In outlining his top three priorities as the calendar turns into 2026, Federal Chief Information Officer Greg Barbaccia didn’t necessarily break new ground.

Barbaccia said in a video posted on X that since January, when he arrived in the position from the private sector, his focus has been on three specific areas.

“One, fixing the talent pipeline. We’re making sure we hire, train and empower the technical experts we need. We have exciting new initiatives related to that happening right now. Two, buy smarter. No more paying top dollar for tools we don’t use or can’t connect. We’re eliminating waste, duplication and decades old rules that slow us down. Follow along as we go on that journey together. And three, securing the foundation. We will be setting one standard for how government technology works for the American people, from our websites to our use of artificial intelligence,” Barbaccia said. “Over the next few months, I’ll share exactly what we’re doing and the results we’ve already seen. America is long overdue for a major tech upgrade, and we’re delivering it. My promise is simple, government tech will be transparent, efficient and worthy of the United States of America.”

Earlier this year, I was honored to be appointed White House Chief Information Officer. What do we do? The White House CIO role is about ensuring technology works for taxpayers and agency employees alike, from secure systems to seamless services. pic.twitter.com/DfMzRFfF5l

— Gregory Barbaccia (@GregBarbaccia) December 15, 2025

What is new about Barbaccia’s top priorities is how the Trump administration is starting to turn initiatives and plans into reality.

Take the goal of fixing the talent pipeline. It’s been clear the so-called Department of Government Efficiency went too far in cutting probationary employees and pushing others to take the Deferred Resignation Program. Add to that the administration’s hiring freeze, and the need to bring technology talent, along with many other types of expertise, back into government is clear.

To that end, the Office of Personnel Management is leading a new recruitment initiative, the Tech Force, with a goal of hiring 1,000 new employees for agencies that include the departments of State, Treasury, Defense, Interior, Agriculture and Labor, as well as the IRS, OPM and the General Services Administration, among many others.

OPM Director Scott Kupor wrote on his blog that these early-career engineers will work “directly with the most senior leaders across cabinet-level government agencies to tackle our nation’s top technical challenges.”

“We are going to bootstrap a network effect to fuel the next 50+ years of government hiring by demonstrating the government offers brilliant engineers the opportunity to solve the world’s most challenging and largest scale technology projects and that the private sector values this experience by translating it into awesome post-government employment opportunities,” he wrote. “The more engineers we recruit into Tech Force, the more critical technical problems we will solve, the more Tech Force graduates take their skills to the private sector – that’s the flywheel that will enable us to grow a definitive, world changing pipeline of early-career talent into the federal government.”

Priority 2: Website modernization

The creation of the Tech Force also flows into Barbaccia’s third priority around securing the foundation and setting one standard for how government technology works for the American people.

OPM, working with the National Design Studio in the White House, launched the Tech Force website for potential engineers to learn more about the program and apply to join.

NDS, led by Joe Gebbia, who is the co-founder of Airbnb, has been rolling out an updated look to federal websites, starting with several new ones like Tech Force.

Gebbia, who President Donald Trump named as the nation’s first chief design officer in August, also recently unveiled merrychristmas.gov, which is highlighting 12 days of government design history. For example, day one, Dec. 14, focused on the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project’s poster program during the Great Depression, and day two, Dec. 15, highlighted the Great Seal of the United States, created in 1782.

Additionally, Gebbia today launched the new website Trumpaccounts.gov during an event at the Treasury Department, using similar design principles.

Barbaccia kicked off the website modernization effort last spring by asking agencies to consolidate and update their public-facing platforms. Barbaccia asked agencies to submit data to OMB about their public-facing websites, including the underlying technological infrastructure they run on and the contracts that support them.

The resulting data call from July showed that the 24 largest departments and agencies inventoried more than 7,200 total websites. Documents obtained by Federal News Network show agencies plan to eliminate 332 of those websites — less than 5% of their total web presence.

Priority 3: Software licenses

The software inventory and consolidation priority has been the most public facing of the three up until now.

GSA has led the effort under the OneGov strategy and now has created 15 enterprisewide software contracts with deep discounts.

Laura Stanton, the deputy commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service at GSA, said at the recent ACT-IAC Executive Leadership Conference that 43 agencies already have taken advantage of the enterprisewide contracts for artificial intelligence, for example.

GSA also has made the specific OneGov agreements public through its IT Vendor Management Office and is providing agencies with fact sheets and help to use the new discounted deals.

Birgit Smeltzer, the acting director of the Office of IT Products within the Office of Information Technology Category (ITC) in GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, said at the ELC conference that her office is helping others find and make the most of those OneGov deals.

“The culture shift that I’m seeing is agencies will move away from doing their own thing and come to us to help them create those contracts and get those cost savings through the OneGov strategy,” she said. “What we are hopeful for is that when the renewals start to come out [for existing contracts], we can start collecting that information and help agencies save even more money than they can on their current contract and bring them into the OneGov fold.”

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