How the federal CIO is prepping for the presidential transition

With 66 days until Inauguration Day, Federal Chief Information Officer Clare Martorana says her top priority in the last days of the Biden administration is cybersecurity. 

“Continuing to make sure that cybersecurity is not an afterthought,” she told Nextgov/FCW on the sidelines of an ACT-IAC event Friday, adding that she wants cyber to be part of the IT community, rather than segmented away from each other.

“In government, it just continues to perplex me that we don’t necessarily co-join in our product development and the ongoing maintenance of our digital properties as a single, cohesive team,” she said. 

Second up is facilitating an effective transition for the incoming Trump administration 

“Making sure that the next team that comes in knows exactly what we’ve accomplished, knows exactly the areas that we feel need additional attention and that are going to be what the catalysts are for the next four years of technology, customer experience, digital experience evolution” is a “really, really important part of my job right now,” said Martorana. 

“I want to make sure that the next federal CIO has the best chance of hitting the ground running and being as effective as they can be,” she added. 

So far, President-elect Trump’s transition team has not signed the necessary agreements to participate in official transition processes and access federal funds and agencies before Trump takes office, although the current White House has said that the Trump transition has signaled an intention to do so.

In terms of customer experience, the federal government recently hit high marks for citizen satisfaction, at least in part due to the implementation of a digital experience law signed during the first Trump administration and assigned implementation guidance during Martorana’s tenure. 

Customer experience has largely been nonpartisan across both administrations, although what happens next isn’t clear. 

One X factor is who joins the Trump administration, a former fed told Nextgov/FCW recently, and whether those people want the government to function.

“I think the teams are going to have a really awesome opportunity to interact with a team that understands things like brand, understands things like communicating to the public, plain language, privacy, accessibility,” Martorana said. “[For] the people that I worked with in the previous Trump administration, those were all top of mind issues, so I anticipate people coming in are going to be thinking the same way.”

On stage, Martorana stressed the importance of work on digital experience.

“The digital experience is where we have so much opportunity in government to be able to drive change and make really systematic and significant, sustained changes,” she said 

Asked for recommendations for agencies doing work on digital experience, Martorana encouraged them to “know your numbers,” both for the transition and the work itself. 

Her office has prioritized metrics in its implementation of the digital experience guidance it issued under the 21st Century IDEA Act. 

“Know who your customers are [and] be able to present that information on an executive level to someone who doesn’t know anything about your agency,” said Martorana. “Make it easy for them, because as soon as you make it easy for them and they understand what you’re trying to do, you’re off to the races. They will continue to remember that the customer is the center of our missions, and I think that will really help propel your efforts forward.”

Still, there are remaining unknowns in terms of the incoming administration. 

Trump has promised to repeal a Biden executive order on AI. He’s also tapped billionaire Elon Musk to lead a new advisory body dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency alongside former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Despite the name, it won’t be a government department. 

“Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies—essential to the ‘Save America’ movement,” Trump said of the effort.

Martorana noted on stage that there are basic efficiency gains still to be made in the government. 

“We still do most of our processing on paper. Let’s not forget that. We have made great strides in CX, great strides in digital experience, but an enormous amount of the connective tissue in government is paper. And you want to talk about efficiency —  that is where we can become more efficient,” she said.

There are also the workforce plans of the incoming administration. 

Trump has said that he intends to revive his Schedule F executive order to strip the civil service of many career feds in “policy-related” positions. 

Asked about the impact of Schedule F on the government's IT workforce, Martorana said that she couldn’t comment. But she did offer that “technology is the bedrock of service delivery.” 

“We are in the service delivery business in the federal government. We’re a bank. We’re an insurance company. We are health care systems,” she said. “All of those things are absolutely mission critical that the customer is at the center of that experience and that they are being satisfied and their needs are being met.”