Biden looks to preserve his tech and cyber legacy with veto threat

Just one day after President Joe Biden’s decision to shutter his bid for reelection and endorse his number two Kamala Harris in the race against Donald Trump, the administration issued a veto threat against a key spending bill in part because of cuts to key tech priorities.

The administration warned Monday it would veto the House-passed Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act. As Biden’s time winds down, the policy statement could double as a laundry list of the administration’s tech and cyber accomplishments.

The White House is looking for Congress to pass the $75 million request for the Technology Modernization Fund in the fiscal year 2025 budget. The revolving fund, which supports IT modernization and cybersecurity efforts at federal agencies, got a $1 billion boost under the American Rescue Plan Act, which is nearly depleted. 

Biden also warned that a failure to fund the Information Technology Oversight and Reform account at the Office of Management and Budget could result in “layoffs of 251 of 278 staff across [the U.S. Digital Service] and the office of the Federal Chief Information Officer,” which would threaten modernization efforts across government agencies including the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Health and Human Services, Treasury and the Social Security Administration.

The message also complains about efforts to eliminate the ability of the Securities and Exchange Commission to enforce recently adopted cybersecurity rules.

Mike Hettinger, a former senior congressional staffer who lobbies on behalf of technology companies, said the plus-up of the TMF was one of Biden’s signature achievements when it comes to modernization of government IT.

“There’s no way we get a billion dollars without the money going through the American Rescue Plan,” Hettinger told Nextgov/FCW in an interview. “That's tremendous. He recognized the need to promote technology modernization enough to put the money forward.”

Biden also wants to restore funding to the Federal Citizen Services Fund at the General Services Administration, noting that cuts would hamper the ability to follow through on the administration's guidance to the Trump-era 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act.

Hettinger noted that the IDEA Act guidance “was something we couldn't get the last administration to do,” and said that generally “that’s a lot of progress in what amounts to three-and-a–half years.” 

"No president has done more to drive meaningful, lasting change in how people interact with  government services than President Biden," Code for America CEO told Nextgov/FCW in an emailed statement. "He issued a first-of-its-kind executive order on improving the customer experience, making it easier for people to navigate safety net programs, file taxes, claim retirement benefits, and renew passport [and] fostered critical collaborations between government and civic-tech organizations, like Code for America, to build a more inclusive, responsive digital age that works for all."

But IT modernization, even at the scale of IRS legacy tech, is only part of the story. As Hettinger pointed out, there’s a “long tail” of tech policy emanating from executive orders on artificial intelligence, customer experience and cybersecurity that could establish continuity between Biden’s term and possible Harris presidency. 

However, on other tech policy matters including antitrust, a Harris administration could serve as a soft reset for executive branch oversight of big tech. 

Harris, who represented California in the Senate, has built close ties with the tech industry, given the presence of Silicon Valley startups and tech giants that have permeated everyday societal life, said Adam Kovacevich, a former Google policy director who now leads Chamber of Progress, a center-left tech policy think tank.

It doesn’t necessarily mean Harris would always side with tech companies, especially on kids’ safety issues or AI ethics, he said, but it could help stave off more intensive oversight activity that the FTC and Justice Department have pounced on, having filed several lawsuits against tech companies since Biden took office.

“Biden decided to outsource business regulation to the left,” Kovacevich said. “I just don’t think she’s coming at this from the same posture that Biden did, which is needing to throw the left a bone on these topics,” he said.

Divyansh Kaushik, a senior fellow at American Policy Ventures, told Nextgov/FCW that her background in California politics positions her to have a strong dialogue with the tech industry. He specifically cites Harris’s involvement in the beginning of California’s data privacy policymaking, long before the state’s landmark data protection law was adopted.

“Harris will likely continue President Biden’s vision on AI and is expected to bring a nuanced approach to tech policy more broadly, balancing robust scrutiny with an appreciation for innovation,” Kaushik said. “Her work on data privacy, including brokering agreements among leading tech companies, highlights her commitment to protecting Americans' digital rights.”

Artificial intelligence 

As vice president, Harris was tasked with serving as the administration’s ‘AI czar’ to promote the safe adoption of the emerging capabilities, and to promote the AI executive order to industry and global stakeholders. 

Harris is anticipated to stick to the Biden administration’s perspective on safeguarding Americans from the potential misuse of emerging AI and machine learning systems. 

“There's been a fairly consistent message from this administration, and Harris has helped articulate a good chunk of that vision,” Adam Thierer, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, told Nextgov/FCW. “So I would think it would largely be steady as she goes, in terms of a Harris AI vision being a continuation of the themes we've already seen developed in the Biden administration.”

Thierer notes that much of the policy language still operates at a relatively high level of generality, making it hard to know what precise policies Harris was directly responsible for. 

“I do think she was active, however, in this process,” Thierer said. “I think in some ways, I think it’s probably safe to say she was more active in the formulation of these AI policies than President Biden was in some sense.” 

Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., who has been a leading voice in Congress for more transparency around the use of AI generated content in political campaigns, said Harris “stands among our strongest and most resolved advocates for the safe use of artificial intelligence.”

“At a fundamental level, she understands both the profound opportunities for good this emerging technology offers, as well as the serious possibilities for harm inherent to it — from threats to our cybersecurity and the biases saturating algorithmic decision-making processes, to the abuses of explicit, non-consensual deepfakes and the flaws of facial recognition, the shortcomings and failings of AI are pervasive and entrenched in these systems,” she told Nextgov/FCW in a statement.

During a speech last year ahead of the AI Safety Summit in London, Harris said that she and President Biden were “committed to working with our partners in Congress to codify future meaningful AI and privacy protections.” But she added that the international community also needed to work together to mitigate AI’s harms on vulnerable populations.

“Just as AI has the potential to do profound good, it also has the potential to cause profound harm,” she said. “From AI-enabled cyberattacks at a scale beyond anything we have seen before to AI-formulated bio-weapons that could endanger the lives of millions, these threats are often referred to as the ‘existential threats of AI’ because, of course, they could endanger the very existence of humanity.”

Harris is also likely to continue fulfilling the requirements of Biden’s October 2023 executive order on the safe, secure and trustworthy use of AI, which outlined how federal agencies should use the technologies while taking steps to mitigate their potential risks. 

The vice president also took the lead in announcing final AI guidance issued by the Office of Management and Budget in March, which was required by Biden’s order.

During a press call on the release of OMB’s memo, Harris said she believed “all leaders from government, civil society and the private sector have a moral, ethical and societal duty to make sure that artificial intelligence is adopted and advanced in a way that protects the public from potential harm while ensuring everyone is able to enjoy its full benefit.”

Harris also played a key role in securing voluntary commitments from AI companies to manage the risks posed by AI and met with leading AI firms to discuss the importance of establishing safeguards around their technologies’ use. She has also engaged with consumer and civil rights groups to discuss ways of limiting AI’s negative impact on American workers. 

“Vice President Kamala Harris has demonstrated a clear commitment to upholding civil rights values in governing emerging technology, including artificial intelligence,” Koustubh “K.J.” Bagchi, vice president of the Center for Civil Rights and Technology at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told Nextgov/FCW, adding that “at every step of the way, Harris has been a trusted messenger, speaking to the importance of protecting people’s rights and safety amid the industrial revolution of our time.”

Surveillance tech

On privacy and surveillance policy, civil liberties groups are hopeful that a Harris administration may turn the tide in their favor.

As a senator, she backed a measure pushed by privacy hawks that would have added a warrant requirement to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The spying power allows intelligence agencies to warrantlessly collect the communications of foreigners abroad for use in national security investigations but has come under fire for a function that permits collection of Americans’ communications when they speak with a foreign target, raising concerns over whether the tool violates Fourth Amendment rights.

Biden in April signed a two-year extension of the law without the warrant measure in place. The intelligence community has frequently argued a warrant obligation would slow down ongoing terrorism investigations and gut the effectiveness of 702. The tool, which spy agencies say is vital for stopping cyberattacks and tracking terror threats, contributes to a major chunk of President Biden’s daily briefings.

“If Harris were to win, civil liberties advocates hope being ‘unburdened by what has been’ won’t mean flipping from her strong voting record and statements on the need for serious FISA reform,” said Jake Leperruque, who helps lead the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

An official stance remains to be seen, but there are signs that a hypothetical President Harris could lean more toward the side of the intelligence community now that she’s been on the receiving end of classified security briefings.

“My gut tells me that four years have given her a unique perspective on this, and that may inform her thinking today,” said Suzanne Spaulding, a former CIA and DHS official who now leads the Defending Democratic Institutions project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

A spokesperson for Harris did not return a request for comment by publishing time.

“The executive branch is not above the law. The President can override or bypass federal statutes that are clearly unconstitutional, but the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, anti-torture laws, and the detainee transfer law are constitutional. As President, I would respect these laws,” Harris told the New York Times in a 2020 presidential candidate survey series.

Cybersecurity

A Harris administration could also focus on continuing to bolster the cyber policy groundwork laid under Biden’s time in the Oval Office, including the establishment of the Office of the National Cyber Director as well as the Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy in the State Department.

In the wake of Friday’s mass IT outages linked to CrowdStrike and Microsoft, the conversations over reliance on a small number of major tech vendors must continue, said Kiersten Todt, a former chief of staff at CISA. “It’s not to say those two companies shouldn’t be involved, but we have to ask: what resilience do we need to be baking into our infrastructure?” she said.

Other themes should continue, said both Todt and Spaulding. CISA under the Biden administration has thoroughly pushed “secure by design” principles in which software manufacturers are encouraged to design their offerings with built-in security features that come pre-installed at point-of-sale.

Software liability, where manufacturers are held to account over poor feature design that enables cyberattacks, has become a major component of the Biden administration’s National Cyber Strategy that experts say should be continued under Harris. A new implementation plan of the strategy outlines nearly 70 objectives aimed at shoring up U.S. cyber posture, calling on the government to leverage “all instruments of national power” to make it harder for hackers to threaten national security and public safety.

“If those offices transition leadership to a Harris administration, there’s a lot of great work that has been done that has developed a foundation off of which the next iteration of leadership can certainly take it to the next place,” Todt said.

But ONCD may need to further integrate itself into future discussions with the National Security Council, said Spaulding. Former national cyber director Chris Inglis had clashed with Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, prompting him to resign early last year, Bloomberg reported last April.

Nextgov/FCW staff reporter Natalie Alms contributed reporting to this article.