HSPD-12 public status report

Current HSPD-12 public status report:

 So far just 10 percent of the large pool of contractors and federal employees who need secure ID cards mandated by HSPD-12 have received one. And the deadline for 100-percent compliance for most agencies is just three months away. But not all is bad news. FederalNewsRadio asked Karen Evans, Administrator for E-Government and Information Technology at OMB, to answer three basic questions about the process.

Is this about where you expected it to be?

What we're actually doing is going back now and looking at each agency's plan, and what we are looking at is how many cards they're actually producing - the actual cards, kind of a mini earned-value management here - what they had planned to produce, and to see if they can actually make the target in three months.

Given where they're actually producing, what we're looking at is across the government as a whole. So that if some agencies are further along and they have excess capacity, and given where some of these agencies are, what we're going to try to do is redirect or share best practices or tell other agencies where the excess capacity is.

This really comes into play with field offices and where your field office staff are. USDA has bought mobile units, and when you start looking at the population across the United States, you know that we have a lot of federal population in Denver and out on the west coast and those types of things. So the agencies are really partnering up so that they can then use those stations to the maximum benefit of all agencies.

What are some of the challenges in deploying the cards?

One of the things that we're seeing as we're meeting, and (OMB director) Clay Johnson's meeting directly with each and every agency on a whole host of IT issues, is really making sure that the proper planning is in place and that the capacity issues are really being managed and that we're really making sure that they have the will to get across the line and that they're looking at it in a broader perspective and sometimes it really is best practices. One agency is still struggling with the same types of issues that Agency B did, and so it's really putting the agencies together so that they can say 'Oh! These guys already tackled that issue.' And a lot of it is dealing with the registration of the employees and making sure that they have all of that work done before the actual issuance of the credential.

Remind us again, why go through all this in the first place?

The goal of HSPD-12 is to "increase the security of our federal facilities and our federal systems. and so the basic thing of this is to know who has access to what, and making sure that they are who they say they are. That's HSPD-12 in a nutshell, and then the next piece of that is... then we can make sure that if you're authorized to have access to have access to a system, or authorized to be accessed into a building, that the same card, the same technology, is interoperable - that we're not all issuing different cards, that we have different technical solutions, and that then you layer that on top of everything else. So it's to simplify the way that the systems and the buildings will interact, but it's really to increase the security of our facilities and the security of our systems.