During a House Appropriations Committee hearing last week, Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) questioned Amy St. Eve, the Chair of Budget Committee at the Judicial Conference, about funding towards technology at the Federal Judiciary.
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00:00Thank you for that observation, and the chair totally agrees with you.
00:04The chair now recognizes the gentleman from North Carolina, Mr. Edwards.
00:09More questions?
00:10Thank you, Mr. Chair.
00:11Let's turn the conversation to technology,
00:14something I think we don't spend nearly enough time talking about.
00:19And when I look at your budget request and the historical spending,
00:24I see that the federal judiciary spends, let's call it about a million dollars a year,
00:29which doesn't seem like a whole lot of money,
00:31but I know that often money towards technology goes into a big old black hole.
00:40Can you tell me a little bit about how that million dollars or so is being spent,
00:48how much of that is on maintenance, how much is on new software development,
00:53the portion on new software development,
00:57how do you know we're getting our money's worth out of it?
00:59I was an appropriator for technology back in North Carolina when I served in the Senate,
01:05and I know we invested tens of millions of dollars in new development.
01:10Years later, we'd run into a roadblock and realize we've wasted all the new development money that we had,
01:18and we had to start over again.
01:19I'm just curious, are you finding those types of issues?
01:23So when it comes to the JITF funding, how is that being spent?
01:31What are your concerns?
01:32Okay.
01:32Thank you for clarifying that, Congressman Edwards.
01:35If I understand you're asking in particular about our money into JITF.
01:40Let's start with that.
01:41Okay.
01:41And then tell me if there's something else that I'm not looking at.
01:44As opposed to some of our cybersecurity efforts and the FIDA plan.
01:48Separate from cybersecurity.
01:48Okay.
01:49Thank you for that clarification.
01:51So our systems are becoming obsolete, and for years we did not put money into IT.
01:59A common story.
02:01Yes.
02:02Yeah.
02:02For a long time people thought IT was the, you know, oh, I need my printer fixed.
02:07And it's changed dramatically.
02:10But for years, and because we try to be good stewards of the money, we put our priority elsewhere.
02:18And as a result of that, we lost people in IT, and our systems have become obsolete.
02:25So the money that goes to our IT account is going really to rebuild those systems and to modernize them.
02:33And along with that modernization comes security.
02:37Part of that money goes to bringing on and keeping IT personnel, which is, as you probably know, very hard to do.
02:46Because a lot of IT personnel can earn a lot of money if they go outside of the government.
02:53And so trying to keep those people is very important to us.
02:57But we really depleted our IT to a large extent in terms of personnel.
03:04And we've been trying to increase that because it's essential to keeping our systems secure and modern.
03:12I will, Mr. Chair, I'm going to submit some written questions.
03:17I'd like to understand more about the investment in IT and where you see the future.
03:22But let's shift to AI now.
03:26Where does artificial intelligence fall into the overall platform or plans for the federal judiciary?
03:35So the director, and maybe I'll let you answer this, has put together an AI task force.
03:41Recently, and it's directed both at the ways in which AI can be a benefit to the justice system
03:52and in ways to prevent it from being destructive.
03:56And so the task force consists of gifted people across the country identifying the AI issues that we deal with now
04:11and hopefully anticipating them in the future.
04:15That task force has been recently comprised, and we look forward to learning a lot through it.
04:24Will you be sharing the results of that task force with this committee?
04:29Be glad to.
04:30Yes, sir.
04:30That'll be one of my requests and my written follow-up.
04:35Thank you, Mr. Chair.