One special emphasis of the budget from both a personnel and spending aspect is cybersecurity, where the White House announced initiatives to attract and keep employees who have the skills agencies need.
“The federal government, through efforts such as the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education, will enhance cybersecurity education and training nationwide and hire more cybersecurity experts to secure federal agencies,” an OMB fact sheet says.
This is to include making more money available to cybersecurity employees to repay student loans; expanding the Scholarship for Service program, which offers scholarships for cybersecurity students in exchange for a service commitment in federal employment; and developing a cybersecurity core curriculum that will “ensure cybersecurity graduates who wish to join the federal government have the requisite knowledge and skills.”
Also planned is increasing the number of federal civilian cyber defense teams, which include both federal and contractor employees. “These standing teams will protect networks, systems, and data across the entire federal civilian government by conducting penetration testing and proactively hunting for intruders, as well as providing incident response and security engineering expertise,” it says.
Other initiatives include: creating a federal chief information security officer to oversee cybersecurity policy across the government; requiring agencies to identify and prioritize their highest value and most at-risk IT assets and then take concrete steps to improve their security; and extending to all agencies the capability to use cybersecurity diagnostic and response services available from DHS.
The budget calls for $19 billion in cybersecurity spending government-wide in 2017, up by about a third, including creation of a $3.1 billion IT modernization fund at GSA that agencies could tap for up-front money to upgrade their systems, with the money to be repaid later. Those portions are subject to congressional approval.
