Gsa Technology Accountability Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the distinguished gentleman and friend from Kansas for yielding.

I also thank my colleague from the District of Columbia, representing the minority or the Democratic Party on the Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce, for her leadership.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of this bill. It is a bill that we tried to make bipartisan and to include ideas from a number of people that were on the committee.

As the chairman of the Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce, we worked together not only holding hearings, but discussing the need for transparency and better technology for projects from the General Services Administration.

As it stands now, the government's internal technology consultancy is mostly opaque in its operation, resulting in the lack of competition and a few instances of serious failures from the GSA's products. Those are products that were developed in-house.

Last year, the GSA Inspector General reported that Login.gov, a GSA product that was intended to be a single-sign-on solution for the Federal Government and government agencies, was intentionally misleading Federal agencies about its technical capabilities and ability to actually authenticate the users.

In other words, Mr. Speaker, as people came in to do business with the government agency, GSA had a front to it that would assuredly tell that agency wherever they were going and with great likelihood exactly who that person was.

This subversion left government websites exposed to fraudulent users and removed a critical barrier for criminals to improperly claim government benefits. In other words, they said that it contained certainty about who that person was that came to them for those agencies then did not need to do further investigation to make sure who was seeking government benefits.

While we do not currently know the total amount of fraud that was committed because Login.gov did not provide adequate system security as it was required and stated that it was prepared to do, we do know that the American taxpayer was on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars--up to $400 billion--in fraud from various COVID relief programs; each of these agencies counting on the person that they were speaking to and in contact with were the correct person.

The central tactic used in this was identity theft. It was fraud.

In order to prevent such fraud in the future, Federal systems must have identity verification capabilities that work.

Instead, the GSA marketed, and Federal agencies paid for, an identity verification system that was either not present or did not work.

It left the door wide open for criminals pretending to be someone else, to steal benefits, to steal information, and otherwise compromise government systems with a false identity.

Last year, the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight Subcommittees, which I chair, held a hearing and it was a bipartisan answer that we came up with. It is a problem.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleagues, including the gentleman from Virginia, Mr. Connolly, for his support of this legislation, but certainly back in the committee as we brought this bill forward, it was a bipartisan answer that no matter whose fault it was, it needed to be fixed.

We looked at it, I think, the same way. I am very proud of this committee, and I am very proud of my colleagues, the Democrats, the minority party, for working with us just like it was a part of their responsibility, which it was. I totally support that.

With Login.gov, the Technology Transformation Service failed. Now, we are going to provide the transparency that is required in this bill. I am very proud of this work that was done on a bipartisan basis.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source