Ben Berliner Extensions for certain provisions of the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act moved closer to passage on July 19 with the House Oversight Committee's approval of the FITARA Enhancement Act of 2017. The bill would extend or eliminate the "sunset" dates for requirements on data center consolidation, on transparency and risk management of major IT investments and on PortfolioStat reviews of IT programs and resources. Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), the bill's author, told...
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Frank Konkel A bipartisan group of House lawmakers has a backup plan to extend provisions set to expire later this year under the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee by voice vote cleared the FITARA Enhancement Act of 2017, which would extend the sunset periods of three key requirements regarding data center consolidation, PortfolioStat reviews and the IT dashboard. Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., authored the bill and has suppo...
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Jessie Bur If Federal agencies invest upfront in technologies to track fraud and improper payments, the government could end up saving enough money to pay back some of the national debt or stave off sequestration, according to Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va. “We can do something in the management end that would have big payoff, and technology will help us. It will catch the duplication, it will catch the redundancy, it will catch a lot of the errors. So we need an upfront investment in technology, b...
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Mohana Ravindranath A presidential commission investigating voter fraud could compromise voters’ personal information, says one lawmaker who is urging the panel to drop its request for that data. President Donald Trump established the panel in May via an executive order. The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity aims to look into “vulnerabilities in voting systems and practices used for Federal elections that could lead to improper voter registrations and improper voting” such ...
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Meredith Somers and Jared Serbu The long, long search for a new Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters is finally at its end. Not because the government has settled on one of the three sites in the running, but because the General Services Administration has decided to cancel the project altogether. GSA is expected to formally notify the three developers who had proposed different headquarters sites in the Washington, D.C. suburbs on Tuesday that it is ending the competition that each had ...
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Jonathan O'Connell The federal government is canceling the search for a new FBI headquarters, according to officials familiar with the decision, putting a more than decade-long effort by the bureau to move out of the crumbling J. Edgar Hoover Building back at square one. The decision follows years of failed attempts by federal officials to persuade Congress to fully back a plan for a campus in the Washington suburbs paid for by trading away the Hoover Building to a real estate developer and put...
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Olivia Beavers Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) called on Vice President Pence in a letter Tuesday to rescind President Trump's voter data directive that he says “is a thinly veiled effort to carry out voter suppression on a national scale." "I write to urge you, in your capacity as chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, to rescind the Commission’s directive for sensitive voter data," Connolly wrote in the letter to Pence, who serves as chairman. The Virginia lawmaker ar...
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Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-VA) released the following statement on reports that the federal government is canceling its search for a new FBI headquarters: "Reports that the federal government is pulling the plug on a new FBI headquarters reveals insurmountable Trump conflicts with GSA, FBI, and Vornado. This is devastating news. Conflicts have consequences."
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Edward Graham Congressional Democrats are calling on the Federal Communications Commission to review its cybersecurity protocols following a May cyberattack that knocked the agency’s commenting system offline, and ahead of online activism in support of net neutrality planned for Wednesday. Ranking House Democrats on two committees — Energy and Commerce and Oversight and Government Reform, as well as their relevant subcommittees — first sent a letter to the three FCC commissioners on June 26, exp...
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Rebecca Savransky Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) late Wednesday criticized President Trump for holding a reelection fundraiser at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. During an interview on CNN, Connolly said he has "insisted" that Trump's "whole relationship with the Trump hotel becomes a massive conflict of interest the day he was sworn in." Connolly called it a "terrible perception problem." "I think it really taints the process," Connolly added. "I think it's most unwise and I thin...
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