Committee on Legislative Modernization hears inter-branch briefings on cybersecurity, AI and IT consolidation

Tom Day, director of Legislative Administrative Services and interim chief technology officer for the legislative branch, Jeff Maxon, Executive Branch Chief Information Technology Officer, and Alex Wong, State Information Technology Officer for the judicial branch, briefed the Committee on Legislative Modernization on technology concepts tied to recent legislation and ongoing modernization efforts.

The committee heard that the legislative branch has implemented new cybersecurity tools and is upgrading its bill-drafting and document systems. "We have implemented a software program called Arctic Wolf, which does help us block spamming, phishing expeditions," Tom Day said, adding that the legislature is finalizing a new CALOS bill-drafting system and moving printed bills from a 6-by-9 format to standard 8.5-by-11 pages.

The discussion focused on concepts in the prior session's Senate Bill 291 (mentioned as moving forward in altered form) and related House measures now circulating. Committee chair noted the committee returned House Bill 2270 to committee to keep it alive past turnaround; the chair said, "If the bill remained out on the house floor, past turnaround, it would have died and we wouldn't be able to handle it. But once we return it back to the committee, it stays alive below the line here in the committee." (Motion/official mover not specified in the transcript.)

Jeff Maxon described the executive branch's work on a statewide IT modernization and consolidation assessment, saying the goals include finding efficiencies and increasing security. "We were one of the first states to actually put together an AI policy for a state level," Maxon said, and added the executive branch is preparing a second version of that policy. On workforce effects, Maxon said the state views artificial intelligence "as a tool to augment the existing workforce and not necessarily replace the workforce."

Representatives raised questions about AI accuracy, verification and jobs. Representative Smith asked whether AI would be limited to research tasks and cautioned about AI producing incorrect statutory citations; "some of the AI information that was coming up was incorrect statutory citations," Tom Day and Gordon Self, Revisor of Statutes, noted. Representative Simmons said she was concerned about displacing legislative staff and losing employees who live in Topeka and nearby cities, saying, "I'm fearful that if we dive too deep into replacing people ... they're going to leave my city because they won't have a reason to live here."

Alex Wong described judicial-branch priorities for network redundancy and flexible connectivity for judges and court staff who work remotely or from multiple locations. "We are not trying to duplicate or replicate any existing infrastructure that's already in place," Wong said, adding the judicial branch seeks targeted exemptions only where necessary to ensure performance and redundancy in edge cases.

Speakers identified several concrete items and clarifications: the legislature migrated its public domain from kslegislature.org to kslegislature.gov last summer and retains redirects; Arctic Wolf is in use for email and security management; the legislative branch is implementing a new CALOS bill-drafting system with the vendor Propelon that will output bills in standard paper size; and the executive branch has been using federal Homeland Security grant funding to support cybersecurity training for local governments.

Committee members discussed coordination forums. Speakers said the Information Technology Executive Council (ITEC) and other advisory groups are venues for cross-branch discussion but noted changes in membership and voting rules after recent legislation. Committee members asked for opportunities to be briefed and for continued inter-branch coordination as statutory language and policy are revised.

The chair closed by noting the bill that could not pass the floor was returned to committee to preserve it for the next portion of the biennium and encouraged members to gather peer-state practices at conferences and bring ideas back to staff at the Kansas Legislative Research Department.