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It’s not yet clear whether lawmakers will shut down the government before the Sept. 30 investment deadline, but former government IT officials say even the specter of such a shutdown has an effect on federal tech stores.
Depending on what’s happening on Capitol Hill, processes begin weeks before potential shutdowns, as agencies plan for an imaginable credit outage, resources told Nextgov/FCW.
Richard Spires, a former chief data officer for the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS, said that even without a true shutdown, making plans for such a shutdown is “a pretty complex task” that “really disrupts day-to-day work in general. “»
“From the IOC’s point of view, it’s a lot of work,” said Maria Roat, former deputy federal CIO from 2020 to 2022, who was CIO of the Small Business Administration at the close of 2019.
Plans are being made about which painters will stay, which contractors can continue painting and what communications will be disseminated, either among painters and among the public, Roat said.
In terms of systems that can continue to work, agencies want to know if this is discretionary funding, if its purposes are “excluded” by law, or if they are mandated to help excluded or authorized purposes, according to a 2021 OMB FAQ. State.
Agencies will have to post notices on websites that are closed or operating with reduced capacity to inform users that they may not be up to date and that transactions will not be processed until the government receives funding, according to the FAQ.
Still, “systems are monitored and controlled even in the event of a shutdown,” Roat said, noting that cybersecurity may be a primary concern. “The risk actors . . . No one is watching them. “
The OMB emphasizes that cybersecurity operators must be vigilant. Agencies will be required to maintain patch management, security operations center, and incident reaction in accordance with frequently asked questions.
“When making the resolution to suspend IT operations and add websites, agencies will have to take cybersecurity risks,” the FAQ says. “In general, strong cybersecurity purposes are excluded because those purposes are mandatory to avoid an imminent risk to federal property. Agencies must also ensure that firm information is preserved.
Cybersecurity emerged as a factor in 2019, Jordan Burris, staff leader at the IOC’s federal office, told Nextgov/FCW, the 35-day shutdown that lasted in late 2018 and early 2019, specifically in terms of interagency differences in the amount of cybersecurity. The professionals remained on board.
“When it came time to respond to a series of incidents, we had a critical mass of cybersecurity professionals, and that created . . . some delays to get things done at a faster pace,” he said.
Suzette Kent, who was federal CIO at the time of the 2019 shutdown, also said that, in general, “some agencies look a little more than others at who the essential personnel are,” which also gave the impression of “shared services. “inter-agency.
Overall, “from an IT perspective, almost everyone in IT is considered mission critical,” he said. “Many CIOs were in a position where all of their staff were critical or supported certain parts of critical functions,” but “sometimes what we lacked were business and functional partners who made things work. “
As for impact, Spires said the planning-making procedure has an effect.
“The projects, the systems they’re looking at moving forward, are on hold or really very few paintings are done during the era where they’re making plans for closure,” he said. “So it’s one of the prices that’s hard to quantify . . . But there’s no doubt that there are a lot of missed opportunity prices when you face them, even if you don’t close your business, even if you just have to plan accordingly. “
Real and hidden costs
All that work also becomes costly in terms of real dollars, from building security features to sending notifications to websites, to missing savings from delayed generation deployments, Burris said.
“You spend a lot of cash to be able to orchestrate a shutdown, so it ends up costing the government,” Burris said.
“The determination of which facilities will continue after assignments expire is not affected by the fact that closing prices exceed service maintenance prices,” OMB told agencies in the FAQ.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated in 2019 that the five-week shutdown that year reduced the country’s gross domestic product by $3 billion.
Once the closures are over, there’s an “avalanche of work” waiting to be done, Kent said. The 2019 shutdown was so long that many federal departments shut down their generation because they weren’t working when the required password resets were performed, leading to this “flood” of technical support services, as many federal departments reconnected for the first time in weeks.
The “ripple effect” can also be felt in delays in generation deployments — which last for months even if a shutdown lasted only a few weeks — in contract delays and in delays for the public, Roat said.
Technology retail outlets would also likely have to deal with unresolved issues during the shutdown, Burris said. There would also possibly be a “retention challenge” after the closures. Although federal furloughed workers are now guaranteed back wages after a shutdown, those checks are not paid until the shutdown ends.
“A lot of other people don’t like the idea of not having to pay their salary for a while,” he said.
And there are the “human costs” for others waiting on the other end of government websites and phone lines, Kent said.
“During a shutdown, if something breaks down and there’s no one to fix it, well, I guess it still doesn’t work, right?”Roat says.
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