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The Daily Scoop Podcast
A special interview with Federal CIO Greg Barbaccia
00:24:03
As 2025 and the first year of the second Trump ad…
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- [00:00]
A
Today on the Daily Scoop Podcast from the Scoop News Group, a special interview with federal CIO Greg Barbaccia. It's Tuesday, December 9th, 2025. Welcome to the Daily Scoop Podcast where you'll hear the latest news and trends facing government leaders. I'm the host of the Daily Scoop Podcast, Billy Mitchell. Thanks so much for joining me. Today we're changing up our normal programming of Daily Scoop headlines to bring you a special interview with federal CIO Greg Barbacci. As 2025 and the first year of the second Trump administration come to a close, Barbaccia sat down with Fed Scoop reporter Madison Alder for a wide ranging interview on the state of federal IT, including critical initiatives like FedRAMP modernization, AI adoption, federal tech talent, the consolidation of federal tech and contracting, what's ahead in 2026, and much, much more. We hope this interview will provide you with an exclusive look at what's been done and what's to come from the office of the Federal cio. I'll pass it over now to Madison Alder for her interview with Federal CIO Greg Barbaccio.
- [01:10]
B
Well, Greg, thank you so much for being here today. We're happy to have you on the podcast.
- [01:14]
C
My pleasure. Thank you.
- [01:15]
B
I'd love to jump right in with acquisition. A couple of months ago, you appeared with Pete Waterman of GSA to talk about the 20x initiative at that agency and to improve cloud purchasing. That's where I met you for the first time. You spoke about your experience with Fedramp there, calling it, and I quote, pain in the butt.
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C
It's a pain in the butt, yeah.
- [01:34]
B
I think a lot of people might have that same experience. So can you tell us a little bit more about your experience in the past with Fedramp in the private sector and why this has been such a priority for this administration?
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C
Sure. You worked with it at a couple of firms in the past, and one of the firms I worked at actually had to make their own commercial offering to make it easier for other companies to get in. And what's interesting about today's tech landscape is it's so much easier to build technology. You don't need an army of engineers. In a lot of cases, you don't need a mountain of hardware. So we have these smaller firms who are building tech and it's just too hard to get in. And 20x is a really great example. So the predecessor, revision 5, that was just another incremental step. And what's exciting about 20x is it's not just another revision to what was not working so well in the past. It's really a complete rethinking. So we're using that as a microcosm of how we think about tech and the government writ large. Instead of making tiny incremental changes, how do we throw out the playbook and go back to first principles and make the whole ecosystem faster?
- [02:36]
B
You also have the one Gov initiative, which is in a similar vein of that tech use in government and the deals that have been entered with a lot of companies but a lot of AI providers. I'm curious what the immediate impact of a lot of those deals has been on tech and AI use in government.
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C
It's certainly accelerating it, which was exactly the point and part of my whole priority for this administration is how do we move forward as a whole of government. And when you have individual agencies operating in silos and they're having different pricing or services, when they have different terms and conditions, it creates confusion. It stops the ability from a government employee to be successful at one agency, go to another agency and be as successful because it's just different. So OneGov is great because it's centralized procurement, centralized terms and conditions negotiation, and that just helps people test software better if they ever want to procure them individually for more bespoke use cases.
- [03:32]
B
What is the plan when. When those agreements end? I mean, as people might know, the agreements are severely discounted, pretty much free, used for a limited time for these services. So once those deals are over, what do these agencies do that might have implemented those into their environments?
- [03:50]
C
Sure, it's great because a $1 deal allows for a potential 10 times multiple next year and we still don't feel the pain at $10 a year. But joking aside, it's helping understand what they want. I believe we're going to see commitments from the major vendors who are doing these deals to have aligned pricing in the future. Now, when we talk about the AI companies specifically, it would almost be a challenge for them to understand how to price right now because they have never rolled out before. This also gives them the opportunity to understand what it costs them to deploy to government and how they could price in the future. And also when they need to bring things internally. The agencies who have took advantage of these deals had the ability for a doubter, understand they want provider X over provider Y and know what to procure for themselves.
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B
Aligned pricing, what would that potentially look like? It's not going to be $1, but what would that be?
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C
It would be nice. I don't think it's going to be $1. I think it'll be transparent at least, which is a step in a great direction where they could say this is your usage, this is a computed cost, this is the overhead it costs us to run. Um, this is what we're trying to get out of the deal. So at least they're coming to the table with fact based pricing that's transparent to us, which is something I think we've missed out on in a lot of things.
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B
You mentioned throwing out the playbook earlier and something I've noticed with this administration, whether it's the consolidation of GWACs, IT GWACs or you know, whether it's something like OneGov or even IT consolidation at agencies like HHS, there's this consolidation and centralization. What is your philosophy there? Is there kind of a running theme behind why, you know, centralize these things or consolidate them across the board?
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C
Absolutely. So commodity technology, things that are agnostic to the end mission of the agency should be consolidated and it goes to the administration priorities of efficiency.
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Transparency and accountability. A lot of the problems we have at government is everybody thinks they're special and they have special business processes. It does not help the taxpayer that we have hundreds of HR systems potentially that are different and are immediately Frankensteined. It doesn't help the vendors because it's hard to keep commercial parity with their version releases. It's hard for cybersecurity in that regard too. So moving things forward and changing our business processes to know that if you're a giant company in the private sector and you could procure something off the shelf, maybe we should take a look inside and say we need to change the paradigm of we do these giant commodity tech things once every 10 years, we immediately Frankenstein it and then it looks like nothing of what we procured. So that's the paradigm we're trying to change.
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B
I mean, obviously a huge entity that's been a part of, of changing the paradigm in government or the efficiency effort is, has been doge. It's been a central point of this administration. You know, as we know it was set up in the former uscs. Traditionally the federal CIO has had a relationship with the uscs and they do similar work. So I'm curious from, from your perspective as Federal cio, what relationship like with, with the doge?
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C
So in the early days when DOGE was more of a central entity, I had more liaising. But now the central like command and control has been dispersed. So there's DOGE teams alive and well at different agencies that report to their directors, and they all report to the heads of the agencies. So I don't really have a central point any longer because it no longer exists.
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B
Okay, okay. I think there's been a little bit of confusion recently over kind of the status of that entity. No longer existing, but still existing. Can you clear this up for us in terms of what its operational status looks like now and how that work is being implemented in agencies?
- [07:23]
C
Sure. So there is the United States DOGE service, which was the legacy USDS US Digital Service. That's a separate EOP component that reports to the White House. My office resides in omb, which is a separate component. So early on, when there were DOGE teams, they were more centralized where they were moving in concerts. Over the last few months, it's my understanding that the teams were. That were assigned to agencies, still operate, and now they're completely within their agencies, reporting to agency heads. Some are within the CIO organization, some are not.
- [07:55]
B
Okay, okay, that makes sense. I want to shift to AI use, which has been another priority for this administration and actually was for the first Trump administration, too. We're at the time of year where agencies put out their AI use case inventories. This was an initiative that was brought about during the first Trump administration, has continued since. I know one of the deadlines was supposed to happen during the shutdown. Agencies were supposed to submit to omb. So can you talk to us a little bit about what expectations are for the use case inventories this year and what those timelines look like right now?
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C
Sure, yeah. We're excited about it. We've gotten a lot of use cases in, I think, last calendar year. And this is public online. We have over 2,000 use cases reported. So the advanced deadlines we haven't released publicly, but we're making sure we're taking into account the shutdown days and then the holidays coming up. So giving people enough time to absorb the days that they missed during the lapse. Yeah.
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B
Okay.
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C
We're not a major delay.
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B
Okay. Have the instructions changed at all to agencies? Is there anything new or different happening this year with those?
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C
No, it's. It's largely in the same. All we've done is said that we understand you were unable to make the timelines. Okay.
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B
What are you expecting in terms of. Of uses? What. What kind of story will those tell for federal government AI use?
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C
Yeah, it's exciting. The initial use cases are going to be those low impact use cases, and that's another cultural change we're trying to get around. People in the government have this no risk type of mentality. But it's near impossible to do things without some sort of risk. So if things have a low risk, that's okay. We want to make sure we move fast, responsibly, and test the technology. So we're looking at things that are kind of fungible that any agency could use. Obviously, things like translation services are easy first targets. Kind of distilling large documents and large corpuses of policies down to a level that makes sense. And also document generation, something that multiple agencies struggle with is creating position descriptions for job descriptions. So we're seeing a lot of success with that type of portfolio.
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B
That's really interesting. I know. Speaking of jobs and AI, in an interview with CNBC this summer, you were talking about the AI action plan and you mentioned kind of the labor impacts of AI and how AI could be used to replace mundane, repetitive tasks. This is something that we've seen federal government leaders also talk about, and they're saying AI can do just that. So I'm curious, have you seen AI replace any of those tasks yet in government? What are those thematic areas look like?
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C
Sure. State Department's a great example. State Department has diplomats that they send into the field, and it takes them a long time to get up to speed on the human terrain and the political dynamics of their area of interest. So instead of manually reading months and months of literature or policy documents, we're able to use AI to distill them down and get key points that are immediately relevant to your day to day. So now our diplomats could get out into the field. They could be interacting with the local government, the local population, pushing our strategic efforts forward. And also we have third country nationals at all our diplomatic installations that all they do sometimes is translate documents. You understand, previous translation that was computer driven was weird. It would come out without context and things. So AI is helping with that. And now instead of just translating things all day, they're able to engage with the local population and then be strategic advisors to our diplomats. I think that's a really good example. And again, it's getting people to do what is in the best benefit of their mission for their agency. And it's oftentimes not sitting behind a computer doing something that we could now automate away.
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B
A lot of those State Department uses have been parts of State Chat. Are we expecting more state chats across government agencies to start implementing their own kind of model?
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C
I'd like to see it. State Chat is a great example. The State Departments been at it a lot longer than some of the Agencies, but all the key ethos of finding these things that we could immediately make relevant across our agency mission. Like, I'd love to see more of that. Absolutely.
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B
Also on AI job displacement or AI impact on jobs. Displacement is an anxiety with respect to AI. There's even legislation on it right now, bipartisan, that would take a look at which jobs AI is replacing in both the public and private sector. I'm curious, have you seen any displacement in government yet? And if so, what areas are those in?
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C
I have not seen whole cloth displacement of an individual because their job was completely outsourced to AI or any other technology. And again, using the example, that's what we're trying to do here. Get something that we could automate away and get this human doing something that's more high value.
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B
Tech talent is another area that we focused on a lot. Just given the change in this administration in the federal workforce and the impact on the federal workforce, there's been some anxiety, I think, from folks that federal tech workers have been impacted as part of that, as we know, this has been a priority for administrations in the past. You know, it's been a priority for previous administration and the first Trump administration as well. And we've even seen current administration officials talk about the importance of tech talent hiring. But it is, it is a struggle, as we know. And I'm curious, what is your approach to that? What is the status of the current tech workforce and government, especially with respect to some of these impacts on the workforce that we've seen thus far?
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C
Sure. So as far as the current government tech force, we have a lot of people who are hired as engineers and what they're doing is not core engineering work is usually managing contractors and things like that. So when we have the right people, oftentimes they're in the wrong roles. So that's an issue. And the way I sell tech is the way, you know, you would try to do an early stage startup is while tech and government, the pay not be might not be there, you do have access to really some of the hardest problems in the world, some of the most high impact use cases you could have in the world, and there are some exciting initiatives in flight.
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B
Okay. Has there been an impact on the tech workforce though? I mean, with respect to some of these cuts that we've seen?
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C
You know, it's hard for me to put a number on things like that. Of course there was some sort of disruption and disruption is not intrinsically a negative thing.
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B
You know, I know if, if I were a government worker looking at jobs right now. And I saw a lot of these cuts happening. I might be a little. A little nervous about that. So what is your pitch to alleviate that to people and say, you know, these are still stable jobs, you know, and especially when you're competing with the private sector, which has a little bit of an advantage in terms of the salaries that they can offer to people.
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C
Sure. I mean, your impact here is going to be outsized. The mission focus is going to be things that are almost impossible to get in the private sector. And if you were to come close to this type of mission impact in the private sector, you'd probably be in government contracting anyway. I think there is a tremendous amount of stability for a highly skilled, highly motivated technologist in the government right now. We have a large appetite for that.
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B
From a leadership perspective. Excuse me, on tech talent, we have new CIOs, people that have come from the private sector. And I'm curious how that dynamic has changed at all or looks like on the Federal CIO Council. Obviously, you're a leader of the Federal CIO Council. So what are these. What are the pros and cons of having people who have mostly private sector experience coming in with. With that perspective to that environment?
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C
Yeah, it's interesting. So there's the 24 CFO agencies, and I think around nine to 11 are private sector new CIOs. And it's really night and day because it's almost comical, the frustration the private sector CIOs that come in have. And the dynamic of the CIO Council meetings are really good now because now that we have this mix, it's helpful for the private sector people to take an objective look at something and go, this doesn't make sense. It would never work in the private sector. And then for having some of our career brothers and sisters say there are statutory requirements, this is kind of what we. The box we need to play in and then watch the dialogue between those two to kind of get kind of creative solutions to things that might not have been done in the past.
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B
So working together, using both of those to their advantage, and for the career.
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C
People to look at the new people and go, oh, you know, now is an environment and there's an appetite for changes and not doing things because we did them always in the past. And there's, you know, I perceive there's this game of telephone that goes on in the government where you get a job, you've been there for 20 years, and you're doing something because you heard that's the way it's always been done in the past, or there's some statutory requirement or something about this. In the past there's some regulation. And at least now we're saying, well, let's pull the language or let's work with the Hill and go back to first principles and say, we've tried this. It simply doesn't work. So we have to change the paradigm.
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B
Are there any areas you feel like that new dynamic has changed at all or been really beneficial for?
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C
Yeah, I think so. Going back to something adjacent to Fedramp, just Atlantic Authority to operate security compliance regime that is involves how you deploy technology that is largely a pedantic, check the box type of.
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Kind of celebration of a checklist. And it is kind of disconnected to the reality in the field that it supports. Right. So people are focused on the process and celebrating that they checked all the boxes. But no matter how good that is, if it doesn't really impact the security endpoint, we need to change the whole environment. So that's how we're thinking now. How do we change the environment so it is no longer set up for these inefficiencies?
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B
Well, I think that brings us to my final questions, which is about your priorities. You know, we're at the end of the year, a few weeks away from the end of the year. Now's a great time to reflect. So looking back on. On the first few months, you know, in this position, what. What are the things that you're taking away as. As wins for. For federal it?
- [17:56]
C
Yeah. I'll tell you, when I started, I thought the job was going to be find a problem, implement a technical solution, which is a large part of my background. That's not my role. Then I thought, all right, I'll seemingly indefinitely bounce around the federal civilian government, find broken tech and fix that in an individual basis. That's also not my role. We've spent a lot of time treating the individual symptoms, and I now realize my role is to, you know, treat the disease. Things are inefficient, we waste money, and they're set up for possible exploitation because an environment exists that allows for that. So if we don't change the operating environment to one that does not allow for inefficiency and incompetent decision making, we're bound to be stuck in this loop forever. So I think my number one goal is to change the culture and change the way people think, get new people in who think differently, and then empower the people we've had in career positions to think in a way outside of the box that they've thought of before. So I am very, very proud of the culture change in the CIO Council. In the past it was largely where OMB would put out information. It was ill attended. Now you know, they're almost 100% attended. We always do social functions. There is a camaraderie and a fraternity and a candor among the CIOs. And that allows us to access the hive mind of the government. I try to draw a lot of lessons learned from my experience in the war on terror. It was very difficult because the government was playing 20 years of one year war. There was no continuation of knowledge. And we see that a lot in the federal government. The agencies operate independently. So how do we leverage the hive mind? And I get people talking and people realize this is a strong conviction I have that there is no one problem that plagues a CIO of an agency another CIO hasn't figured out how to solve in either a way of process or change or thinking change. And every agency has a few things that they do really, really well. And we're doing the agencies and the taxpayer disservice when we don't have a marketplace for those ideas. So right now I'm most proud of how we've changed the culture of the CIOs and also how I've changed my team. My team in the federal CIO is deploying to the agencies in person. I'm going with them and we're building that trust, we're building that rapport and then we're generating that candor. So when CIOs and careers especially can talk to me candidly, then I could go have conversations with vendors. And we're also resetting our relationship with all the major vendors. So again, how do we leverage the hive mind and the shared brain trust of the federal government and move things together towards a hollow government approach? So that's what I'm most proud of right now.
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B
And that brings us to your priorities for 2026. What are you looking forward to doing next year? Kind of with that in mind, I.
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C
Want to do Fedramp. Another complete rethinking of it. I think all the lessons Learned from phase 1 and currently phase 2 of FedRamp 20x will get us to another kind of one to end type change there. I'm looking for a major revamp of ATOs on the people and culture front. New. A few new interesting ways of being bringing tech into the government. Tech talent, some ways that haven't been tried in the past. I know there's been a lot of regurgitations. We do have some new new tricks up our sleeve that we're excited to try and then currently just for some tech solutions again, I think it's kind of odd that we don't have a way of looking at whole of government information. Why can't we all the contracts in one elegant solution. Data becomes intelligence when you could drive decisions from it. I think we have a lot of upside to the intelligence benefit. We could give the senior leaders in the executive branch looking at things across the people landscape and the decision making and funding and budget and contractual landscape across the whole government a couple of these things where when you look at them in silos, it's hard to see these giant patterns evolve. But if we take a step back and look at at least all the CFO act agencies, some things will jump out of us that I think will be surprising.
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B
Can we get a preview at all of the ATO or tech talent changes coming down the pike?
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C
Sure. There's something that I'm very proud of that OPMs to release in the next few weeks that I won't scoop them here, but it's a very high level initiative that is going to be a novel way of bringing early stage tech talent in and then something I'm excited about. We're looking at like you do a semester abroad, you do a semester at other things. What would a semester in the government look like? Where instead of going overseas and doing a semester and getting credits, what if you were come into the government and you could do a semester Internet semester's worth of college credit? We have some precedent for that right now. So that's something we're excited about as well. And then ATOs are going back to first principles. If NIST is not the right way to look at the security regulations, then we should work with the Hill and see what else is there. But again, instead of looking at how could we make checking these boxes in the ATO process that is slow, incrementally faster? How do we change the environment and how we're thinking about it and to make it exponentially better.
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B
All right, Greg, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.
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C
My pleasure Madison. Thanks for having me.
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A
For more on the state of federal IT, make sure to visit fedscoop.com.
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Thanks so much for tuning in to another episode of the Daily Scoop podcast, available on all podcast platforms. If you've already rated the podcast on your platform of choice, thanks so much. High ratings and good reviews of the show help more people to find it. The Daily Scoop Podcast is a production of the Scoop News Group in Washington, D.C. adam Butler and Carlin Fisher help put the show together, and the entire Scoop News Group team contributes. We'll be back tomorrow with more top headlines. Until then, I'm your host. As always, Billy Mitchell. Thanks so much for listening.