Week ahead: New OPM chief starts with full plate

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) will move forward under new leadership next week, launching the next chapter at the troubled agency shaken by a devastating government hack.

In an abrupt reversal Friday morning, embattled OPM Director Katherine Archuleta stepped down, bowing to mounting pressure from Capitol Hill for her to quit.

Archuleta resigned a day after she insisted she would not step aside, even as officials revealed that multiple breaches at the agency had exposed more than 22 million people’s sensitive information.

{mosads}Starting Saturday, Beth Cobert, the U.S. chief performance officer and deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), will assume the role of acting director.

At the OMB, Cobert has worked to streamline the government’s turgid process for acquiring information technology. She has also worked with the U.S. Digital Service to improve the federal government’s online services for Americans.

At the OPM, she will immediately have a lot on her plate.

Within her first two weeks, Cobert will have to negotiate a request for a budget increase sought by the agency.

“We’ll mark up our bill in the next week or so,” Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.), chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee on general government, told The Hill on Thursday. “We need to give them the resources that are needed. But along with that we need to make sure that they’re held accountable, that those resources are spent wisely.”

The OPM’s fiscal 2016 budget already includes a request for $32 million more than its fiscal 2015 total, most of which is dedicated to IT upgrade initiatives.

But following the hack, the agency revised its request to help shore up network security and cover fallout costs.

The OPM has already committed more than $20 million to a contract with credit monitoring firm CSID to notify and provide identity fraud protection services for 18 months to the 4.2 million federal workers affected by the initial breach.

But the agency has not yet signed a contract to notify and provide three years of credit monitoring services that will be offered to the 21.5 million people affected by the second, more serious, digital intrusion.

“This is one of those things — it’s kind of like defense — you spend as much money as you need to to keep the country safe,” Boozman said.

Soon after, Cobert will be tasked with bringing the OPM’s security clearance system back online. The agency took it down in recent weeks after discovering a serious security flaw it said would take four to six weeks to address, raising fears about exacerbating the existing backlog.

She’ll also have to facilitate and respond to a 90-day review of the OPM’s security strategy, overseen by the agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. OPM officials announced the review Thursday.

It’s unclear when, or if, the White House will name a successor for Archuleta. Before Archuleta took over in November 2013, the OPM had been under an acting director for seven months.

“I urge President Obama to find a permanent replacement with appropriate management and information technology experience,” said Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).

Other stories:

— Senate Republicans were quick Friday to warn the White House that Archuleta’s resignation does not let the administration off the hook: http://bit.ly/1RoUrbF

— Lawmakers want to use legislation to force the OPM to provide better protections from financial fraud to the millions of people affected by the recent hacks: http://bit.ly/1M0bDjS

— Senators may seek briefings next week on what caused the New York Stock Exchange outage: http://bit.ly/1D5GinY

— The NYSE has blamed the halt in trading on a software update gone awry: http://bit.ly/1eNJn69

— The White House is touting the successes of a 30-day “cybersecurity sprint” intended to shore up the government’s most gaping vulnerabilities: http://bit.ly/1fuorSA