’s really imperative that privacy and security officials work close together. And I’m really delighted to say that here at OPM, our privacy and security teams are very closely aligned and very in lockstep, working together. And that’s a great thing,” Moncada said.

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The Commerce Department serves as one of the country’s biggest data hubs, and drives decision-making across government and industry.

But the department, amid rapid changes in emerging technology, is looking to evolve its data mission and will spend much of 2024 drafting an enterprise data strategy.

Commerce Chief Data Officer Oliver Wise said the department expects to release the strategy in fall 2024, which will focus on five “cross-bureau” priority areas for data maturity.

“We have some of the most data-mature organizations in the world, and every American should be incredibly proud of the amazing work happening at places like [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration], Census and beyond,” Wise said in a recent interview. “But when it comes to the connective tissue of those data siloes, we’re really quite weak, and it’s very hard for our practitioners working bureaus to work collaboratively toward some shared purpose.”

Among its goals, the data strategy will accelerate some of the work that’s already happening at Commerce’s component agencies. It’ll also look at ways to improve inter-agency data sharing and coordination.

“What we’re going to do in our data strategy is very deliberatively look not just at the boxes in the org chart, but at the white space in the org chart too,” Wise said.

Wise said the draft data strategy directs Commerce to strengthen American competitiveness in emerging technologies. That includes bolstering the domestic supply chain for semiconductors under the CHIPS and Science Act and accelerating National Institute of Standards and Technology’s work on emerging technologies.

The strategy will also address strategic competition with China and staying ahead of a global arms race around artificial intelligence.

“The domains of that competition are not just military and diplomatic, but principally economic and will come down to technological innovation, and whoever [out-]innovates the other will dominate in the 21^st century and beyond,” Wise said. “You’d better believe it that our competitors are leveraging data.”

The upcoming data strategy will also have Commerce refocus its efforts on community development — using data to make informed decisions about investments that will benefit urban and rural populations across the U.S.

“From a database perspective, that means being able to have sufficient geospatial capacity, in order to see it all together in one place on a map,” Wise said.

Commerce will spend much of the upcoming year understanding how its massive data inventories can improve climate resilience. Wise said that will require going beyond weather data collected by NOAA.

“We also have unparallel demographic and economic data at Census, but we need to work to make those data more interoperable, so that we can not just make good climate projections, but understand what it means in terms of community resiliency,” he said.

The data strategy will also direct Commerce to use its data to accelerate the use of AI in and out of government.

President Joe Biden signed a sweeping executive order in November, calling on agencies to step up their use of AI tools.

“We’re not ready for AI until our data is. And then, in order to have safe, accountable, responsible AI, we need to have a very good handle on our data. The data has to be well documented and enriched with the proper metadata,” Wise said.

Commerce will also focus its data strategy on improved HR analytics, and using data to support long-term workforce planning decisions.

“We’re are people-based organization. If we’re going to be competitive in the future, we’ve got to be able to answer questions, like what are our human capital needs over the next five, 10, 15, 20 years? And we need to have a much more coordinated approach to understanding our existing talent and our needs over time, and what the likely supply of labor will be,” Wise said.

Commerce has always relied on data to meet its mission. A NOAA warehouse in Asheville, North Carolina holds century-old paper records of some of the earliest meteorological data ever recorded in the U.S.

But Commerce is taking steps to ensure its data keeps up with public demand and the adoption of generative AI tools and large-language models.

“We’re now on this hockey-stick curve of technology innovation, and we’re thinking long and hard at the Department of Commerce of how we use those technologies to further our data democratization goals,” Wise said.

As part of this effort, a new working group of Commerce AI and data management experts is focused on publishing the department’s data set in machine-readable formats. The working group is also making data sets “machine-understandable,” so that AI models and web crawlers can identify Commerce data sets as authoritative.

“We are publishing our data in ways so that users of these technologies can reliably use them to derive insights about the world around them from our data. That is a major priority of ours,” Wise said.

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Mariel Santa Cruz |

NASA’s Artemis mission will bring U.S. astronauts back to the moon’s surface more than 50 years after its last trip, the 1972 Apollo 17 mission. The agency expects a crewed moon landing mission will occur in 2025.

NASA Chief Data Officer David Salvagnini said the Artemis mission depends on the agency’s wealth of scientific data — including data from the Apollo missions more than a half-century ago.

“Data fuels everything we do. Data fuels scientific research. It fuels all of our open science initiative work … It fuels all of our missions, from a risk mitigation perspective, and from a program development perspective,” Salvagnini said in an interview. “So we are a very data-centric organization by default.”

To prepare for this historic mission, NASA is pursuing advanced communications technology for space-based system technologies that will allow it to move more data more rapidly.

Salvagnini said these technologies will increase bandwidth by “orders of magnitude,” which the agency will need, as improved sensor technology leads to higher-resolution images and larger data files.

“NASA is always looking at ways to further its exploration by being able to harness some of the data that becomes available to us through these various sophisticated sensors that are deployed, not only in space, but also on Earth,” he said.

NASA, as part of this mission, will establish an Artemis Base Camp on the surface of the moon, and a “Gateway” spaceship that will remain in lunar orbit for more than a decade.

“With a persistent presence on the moon, and with a station in orbit around the moon, there’ll be a lot of data there as well,” Salvagnini said. “Those platforms become a way in which we can relay information in an efficient manner, from deep space-based sensors back to Earth for analysis.”

Salvagnini, who joined NASA in June, said one of his key priorities is improved data sharing across the organization.

“Part of sharing is really discovery. So if an officer at NASA is looking to do work, they’ve got to be able to discover data before they can even expect it to be shared with them,” he said.

Part of this work started when the White House Office of Science and Technology set 2023 up as the “Year of Open Science,” an interagency effort to make federal data and research more available to the public.

Salvagnini said NASA, under the Year of Open Science effort, is focused on creating a “share-first” culture around data —as opposed to limiting access by default. That effort includes breaking down some of the barriers to access that may fall along organizational or mission lines.

“I think there’s a human tendency by some to see the value of the data that they have, and for a number of reasons, not necessarily think to make it available to all and or share that data more widely,” he said.

Salvagnini said NASA, as part of this effort, is working with “citizen scientists” to contribute to some of its work.

“NASA realized that we’ve got amazing intellectual capacity within this organization. But our ability to solve problems internally is quite advanced. But it’s even better if we share some of the problems that we have more broadly. And we solicit the thoughts from external contributors,” he said.

Some of the concerns around sharing data more widely include the risk of data being misused and misinterpreted outside the program office or project that’s managing the data.

“This one, in particular, is a challenge with some of the very sophisticated datasets that we hold where, unless you’re a specialist in a particular field, you may not be able to interpret the data in a way that’s accurate. As such, you could arrive at a faulty conclusion,” Salvagnini said.

Salvagnini said he’s looking at creating a “top-tier search capability” that would give NASA employees the ability to search for data across multiple systems.

“So basically, [it’s] a single point of entry for a search that is able to cast a broad net across all the holdings at NASA, and tap all those indexes of information that we have, and bring results back,” he said.

Salvagnini said NASA is also in talks with hyperscale computing vendors to ensure the agency has the cloud infrastructure necessary to support its data.

“We are a very data-centric organization by default. Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t opportunities for us to mature. And that’s exactly where I’m focused on — looking at those opportunities, and then figuring out okay, ‘How do we advance the ball for NASA?’” he said.

Salvagnini joined NASA in June 2023, but has held several roles in the federal government since 2005. Among those positions, he previously served as CDO at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“As you can imagine, the mission at NASA is quite different than the mission in the intelligence community. Also, the public-facing role of NASA is quite different than what I’m used to in the intelligence community. And quite candidly, I have thoroughly enjoyed the switch,” Salvagnini said.

Salvagnini isn’t alone in keeping NASA’s data modernized to keep pace with its mission. NASA also has its Data Stewardship Community of Practice, which predates his tenure at the agency.

“More momentum is growing around that group, but that’s organic. That is people seeing a need, seeing a gap and working together to solve a problem,” he said.

NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in April 2021 also named Kevin Murphy as its first chief science officer.

“There’s organizations that are standing up data governance. They’re doing it not because I said they have to stand up data governance. They’re doing it because they see value in doing so. They’re seeing that they have to govern their data, because they do see their data as an asset, and they see the value that it holds,” Salvagnini said.

Salvagnini said “undeclared data heroes across NASA” are also helping NASA to advance its data mission.

“That’s those people who have a data role. And they don’t necessarily identify with that data role. But they are doing all the work that a CDO or data steward or any number of other data practitioners might do, just because they know that it has to be done,” he said. “They see the need, and they’re rolling up their sleeves, and they’re taking care of things for that particular organization.”

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The Department of Veterans Affairs is looking at artificial intelligence tools to accelerate its work reducing burnout among its health care workforce.

The VA, through an AI Tech Sprint it launched Tuesday on Challenge.gov, is calling on technologists to develop tools that will allow clinicians to spend less time with paperwork, and more time treating patients.

The department is specifically looking at AI dictation tools that will help clinicians take notes during medical appointments, as well as AI tools that can help analyze and summarize patients’ medical records.

Tech teams have until Jan. 5, 2024, to participate in the AI Tech Sprint.  The VA will award a total of $1 million to winning teams.

Gil Alterovitz, the director of VA’s National Artificial Intelligence Institute, said the VA is looking at how it can use AI to make sure its clinicians have access to a veteran’s full medical history, even if that veteran has received care outside the VA medical system.

“We want to make sure that when they come back to the VA system, they’re able to make use of that information,” Alterovitz said. “And right now, that information may arrive as faxes, may arrive as images in a way that is not ready for easy searches and easy analysis by the provider.”

Under Secretary for Health Shereef Elnahal said in a statement that solutions from the AI Tech Sprint will reduce burnout among clinicians and improve veteran health care.

“AI solutions can help us reduce the time that clinicians spend on non-clinical work, which will get our teams doing more of what they love most: caring for Veterans,” Elnahal said.

The VA is launching the AI Tech Sprint as part of the executive order President Joe Biden signed Monday, calling for a “governmentwide AI talent surge” across the federal workforce to build up its capacity to lead on this emerging technology.

The AI Tech Sprint is expected to further the work of the Reduce Employee Burnout and Optimize Organizational Thriving (REBOOT) Task Force that the Veterans Health Administration launched last year.

The task force is developing tools to address clinician burnout, based on feedback from frontline VA health care workers.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough recently told reporters he credited the work of the REBOOT task force with helping VHA exceed its FY 2023 hiring goals and reduce turnover to levels not seen since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Top members of the REBOOT task force see AI tools as an opportunity to further reduce burnout.

Kavitha Reddy, the associate director of employee whole health in VHA’s Office of Patient-Centered Care and Cultural Transformation, said in an interview that paperwork is a “real burden” for health care providers, and that AI has the potential to ease that burden.

“We’re all looking forward to understanding how that might be able to decrease how much time we’re spending in front of a computer, and thereby allowing us more time to sit and talk with veterans and learn more about them,” Reddy said.

Jessica Bonjorni, VHA’s chief of human capital management, said the REBOOT task force is coming up with ways to reduce retention and burnout, based on what the agency is hearing from frontline employees.

“We know that a lot of things in the HR space tend to impact employee burnout,” Bonjorni said. “One of the key things [is] making sure we have enough staff to handle the workload.”

VHA more than doubled its workforce growth targets for FY 2023. It also saw a 20% decrease in the turnover rate among VHA employees, compared to the previous year.

“The numbers are really, really encouraging to see the growth,”  Reddy said. “Once somebody is hired in, the important piece is what are we doing to retain them and keep them here.”

The REBOOT task force is developing solutions based on what it hears from about 30 chief well-being officers stationed across VA health care facilities.

“Their goal is to look specifically at what are the drivers of burnout in their day-to-day work,” Reddy said.

Chief well-being officers listen to frontline employees, then sort through that feedback with facility management and come up with ways to put these ideas and suggestions into practice.

“They absolutely are developing relationships across their facility, trying to learn not just from the service chiefs, but the frontline employees themselves. What are those ‘pebbles in your shoes?’ What are those things that are getting in the way of you having fulfillment in the work that you do every day?” Reddy said.

VHA, based on employee feedback, is offering more flexible work schedules to VA clinicians, particularly nurses.

Bonjorni said VHA is allowing some registered nurses to work a “72 for 80” schedule. Under this system, nurses work three 12-hour shifts each week – for a total of 72 hours per two-week pay period.

Nurses working this schedule are paid the same as if they worked a more traditional eight-hour shift five days a week.

Bonjorni said this new way of scheduling reflects some of the best practices in private health care organizations.

“That really tends to, from the feedback we’ve gotten from our employees, improve their experience of burnout, because they have more time to spend with their families,” Bonjorni said.

Bonjorni said VA facilities implementing these new schedules are seeing a reduction in turnover, which contributes to overall cost savings.

Reddy said the REBOOT task force is promoting flexible scheduling, as more employers explore alternatives to the traditional five-day workweek.

“Often there are some myths about whether somebody can be productive, or meet the needs of their colleagues or patients that they’re taking care of. And what we’ve seen, coming through the pandemic, is that people can, in fact, be very productive with flexible schedules,” she said.

The REBOOT task force, based on feedback from frontline VA health care workers, is also streamlining mandatory training.

“When you work in the federal government for a long time, there’s some training that you have to take every single year. And what we’re looking for is to make sure that we are offering options for evaluating the knowledge that people already have, so that they can go ahead and perhaps take a test and confirm each year that they understand the fundamentals of that required training. And then they wouldn’t need to sit through an hour-long training to reinforce that same information,” Bonjorni said.

The post VA launches AI Tech Sprint to reduce burnout among health care employees first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Navy is putting artificial intelligence into practice through low-risk, but high-reward test cases.

That includes the launch of its first conversational AI program, called Amelia, to answer thousands of help-desk requests in less than a minute. That frees up its IT personnel to handle more pressing matters.

Nathan Hagan, deputy data officer at the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, said Amelia allows the Navy to answer thousands of help desk tickets in under 45 seconds, with only about 15 employees staffing the help desk.

“The value of that, is it allows us to perform a really important business function, keep it at a manageable scale, and then invest those resources that are saved, as a result of that … do something that is more pressing to the Chief of Naval Operations’ needs. In almost all cases, when I say something more pressing, I mean saving lives, shooting a weapon, to have an impact in the battlespace so that our sailors are safe,” Hagan said Oct. 13 during a recent Federal News Network-moderated panel discussion at AFCEA NOVA’s Navy IT Day event.

Amelia is a conversational AI, and uses natural language processing to understand the words that are being said. But Amelia doesn’t rely on training data beyond the Navy.

“Amelia only knows what it’s told to know … It’s a safe use case that we can leverage across the Navy,” Hagan said.

Duncan McCaskill, acting chief data officer for the Department of the Navy, said the department is also prioritizing steps to make its data a strategic asset.

“The challenge that we have is trying to identify what is of the highest value. And for that, we need to be talking to those mission and business elements that have those use cases. And then, being able to aggregate across all those use cases and understand this particular piece of data is going to be very high value … That’s something that we need to modernize to be able to get data out at speed at scale,” McCaskill said.

Hagan said the Navy faces a clear goal to have all its data characterized and cataloged by the end of fiscal 2026.

“We know that’s our target … Our thesis is that if we provide data in an organized fashion, that is well governed and made accessible, the algorithms, from an AI perspective, that are really tied to use cases, will then be able to tap into that well-structured data governance model, and pull the data they need to train appropriately and then move forward,” Hagan said.

The department is looking at AI as a tool to potentially accelerate the tagging and sorting of its data.

McCaskill said making full use of the data the Department of the Navy already has is critical to maintaining an information advantage against adversaries.

“That legacy data is really, really, really important. And if we don’t think that all of our adversaries are going back and looking through everything that they have over decades, all the things that they have on us, we should be doing those types of things for ourselves –looking back at all the data that we have, being able to go back and mark it at speed and at scale, understand what those data objects are, is critically important,” McCaskill said.

The post Navy putting AI into practice through low-risk, high-reward uses first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Department of Homeland Security is looking to become one of the “early and aggressive adopters” of AI tools within the federal government, and is taking steps to protect critical infrastructure from AI-powered cyber attacks.

Defense and national security community officials, speaking Wednesday at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT)’s  AI DC conference in Arlington, Virginia, said their agencies see AI as an essential way to maintain an information advantage against malicious actors.

Robert Silvers, DHS undersecretary for policy, said that DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is setting the department’s own priority areas for AI. Those priorities are meant to align with what the Biden administration has planned for an upcoming executive order on AI.

“One is we should be early and aggressive adopters of the technology,” Silvers said. “We should also be at the vanguard of establishing rules for responsible and ethical and safe use for our own programs.”

Silvers told Federal News Network on the sidelines of the conference that AI tools have served a critical role in advancing DHS’ mission, and that the department is looking at new opportunities to benefit from the technology.

“When you think about how it can be used for our security mission — from detecting and interdicting fentanyl, to streamlined and safer airport security screening — there’s tremendous promise, and we’re going to lean into that,” Silvers said.

DHS, Silvers told the conference audience, is also working on guidance to critical infrastructure companies on the “safe and secure deployment of AI technology” in critical infrastructure operations.

“There’s tremendous promise, as you deploy AI to operate the grid — water supply, hospital systems, financial markets — you’re going to want to make sure, though, that that is done in a safe and secure way. That if things fail, it happens safely, not catastrophically, that you have adequate auditing and testing, that you give due consideration to when should certain kinds of decisions be made with a human in the loop, for example,” Silvers told Federal News Network. “And so, we’re going to also be aggressively pushing guidance out to owners and operators across the country to make sure that they can embrace this really promising amazing technology which we should all celebrate, and do it in a safe and secure way.”

DHS is benefiting from the opportunities of AI, but guarding against emerging challenges.  Silvers said that AI has had a “stronger impact, to date, on network defense than offense.”

“We haven’t seen sort of catastrophic cyber attacks land that used AI – at least not yet, or that we’re aware of. And so, we’re going to see this is going to develop fast. But let’s not be “pollyannish” about this, there’s going to be adversarial use, for sure,” Silvers said during the conference.

Silvers told Federal News Network that AI is going be used by network defenders and offensive actors alike, and DHS knows that malicious actors are already experimenting with it.

“I often get asked, ‘Who is this going to advantage more, the cyber defenders or the cyber offensive actors?’ and the jury’s still out on that. But to date, we’ve seen incredible use for defensive use, including finding vulnerabilities, scanning code and other things,” Silvers told Federal News Network “And we’re really going to be focused on how we can work with the network defense community to gain all that. We’re also very closely monitoring and trying to model out potential adversarial use.”

DHS is also partnering with AI companies to understand the capabilities of this emerging technology, as well as its limitations.

“We really have to be humble in the government about our level of understanding of this technology. It’s super complex, it’s super nuanced. Talent is at a premium, and we’re fighting for talent. Companies are fighting for talent,” Silvers said. “It will only succeed if we are literally shoulder-to-shoulder with the frontier technology companies that are developing the technology, and then also the critical infrastructure companies that are our end-customers, and putting that technology into operation. We have to be developing this together with their input to do this well.”

DHS is also setting new rules of the road for its internal use of AI tools. The department last month released a new set of policies to govern its own use of AI technologies.

“That’s all going to be at the forefront, so that as we embrace the benefits, we ensure that we’re protecting civil rights, civil liberties and privacy,” Silvers told Federal News Network.

Army Cyber Center of Excellence sees AI as key to ‘better, faster, cheaper’ decisions

The Army’s Cyber Center of Excellence also sees AI as a net positive for its cybersecurity mission.

Col. John Agnello, the director of information advantage, for the Army’s Cyber Center of Excellence, said the service is looking at the potential of AI to make critical decisions “better, faster, cheaper.”

“We want our data to be faster and more accurate than our adversaries, so we can have some type of information advantage versus our adversaries. And what we’re looking at is how do you use AI for that, and I think that that type of neural network is really where we’re going to use it,” Agnello told Federal News Network at the conference.

Agnello said the Army, much like DHS, is using AI on low-risk tasks, like supporting personnel on continuing monitoring to detect emerging cyber threats.

“Continuous monitoring to help defend and cyber hygiene, it’s low threat. So how can we use AI, where it’s a little more simple, and you don’t have a major threat associated with it?” he said.

While AI has the potential to serve as a force multiplier for the cybersecurity workforce, Agnello said there is a “human in the loop” to make key decisions.

“The bottom line is that we use AI to do those more menial tasks, which allow a human to actually be that button-pusher, whatever that button-pushing may be. It may be something from defending a network, to sending a tweet, to dropping a bomb. It can be anything from that full spectrum there. AI really helps us make a decision, but still, the human has to be the one [and] the commander has to be the one to make that overall decision,” Agnello said.

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The Postal Regulatory Commission prioritized new hires and tech upgrades in its fiscal 2024 budget request to increase its capacity, after launching a public inquiry into USPS plans to overhaul its network of mail processing and delivery facilities across the country.

But it’s not getting everything it asked for, now that the USPS Board of Governors approves its spending, not Congress.

It’s not unusual for an agency to get less funding than it asks for, but the PRC is getting its funding from USPS at a time when the agency has pushed back against the public inquiry — and when Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has questioned whether USPS even needs a regulator.

Postal Regulatory Commission Chairman Michael Kubayanda said it “set off a few alarm bells” that the USPS Board of Governors reined in the regulator’s budget request, now that they control its purse strings.

“I think one of the things that occurred is that you have two different entities looking at the same issues in slightly different ways. I think both organizations were well-intentioned here, so it’s a matter of getting our heads together and getting on the same page, going forward,” Kubayanda said in a recent interview.

The commission, since 2007, went through Congress to get funding each year. But the Postal Service Reform Act signed into law last year brought the PRC back to a system that had been in place from 1970-2007, where the USPS Board of Governors approves its budget.

Kubayanda said that prior to 2007, the USPS Board of Governors generally did not probe into specific PRC priorities when reviewing its budget requests. But in this budget cycle, he said the board asked a lot of questions about the PRC’s approach to regulating, and why it wanted to invest in certain capabilities or needed certain types of experts.

“It did catch us a little bit by surprise. I think we have to keep in mind, we’re only in the second year of this new system, and so both organizations are kind of learning their way through it, and what we need to do is sit down with them and continue to communicate about the best way to run this process,” Kubayanda said.

“Now, these are perfectly reasonable questions in many contexts, when you’re talking about how funds are going to be used. But it’s a little bit different, when you’re talking about a regulator and an operator, and the operator is trying to determine what you think is appropriate for the regulator to invest in,” he added. “So those are some of the issues that started to set off a few alarm bells regarding independence. And I realized there might be a need to draw a few lines, even if everyone is carrying out their roles in good faith, as I believe they were.”

Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Gary Peters (D-Mich.) said during a recent hearing that the Postal Service Reform Act, by moving the PRC’s funding out of the congressional approval process, will allow it to keep operating, even during a government shutdown, “which, hopefully, we won’t have.”

“The PRC is an independent agency, and as a strong regulator must certainly maintain sufficient independence from the Postal Service,” Peters said.

Kubayanda agreed that the commission is better off, now that it’s protected from the looming threat of a government shutdown, which would have forced it to pause much of its oversight responsibilities.

“It raised the risk of the commission shutting down, in case of a governmentwide shutdown. And that would be particularly bad, because the Postal Service keeps operating,” he said. “We really wanted to make sure that there is some alignment between the Postal Service itself and the Postal Regulatory Commission in that regard.”

USPS Board of Governors Chairman Roman Martinez IV said in a statement on Sept. 11 that the board’s members “recognize and respect that Congress has created the PRC as an independent entity with specific regulatory responsibilities over the Postal Service, and that it needs to have the resources to effectively perform those responsibilities.”

“At the same time, the governors also recognize the need for responsible stewardship of the resources in the Postal Service Fund, which ultimately derive from users of the Postal Service,” Martinez said.

PRC unable to ‘halt network changes’

Kubayanda said the commission will keep Congress notified about its funding concerns, but said the agency at this point isn’t looking for any further changes to how it receives its budget.

“We do want to make sure we bring this issue these issues of independence to the attention of the policymakers,” Kubayanda said. “I think we can make it work, maybe there’s some tweaks to how we run the process to make sure that the governors have all the information they need in their decision-making, and the Commission’s independence is respected.”

DeJoy has rebuffed the regulator’s public inquiry into USPS network modernization plans, telling lawmakers that the probe will “put this whole plan in jeopardy.”

But Kubayanda said the PRC doesn’t have the power to stop or change of course of USPS’ 10-year Delivering for America (DFA) reform plan. But it can ask USPS about its plans to build new facilities and consolidate others across the country, and how that will impact its costs and performance.

“At this time, we’re simply trying to find out what’s going on with the processing and delivery design changes. At this stage, we’re more open-ended, where any stakeholder can weigh in and ask questions,” Kubayanda said. “I think an important aspect of our authority is to provide that kind of transparency for these large changes that impact every American, but the Postal Service retains its flexibility and how they want to address those.”

At most, the commission can hand down an advisory opinion to endorse or critique how USPS is handling its network changes — but its advisory opinions are non-binding, and USPS isn’t required to adjust its plans around any PRC feedback.

“The commission’s advisory opinions are advisory, so the commission does not stop or halt network changes,” Kubayanda said.

The PRC, for example, told USPS in July 2021 that its plans to relax on-time mail standards, slowing nearly 40% of first-class mail, wouldn’t result in “much improvement, if any” to its current financial condition, and wouldn’t immediately result in the agency reaching its on-time delivery goals.

USPS, however, implemented the new standards anyway. Since then, the agency says it’s saved about $1 billion a year by drastically cutting the volume of mail and packages it pays contractors to fly across the country. USPS now uses trucks to transport 95% of all its mail and packages.

DeJoy recently said about 99% of the U.S. population is getting mail and packages within three days — and that 50% of first-class mail is getting delivered a day in advance.

‘Absolute need’ to modify USPS network

Robert Taub, President Joe Biden’s nominee to serve a third term at the Postal Regulatory Commission, told the committee last week that the PRC is prepared to oversee the Postal Service’s “most far-reaching plan” in recent history.

“If one listens to some of the Postal Service’s information on this, it may be the most fundamental change to the network since Ben Franklin was postmaster general,” Taub said.

The committee heard this week from former USPS executive Thomas Day, Biden’s other nominee to serve a six-year term at the PRC.

“The role of the regulator is clear — rate regulation, service standards and service performance to ensure fair competition, to enforce the transparency and accountability of the Postal Service,” Day told the committee this Thursday.

Day said he worked at USPS for more than 35 years, and said he held management positions from frontline supervisor to senior officer, “and everything in between.” He retired from USPS in 2019, when he served as its chief sustainability officer.

Day told the committee he agrees “there is a need for modification” at USPS, considering major declines in mail volume in the digital age. USPS is also looking to capture more of a competitive package market.

“Because of this dramatic decrease in traditional mail volumes, combined with the increase in package volume, there’s an absolute need to modify the postal network,” Day said. ” It is essential that the PRC provide the oversight to ensure that the implementation of DFA is accomplished in a manner that provides fair competition, accountability and transparency.”

‘It’s the law’ to oversee USPS

Kubayanda described the PRC as a “technocratic” agency that regulates U.S. mail the same way other agencies regulate public utilities like water or electricity.

USPS needs the approval of the PRC before it raises its prices. The commission also reviews tens of billions of dollars in contracts that USPS signs with mailing industry companies, including Amazon.

The PRC has just over 80 employees to oversee the inner workings of an agency with 635,000 employees that generates about $80 billion in revenue every year.

Kubayanda said about 10% of the PRC’s total staff and resources are focused on reviewing USPS changes under its 10-year reform.

“Now for us, that’s a big deal, because we’re so small,” Kubayanda said. “We are a micro agency, and we’re currently at capacity, so any kind of new undertaking is a bit of a challenge,” he said.

Because the PRC keeps such a low profile, Kubayanda said he was surprised by some recent comments DeJoy made about the regulator.

DeJoy, in an exclusive interview, said in July that USPS decided not to challenge the PRC’s public inquiry in federal court.

“We didn’t want to do it, because I don’t like being involved with nonsense. I’m pretty busy. Everyone here is pretty busy too. But I decided not to appeal it, and to try and work through it. But they’ve got to know that we’re losing money,” DeJoy said.

However, he raised concerns that the probe could interfere with the agency’s “urgent” plans to turn around its long-term financial challenges.

“Who is the Postal Service going after on this whole thing?” DeJoy said. “We’re committed to the service standards, we don’t need to be babysat. What are they going to figure out, with what we do with transportation and all this stuff?”

Kubayanda, however, said the PRC is well within its jurisdiction to oversee the USPS’ far-reaching plans to reshape its delivery network.

“Congress created the Postal Regulatory Commission to oversee the Postal Service, and that’s still the law. And so, it’s not up to me or any other individual to unilaterally change that,” he said.

While USPS is generally self-funded through its own revenue, Kubayanda said the agency still requires oversight, especially because it has a monopoly on delivering mail in the U.S.

“This is the classic case, in our kind of free market system,  where you do need a regulator. And this happens to be a government monopoly. So the case is, I think, even stronger,” Kubayanda said.

Kubayanda said the commission is seeing an increase in calls and complaints about USPS performance, and that he has received several calls from House and Senate staffers looking for answers about constituent mail delays.

“What we can do is provide that transparency and accountability through objective analysis,” Kubayanda said. “However he sees it in particular, I know that role is well-received, and it’s valuable. And I think we’ve seen, more and more acute need for that role, due to changes that are going on in the postal system.”

PRC dipping into its ‘rainy-day fund’

The USPS Board of Governors recently approved a $21.12 million budget for the Postal Regulatory Commission in fiscal 2024. That’s a nearly 10% decrease from its initial FY 2024 budget request and more than a 6% decrease from a revised proposal it submitted a few weeks ago.

USPS said DeJoy and Deputy Postmaster General Doug Tulino were not involved in the board’s vote to approve the PRC’s FY 2024 budget.

USPS said that “combined with the PRC’s other resources,” the commission will have $27.2 million to spend next fiscal year.

However, those other resources include money the PRC received from the Technology Modernization Fund, a loan the agency will use to build up its data analytics and cybersecurity capabilities, as well as a rainy-day fund it relies on to make up any shortfall in its budget.

The USPS Board of Governors gave the commission a $500,000 increase from its FY 2023 budget — but that won’t be enough to cover $2 million in increased costs next year, driven by higher rent and cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) for its employees.

Kubayanda said the commission will also have to spend down some of its reserve funding to cover some of its rising costs.

“We’re going to have to dig into that rainy-day fund immediately throughout this year. So we’re going to have to spend down the majority of that fund in order to meet our expenses for FY 24,” he said.

The commission grew from 74 to 84 employees this fiscal year — including the creation of a data analytics team staffed by four workers. That data analytics team, Kubayanda said, will play a key role in overseeing USPS performance under its 10-year plan.

“I see a need for continued incremental growth, to continue addressing our infrastructure backlog and solidifying our workforce,” he said.  “This group is taking the lead on analyzing DFA. Obviously, the DFA changes a lot of impacts on network performance and efficiency. And I would really like to see us apply advanced analytical techniques to provide some additional transparency and accountable accountability on that.”

The post USPS regulator raises ‘alarm bells’ as agency board reins in its budget request first appeared on Federal News Network.

Agencies are seeing opportunities for artificial intelligence tools to help federal employees pour over vast quantities of data. 

The Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, for example, sees AI as a valuable tool to flag potential fraud in pandemic spending data. 

PRAC Chief Data Officer Brien Lorenze told Federal News Network in a recent panel discussion that pandemic oversight is a “target-rich environment” for AI, and that the technology can highlight when fraudsters are using synthetic identities or shell corporations to exploit federal benefits programs.

“We’re really interested in the phenomena of fraud — the way schemes are changing,” Lorenze said on Aug. 2 during an ATARC AI conference. “I think AI, if properly set up, can allow us to work a lot faster.”

The  PRAC holds about 95 data use agreements with agencies and about a billion transaction records from eight different agencies. 

“[It’s] a lot of data to parse through, and all of that data has different rules and governance over what we can use the data to do,” Lorenze said. 

The Biden administration is taking steps to ensure the ethical use of AI tools across government, but Lorenze said agencies are also increasingly having to prepare for fraud scheming accelerated by malicious large-language models like FraudGPT and WormGPT. 

These large-language models can help fraudsters craft malware and phishing attacks more quickly, and at a much greater volume. 

“There’s a lot of burgeoning tools in the fraud space to actually enable fraud,” Lorenze said.  “And they have no compunction around ethics whatsoever.” 

“You have to put yourself in the mind of the fraudster to be able to properly counteract the fraudster. And so, we want to experiment with the tools that they’re using, just so we can understand what to recognize and how to recognize it,” he added. 

Heather Martin, the acting director of the Office of Plans, Programs and Strategies within the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s  Directorate for Data and Digital Innovation, said AI tools are helping intelligence community analysts to more easily track down objects when sorting through a growing volume of satellite imagery. 

“We’re going to have more data at our fingertips, which is great for the kinds of missions that all of us are doing. And we aren’t going to have enough people to look at all this data and work with this data,” Martin said. 

“We really are turning to the adoption of AI and computer vision to help our analysts find those things they care about in large amounts of imagery, so they can focus their time on other priority things, and really do more in-depth analysis,” she added. 

Damian Kostiuk, deputy CDO for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the agency sees potential for AI, but is taking cautious steps toward implementation.

“The initial use cases are wonderfully boring because nobody wants to apply it right off the bat. There’s a lot of laws, and I think there’s definitely going to be regulation against it,” Kostiuk said. 

Kostiuk said AI, for example, is helping USCIS pre-draft documents, but the agency still requires a human in the loop to read over and redraft those documents. 

“Can we use this to synthesize and summarize thousands of pages of information that we’re getting from people? Yes,” he said. “At least that’s a starting point — and then it still has to pass by the eyeballs of an analyst before doing any kind of reporting.”

Kostiuk said AI needs huge volumes of data to train on, but that much of the federal government lacks the type of data environment to train AI models.

“A lot of federal agencies are still very much into siloed and turfed territory for data, and some groups are loath to share. Well, that actually inhibits our ability to actually get this type of technology up and running — and actually make it running with high quality — if we’re missing holes in that knowledge gap,” Kostiuk said.

To address these systemic data challenges, Chakib Chraibi, the chief data scientist at the National Technical Information Service, said the Commerce Department is wrapping up an agency-wide data maturity assessment report. Chraibi said the department expects to complete the assessment by the end of September 

“Each agency will look at how they are governing the data, how they manage the data, what are the gaps, how they can improve data, and when we were talking about data in terms of quality, in terms of governance, in terms of accessibility, in terms of sharing that data, and how to best leverage the data,” Chraibi said. 

The post Pandemic watchdog sees ‘target-rich environment’ for AI to track down fraudsters first appeared on Federal News Network.

Agencies saw a governmentwide decrease in improper payments last year, after a surge of them at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now an interagency group is drafting a playbook to build on those pandemic-era lessons.

Members of the Joint Financial Management and Improvement Program are planning to release a three-year Payment Integrity Plan this fall.

JFMIP members include the Treasury Department, the Office of Management and Budget, the Government Accountability Office and the Office of Personnel Management.

Treasury Deputy Assistant Secretary for Accounting Policy and Financial Transparency Renata Miskell says the strategy is focused on getting agencies better access to data to proactively stop improper payments.

“It’s really all about paying the right person the right amount at the right time,” Miskell said. “When you receive a check, or ideally a direct deposit into your account, that’s really one of the most direct ways that you actually interact with the government. It’s also one of the most important functions that the government performs, so it’s important that we do it with integrity, and do so in a way that prevents improper payments and fraud.”

Miskell said the Payment Integrity Plan focuses on getting agencies access to data and analytics key to real-time prevention and detection. She added that a lack of access to data remains a “root cause” of improper payments.

In an effort to further reduce improper payments, Congress is giving Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service access to the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File. The bureau handles about 90% of all federal payments.

Miskell said the bureau will have access to SSA’s Death Master File for three years, starting this December. However, she said the bureau is planning to make full use of this data in the hopes of convincing lawmakers to permanently codify its access to this data into law.

“It’s actually really challenging to get access to that whole Death Master File, both in terms of costs, and also because of privacy and security reasons. It’s really all about breaking through some of those complex challenges and making it easy to do the right thing,” Miskell said. “We hope to just have permanent access in general, because we know that this is a very valuable data set that can be challenging to access for a federal agency,” Miskell said.

Fiscal Service established an Office of Payment Integrity earlier this year, bringing its Payment Integrity Center of Excellence and Do Not Pay under one roof.

The bureau also piloted a commercially available account verification tool to verify whether bank accounts actually belong to the individual or organization that’s receiving payment.

Miskell said this tool helped the bureau screen pandemic-era Economic Impact Payments and Advanced Child Tax Credits, and prevented the federal government from issuing about 130 million improper payments.

The bureau is also piloting tools that will make it easier for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid enrollees to verify their income and eligibility.

“There are people who are non-traditional earners, who may not have a history with commercial services that provide that information. And then the commercial information is also really expensive, so if you’re a state or if you’re a federal program, it can be really challenging to find dollars to pay for that service,” Miskell said.

The three-year Payment Integrity Plan is also focused on strengthening interagency partnerships to reduce instances of improper payments.

Miskell said the majority of improper payments stem from federally funded, state-administered programs like Medicaid and federal-state unemployment insurance program.

The Office of Management and Budget, in a blog post last December, found improper payments grew most under the Federal-State Unemployment Insurance program, which saw its improper payment rate reach nearly 19% — eight points higher than pre-pandemic rates.

“We know that problems accumulated from early in the pandemic are still being discovered and will take a long time to clean up,” OMB wrote in the blog post.

Improper payments include overpayments, underpayments, as well as payments in the right amount to the right person, but not strictly adhering to legal or regulatory requirements.

“Coming off of the pandemic, we saw how important partnerships were in response and recovery efforts,” Miskell said. “It’s important to strengthen the partnership with the states that administer these programs, and really help make the connection between the federal resources and the state challenges.”

Fiscal Service partnered with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) when standing up its COVID-19 Funeral Assistance program. The bureau helped provide account verification services to ensure the FEMA funds covered legitimate funeral expenses.

“They asked us, ‘Hey, this program could be subject to lots of fraud. Can you help us?’ So we proactively engaged with them, we shared tools,” Miskell said.

Miskell said Fiscal Serviced helped FEMA avoid about $86 million in potentially improper payments from its funeral assistance program.  FEMA estimates it awarded $2.8 billion in payments through the program.

The three-year plan is also focused on scaling up payment integrity programs across the government.

GAO found in a recent report that agencies saw a slight decrease in improper payments decrease in 2022, compared to the year prior.

“The decline is a step in the right direction, and I think it reflects the ongoing collaboration and the tremendous, almost herculean efforts that agencies took to put controls in place to prevent fraud and improper payments,” Miskell said.

As agencies look to further reduce improper payments, they’ll also have to balance program integrity with the speed of payment.

Miskell applauded agencies for getting emergency funding out to the public quickly. She estimated that, at the height of the pandemic, the federal government issued $400 billion in pandemic relief spending in a matter of days.

“That’s great, we were able to deliver funding in record time to help provide relief. But at the same time, we saw fraudsters taking advantage of that record-breaking assistance and exploiting those vulnerabilities,” she said.

GAO last month, as part of this effort, released a guide to reduce payment errors and fraud in emergency assistance programs.

“It gives really some concrete and practical steps that program managers can go through to set up that program to make sure that they’re assessing risk,” Miskell said.

To reduce improper payments among longstanding federal programs, Miskell said agencies should address the vulnerabilities that IGs highlighted as a significant source of fraud.

“The pay-and-chase model is not the best way to promote payment integrity. Once money goes out the door, it is really challenging to get it back, and so it’s really important to set those controls up front.”

Looking forward, Miskell said artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, if used responsibly, could become a “game changer when it comes to enabling real-time prevention and detection.”

“Just as it can be a really positive thing for government, in terms of more efficiently [and] effectively delivering services, you can also assist fraudsters and nefarious actors in quickly exploiting weaknesses in federal programs and taking advantage of taxpayer dollars in a way that’s inappropriate,” Miskell said.

“Fraud has always been kind of something that’s been out there. But the speed and the magnitude at which it occurs and can occur is really the kind of the biggest change.”

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The intelligence community is setting a two-year roadmap for its workforce to become more familiar with data and artificial intelligence tools — and is already charting progress toward those goals.

The 2023-2025 IC Data Strategy, released Tuesday, lays out the steps all 18 intelligence agencies will take to develop a more data-savvy workforce, and set the groundwork for the IC to use AI tools.

The strategy states the IC brought the document together to stay ahead of a “new period of strategic competition.”

“It is no longer just about the volume of data, it is about who can collect, access, exploit and gain actionable insight the fastest, as the will have the decision and intelligence advantage,” the report states.

Lori Wade, the intelligence community’s chief data officer, said in an exclusive interview that the 11-page strategy spends little time on background, but focuses on implementation of near-term goals.

“We have two years to really get focused on some of the foundational areas of end-to-end data management,” said in a joint interview on Inside the IC and All About Data.

“Data is fundamental to everything that we do in the intelligence community, and our ability to manage it properly. And to maintain how we do data across our entire lifecycle is an important part of where we’re going to move the needle forward, if you will, for the intelligence community,” Wade said.

The IC CDO Council’s next meeting in August will focus on a review of the second-quarter results of the data strategy’s one-year action plan. The council also serves as a forum for component agencies to collaborate on shared solutions, as well as work together on shared challenges.

“We’re opening up the space, where they take a step back and do a collective move forward on either challenges, build on accomplishments, or work together as we go forward,” Wade said.

The data strategy outlines four focus areas:

• Perform end-to-end data management
• Deliver data interoperability and analytics at speed and scale
• Advance all partnerships for continued digital and data innovation
• Transform the IC workforce to be data-driven

“To date, we have not significantly prioritized data as a strategic and operational IC asset. The central challenge remains that the IC is not fielding data, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled capabilities at the pace and scale required to preserve our decision and intelligence advantage,” the report states.

To ensure the intelligence community has the skills it needs to respond to emerging threats, the strategy elevates the importance of upskilling the current IC workforce on data skills, while also recruiting new hires with these in-demand skills.

Wade said the IC data strategy reflects the need for data professionals and analysts to keep their skills sharp through continuous training and “evolving their data tradecraft.”

But the entire IC workforce, she added, will need to have a baseline level of data literacy.

“There’s a data acumen and literacy that we have to bring every single IC officer up to — whether they’re leading the agency, working on the legal side [or] the acquisition side. No matter where you are, you’re going to touch and work with data, whether it be our business data or mission data. So we need to understand, what does that mean, and how does that look?” Wade said.

CDOs are actively evaluating the level of data literacy that exists today across the intelligence community workforce to understand potential gaps and training requirements.

“How do we embed some element of data into every module that’s for entry on duty for anyone coming into their agency or to the IC,” Wade said.

The intel community is also looking to upskill its workforce through its Public-Private Talent Exchange (PPTE). The program gives IC personnel an opportunity to develop skills and expertise from industry partners on the front lines of technology breakthroughs.

Wade said that, as part of the PPTE program, her office is bringing academia and IC components together on a data-focused “mission sprint,” that will focus on real-world applications of data in the intelligence community.

“We’re going to use a real mission example, and we’re going to bring in officers from the IC to work  with individuals and experts from the private sector and from an academic organization to really dive in and solve a real mission problem,” she said.

The IC workforce now spans five generations, but as intelligence agencies bring in Gen-Z talent, Wade said the IC needs to make full use of their specific skill sets and expertise.

“We need to make sure that everything that we’re doing across the organization will take full advantage of what they’re bringing to the table — which is, they’re digital natives,” she said. “And we need to make sure that we’ve got everyone else who’s already in the intelligence community up to that kind of understanding, so that we can work together as one IC, as we go forward with the same digital and data literacy,” Wade said.

AI foundations

Wade said AI and automation tools serve as the foundation for data-driven decision-making, since the volume of data IC agencies produce far exceeds what its workforce can process manually.

“Today, people aren’t understanding the volumes of data — that they no longer can just even go through it on their own. We have technology and capabilities that we can bring to help us to do that in ways that we haven’t in the past. We need to take full advantage of that, but we need to be ready ourselves,” Wade said.

The strategy lays out a goal to establish “end-to-end data management plans” from when data is collected or acquired, all the way through the exploitation, dissemination and ultimate disposition of that data.

Wade said the goal is underpinned by a new intelligence community directive on “data management” that ensures all data that’s collected — whether it’s open source, commercial or by classified means — has a data management plan.

She noted the successful adoption of AI will require the deliberate management of data.

“AI is something that requires quality data,” she said. “Highly curated data, or data that has to be tagged and labeled. It has to be discoverable and accessible. We have to have a data architecture in place. So we’re working on all of that.”

ODNI is also developing a “common IC data catalog” to help create inventories of data across intelligence agencies with shared standards and metadata.

“So each agency can have their own catalog, but they need to be able to then connect it to the larger IC data catalog,” she said. “We see that as a way to drive the data management and the best practices, because if you’re putting something in a catalog, you’re tagging it, you’ve labeled things.”

And the strategy further prioritizes interoperability of data standards in and out of the intelligence community. Wade said the IC is partnering with the Defense Department as they build out their own data strategy.

“That’s how we ‘re going to get to speed and scale — as much of the things that we have that already exist, that we can adopt — and making sure that we’re following a set of common standards, that we have that infrastructure where we’re sharing capability, and that we are looking and doing that end-to-end,” Wade said.

To ensure the IC is tapped into the latest technology developments, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is looking to lower the barriers to collaborate with industry partners through its “Front Door” access program.

Wade said she also recently met with Army Futures Command and industry partners in Austin, Texas, to better understand which emerging technologies the intelligence community needs to focus on, and how those tools might impact the data strategy and its second-year action plan.

Wade said these programs focus on reducing the barriers of entry for private sector companies that are working on some of these emerging technologies — whether it be AI, Web3 or immersive technologies like the Metaverse.

“If this is the place, and the platforms, and the technologies where all social interaction will occur, what does that mean for national security?” she said.

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The Defense Department, as it steps up its readiness around artificial intelligence, is building up the data literacy of its acquisition workforce.

DoD’s Defense Acquisition University is on a mission to upskill more than 3,000 military and civilian professionals across the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.

DAU is planning to upskill these employees on data analytics and AI skills to better understand the emerging tech that DoD is buying.

The university offers certification training, elective training and mission-assistance work to more than 155,000 members of the defense acquisition workforce.

David Pearson, the director of the DAU’S Engineering and Technology Center, said data and AI skills training courses are already available to DoD acquisition employees. But the university is taking greater steps to tailor these courses to an employee’s specific role and career trajectory.

“The skills that we hired people for 15 years ago are no longer the skills we’re going to be needing to field the systems of our future — that warfighters are going to be depending upon,” Pearson said on a recent episode of All About Data. “The emerging technology that’s going to be driving the performance of our defense systems that we send out to the field increasingly rely upon those who have the technical skills to properly manage and acquire them in the future.”

DAU’s upskilling initiative marks the latest effort within DoD to improve its AI capabilities. The department is looking to reach a baseline level of “AI-readiness” by 2025 to stay on top of emerging threats.

Pearson said these data skills are becoming more valuable for the defense acquisition workforce, and serve as the foundation for data-driven decision-making for DoD leadership.

“There’s broad recognition across all of the Department of Defense that we really need to step up our game in the area of data skills. Far too often, decisions at all levels are being oftentimes made on dated anecdotes, or simply the opinion of the senior-most person in the room. We really need to change that,” Pearson said.

DAU is partnering with Coursera to offer thousands of online courses from top universities and industry leaders.

“An acquisition workforce member could enroll in a 34-hour course from the University of Michigan on programming and Python for data analytics. Or they could take an AI product management course from Duke. We’ve made this and thousands of other courses available through our partnership with Coursera,” Pearson said.

Pearson said DAU is adding DoD-specific context to its commercial training. The university is also working with DoD’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office on coursework curation, as well zeroing in on the skills and abilities the DoD acquisition workforce will need in the coming years.

“We’ve got lots of rules, policies and work practices and unique problem sets here in DoD, when it comes to using data and AI. DAU adds value by teaching students how to apply these data and AI skills to our unique DoD acquisition environment,” Pearson said.

Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda said that curated training based an employee’s role and career trajectory helps cut down on “content chaos,” and presents them with the courses most relevant to their responsibilities.

“What most individuals want is a pathway to a better job, better career, better opportunities. And what learning and development is doing is creating those pathways,” Maggioncalda said.

DAU is looking to upskill the defense acquisition workforce in three phrases. The university’s first step is to promote awareness training, and to make more personnel aware of the tools and technology that is reshaping their work.

From there, Pearson said the university is looking to build general “data literacy” across the workforce — helping employees learn how to make data-informed decisions within the context of their jobs.

For more data-intensive fields, Pearson said the university is getting students to apply their newfound knowledge on challenges they’d see during a usual workday.

The DoD acquisition personnel sees the need for continuous learning to stay up to date on the latest technology.

“We’ve seen that the people working in the tech space really recognize themselves that in order for them to stay competitive, and stay relevant in their particular discipline, they have to be committed to a continuum of continuous improvement and skills,” Pearson said.

DAU is also taking a data-driven approach to retooling its coursework. The university is looking at data to determine what courses to build, how to improve them based on student feedback and when to retire a course.

“Today, we’re using some very fundamental skills to collect and analyze the data … but looking ahead, we’re excited about more fully instrumenting our courseware,” Pearson said. “Rather than relying solely upon subjective student survey data, we want to document student behaviors and how they’re interacting particularly with our online course. We can use this information to make the targeted improvements we need to our courseware, further advancing our mission.”

Maggioncalda said Coursera is helping DoD shift training away from an entirely traditional classroom setting and make more of its training available online.

“Especially if you’re deployed or you’re moving around, it’s really hard to have a purely place-based educational system that’s going to be flexible enough to meet those kinds of demands, so online is a key part of it,” he said.

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The State Department put a spotlight on one of the Biden administration’s top federal workforce priorities, when it named its first chief diversity and inclusion officer.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken named Amb. Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, a career diplomat with more than 30 years of experience, to serve in this elevated role in May 2021.

More than two years later, Abercrombie-Winstanley is stepping down from the role, and leaving government service this Friday.

But in an exit interview she told Federal News Network she expects the department’s diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility work will outlast attempts to roll back DEIA programs across government.

“Equal opportunity, fairness, a level playing field — these are American values and ideals. We have to be careful how we talk about them, perhaps so that people understand it, why it is an American ideal, [but] it’s not going anywhere,” Abercrombie-Winstanley said.

While a comprehensive spending plan for fiscal 2024 has yet to come into focus, members of the House Appropriations Committee advanced a spending bill that would defund “unnecessary and polarizing” DEIA training and programs at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Former President Donald Trump signed an executive order in September 2020 that banned federal agencies and contractors from conducting some diversity training, but President Joe Biden repealed that executive order in his first week in office.

Abercrombie-Winstanley, in a recent interview, touted the success of the department building out its data expertise to better address DEIA and workforce issues.

The State Department, following the release of its DEIA strategy last year, holds disaggregated workforce data sets that break down the composition of its workforce across nearly every one of its offices.

Abercrombie-Winstanley said that workforce data helps leadership pinpoint where and how the department is falling short of its goals, and how to get the agency on the right track.

“You cannot judge any progress or know where your problems lie without that data. And when you’re trying to convince people to make changes, and they are highly resistant … the data helps convince people when they see it in black and white,” she said.

House Republicans have pushed back on the State Department’s DEIA priorities at a hearing earlier this month, but Abercrombie-Winstanley said the department’s DEIA goals will remain a priority beyond her tenure and will continue across multiple administrations.

“People talk about DEIA now not as a mystery, or just an annoyance, but something that they want to know where to do it, how to do it,” Abercrombie-Winstanley said.

Abercrombie-Winstanley said DEIA goals aren’t just a priority for the current administration, but part of broader workforce issues where department employees are demanding change.

Abercrombie-Winstanley told members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee earlier this month that the department intends to address allegations of “toxic conduct” in a recent workforce survey.

More specifically, Abercrombie-Winstanley said nearly 50% of respondents reported experiencing bullying or harassment at the department within the past five years.

About 80% of respondents said they didn’t expect the department would take action.

Nearly 9,000 employees — about a third of the department’s direct hires — responded to the survey.  Respondents said their top recommendation was to remove barriers to merit-based promotion.

Abercrombie-Winstanley said those results are “devastating,” but added that the root cause is department managers and supervisors not doing enough to advocate for their employees.

She added that the department has made it “not a nice-to-have, but an absolute need” for managers and supervisors to demonstrate progress toward DEIA goals as part of their performance reviews.

Those poor management skills, she added, also translate into employees not believing in the fairness of hiring and promotion decisions.

“Accountability is saying that you will be promoted if you manage well — if you look after all of your staff, not just the ones who remind you of you with whom you share background, or kindred interest, or the same school or hometown or whatever. You need to look at those who aren’t like you,” she said.

To address these problems, the State Department is bringing transparency to the process of hiring for deputy assistant secretary positions, which Abercrombie-Winstanley said was a “stepping stone” to even more senior positions at the department.

“We discovered that we did not advertise those positions. You had to be in the know. Somebody had to know and like you, and tap you on the shoulder to get you to come and do that job. So we changed that. The workforce said we don’t believe this is equitable, it definitely isn’t transparent. We made it transparent.”

The department is also conducting several barrier analyses, and taking a closer look at the data to determine which applicants receive an interview for vacant positions, and who receives those jobs.

The State Department is looking for additional funding to expand its data analytics capabilities in its fiscal 2024 budget request.

The funds would bolster the department’s Center for Analytics, its central hubs for all things data, as well as the data capabilities of the CDIO’s office, which is already swamped with requests for data.

“Congress has put forward 24 different requests for data for the Department of State. So even before I touch anything that we have to do, I got 24 different reports that I have to do for Congress,” Abercrombie-Winstanley said.

Abercrombie-Winstanley said a level playing field for promotions is benefiting State Department employees from all backgrounds.

“I say very frankly, if not diplomatically, every white guy is not in the ‘in’ crowd,” she said. “We’re not trying to put a new group at the top. We’re trying to level the playing field for everyone.”

The department has also made it a best practice for a panel of senior officials to make hiring and promotion decisions.

“It has built far greater trust and confidence in the decisions, because it wasn’t just one person making that decision, that there was a panel that every applicant was asked the exact same question.”

While the State Department is diversifying its entry-level workforce and bringing in a new generation of diplomats through new fellowship programs,  more work is needed to diversify its higher ranks.

Abercrombie-Winstanley said over 80% of senior positions at the State Department are held by European-Americans, and that more than half 50% are held by men.

“Our best diversity is at the bottom of our pile, quite frankly. It is as you go up the ladder that it thins out … In some ways, there isn’t a lot to choose among at the senior levels, because we’ve lost so many along the way.”

The department is taking a closer look at workforce retention.

Abercrombie-Winstanley said the department is standardizing exit interviews with diplomats who leave midway through their careers, and tracking incidents in which diplomats may feel like “second-class citizens” in overseas posts.

“In some countries, it happens because you’re brown. In some countries, it happens because you have a disability. It happens because of your sexual orientation and gender identity. And it happens because you’re female. We are getting stories in from all of those groups, and what the mission is going to protect them — to stand for them, as they do for every other member of staff.”

The State Department earlier this year also loosened longtime restrictions barring some employees from serving in certain overseas posts, based on their ethnic background.

Abercrombie-Winstanley said the department has eliminated assignment restrictions based on an employee’s identity. However, she added that those restrictions decisions “were based on items that showed a vulnerability or something else.”

“it isn’t, strictly speaking identity, because we have people from every background serving in different places around the world,” she said.

The State Department precluded some diplomats from working on specific regional issues when they owned property or assets in another country, or if they had immediate family members living abroad.

Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), a former diplomat who served both domestically and abroad, said his treatment as a Korean-American working at the State Department influenced his decision to leave.

Kim recalled receiving a letter during his tenure, prohibiting him from working on policy issues related to the Korean peninsula.

Abercrombie-Winstanley said the department’s use of assignment restrictions was having a chilling effect on State Department employees bidding on certain posts or assignments, based on their race or ethnicity.

“That means we’re losing something important, something vital. If they came with a language, personal knowledge, for whatever reason, and they didn’t bid on the post, we have lost their contributions to America’s foreign policy,” she said.

She said that was a “huge reason” for Secretary Blinken decided to loosen those restrictions in a memo earlier this year.

“We have to make sure that they have the information early enough that people coming into the State Department, who are bidding on assignments, understand what that process is, so that isn’t as much upset or last-minute kerfuffles.”

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