Mohana Ravindranath

President Donald Trump has yet to fill many key science and technology positions at the White House, and it's not clear when he will. Under President Barack Obama, the White House chief technology officer's staff included about 24 people. As of the week of March 27, President Trump has named only one person to that office—Michael Kratios, formerly chief of staff to Trump's tech adviser and tech investor Peter Thiel.

The CTO's office is housed within the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, which also doesn't have a director yet. “The impression this leaves is that Trump isn’t interested in science and that scientific matters are a low priority at the White House,” said Vint Cerf, the Google technologist known as the "father of the internet". President Trump's budget blueprint, released earlier this month, proposed slashing federal research funding at agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and, at the Energy Department, eliminating a research and development unit altogether. Some of President Trump's advisers have recommended eliminating OSTP, which the administration is free to do. White House structure isn't set in law, said Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project.

President Donald Trump has created a new White House office dedicated to bringing private sector tech practices to the government.

Initial projects may include revamping the Veterans Affairs Department, modernizing federal IT and re-designing government workforce training. The office could also tackle opioid abuse, among other issues. Right now, it’s unclear what the new group will mean for the federal tech and innovation groups created in the Obama administration, including the White House’s US Digital Service—itself described as a tech troubleshooting SWAT team—and 18F, the digital consultancy housed within the General Services Administration. Those groups also recruit tech talent heavily from the private sector, often for 1- or 2-year stints, and emphasize shaking up Washington’s bureaucracy with concepts from tech hubs such as Silicon Valley, Austin (TX) and Boston (MA).

A senior tech leader under the Obama administration is staying on under President Donald Trump. Haley Van Dyck helped create the US Digital Service, a White House tech trouble-shooting team that tackles large-scale federal IT projects. It was founded as a continuation of the team that helped salvage the HealthCare.gov rollout.

Though Van Dyck resigned toward the end of the Obama administration, she is reportedly re-joining USDS. Until recently, it was unclear whether Trump's administration planned to maintain tech efforts including USDS. Trump's pick for White House chief digital officer, Gerrit Lansing, tweeted support for the group in January, stating: "FYI: USDS is here to stay with the new administration. Period." But less than a month later, Lansing left the White House because he was unable to pass an FBI screening.

President-elect Donald Trump's technology agenda is largely opaque, but at least one member of Congress has a message for his administration: ideas for cutting-edge technology often comes from the grassroots. “Innovation may have a national or even global impact but like politics, the process of innovation is inherently local,” Rep Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM) said during an Information Technology and Innovation Foundation event on Capitol Hill. The government needs to think of creative ways to “provide resources to the innovators ... across the country," he added. Rep Lujan advocated for establishing maker-spaces in public libraries, potentially outfitting them with small-scale manufacturing equipment such as 3-D printers, that are accessible to businesses, researchers and the nearby community. Because public libraries already exist across America, "including the rural parts, where we still don’t have bandwidth capacity," they could become hubs for technological development outside Silicon Valley, he said.

The Senate has passed legislation that would require agencies to make more data available to the public in a machine-readable format. The Open, Public, Electronic and Necessary Government Data Act, or the OPEN Government Act (S 2852), mandates federal agencies, when "not otherwise prohibited by law," make data available in a way that does not "impede use or reuse." It must also be free to the public, "with no restrictions on copying, publication, distribution, transmittal, citing, or adaptation."

That news comes shortly after various watchdog groups concluded agencies might miss the deadline in implementing another transparency-themed effort: the 2014 Digital Accountability and Transparency Act. That act requires major federal agencies to publish their spending data online, also in a format easily accessible to the public.

Donald Trump’s stunning victory may have overshadowed key congressional races, a handful of which could shape the president-elect’s tech agenda. In one race late Nov 8, Rep. Will Hurd (R-TX), managed to stave off a Democratic challenger. Rep Hurd has championed legislation that aims to fund IT modernization through new agency-based working capital funds, as well as a federalwide fund to which agencies could apply. In a Congress that now remains under Republican control, here are a few members who could influence future IT legislation in Trump's administration.

Sen Ron Johnson (R-WI) stays chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. In a contentious race, Sen Johnson took 50 percent of the vote and defeated challenger Russ Feingold, a former Wisconsin senator whom Johnson unseated in 2010. As HSGAC chair, Sen Johnson has urged the White House to establish real-time automated monitoring for cybersecurity threats. In 2014, he introduced a measure requiring federal agencies to quickly deploy Einstein, the Homeland Security Department's cybersecurity system.

The White House's first chief information security officer has ambitious plans to shore up government cybersecurity, including elaborate educational campaigns for employees and ensuring investments in data protection are proportional to the value of that data. In one of his first public appearances since his appointment in Sept, Gregory Touhill said his approach to cybersecurity was multipronged with separate goals for hiring cyber talent; educating federal workers about cyber hygiene; and encouraging agencies to treat information as an "asset" by considering whether it's worth it to invest in high-tech protections for low-value data sets.

"We focus too much on the technology and the keyboard stuff," he said. "Protecting information could be as simple as not discussing certain information over the phone, guarding the paperwork that you provide, shredding information that appropriately needs to be disposed of." In 2017, his team plans to come up with new ways to "educate and train and hopefully entertain our workforce, to help them better understand both the 'why' as well as the 'how' of cybersecurity," Touhill said. Annual reviews of computer programs, he added, won't be enough to ensure proper cyber protection. In the near term, the administration plans to launch Cyber.gov, a repository for information about cybersecurity-related goals and strategies, in the next couple of weeks. A group of federal CISOs will have their first meeting Oct 28; Touhill is also considering setting up a volunteer CISO advisory council.

Government agencies spend less of their total budget on making operations mobile than commercial groups do, according to new research from IDC. Public-sector spending is about 17 percent of its budget, compared to about 25 percent of private-sector counterparts, according to an as-yet unpublished survey from IDC.

Analyst John Jackson described some of the findings at an AT&T event Sept 7 in Washington. Concerns about the security of apps and the data stored in those apps have been the primary barrier to adoption, Jackson explained. And for at least the past three years, concerns about integrating back-end systems into a mobile strategy have been the second largest barrier to adoption. Jackson predicted public- and private-sector organizations will soon spend more on software services, but spending on software itself is not likely to move much, he said.

So, who governs the Internet of things? Who ensures connected and self-driving cars don’t put their passengers in danger, that security cameras don’t relay video feeds of their users to third parties, or that data collected from billions of consumer devices can be used without compromising personal information? For now, it’s still not clear. Today, several agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission and the National Highway Traffic Security Administration have authority over some aspects of the Internet of things.

Experts say the regulatory framework isn’t well defined and that agencies will likely need to work together as cases arise that expose the potential downsides of widespread connectivity. As more IoT-related cases begin to test the regulatory framework, “the main thing that connects them is they’re going to have internet connectivity of some sort,” said Lee Tien, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Regulating a Fitbit is very different from regulating an automobile or regulating an implantable medical device like a defibrillator.” Here’s a look at some of the discussions federal groups are having about regulating the Internet of things.

Collecting public comment on federal rules might get a little easier. An Environmental Protection Agency pilot lets citizens comment on specific paragraphs of proposed rules instead of submitting them via e-mail or in a separate text box. It might seem like a minor feature that should have existed before, but EPA is among the first to test drive it, according to a blog post from General Services Administration tech consultancy, 18F.

Since 2015, 18F and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have been gradually adding new features to the eRegulations system, an open source platform that hosts proposals online. EPA is trying out the comment feature on a rule that would lay out fees for groups using the agency's hazardous waste tracking system; interested parties can choose to comment on specific sections, such as the rule's "scope" or "preamble."