The House Government Operations Subcommittee will hold a hearing on Dec. 15 at 9:00 a.m. to discuss results from the 15th edition of the FITARA Scorecard expected to be released by the House Oversight and Reform Committee on the same day.
The scorecard grades the 24 largest Federal government agencies for improvements on a range of IT and cybersecurity-related categories and has been credited with saving the government billions of dollars over the past seven years by driving efficiencies in how agencies deploy and use technology.
A witness list for the Dec. 15 hearing has not yet been released, but it’s a good bet to expect plenty of discussion at the hearing about Federal agency cybersecurity.
Metrics – or the lack thereof – to measure agency progress on security was a major discussion point earlier this year when the committee released the 14th edition of the scorecard.
On the 14th edition of the scorecard, agency grades ticked lower across several performance categories, although some of that movement was due less to specific agency performance for the first half of 2022 and more to do with scorecard category and methodology changes by the committee.
Those changes included the removal of grading for compliance with the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) and the absence of data available to the committee to help figure out cybersecurity-related grades.
The committee, which compiles its semi-annual agency grades with input from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), regularly considers grading category changes, and recent public discussions of possible changes have included topics such as cloud adoption, and customer experience ratings, among others.
