President Donald Trump had pushed for money for a down payment on the Mexican border wall. That quickly emerged as a sticking point in congressional negotiations on a budget for the rest of the fiscal year and as the weekend neared, shutdown fears in Washington began to fade.

On the policy front:

A聽White House aide says聽the Trump聽administration’s聽cybersecurity strategy will be coming out soon. Speaking at a Georgetown University conference, cybersecurity coordinator Robert Joyce says cyber will be closely tied to IT modernization. He says cyber and innovation are intertwined and that neither will get short shrift. Policy will also stress securing聽critical infrastructure聽networks.

Policy for farms and rural communities gets an overhaul by the Trump administration. It establishes an interagency task force to examine agriculture and rural prosperity. The new order abolishes the Obama-era Rural Council. It comes as President Trump ordered a tariff on Canadian building lumber and tries to settle a long-running milk price dispute thought to harm U.S. farmers.

Making good on a promise to return power to states and localities, President Trump signed an executive order on education. It orders Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her staff to review the department’s regulations to make sure they don’t contradict laws 鈥� long on the books 鈥� aimed at preserving state and local control of curricula and content of school libraries. The order includes guidance documents and dear-colleague letters.

The Trump administration established a in the Veterans Affairs Department. It has the express purpose of increasing accountability for care delivered to patients. It will be headed by an individual reporting directly to Secretary David Shulkin. The office will focus on whistleblower protection and on removing any bureaucratic impediments to firing poor performers quickly.

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Several new policy directives came from the Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump. Among them: EPA administrator Scott Pruitt called for the U.S. to pull out of the so-called Paris Agreement, which many other countries signed onto. The agreement ostensibly addresses what they believe are causes of climate change. Pruitt calls participation an America second, third or fourth kind of approach.

EPA acting Deputy Administrator Michael Flynn informed employees the there will continue and that they can expect a buyout/early retirement plan soon.

The Trump administration faces a battle over its plans to cut State Department funding by 28 percent. Several military officials, including Air Force General Paul Selva, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the need for maintaining so-called soft power. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) proposed a plan to double State Department funding over five years.

President Trump signed a bill to extend the VA’s Veterans Choice program. It’s a short-term extension until early next year to give Secretary David Shulkin more time to develop a permanent proposal. Under Choice, veterans can obtain medical care outside of the VA system but have it paid by VA. The program was to expire in August with a billion dollars left over.

President Trump noted the protests calling for him to release his tax returns. But he rejected the idea, tweeting, the election is over. He also decided to keep White House visitor logs secret, reversing a policy the Obama White House started late in the first term but keeping with what had been tradition. Court cases have upheld the secrecy, but open government groups objected.

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The Homeland Security Department received the first deputy secretary to be Senate confirmed for the Trump administration. Elaine Duke joins DHS with unanimous consent. Duke also served as DHS undersecretary for management during the George W. Bush administration. Former Defense official Dr. Lynda Davis joined Veterans Affairs as chief veterans experience officer.

Also at DHS, a key Trump ally took a page from the previous administration. Secretary John Kelly promised a top-to-bottom review of department operations, while promising to let employees do their jobs. He praised prior Secretary Jeh Johnson’s unity of effort initiative saying Duke, will take the lead on completing the program to meld DHS components into a more unified agency.

The Trump administration got advice from Sens. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and Tom Udall (D-N.M.). They encouraged the administration to renew efforts to modernize federal information technology. Moran and Udall, both members of the Appropriations Committee, advised White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner to use the new Office of American Innovation to focus on improving and securing federal systems.

Meanwhile, Sens. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) and Gary Peters (D-Mich.) asked the Government Accountability Office to review the effects of the hiring freeze, which is supposed to end on April 18.

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The Office of Management and Budget underscored the White House desire to the federal government. It issued for how agencies should go about what it calls reshaping the work force. The advice includes ideas for avoiding reductions in force, such as furloughing people, sending them to other agencies, or demoting them. It followed that up with a 64-page guide to administrative furloughs.

President Donald Trump earlier in the week revealed a federal management agenda. Adviser Jared Kushner will head up a new unit in the White House, dubbed the Office of American Innovation. It will focus on improving procurement and modernizing agencies’ information technology infrastructures, and also on conditions at the Veterans Affairs Department. The goal is to improve how government interacts with and serves聽citizens.

Lots of federal employees will have to think differently as a result of two presidential actions. Contracting officers won’t have to focus on contractor labor law violations, or at least not worry about obtaining redundant reports on them. That’s because Congress, in a joint resolution signed by聽President Trump,聽 a reporting rule imposed by the Obama administration.

Also voided: the Obama-era from the EPA. Climate change become and the social cost of carbon become聽smaller considerations in environmental rule-making. But environmental groups and congressional Democrats challenge the move.

More details emerged on how the Trump administration proposes to in 2018 to offset increases in defense spending. For example, the FDA would see a $40 million cut in its salaries and administrative expenses lines. Homeland Security would lose $41 million for financial systems modernization, a project it shares with Interior.

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The 1.9 percent number may have come from language already 聽that automatically raises federal pay by that amount, unless the President or Congress says otherwise, either by submitting an alternative pay raise rate or cutting the raise altogether. A bill in the house would give employees a 3.2 percent raise, but without such a law, the President has a lot of discretion.

One the President Donald Trump’s main topics during his campaign was to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and he signed an executive order calling for one. This week, the administration took another step to bring that idea to fruition. Customs and Border Protection is looking for proposals for the design and construction of a wall along the U.S. southern border. It issued two Requests for Proposals to implement Trump’s executive order. It called for聽multiple conceptual wall designs with the intent to construct multiple prototypes.聽Responses are due by March 29.

We also got more of an idea of whom the President wants implementing his policies. Trump maked his selection for a key post in聽the Homeland Security Department, tapping David Glawe to the be the next under secretary for intelligence and analysis at DHS. Right now Glawe is the assistant commissioner at CBP. Until he’s confirmed, the President named Rear Adm. Robert Hayes to serve in the role in an acting capacity. Trump’s second choice to run the Labor Department testified before the Senate Health, Labor, Education, and Pensions Committee. Alex Acosta聽assured committee members he would not allow political pressures to influence his decision making, a mistake he felt he made when he served as a federal prosecutor during the Bush Era.

Trump also authorized $19.5 billion in funding for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but gave the agency a tall order. The legislation tasked NASA to develop a human exploration road map with the long-term goal of human missions near or on the surface of Mars in the 2030s. The White House upped its commitment to space travel even more by recreating an old working group from the first Bush era. Vice President Mike Pence said they were reestablishing the National Space Council, which he will chair himself.

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More and more agencies are moving technology functions to the cloud. However, merely becoming cloud-based doesn鈥檛 always accomplish what they hope. That isn鈥檛 something one wants to find out after investing financial and other resources to make the switch, explains Steven Carter, Chief Cloud Architect for聽聽public sector.

Instead of jumping head first into the cloud, Carter suggests agencies might first benefit from increasing automation. Automation improves the efficiency of the varied applications that operate in a complex, diverse and distributed information technology environment.

Maximizing an organization鈥檚 automation helps prepare agencies and their workloads for cloud deployment. Those same steps will make cloud migration and moves between clouds successful.

Getting more from the cloud

One of the more common mistakes agencies make when moving to the cloud, according to Adam Clater, Chief Architect at聽, is something he calls lift and shift. 鈥淚鈥檓 going to pick this up and put it into the cloud and eliminate the cost of my data center and eliminate the cost of my hardware refresh, turning that workload into a 24/7 operation with cloud provider X,鈥� Clater says.

While many agencies have taken this option, it doesn鈥檛 make the most of cloud technology. Instead, Clater advises automating the lifecycle of the workload. 鈥淗ow does it work going into development? How does it work going into production? How do we scale that workload horizontally? Then how do we scale it back down when the workload is reduced.鈥�

As an example, because of tax season, the IRS needs more servers online in March and April than in May. It is valuable for the IRS to scale up its infrastructure in an automated fashion inside the cloud to address that demand and then scale back after filing season is over.

Reduces IT workload

Automation allows agencies to expand into the cloud without putting a crushing operational burden on IT teams. For example, if an agency is using Amazon Web Services, they must adapt to the Amazon platform, Carter explains. That doubles the complexity of trying to work in the cloud. Without automation, those complexities increase exponentially every time a new cloud or process is added.

Minimizes human dependence

In many organizations, there are key IT individuals who know how everything works and functions. Carter refers to these individuals as 鈥渉eroes.鈥� This creates many problems, not the least of which is your operational capabilities walking out with a disgruntled employee.聽 Since automation provides a way to describe the infrastructure as code, these 鈥渉eroes鈥� become part of an integrated team that contributes institutional knowledge and best practices into a central repository with change management and revision control.聽 Using automation, agencies are less affected by staffing fluctuations. When virtual servers or other infrastructure needs provisioning or updating, automated processes are a better option for consistency, resilience, a minimal error.

Protects against problems

A range of problems can occur with cloud providers. Clater cites situations like a significant outage, a price adjustment or loss of a security certification. When that happens, an agency must be able to quickly move workloads to another cloud provider. Automation then becomes the key element of getting into or out of any cloud.

鈥淥nce you鈥檝e figured out how you鈥檙e going to automate workloads into a cloud, you鈥檝e also figured out 鈥� in some way 鈥� how you鈥檙e going to automate your way out of those clouds,鈥� Clater says.

Start small

Carter and Clater recommend a staged approach to cloud adoption. They suggest choosing a small, user-focused application you can use to build a proof point around both cloud and agile development approaches. In the beginning, stay away from applications that require wholesale change to existing data and application infrastructure.

Small successes will allow agencies to build subsequent application migrations on the patterns and procedures developed in the process of successfully moving these smaller workloads.

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The 2018 is clear on President Donald Trump鈥檚 priorities. Big boost for DoD at the expense of all civilian agencies except for Homeland Security. It fingers 19 small, independent agencies whose budgets the President 聽would zero out.

The new executive order on federal government reorganization gives a tough assignment. They鈥檝e got 180 days to come up with recommendations for ending duplicative or unnecessary programs and other ways to cut costs such as through shared services. Even ideas for which agencies to close altogether. Then the public gets a chance to comment. The order envisions a year-long process leading to a final recommendation.

The White House dove into the health care legislation reform debate. President Trump threw his backing behind a so-called repeal-and-replace bill led by House Speaker Paul Ryan. He spent part of Monday meeting with what the White House termed victims of Obamacare, both individuals and businesses.

President Trump also held his first cabinet meeting.

President Trump accelerated appointments to the second management tier, those who get much of the work done. He names James Donovan, now a managing director at Goldman Sachs, as deputy Treasury secretary. And Eric Hargan, a shareholder with Greenberg Traurig, as deputy secretary of Health and Human Services, a job he held as acting once before during the George W. Bush administration.

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The White House issued a redone version of its temporary travel and immigration ban from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The original order 鈥� halted by a federal judge 鈥� had included Iraq. The new order treats Iraq as a 鈥渟pecial case鈥� because of ongoing U.S. military and diplomatic involvement there.

A special White House memo to the secretary of State, attorney general, and secretary of Homeland Security ordered an immediate start to heightened screening and vetting of visa and immigration applicants.

Several officials in either acting or permanent appointed positions withdrew their bids for appointment or reappointment. These include acting Defense Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, National Security Agency IG nominee Robert Storch (now deputy at the Justice Department), Elizabeth Field as director of the Office of Personnel Management (now at the State Department), and Special Counsel Carolyn Lerner.

The Office of Management and Budget put out for public comment, semi-finished proposals for revising federal standards for collecting and maintaining race and ethnicity data. Current standards are 20-years old. Among the questions: should there be a middle-eastern-North Africa (MENA) designation? Also up for consideration: whether to revise Hispanic and African American groupings. Comments are due end of April. The administration wants to finish the standards in time for the Census Bureau to include them in the 2020 decennial count 鈥� for which testing begins next year.

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Short term, military officials say the hiring freeze stings. For instance, the Navy鈥檚 research and acquisition chief, Allison Stiller, says she needs to hire engineers right now to support existing shipbuilding plans.

Cuts read 鈥渓ayoffs鈥� to many federal employees. A survey by the National Treasury Employees Union shows a downturn in members鈥� morale. Respondents also say they鈥檙e already feeling the workload grow heavier.

Democratic senators urge Secretary Rex Tillerson to push back against plans to cut State Department funding by as much as a third.

On the personnel front, surgeon and former presidential candidate Ben Carson was confirmed as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Investor Wilbur Ross got the Senate鈥檚 nod for Secretary of Commerce. Attorney General Jeff Sessions got embroiled in questions about contacts with Russian officials while still a senator.

Regulatory reform spread out. Pursuing his promise of greater federalism, President Trump began the rollback of a controversial environmental rule from the Obama administration. His executive order seeks comments on rewriting or rescinding the Clean Water Rule.

Homeland Security seeks bids to have prototypes of a border wall built. More than 200 contractors respond, hoping to make it past the down-select later in the Month.

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The president鈥檚 pick for a replacement National Security Adviser, Army Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, drew praise from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), chairmen of their respective chambers鈥� armed services committees.

Mick Mulvaney was sworn in as director of the Office of Management and Budget. During the East Room ceremony, President Trump said a plan for replacing the Affordable Care Act would be forthcoming in March. After that, he said, his team will move on to tax reform. A final plan for that might not come until August 鈥斅燼fter a plan for the 2018 budget.

If President Trump has an agenda for online government services, it may have to wait a bit. The White House chief digital officer, Gerrit Lansing, left after a month on the job and it’s unclear why. Also leaving is Aaron Snow, a co-founder of the GSA’s development group 18F, that the agency’s inspector general has sharply criticized.

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President Donald Trump will have the chance to name his own Secret Service director with the resignation 鈥� more accurately, return to retirement 鈥� of Joseph Clancy. He urged the president to appoint an outsider.

On the management front, Federal 太子探花 Radio鈥檚 Jason Miller , a draft executive order was circulating among agencies. It will ask agency managers for ideas on how to reorganize the government. Specific areas of focus include consolidating duplicative programs, seeing what can be shifted to state and local government, and considering what functions might be done more efficiently by contractors.

Also in the executive order is reportedly an emphasis on use of agency shared services 鈥� an initiative stretching back to the Bush administration.

Trump also issued an executive order changing the Attorney General succession plan from the way it had been set up by the Obama administration. Should the AG, deputy AG and deputy assistant AG be unable to perform their duties, next in line would be the U.S. attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, followed by the same titles in the northern district of Illinois, then the western district of Missouri.

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For regulatory agencies, the White House clarified its earlier executive order calling on them to remove two regulations for every one they issue. The guidance came from the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which still lacks a permanent director. It gave details on which types of rules came under the order, the dates covered and more detail on figuring the costs of rules when meeting the requirement for zero net increase in the cost of regulation. For example, the guidance says savings from energy-efficiency rules don鈥檛 count.

The Senate confirmed two more cabinet secretaries. Now there鈥檚 permanent leadership at the Education and Justice departments. Vice President Mike Pence had to break a tie vote Betsy DeVos for Education. Now-former Sen. Jeff Sessions was headed to swearing in at Justice on Thursday morning.

President Donald Trump faces continued concern in Congress, centered in the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, over terms of the lease of a federal building to the Trump Organization. Members also want to see revenue and expense reports for the on Pennsylvania Avenue about four blocks from the White House.

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The White House issued an executive order 鈥� the 11^th since 2001 鈥� on cybersecurity. It didn鈥檛 really set new policy, but instead called for a series of reviews on agency preparedness for cyber attacks.

In reversing the prior administration鈥檚 action on immigration, President Donald Trump took federal agencies a bit by surprise, particularly Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Border Patrol. They weren鈥檛 initially certain how to respond to questions or operational issues that the immigration order sparked.

The landscape will change for regulatory agencies, notably EPA, in the president鈥檚 order on regulation roll back. It calls for elimination of two rules for every one an agency proposes. It鈥檒l require serious effort because of the regulatory budget provision in the order. Trump is also calling for zero (or lower) cost growth in regulations. That means agencies must ensure the issuance of new regs and the withdrawal of existing ones result in a net zero or reduction in costs to the regulated entities.

The administration also clarified exemptions from the hiring freeze it imposed the first week. It allows temporary seasonal hires such as required by the Postal Service. Also interns, Presidential Management Fellows and in-service grade promotions can move forward. Veterans Affairs officials confirmed they鈥檒l still be hiring front-line employees such as doctors, physicians assistants, and nurses.

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