The Fed Mission Success Round Up: Congressional Offices Experimenting with AI; the SSA Customer Service Challenge; and AI Workforce Efforts

Welcome to the Fed Mission Success News Round Up brought to you by Makpar. Each week, we will provide a summary of actionable news and insights to help aid in overall mission success for Federal agency IT decision-makers and influencers.

Congressional Offices Experimenting with Generative AI, Though Widespread Adoption Appears Limited

As generative artificial intelligence tools have made their way into public use, a few offices on Capitol Hill have also begun to experiment with them, however, widespread use appears to be limited.

Lawmakers Seek Details on Biden Administration’s AI Workforce Efforts

Lawmakers on the New Democrat Coalition's Artificial Intelligence Working Group recently sent a letter to the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, advocating for the up-skilling of the existing federal workforce in artificial intelligence systems.

SSA Needs Funding to Address its ‘Customer Service Crisis’

The Social Security Administration is trying to improve its admittedly dismal customer service, but it needs more funding to be able to do so, according to its commissioner, Martin O’Malley.

USTRANSCOM’s Michael Howard on Becoming a More Agile-Minded Organization

The U.S. Transportation Command will kick off a three-year effort to make it easier for users to access data anywhere, anytime, its transformation chief said in this recent Fed News Network article.

NIST’s New AI Safety Institute to Focus on Synthetic Content, International Outreach

National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) new U.S. AI Safety Institute aims to lead both domestic and international conversations about standardization for artificial intelligence tools and applications, with a focus on monitoring synthetically generated content.

DoD’s Emerging Tech Experiments Will Continue to Support CJADC2

The Pentagon’s Global information Dominance Experiment — or GIDE — series last year paved the way for the department to roll out the initial version of its effort to streamline communication between combatant commands, a Department of Defense official said last week.

MITRE Launches Lab to Test Federal Government AI Risks

MITRE opened a new facility dedicated to the testing of government uses of AI, especially for assessing the risk of systems using AI in simulated environments, red-teaming, and “human-in-the-loop experimentation.”