New Leadership for the House Energy and Commerce Committee

It’s a new year and a new legislative agenda prevails in the House. Fred Upton (R-MI) is the new chairman of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, and he has named his subcommittee chairs:

1. Subcommittee on Manufacturing and Trade Chair Mary Bono Mack (R-CA),


2. Subcommittee on Communications and Technology Chair Greg Walden (R-OR),


3. Subcommittee on Energy and Power Chair Ed Whitfield (R-KY),


4. Subcommittee on Environment and the Economy Chair John Shimkus (R-IL),


5. Subcommittee on Health Chair Joe Pitts (R-PA) and


6. Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Chair Cliff Stearns (R-FL).

We also are still waiting for the announcements on whom the committee and subcommittee ranking members will be which should occur sometime next week.

Although there are no current hearings scheduled Upton has laid out a few legislative priorities, including an effort to repeal healthcare and stop the Federal Communications Commission’s effort to implement net neutrality rules. We will closely monitor any new developments and report back in our next blog post.

Federal Migration to Cloud Computing

The federal government recognizes that cloud is the new computing platform. However, there is reluctance by federal procurement officers, CIO and other federal IT specialists to migrate their existing IT systems to this new platform. Fortunately, the Obama administration recognizes this reluctance and has initiated several programs to ignite the cloud migration for federal agencies. In fact, the White House CIO Vivek Kundra made the case for the importance of the migration at a recent cloud computing forum.

One agency taking a lead role in this regard is the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This agency launched a cloud computing program in May of 2010 with the goal of creating “a technically oriented strategy to develop a set of priorities for standards, guidance, and policy development,” to ultimately assist federal agencies with their migration to the cloud. As an initial step, NIST created a working group comprised of government IT officials and private sector stakeholders to develop a roadmap outlining this process.

Since the federal government annually spends roughly $80 billion in IT procurement, a clearer federal framework for a cloud migration and adoption may result in government procurement opportunities for those early and enterprising businesses. The next meeting is scheduled for next Monday, January 10th.