Bugcrowd unveils AI Triage Assistant and AI Analytics to help security teams proactively defend against AI-driven cyberattacks by accelerating vulnerability analysis, reducing MTTR, and enabling preemptive security decisions.

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Interview transcript

Terry Gerton Deloitte’s got a new report out that suggests that inefficiencies and mission support functions are diverting resources from war fighting. Can you start by walking us through the central argument there? How do you connect those dots?

Tom Muir Sure, it’s a great topic, and certainly one that’s timely, not just for the Department of War, but other federal agencies. We think we’re at a unique point in time for government agencies, particularly with artificial intelligence, machine learning, an empowered and upskilled workforce to deliver on the promise of back office services. We won’t call them back office services in this report. We call them mission support services. Because at least when they’re the Department of War, Department of Defense, it is absolutely critical that they make the most of their budget and their priorities to focus on the mission of the department and the priorities to meet the national defense strategy and to enable our national security. We think we have a unique period of time for the department to deliver at speed and scale. They’re doing this in their mission. Secretary Hegseth talked about this about a week ago about acquisition transformation. And they can do that, take that same approach to mission support services that enable the mission of war fighters, improves readiness, enables the department to do their mission, and from an employee perspective, improves the ability of employees to leverage new technologies to deliver on their tasks in support of the mission.

Terry Gerton So you and I both spent some time wandering the halls of the Pentagon on the OSD stack. Many enterprise reform efforts have failed or come up short when it comes to being deployed in DOD. Talk us through some of the cultural difficulties and the organizational difficulties in doing this kind of reform.

Tom Muir Well, as you and your listeners know well, the department is budgeted and funded through appropriations under Title X, right? Military departments are funded to drive the performance of their military departments aligned with Department of War, Department of Defense priorities and national defense strategy. So part of the budget process would argue against this, but in order for them to achieve the efficiencies and effectiveness that the department needs to drive its mission capabilities, there’s a consolidation that’s critical for them to achieve that speed and skill we talked about earlier. We think that this is a unique opportunity because for the first time in, at least in my experience working in the Pentagon and agency supporting the Pentagon, they have a number of private sector leaders that are present in key leadership positions across the Department of War and Department of Defense that this be this is second nature to them. Improving performance, delivering on customer experience, reducing costs, recapitalization and empowering and upskilling the workforce is what they have done in private sector. And they’re bringing that same experience and insights to their government positions now inside the Pentagon. So we think because of technology, leadership and the current environment of cost savings and delivery on mission, this is the right time to have this conversation.

Terry Gerton People have said for years that Fortune 100 global companies can do this and are incentivized to do this, but the military operates under different constraints. So all of those private sector folks sometimes run up against some real obstacles in the military. What are some of the lessons that you think from the corporate world get that can realistically be applied inside DoD?

Tom Muir That’s a great point. You know, we cannot expect to apply all the lessons from private sector to the Department of Defense or Department of War. It’s just, it — particularly not carte blanche. It is a unique mission. It is critical to our national security. It is critical to our economic security globally. And so the Deloitte team has significant experience throughout the years working with Fortune 100 companies to stand up technology-driven multifunctional back offices. So this brings together HR, IT, finance, and acquisition of the four that we’ve specifically focused on in terms of our mission support services in this paper. And our work in private sector, we enable that consolidation, centralization, and mission focus of these cross-functional teams. Many agencies in private sector or companies in private sector call this a global business service. We tend to refer to it in Deloitte as sort of a center office concept, not a back office, because these offices and functions are critical to the mission of the performance of government agencies. For the private sector, we call them business units. Critical in the performance of business units, lowering cost, driving efficiencies, delivering on profit and loss statements to enable shareholder interest. In government, we think it’s more critical. It’s delivering on mission. This is not just about cost effectiveness and performance and efficiencies, it’s delivering on mission.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Tom Muir, he’s a specialist executive with Deloitte. So Tom, one of the big recommendations in your report is that all of this can be AI enabled, taking an AI-first approach. Talk us through how that would work. Is that sort of a way to bridge what kind of have been long running cultural differences between the services and the DOD staff? And what safeguards need to be in place if you’re going to deploy AI in a defense sector?

Tom Muir That’s a great question. You know, the Department of Defense is accelerating the adoption of advanced AI right now and machine learning in support of military capabilities to address their national security challenges. That same approach applies for these functional areas of HR, IT, finance, and contracting. Many of us employ AI routinely in our daily lives, and the workforce ought to be able to employ AI in their workforce lives to deliver on mission. We think AI can immediately apply to a wide range of DoD missions. But when we think about AI to improve audit readiness, right? The Department of Defense is under a statutory requirement to get a clean audit by December of 2028. And the Department truthfully has struggled with that remediation projects over the previous years. There’s a unique ability right now with the technologies available in AI and machine learning to drive that audit readiness, audit remediation, enterprise data management, acquisition of common goods and services at a lower cost point, at greater efficiency and greater performance. There’s an ability for them to gain significant momentum in some of these projects that they’ve already undertaken and pilots that they have advanced for the use of AI and ML technologies and deliver those tools to their workforce and upskill this workforce to use those tools to deliver better performance. We think we’re at a unique point, rather, for our agencies to do this within the Department of Defense, within the Pentagon.

Terry Gerton So Tom, I looked at the back of the report and there’s a ‘what DOD can do today’ page and I thought we could have pulled this from 1990 or 2000 or 2010 or 2020. What makes today’s environment different where Deloitte thinks that this is actually achievable?

Tom Muir The delight team has taken this approach, particularly with the Department of War, Department of Defense, because we think it’s based on three things. The first is, it is a tech forward approach to solving some of these pervasive problems that you and I just talked about, Terry, that have been very difficult for government agencies to move forward over decades. Right? We’ve done a bunch of shared services initiatives that have not gotten the department very far, not just the Department of War, Department of Defense, but other agencies as well across the federal government. We think there’s a second piece to this, and that is it’s a show not tell. We think there’s an ability for AI and ML to deliver to workers and workforce to not study the problem, but to demonstrate very rapidly in matters of weeks and months, not six months to a year, and implement technologies and, as you mentioned earlier, safeguard those technologies, right? There’s a cybersecurity discussion and an ethical use of AI discussion to this to this challenge. And we think the department is putting together policies that do just that. And the third piece is focus on outcomes, not processes, not business processes, but transforming business processes to deliver outcomes for the war fighter in the Department of Defense, Department of War’s discussions. But for other agencies, it’s deliver outcomes for their departments, agencies and bureaus. In business, it’d be deliver, you know, outcomes for the business units and profit and loss statements. That same discussion applies just to the bureaus and the agencies across the federal government.

Terry Gerton So let’s assume that DoD takes Deloitte’s recommendations and moves out on them and implements them. Five or 10 years down the road, what would look different and how would you measure or demonstrate that the efficiencies have actually improved readiness?

Tom Muir The great question. You know, in our minds, at least as we discuss this amongst our teams and as we share this with our clients in the Pentagon and in other federal agencies, we think looking back, right, 10 years from now, what does success look like? We think success is a consolidated mission support focused organization that delivers and manages standardized processes at speed and scale, leveraging technology to upskill the workforce, to allow them to live, to focus on cost and performance. We think when you look at the memorandums and the guidance that has come out recently from the Pentagon about recapitalization of the workforce, about acquisition transformation, it’s about delivery of the skill necessary to defend our nation, to deter threats and defeat them if necessary. We think that that’s critical when you look back, you know, from where we are today to that journey that they’re gonna undertake. And they’ve already taken many actions that’ve already begun. As you and I, who both worked in the Pentagon together, many of these actions are already in place. It’s just a matter of bringing that capacity and a consolidated, multifunctional mission support organization that allows them to deliver on the mission of supporting war fighters more effectively, more efficiently, at higher performance and lower cost. And then those cost savings can be put into critical capabilities necessary for war fighters at the front lines.

Terry Gerton How much of this can DoD do on its own without asking permission from Congress and how much does Congress officially need to support?

Tom Muir I believe that the Department has had an ongoing conversation with Congress, you know, particularly the oversight committees, both the HASC and the SASC in particular, and the appropriations committees on their outcomes that they’re looking to achieve by their transformation plans. We saw the first one just brought forward by the secretary of war last week. Secretary Hegseth discussed where he thought the department needed to move with acquisition transformation. I think we’re starting to see more of those in terms of direct report program portfolio management offices and how the department is tackling some of these large national security challenges. That dialog is ongoing. I think the department can do all of this within its budget and take that budget and put it back towards war fighting missions, right? The cost savings that come from this multifunctional shared service delivery services in support of their mission can be put towards that frontline war fighting mission. So I think that this is savings to the department that they can then put against mission and delivery for war fighters.

The post Can fixing the Pentagon’s back office make the front lines stronger? first appeared on Federal News Network.

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Interview transcript

Terry Gerton We’re a few weeks past the longest lapse in federal appropriations and maybe looking at another one in the end of January. So I want to work with you to put October and November into context. You’ve seen many shutdowns in your time on the Hill and now at Deloitte. How would you say this one differs from previous episodes, especially when it comes to your area of expertise, tax policy?

Anna Taylor Well, I do think it was different than what we’ve seen in years past. And part of that starts with just the way folks on the hill operated in it. I was really shocked that — my first sign that something was different was — I was shocked when I heard reporting that … the members and the staff that work in the Capitol building had left before we even hit midnight the night that we entered the shutdown. That’s not normal. In years past in shutdowns, you have frantic work happening behind the scenes where they’re trying to see if there’s any way to find a deal. And it was just obviously clear to all of them that they were so far away from a deal at that point that there was nothing to do. And so they left the building. And that was my first sign that this one was not normal and we were in for a longer shutdown. You know, in terms of the impact it has on tax administration and tax policy, it’s significant. You know, the fact that you had so many furloughed workers in the federal workforce and specifically at IRS and in Treasury, during that extended period definitely has an effect on customer service. It has an effect on their ability to move forward with their reg writing and guidance plans, which is in this moment, you know, where we’re just getting through a big piece of legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that was signed into law back in the summer, and they’re in a very significant guidance process to go along with that bill right now. There’s a lot of work that needs to get done … I know that you know, the treasury and the IRS said much of that work went on during the shutdown. So I do think that there was some of that that didn’t stop, which is a good thing for taxpayers, but had to slow it down in some capacity. And when you think about just customer service for taxpayers and not being able to call and find somebody on the phone to talk to, certainly there were challenges there as well. So I do think there was that, you know, kind of tangible direct effect. Now, in terms of effect on tax policy, I think it’s jury still out. Obviously there wasn’t any sort of deal that ended the shutdown with additional legislation. So we didn’t have some big tax package coming out of the — sometimes you do see some sort of legislative deal come out of a — well, not often with a shutdown. Normally nobody wins in a shutdown. But when you’re reaching appropriations deals that don’t end in shutdown, sometimes you’ll see tax legislation attached to those kinds of deals. And, you know, we didn’t have that … There were not regular hearings and regular markups happening in the tax writing committees while we were in shutdown. And so there was probably a slowdown in some bills that are maybe under consideration because they weren’t being considered during the shutdown. And so I do think that probably it definitely had a direct effect on taxpayers who may have had an impact on customer service, but there’s also that effect of maybe slowing down policymaking as well.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Anna Taylor. She’s managing principal of the Tax Policy Group at Deloitte. Well, let’s talk about the specific impact on taxpayers. I mean, filing season is going to open in just a few weeks. Is there a reasonable expectation that the IRS and all of the companies that support tax filing will have written in the rules for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act provisions and anything else that might come up before the year end? Are tax filers going to have the systems ready to go?

Anna Taylor Well, I think that the Treasury and IRS have done a — they’ve made a real effort to try to get to the things from that bill first that were going to need to be implemented for taxpayers at the beginning of 2026. So I think in most cases, you have … already seen guidance come out on those things that are affecting individual taxpayers, like … the tipped income deduction and overtime pay, things like that. So they have already put out quite a bit of guidance in those spaces that will have a direct effect on individual taxpayers. There’s still a lot to go though. And, you know, you have business taxpayers who maybe aren’t filing on the same timeline as individuals. Some of that important guidance is still yet to come. But I do think that because of the thinking about the kind of end year for individuals, the administration has tried to prioritize those things that are going to need to be known on day one of the new year.

Terry Gerton That’s good to hear. You also mentioned the congressional tax writing committees and certainly as Congress has come back, the committees have quite a backlog. Can you give us any insight as to what they may be talking about in those committees?

Anna Taylor Well, they do have a full agenda. I mean, I think the first thing that you’re hearing a lot about if you turn on any news outlet right now is of course the thing that landed them in the shutdown to begin with, finding some sort of path forward on those Affordable Care Act premium tax credit — the enhancements for those credits. They didn’t reach any deal before they came out of the shutdown, but they did agree to keep working on it. So there was an agreement as part of coming out of that shutdown where Majority Leader Thune in the Senate said he will hold another round of votes on those credit extensions by the middle of December. So I do think that there’s conversations happening, both bipartisan and partisan, to see if there’s a path forward on figuring out a way to deal with health care costs and insurance premium costs. So that’s taking up a lot of time right now. In addition to that, there is interest from the committees to try to move some things that they’ve been working on for a while on a bipartisan basis. These are things that have been in works for years, honestly, and have pretty broad consensus support. Things like, you know, there’s a tax treaty with Taiwan that has moved through regular order in both the House and the Senate that I think people would like to see get over the finish line. There is, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee have worked on — they haven’t actually processed legislation, but they’ve put out a joint white paper on tax administration. So just some changes to make the system work better for taxpayers. I think that’s something they’re interested in trying to see if there’s opportunities to move together. And then there are a few expiring tax provisions on the business side of the ledger that haven’t been dealt with this year. You know, a lot of the expiring provisions on the individual side were included in that one big beautiful bill act back in the summer. But there are a couple of provisions like the Work Opportunity Tax Credit. That’s an important one that does have an effect on people’s ability to get a job and on business’s ability to hire. And so that’s one that is set to expire at the end of this year that I do think there’s probably bipartisan interest in extending. So those are all things I think on the near-term agenda, if they’re in an environment to be able to move some bipartisan legislation. And we all know right now that’s a big no.

Terry Gerton Well, speaking of that environment, 2026 is an election year for many members of Congress. Do you think in that environment they really will be able to move some of these big pieces of tax legislation or will they maybe just nibble around the edges?

Anna Taylor It’s a really good question. And … when I look in my crystal ball, it’s cloudy, you know. I think that, even in the most political of times, you can sometimes get smaller packages of bipartisan consensus product through. So, you know, I’m still hopeful that they can — they’re going to have to do something on appropriations again when they get to the end of January. That’s when that next government funding deadline will be reached. And so there is potentially a bipartisan vehicle that will be heading our way come late January, assuming we’re not headed towards another shutdown at that point. And so I really do think there’s a possibility that if they reach some sort of funding deal, you know, as they’re working through it in December and into January, that there’s the potential that you could see some tax legislation move along with it, possibly. The later — and I think this goes without saying — the later you get into an election year, the harder it is to do bipartisan things. So when we get into, you know, maybe late summer, early fall, I’ll stop being as optimistic. But until then, I think that there’s still a chance they could move some of the smaller consensus items.

The post What can individuals and businesses expect when the tax filing window opens in just a few weeks? first appeared on Federal News Network.

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Interview transcript: 

Jared Serbu Don’t need to dig into all of the details that went into the source selection here, but if you could give me, just give our listeners a minute or two on this new platform and what makes it such a step forward from the platforms it’s replacing, that would that would help us out greatly for the rest of the conversation.

Ryan Ehinger Yeah, and I could go ahead and give an industry perspective on that. And this is Ryan. So really back in the 2012, 2013 timeframe, we were looking to differentiate capability for the warfighter in terms of vertical lift capability by going twice as fast and twice as far. And a lot of that was under the future vertical lift program effort. And so we started with a demonstrator concept called the V-280 Valor. That really captured a lot of lessons learned from previous tilt rotor experience that Bell had, and it really leveraged that to fly a demonstrator in 2017, accumulate about 215 flight hours on it, and I think inform the Army on tilt rotor technology and requirements that could be met by that technology to support their eventual solicitation and down select of a tilt rotor for supporting the future long-range assault aircraft program.

Jared Serbu Great. Anything to add on that, Colonel?

Col. Jeffrey Poquette Yeah, it’s very similar in that the Army was looking for something that provided transformational speed and range over the current Black Hawk fleet. And then additionally, the government really wanted the aircraft to be an open system. So the ability to upgrade the aircraft in the future quickly, cheaply, without necessarily having to go to any one particular vendor. So the open system is another key part of the platform.

Jared Serbu Got it. And so at this point looking forward, the ask from the Secretary, as I understand it, is to get a prototype up and running by next fiscal year, which is pretty ambitious. So talk us through a bit some of the key things that you’re going to be doing to meet that schedule.

Ryan Ehinger Yeah, we’ve been laser focused on acceleration and getting a prototype out there next year. And so a lot of the work that we’ve been doing is taking the success that we had on the V-280 demonstrator, applying a lot of the items from that in terms of configuration and critical technologies, applying that to a design meeting the requirements for the future long range assault aircraft. And so what we’ve been working on with the government team is first and foremost establishing a foundation of an all digital design, incorporating using model-based systems engineering, but incorporating, as Jeff mentioned, the modular open systems approach. So a lot of the design work that we’ve been doing with the government to date has resulted in more than 90% of our engineering being released and a significant amount of work going on across the industrial base related to building hardware to support that first, and not just the first prototype, but the first six or eight prototypes that will be coming out of the program. But we’d look to complete that in early FY 27, that first prototype.

Jared Serbu Colonel, from the government side, what sorts of risks does that aggressive schedule potentially introduce for you, and what are some of the things that you’re looking to do to manage that?

Col. Jeffrey Poquette Yeah, I think initially when we were asked to accelerate, our concern was, okay, if we start working now while we’re still in the middle of the design process, the chance is always there that we could end up building a prototype that doesn’t do what we need it to do. The reason why we’re okay with that and are willing to accept some of that risk is exactly for the reasons that Ryan mentioned. The V-280 demonstrator gives us a lot of confidence in tilt rotor technology. We know Bell knows how to do it. The open system is something that they’re fully on board with. And then the digital engineering and the digital environment provides the government a lot of insight into the design itself as it’s occurring. Other things that we’ve agreed to do was allowed Bell to pursue some commercial best practices when it comes to safety of flight on some of the early prototypes and being able to leverage FAA certifications instead of Army airworthiness certifications, while in the background we’ll continue to work Army airworthiness. So that is a little bit of an elevated risk, but one that the Army was willing to accept. Some of the digital engineering and technical deliverables, we’ve deferred the actual delivery of the items. However, what we’ve decided to do is really work together as an integrated team. So my team of a hundred or so engineers very often are down there out in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, working side by side along Bell engineers. So we have the insight of working along the way. Bell has the ability to ask questions and make adjustments and they get feedback very quickly, as opposed to maybe earlier it was about handing over technical deliverables for very thorough reviews. So we’ve kind of accelerated our review process, other things. The supply chain is always a concern and the Secretary asked us to leverage the Defense Production Act. So we are engaged with the Army and soon to be the Department of War on how we can potentially get some elevated priority on our program when it comes to the Defense Production Act.

Ryan Ehinger Yeah, and I do think that approach is working well, and I do appreciate when people ask us the question about risk associated with acceleration because it gives us a chance to kind of walk through why I think we’re in a uniquely favorable position to accelerate. And part of it we talked about was the demonstrator and going 215 flight hours and all the data we were able to capture from that successful effort, but then also looking at the steps that we go through from early digital engineering and digital design where we have fly-throughs leveraging virtual reality and augmented reality. We bring the maintainers into that virtual environment and have them simulate maintenance of the aircraft very, very early in the design phase so that we don’t have discoveries, three, five, ten years later as we’re trying to sustain the platform. A lot of that gets baked in early. And then from the standpoint of getting to first flight and flight test activity, we spend a lot of time trying to get discoveries as early as possible in the process. And how we do that is by doing a lot of component-based testing, whether it’s fatigue testing, vibration testing, things of that nature at the component level. And then we integrate all of those components, aside from the structure, but all the systems, a pilot in the loop, all the software in a weapon systems integration lab. And we have that facility down in Arlington, Texas, and the pilot will fly a fully integrated set of systems on the ground for months and months and months, proving out the software and proving out the integration of these components before we ever step foot in an aircraft. So we get a lot of opportunity to reduce risk and learn these lessons early in the program before we’ve started making even some of those accelerated LRIP aircraft.

Jared Serbu Digital engineering’s come up a few times in the conversation so far, and I’m wondering if either or both of you want to give some concrete examples of some of the work that you’ve been able to do in that virtual world and save time that way versus things that, in a previous era, would have had to be done purely in a physical world.

Ryan Ehinger Yeah, just to give a couple examples and then I’ll pass it to to Jeff. But I mentioned the maintainers, and being able to have maintainers, in some cases it’s veterans that we’ve brought over from the services into Bell that have done this for their first career and now they’re spending their second career, so to speak, making sure we get it right. But they actually have virtual, I’ll say tools and toolboxes, and they work to maintain that aircraft. And they’ll come to the engineering team after a test run and say, look, I had to remove three things to get to the part I was trying to fix, and it gives us an opportunity to fix that and make sure that number one, keep things from failing, but if something does fail, let’s make sure it fails in a benign way and in a way that we can replace it and repair it in the field and as easily as possible. And the digital engineering, and I think Jeff will probably touch on this, it is an investment. And it’s an investment early on that allows you to also take all these digital artifacts as kind of one source of truth and use them to support your tech pubs and your manuals, and again that sustainment and logistics tail that the aircraft will have for decades to come. But it all goes back to that initial investment in digital engineering and that single source of truth. And I’ll pass it to Jeff.

Col. Jeffrey Poquette Yeah, we’re really proud of the fact that this program was born digital. So we are clearly leading the way for defense acquisitions. We’re a digital engineering pathfinder for the department. Like Ryan said, I think there’s perhaps a misnomer out there that the investment in digital engineering somehow means that you get to go fast while you’re designing. And I always say, look, this is an investment in time. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that we are designing faster. What it means is when we complete the design and then build it, you can actually test faster because there’s a lot more that’s right with the aircraft. You’re a lot closer to what you wanted to get. The model-based systems engineering approach has allowed us and allowed Bell to really come up with a design that we’re very confident won’t miss any of the key requirements. In the past, it would be hard to know whether you were going to miss satisfying a requirement until you got to test. And then if it happened to be a big expensive miss during test, then you’re now iterating in the test environment. The goal was to really iterate in this digital and MDSE environment such that when you build the prototypes, you can have a test program that’s half as long as a traditional aircraft test program that has occurred in the past. So that’s really what we’re getting at. MDSE and digital engineering go hand in hand. My engineers can go right to their computer and workstations and look at the design in real time. And that has never been able to be done before when you do things the old way.

Jared Serbu On that requirements piece, I’d love to hear you both talk through a bit about the extent to which, if at all, requirements have needed to be changed in order to meet that go faster directive. And if the answer’s no, tell us a bit about why not.

Col. Jeffrey Poquette I’ll take that one. Look, this aircraft is made up of hundreds and hundreds of requirements and they’re tiered into different buckets. None of the most important requirements to include things that are deeply important to the Army, like MOSA, have had to be trade off. Might we have to trade some weight, take on a little bit of extra weight to include some provisions to ensure that the aircraft is truly modular and can handle the SOCOM variant and handle the medevac requirement? Might we have had to make those kinds of decisions? Absolutely. Are there certain things in the requirements document that are deep down in the in the requirement that might not be on the first aircraft? Probably. But that’s not what we’re seeking. We’re not seeking perfection. The Secretary and the Chief made it very clear. We’re not trying to get it absolutely perfect. What we need to do is deliver transformational capability. That’s what we mean when we talk about the speed and range twice as far, twice as fast, and the ability to handle the MOSA architecture and the open system. If we get that, we’re going to have a very, very good first iteration of the aircraft. And by the same token, the open systems architecture will allow us to go in and upgrade anything that needs upgrading. When you go faster, you might have to trade off requirements. We haven’t had any big decision event like that yet, but it is certainly something that we might have to think about in the future.

Ryan Ehinger Yeah, and I would echo that. I think we’re very proud of where we’re looking relative to the requirements for the platform and the capability it will provide the warfighter. And I’ll just go back to the, I’ll say, head start we had relative to tilt rotor technology being being mature and giving us a good foundation to start with.

Jared Serbu Last thing here, and I don’t want to look too far down the road, but now’s the time to start thinking about these things obviously, and obviously you have been already thinking about sustainment, but specifically, what do things like that open systems architecture, having that engineering data, having all of that digital engineering data in hand, do for you, down the road when you get to a sustainment phase on a platform like this?

Col. Jeffrey Poquette I’ll take this one initially. So sustainment is one of the things we’ve been thinking about very early on in the program. When we went to our development decision, Milestone B, I would say nearly half of the very extensive and rigorous documentation we had to submit to the Army and the Department of War was focused on the lifecycle sustainment plan. So it’s very much a key element of the program. I would say one quarter of my office are logisticians that focus on things like training, on maintenance and that kind of thing. Ryan mentioned the digital environment, being able to look at the design through virtual means with virtual headsets or augmented reality, that kind of thing. That has given us the ability to provide feedback so we get it right the first time. And then having access to certain data rights allows the Army to write training so that the training meets the Army’s standards. It allows us to make decisions on what components we want to overhaul in the depot out there in Corpus Christi. Most importantly, I would say, is maintenance and ensuring that we have a good understanding about when parts will need to be replaced. I think all the work that Bell has done has allowed us to have a lot more insight into when components would need to be overhauled and replaced. Digital twins will be developed. So every tail number in the Army out there will have its own digital twin that will reside and can be accessed by my office so that if there is a problem in the field, my logisticians and former maintainers will be able to look at that digital twin and have a really good snapshot of what’s going on with the aircraft. And like Ryan said, it all comes down to having a single source of truth. In the past, documents would get shoveled over email, and eventually, inevitably, someone would end up with an out-of-date or not the current version of what you’re supposed to be looking at. This eliminates a lot of that churn, and I really see the sustainment of this aircraft is going to be a big part of why we call this aircraft affordable. As you know, sustainment, for the lifecycle of a program, we consider about 70% of the cost of the lifecycle of the program to be due to the sustainment phase. So it’s very important to us that we reduce those sustainment costs. And kind of final point here, you typically can estimate the sustainment burden of an aircraft based on its weight. And while the MV-75 isn’t especially light, it’s on the heavier side when you compare it to heavier lift aircraft like Chinook. We have a much, we’ve predicted through simulations and modeling that the sustainment is going to be much, much less than aircraft of its size and weight.

Ryan Ehinger Yeah, I think that’s a good point. And I would just say from an industry standpoint, programmatically and I’ll even say culturally, we’ve approached this clean sheet development in a different way that I think provides a lot more tools for the user, for the Army to maintain this long term. And some of the things that Jeff mentioned related to the correlation between weight and maintenance cost or weight and cost in general. I’d like to think we’re breaking some of those cost curves with this because of a lot of the tools that we’ve used, and quite frankly because of some of the newer technologies that are available today that weren’t available when some of the currently fielded aircraft were developed.

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Over the last 11 months, the General Services Administration has signed 11 enterprisewide software agreements under its OneGov strategy.

The agreements bring both standard terms and conditions as well as significant discounts for a limited period of time to agencies.

Ryan Triplette, the executive director of the Coalition for Fair Software Licensing, said the Trump administration seems to be taking cues from what has been working, or not working, in the private sector around managing software licenses.

“They seem to be saying, ‘let’s see if we can import that in to the federal agencies,’ and ‘let’s see if we can address that to mitigate some of the issues that have been occurring in some of the systemic problems that have been occurring here,’” said Triplette on Ask the CIO. “Now it’s significant, and it’s a challenge, but it’s something that we think is important that you understand any precedent that is set in one place, in this instance, in the public agencies, will have a ripple of impact over into the commercial sector.”

The coalition, which cloud service providers created in 2022 to advocate for less-restrictive rules for buying software, outlined nine principles that it would like to see applied to all software licenses, including terms should be clear and intelligible, customers should be free to run their on-premise software on the cloud of their choice and licenses should cover reasonably expected software uses.

Triplette said while there still is a lot to understand about these new OneGov agreements, GSA seems to recognize there is an opportunity to address some long standing challenges with how the government buys and manages its software.

“You had the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) efforts and you had the federal chief information officer calling for an assessment of the top five software vendors from all the federal agencies. And you also have the executive order that established OneGov and having them seeking to establish these enterprisewide licensees, I think they recognize that there’s an opportunity here to effect change and to borrow practices from what they have seen has worked in the commercial sector,” she said. “Now there’s so many moving parts of issues that need to be addressed within the federal government’s IT and systems, generally. But just tackling issues that we have seen within software and just tackling the recommendations that have been made by the Government Accountability Office over the past several years is important.”

Building on the success of the MEGABYTE Act

GAO has highlighted concerns about vendors applying restrictive licensing practices. In November 2024, GAO found vendor processes that limit, impede or prevent agencies’ efforts to use software in cloud computing. Meanwhile of the six agencies auditors analyzed, none had “fully established guidance that specifically addressed the two key industry activities for effectively managing the risk of impacts of restrictive practices.”

Triplette said the data call by the federal CIO in April and the OneGov efforts are solid initial steps to change how agencies buy and manage software.

The Office of Management and Budget and GSA have tried several times over the past two decades to improve the management of software. Congress also joined the effort passing the Making Electronic Government (MEGABYTE) Act in 2016.

Triplette said despite these efforts the lack of data has been a constant problem.

“The federal government has found that even when there’s a modicum of understanding of what their software asset management uses, they seem to find a cost performance improvement within the departments. So that’s been one issue. You have the differing needs of the various agencies and departments. This has led them in previous efforts to either opt out of enterprisewide licenses or to modify them with their own terms. So even when there’s been these efforts, you find, like, a year or two or three years later, it’s all a wash,” she said. “Quite frankly, you have a lack of a central mandate and appropriations line. That’s probably the most fundamental thing and why it also differs so fundamentally from other governments that have some of these more centralized services. For instance, the UK government has a central mandate, it works quite well.”

Triplette said what has changed is what she called a “sheer force of will” by OMB and GSA.

“They are recognizing the significant amount of waste that’s been occurring and that there has been lock-in with some software vendors and other issues that need to be tackled,” she said. “I think you’ve seen where the administration has really leaned into that. Now, what is going to be interesting is because it has been so centralized, like the OneGov effort, it’s still also an opt-in process. So that’s why I keep on saying, it’ll to be determined how effective it will be.”

SAMOSA gaining momentum

In addition to the administration’s efforts, Triplette said she’s hopeful Congress finally passes the Strengthening Agency Management and Oversight of Software Assets (SAMOSA) Act. The Senate ran out of time to act on SAMOSA last session, after the House passed it in December.

The latest version of SAMOSA mirrors the Senate bill the committee passed in May 2023. It also is similar to the House version introduced in March by Reps. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), the late Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), and several other lawmakers.

The coalition is a strong supporter of SAMOSA.

Triplette said one of the most important provisions in the bill would require agencies to have a dedicated executive overseeing software license asset management.

“There is an importance and a need to have greater expertise within the federal workforce, around software licensing, and especially arguably, vendor-specific software licensing terms,” she said. “I think this is one area that the administration could take a cue from the commercial sector. When they’re engaged in commercial licensing, they tend to work with consultants that are experts in the vendor licensing rules, they understand the policy and they understand the ins and outs. They often have somebody in house that … may not be solely specific to one vendor, but they may do only two or three and so you really have that depth of expertise, that you can understand some great cost savings.”

Triplette added that while finding these types of experts isn’t easy, the return on the investment of either hiring or training someone is well worth it.

She said some estimate that the government could save $50 million a year by improving how it manages its software licenses.  This is on top of what the MEGABYTE Act already produced. In 2020, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee found that 13 agencies saved or avoided spending more than $450 million between fiscal 2017 and 2019 because of the MEGABYTE Act.

“The MEGABYTE Act was an excellent first step, but this, like everything, [is] part of an iterative process. I think it’s something that needs to have the requirement that it has to be done and mandated,” Triplette said. “This is something that has become new as you’ve had the full federal movement to the cloud, and the discussion of licensing terms between on-premise and the cloud, and the intersection between all of this transformation. That is something that wasn’t around during the MEGABYTE Act. I think that’s where it’s a little bit of a different situation.”

The post How the administration is bringing much needed change to software license management first appeared on Federal News Network.

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