published<\/a> an investigation on April 6 arguing that as the Trump administration encourages federal agencies to rapidly adopt AI from major tech companies, it is repeating the patterns that plagued Washington\u2019s transition to cloud computing, where speed trumped security, oversight was defunded, and the government eventually became deeply dependent on contractors it had little leverage over.<\/p>\nThe White House has positioned AI as a national competitiveness imperative. Agencies can now access OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT for $1, Google\u2019s Gemini for 47 cents per user, and xAI\u2019s Grok for 42 cents. The framing, Dudley writes, closely mirrors the language used when the Obama administration declared cloud computing a transformational priority in the early 2010s.<\/p>\n
Three Cautionary Tales From Two Decades of Federal Tech<\/h1>\n
Lesson one: There is no such thing as a free lunch.<\/strong> ProPublica\u2019s investigation found that Microsoft\u2019s pledge in 2021 to give the federal government $150 million in security services was, in practice, a lock-in mechanism. After agencies adopted the free upgrades, switching to a competitor would have been costly and disruptive. \u201cIt was successful beyond what any of us could have imagined,\u201d one former Microsoft salesperson told ProPublica. As crypto.news has reported, Microsoft and OpenAI have since clashed over the terms of their own AI partnership, a signal of how fraught big-tech AI contracts can be even among the parties involved.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Lesson two: Oversight programs require actual resources.<\/strong> The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, known as FedRAMP, was created in 2011 to vet cloud computing services before federal agencies were allowed to use them. ProPublica found that the agency wore down FedRAMP over five years to get approval for a major cloud product despite serious cybersecurity reservations. That was before DOGE. FedRAMP now says it operates \u201cwith an absolute minimum of support staff\u201d and \u201climited customer service.\u201d A GSA spokesperson defended the program, saying it \u201coperates with strengthened oversight and accountability mechanisms,\u201d but former employees told ProPublica it functions as a rubber stamp.<\/p>\nLesson three: Independent reviews are only so independent.<\/strong> As FedRAMP\u2019s in-house capacity has shrunk, third-party auditing firms have assumed more of the vetting function. Those firms are paid by the same cloud companies they are rating. Agencies, often understaffed, lack the capacity to conduct their own thorough reviews and largely rely on those ratings. As crypto.news noted, the broader concern across observers is that governments are consistently slower to govern transformative technology than the companies deploying it.<\/p>\nA Pattern the White House Has Not Addressed<\/h2>\n
The GSA has acknowledged that AI \u201cusage costs can grow quickly without proper monitoring and management controls\u201d and has advised agencies to set usage limits and review consumption reports. But the underlying structural issues remain: underfunded oversight bodies, vendor-dependent reviews, and agencies with little leverage once adoption becomes entrenched.<\/p>\n
Dudley\u2019s conclusion is pointed: \u201cThe implications of this downsizing for federal cybersecurity are far-reaching\u201d as agencies take on AI tools that process sensitive government data under the same weakened oversight framework that struggled to manage the cloud.<\/p>\n
<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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