Eric Burlison Sounds Alarms On Implications For AI With ‘Outdated’ Federal Procurement System

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During Thursday’s House Oversight Committee hearing, Rep. Eric Burlison (R-MO) spoke about the federal procurement system.

Transcript

00:00and i'll recognize mr burleson for five minutes thank you madam chair for holding this very

00:06critical hearing on the federal government in the age of artificial intelligence as we explore the

00:12ai's ability to transform this economy and the potential that it has to enhance federal program

00:20efficiency combat combat fraud and deliver better services to the american people we must address a

00:27fundamental challenge to this and that is our federal procurement system our current system is

00:33riddled with barriers lengthy certification processes complex reseller networks and multi-year

00:40contract vehicles that prevent agencies from accessing innovations or ai solutions particularly

00:48from smaller companies this procurement challenge not only hinders efficiency but also threatens

00:56america's global leadership in ai in the last congress the 118th congress my bill the fit

01:02procurement act was reported favorably out of this committee and then successfully passed the house

01:09with bipartisan support last year i will be introducing the fit procurement act again shortly

01:17but let me point out that my bill directly tackles our outdated federal procurement system

01:22this act streamlines federal acquisition to empower agencies to further acquire cutting-edge commercial

01:29technologies like ai it does this by simply raising the simplified acquisition threshold from 250 000 to 500

01:38000 increasing the micro purchase threshold from 10k to 25k and allowing advanced payments for

01:47subscription-based software which is what we see so readily today that the federal government is not

01:52able to take advantage of with unanimous bipartisan support in the last congress this act is a proven

01:59common sense reform to modernize government save taxpayer dollars and reposition the united states as a

02:06continued leader in the ai driven future and i look forward to hearing from our witnesses about that so

02:13let me get begin mrs miller in your testimony you discuss why agencies should buy commercial technology

02:21rather than build custom code as someone who was an in-house custom coder i couldn't agree with you

02:26more um could you follow up and elaborate on that yeah sure well the point i was making in my testimony

02:33about that was that um you creates technical debt when you're creating um your code yourself and because ai

02:38is moving so quickly frequently it'll be obsolete soon after it's built and so it makes sense to to

02:44contract with vendors who have more updated tools um i would just add that the the bill that you're that

02:49you're just that you're referring to given my my own small companies challenges um getting access to

02:56small pilot projects and proofs of concept um given those those very low thresholds this would be very

03:02beneficial to small innovative technology companies that's thank you you i don't have to now ask my

03:08follow-up question um is it true that um ai can be used to detect fraud in in the grant process effectively

03:17yeah there's so many great use cases for ai and the fraud space when it comes to grants we can

03:23scan through information using open source intelligence ai models large language models can sort that

03:28information incredibly quickly within seconds and spot anomalies humans would not be able to spot even if we

03:34were a lot of times what is happening today are grant processors are pulling up google and opening up

03:40different different screens and looking for things on different on different sites sometimes they have

03:44access to open source intelligence tools but they're still manually checking for that ai makes that

03:49incredibly quick thank you mr shaw you've highlighted the federal government's procurement problem

03:55in their process um based on your experience direct experience do you believe that changes to the

04:01procurement process allowing agencies to pilot products like yours before going enterprise wide

04:08would allow smaller companies like you to better compete for contracts yes we we believe that

04:14strongly i think there's a variety of ways to do that one creating more poc type programs you know a good

04:20example is the uh i think it's called the investment horizon pilot program that the office of the cio of the navy

04:26has implemented but the challenge is every agency seems to have their own set of

04:30ways that they procure um new technology so to the extent that we can help to normalize that will

04:37help us also navigate you know for example through the fed ramp process that i've described of the 8.5 million

04:44600 000 i spent on consultants to help me figure out the process just to get certified yeah so so it's like

04:51you know i couldn't have spent that on maybe more innovation or other other areas so i think that if you

04:56have innovator programs or ways for us to start with other agencies that are less security focused

05:02will will be a big help is it safe to say the federal government is a pain in the ass client

05:08it is uh it is a complex web and uh if you ever want to do a secret shopper with me one day and

05:13you can sort of watch how this plays out i'd be very happy to show you what it looks thank you i yield back

05:18all right now

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