The Central Intelligence Agency is lifting the veil on some acquisition reform priorities. Earlier this week, the CIA announced a new acquisition framework that focuses on speed and innovation. The agency says it wants to better harness cutting-edge commercial technologies. Federal News Network's Justin Doubleday joins me with more detail. Justin, thanks for being here. Great to be here, Terry. Tell us about CIA's new acquisition framework. How is this going to streamline their focus on technology. Yeah, the goal here for the CIA is all about speed and really tightening the partnership between the CIA and America's private sector. You know, this is not a new priority for the CIA necessarily. But what is new here is they're saying that essentially all acquisitions are now all about speed and really reducing the time between when the CIA defines a mission requirement and when new tech receives operating authority. So that's something that we've heard a lot about in the Defense Department space, kind of speeding up that time to meet the requirement and getting tech in the hands of operators a lot, lot faster. You have to go back to CIA Director John Ratcliffe's testimony during his confirmation hearing last January. He talked a lot about how important technology is to the CIA's human intelligence mission. Here he is talking a little bit more about that. As a target, technology is more important than ever, whether it's understanding our adversaries' capability in AI and quantum computing, or their developments in hypersonics and emerging space technologies, or their innovations in counterintelligence and surveillance. The recent creation of the agency's transnational and Technology Mission Center was an acknowledgment of that fact. But much more has to be done because our adversaries, and one in particular that I will discuss now, understand that the nation who wins the race of emerging technologies of today will dominate the world of tomorrow. And Terry, just to clarify, you might have guessed the adversary he was about to talk about was China. And that is certainly driving a lot of the CIA's competitive efforts on technology here. Justin, it's one thing to say you want speed. It's another to actually get it. Are there institutional organizational challenges to what the CIA says it wants to do? Yeah, well, a lot of what you saw the CIA come out with this week was a push to streamline processes. And so in that vein, the CIA is like a lot of other federal agencies. They're struggling with old acquisition processes, old acquisition frameworks that were built in the 70s, 80s, 90s. And they don't really keep up with the tech of today. And so what the CIA is doing is moving to things like centralized vendor vetting, where they'll have a centralized kind of aspect to vetting vendors for security, for performance, and being able to share that across the agency. Streamlined IT authorization processes, streamlining the cybersecurity reviews that vendors have to go through. That's a huge emphasis across the federal government and certainly at the CIA as well. And the CIA has also brought in a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency official to lead this procurement overhaul. Effie Fragio Giannis has just joined the CIA from DARPA in November. She's now the chief procurement executive. She's bringing over that experience from DARPA, where they obviously go after these leap ahead technologies, often using these novel procurement authorities that DARPA has, competition authorities, things like that. So that's a pretty interesting detail there in terms of who will be leading this effort. What are some of the key technologies that CIA says it's interested in? Yeah, CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis gave us a statement that detailed a little bit about that. They want to enter into a range of commercial partnerships, ranging from startups to industry leaders in areas like artificial intelligence, biotechnology, financial technology, and microelectronics. So those are kind of some of the five big ones Quantum computing definitely another big one for the CIA I think you heard Director John Ratcliffe talk about that during those remarks from his confirmation hearing So essentially, these technologies that are really being driven by the commercial sector now, by and large, whereas before, decades ago, it was the government driving a lot of these really important military and intelligence technologies. Now it's the commercial sector and the CIA wants to deepen those partnerships to take advantage of those technology advancements. How does this new approach from the CIA align with what other federal agencies are trying to do on acquisition? Yeah, well, you go to the Defense Department where just last fall, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth put out their big acquisition system shakeup and started putting more of an emphasis on speed, which is really at the center of that effort as well. You know, there's also the federal acquisition overhaul that's happening out of GSA and OMB. So really across the board, you're seeing agencies focus on streamlining federal acquisition regulations, speeding up the procurement process, and really emphasizing speed at the center of all that they do, along with commercial technologies like AI. As the CIA moves forward with this approach, what should we be watching for next? Yeah, no surprise the CIA doesn't give a ton of detail on what they're interested in or what they're doing. But I would be interested to see whether they have any sort of industry type days or put out requests for information or just open up the aperture a little bit since they want to work with commercial companies here instead of, you know, the kind of typical classified contractors. And then there's also a provision in the 2026 Intelligence Authorization Act that requires the intelligence community to establish a strategy to acquire and integrate emerging technologies that meet mission needs. So that strategy, that ICY strategy, will be interesting to see if that comes out and what it says. It really will be interesting to watch how they balance speed and security. Yeah, that's always the big challenge in the intelligence community. And it remains to be seen whether they can strike that balance. That's Federal News Network's Justin Doubleday. Justin, thanks for the story. Thanks, Terry. You can find the full story at federalnewsnetwork.com. Sean O'Keefe, former Navy Secretary, NASA Administrator, and Senior Leader across multiple presidential administrations, reflects on the principles that shaped his long federal career. In this episode of Lessons in Leadership, he joins Shane Canfield, CEO of WEPA, to discuss motivating teams through uncertainty, leading across agencies, and staying rooted in mission during times of public scrutiny and change. Hello, and welcome to the Lessons in Leadership podcast. I'm your host, Shane Canfield, CEO of WEPA. Today, I'm honored to be joined by Sean O'Keefe, former NASA Administrator, former Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget, former Secretary of the Navy, former Comptroller and CFO of the Defense Department, and Professor Emeritus at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Public Affairs. Welcome. Welcome and thank you for joining. Well, thank you, Shane. Delighted to be with you. Appreciate it very much. What first drew you into public service, and when was it evident to you that leadership was an important part of the roles you played? Well, I grew up around the public service. My dad was a career naval officer. He was a submariner, and we lived all over the place throughout the country. And as a result, I got an up-close and personal understanding through him as well as through all the folks he associated with and the environments he was working in, just what the extraordinary value is of public service and what is it that would motivate people to want to be engaged in it and to be really involving themselves in what is something larger than themselves. And the only place that that is really formulated properly is within the public sector and the public service that again is the beneficiary or are the beneficiaries are the citizens of the nation the community and the region in which you live. Did you think about leadership early on saying I need to be a great leader and therefore I'm going to learn how to do it or did you just naturally evolve into it? Any thoughts on that? I guess it evolved by the great good fortune of being a witness to several really extraordinary leaders, people who really did take the initiative to engage others in the task, to pull together and motivate folks to really contribute their very best to achieve an outcome. and I saw the value of that on multiple occasions and found that was the primary ingredient, the trait, the characteristic that needed to be exhibited is the fundamentals of leadership in moving everyone engaged towards a common objective. You have served under several presidents. Can you talk a little bit about that? Were there challenges to overcome or were you away from politics? So you didn't get to talk about that a little bit. How does it differ as you serve through a transition or is it does leadership stay the same? Oh, no, it's quite quite. It's really critically important in transition cases, to be sure. But the two presidents that I served in their administrations were President George H.W. Bush and President George W. Bush in two different eras, obviously. But as a consequence, that was the closest I came to understanding the nature of the individuals who were in that leadership, ultimate leadership capacity, and their capability to motivate. Both of them were just extraordinarily inspiring people who motivated everybody to be part of the solution. But most importantly, they also had a capacity of really designating what something, what needed to be done. And you knew that they were perfectly prepared to do it themselves. And that made the task that much more achievable. There were several different circumstances in understanding what the objectives of the senior leadership are all about. You've worked for different kinds of organizations, political administrations, and then government departments, agencies, and then private sector, and now academia. How does that affect your leadership style? Or do you find that leadership, the core tenets of leadership are applicable no matter what the organization you find yourself in and having to lead? It doesn't matter where you are, that the core leadership characteristics are the same? Are they different? Are you adapting? Well, there's a common myth in my judgment, and I'm probably the minority view of this in the academic field of public management. That common myth is that you can't apply the same principles in the public sector that you do in the private sector. I never found that to be an impediment. It was always a circumstance where strategy, the focus on the talent, people engaged, the process to going through decision making, the integrity imperative that must be there in order to demonstrate the absolute conviction of what's intended here, as well as the moral standing of what it is you're attempting to achieve, all those factors are very much the same. It going to have its nuances and there are very distinctive you know differentiators within those organizations and those sectors But at the same time those basic principles those tenets foundations of what make up organizations and organization theory in so many ways are fundamentally the same And how you employ those may be slightly nuanced to match the condition, but they all are imperative in the same direction. A little bit of a different direction. You were part of the very first cohort of what is now Presidential Management Intern Program, later became the Presidential Management Fellows Program. What did that early experience teach you about leading within government? The presidential management intern program as it started was designed for just that purpose, a focus on public management, a focus on implementation. And its evolution over time has been extraordinary. It mystifies me why that has been the subject now of an executive order that has dismantled it. And it's absolutely unconscionable, given the nature of the hundreds, thousands of people who've moved through that program in the course of the last nearly 50 years that have gone on in some cases to be senior executives within the federal government. And in other cases, they've moved on to other kinds of pursuits. But even with that, even for those who have left the service, they walked away with an appreciation of what public service is all about, why it matters, and why this is so critical to get it right. Because by and large, the reason why these functions are delegated to the public sector is because no one else can do it. Usually that's the case. It takes that kind of focus of a public entity in order to achieve an outcome that frankly would not be achieved in other spheres. So as a result of that, it gave me an incredibly in-depth understanding of that process at a very early stage in my career that has lasted the entirety of that professional experience. A closing question. Who has influenced your leadership style? And what about their example stays with you? And that question can be cast broadly. So, you know, inside government, outside government, perhaps not government at all, somebody that you've met, reported to, and mentored by, a broad net. But when you think about broadly, when you think about who has influenced you, who comes to mind? I would have to say that the number one, hands down, greatest influence during the course of my life was my dad. He was an engineer, so everything was a calculated risk. I think I was probably 25 before I realized the answer was not to be found for everything in a slide rule, but that was his uh uh his bent and his mindset and he thought taught me how to think critically and it uh it really was one of the most extraordinary attributes and he was an inspiring parent uh who and mentor in so many ways and all the different things i've done uh throughout the course of his life i had the opportunity through through much of it to be able to consult with him on a variety of things and always walked away with a more informed perspective. Ed was an extraordinary public servant in his own right. Well, Sean, thank you very much for sharing your insights and experiences. It has been a pleasure talking. I'm delighted to be with you, Shane. Thank you so much for doing this. And this is Shane Canfield, CEO of WEPA, reminding you to empower your team and embrace challenges. Until the next time on Lessons in Leadership. Find the full podcast and future episodes of Lessons in Leadership on the Federal News Network app and anywhere you enjoy your podcasts.
