One-third of agencies make gains in latest FITARA scorecard
Eight federal agencies saw their grades under Congress’ FITARA Scorecard improve since last December, while the rest maintained their previous score on the latest iteration, released Tuesday morning.
The number of CFO Act agencies receiving A grades on the 16th FITARA Scorecard — a measure of CIOs’ progress in meeting the requirements of the 2024 Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act that has evolved to incorporate other tech policies, laws and programs — grew to three since the previous grades were issued in December 2022. Those top-graded agencies are the departments of Education and Labor, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was the only one to earn an A last time around.
Meanwhile, six other agencies also improved their overall scores from a C to a B: the departments of Agriculture, Energy, Homeland Security and Interior, Office of Personnel Management, and Social Security Administration.
The rest of the field remained unchanged, sitting with either B or C grades.
Typically the House Oversight Committee hosts a hearing to review what’s been a biannual scorecard release since 2015 and calls on a variety of CIOs and federal IT leaders to testify on progress. But this time around, more than nine months since the last scorecard’s release, the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation will host a roundtable led by Ranking Member Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., on Tuesday afternoon with representatives from the Government Accountability Office, General Services Administration, departments of State, Veterans Affairs and Commerce, and Social Security Administration.
In his prepared opening remarks for that roundtable, Connolly said: “While the Chairwoman [Rep. Nancy Mace] has an ambitious agenda this Congress, we could not allow a lapse in having a scorecard and we remain committed to working with Chairwoman Mace on the evolution the FITARA Scorecard and have been collaborative in changes.”
“While I look forward to our Subcommittee FITARA oversight hearing later this year, we cannot abandon our traditional biannual oversight cadence of FITARA. As we consider incorporating many insights offered at today’s discussion into future FITARA Scorecards, I look forward to collaborating beyond just this event to create a thoughtful, effective, and bipartisan tool that empowers our CIOs and then holds them accountable for transformational IT change.”
Based on the scorecard the committee provided to FedScoop in advance of the roundtable, it appears a pair of new categories are being previewed for addition to the tool: one focused on cloud and another that is an aggregate measuring CIO reporting structure, budget and acquisitions.
