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Members press CAO and witnesses on data security, procurement and the digital divide
Summary
Subcommittee members pressed witnesses on governance for member data, procurement timelines for CMS and cloud services, and how pilots can avoid excluding digitally underserved constituents; CAO described governance settings and recommended sandbox pilots for public input features.
During questioning at the House Administration Subcommittee hearing, members focused on data security, vendor procurement and access equity as central constraints to modernizing constituent engagement.
Ranking Member Torres raised casework and privacy concerns, asking how offices can ensure any staffer can respond to constituents without exposing Social Security numbers or other PII. Ken Ward of House Digital Services said governance settings in a proposed data lake could segment access and that authentication and role-based controls would allow staff to respond while protecting sensitive fields. He emphasized the CAO is not proposing placing all sensitive data into an LLM and described integration and governance as feasible but requiring careful design.
Members also asked how to make the vendor approval process more transparent and speedier. Ward said CMS contracts run on multi-year terms with option periods reviewed every two years and that the CAO plans to publish more vendor guidance on house.gov and HouseNet. Dr. Beth Novak and Aubrey Wilson suggested sandboxed, stand-alone public engagement pilots that do not require back-end integration as low-risk ways to test approaches quickly.
Several members underscored the digital divide. Torres noted that nearly one in three working Americans have limited digital skills and pointed to past problems when agencies moved to digital-only authentication. Novak and other witnesses pointed to multilingual, mobile-friendly training programs (Novak described a Civic AI WhatsApp program) and emphasized human-centered design to avoid excluding constituencies.
The subcommittee did not adopt any procurement or governance changes during the hearing but signaled next steps: explore pilots that can be rapidly stood up, produce clearer guidance for vendors, and deepen CAO-subcommittee collaboration on cybersecurity and authorization processes. The hearing record remains open for five legislative days for submitted materials.
