While legislation from 2018 sought to have the Social Security Administration (SSA) enter into agreements with states to share and match SSA and child welfare data, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) survey has found that some state child welfare agencies are identifing challenges to participating in these data exchanges.

Many a political leader or IT director will stipulate that government needs to make citizen-facing computer systems more like Amazon – fast, friendly, efficient, and unfailing. But more often than not this seems to be a bridge too far, as some of the most visible citizen-facing government applications have performed woefully. While the pandemic exposed […]

New research on broadband accessibility found that 77 percent of Americans now have access to low-priced wired broadband plans in the first quarter of 2021.

As we predicted two months ago, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last week postponed the October 2021 deadline for Americans to have REAL ID compliant driver’s licenses or identity cards to fly or enter many Federal facilities. Several states – and especially California – were quite nervous about their departments of motor vehicles […]

Federal support for some flavor of broadband service expansion to underserved areas of the United States is an idea whose time has come into fuller flower after many years of being an issue mostly in the wheelhouses of local planning boards, telecom company lobbying shops, and communications policy wonks. It’s another example of a big […]

Before the pandemic, 16.9 million kids fell into what was dubbed the “homework gap.” Essentially, these students had access to the internet and the educational resources it affords while in class but not when at home. Many were forced to use Wi-Fi at fast-food restaurants or rely on the library to do their schoolwork. In […]

Sens. Gary Peters D-Mich., and John Thune, R-S.D., have introduced legislation that would strengthen the Federal workforce through attracting experts in the AI field to public service.

A handful of Democratic legislators have sent a letter to the Department of Justice (DoJ) seeking answers to what steps the agency takes to ensure predictive policing technology is effective, and whether it tests for bias and requires transparency in algorithms used in the technology.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned historic levels of fraud in state government unemployment insurance (UI) programs – enabled through combined failures of policy, procedure, management, leadership, and technology. The pandemic fraud-wave has resulted in perhaps the greatest financial debacle in state governance history – wasting as much as $30 billion in California alone. Nationwide on […]

It had to be good news for IT-challenged states when President Biden last week signed the $1.9 trillion COVID stimulus bill that includes a somewhat surprising $2 billion funding award to the Department of Labor (DoL) to help with state unemployment insurance (UI) program improvement. The plan’s UI package was first reported by MeriTalk on […]