Patrick McFarland, the Office of Personnel Management’s inspector general, told a Senate panel Thursday morning that he does not have confidence in the nation’s human resources department’s management team.
“I believe that the interest and intent is there but based on what we found, no,” McFarland answered after Senate Homeland Security and Oversight Chairman Ron Johnson, R-Wis., asked him if he had “confidence” that OPM’s current management can “really follow through on this and provide the security I think this nation deserves.”
Johnson was referring to a “flash audit” that McFarland’s office produced last week in which he warned that OPM’s ongoing effort to overhaul its information technology infrastructure is falling short.
“In our opinion, the project management approach for this major infrastructure overhaul is entirely inadequate, and introduces a very high risk of project failure,” the June 17 audit stated.
The country’s chief information officer, Tony Scott, declined to take Johnson’s bait about Archuleta. When asked the same question before McFarland, he gave Archuleta’s team credit for improving OPM’s abysmal IT and IT security situation.
Thursday was Archuleta’s fourth time in the hot seat on Capitol Hill since OPM revealed that its databases were twice hacked last year, compromising the sensitive information of at least 4.2 million current and past federal workers. However, Johnson was the first lawmaker to get someone other than a congressional colleague to essentially call for Archuleta’s head.
As recently as Wednesday, after Archuleta took a four-hour verbal beating from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the White House stood by the OPM director. Spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters that President Obama believes Archuleta is up to the task of securing federal workers’ most intimate information.
Earlier in the morning, Archuleta revealed that part of her solution involves hiring a “cybersecurity advisor” who will answer directly to her.
Lawmakers are skeptical of giving OPM more money after the massive data breaches. But that revelation, along with Archuleta hinting to a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Tuesday and again before Johnson’s panel Thursday, makes it more likely that the agency will adjust upwards its $21 million budget request for fiscal year 2016 for IT upgrades.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, on Wednesday flat-out said he’s not inclined to recommend giving OPM more money.
OPM has spent $577 million on IT since 2008, he stated. Yet “often times it feels like one good trip to Best Buy and we could help solve this problem and be a whole lot better than where we are today,” he said in his opening remarks.
