Original Broadcast Date: 09/27/2026
Sponsored by Deloitte
Federal agencies are rethinking how they buy technology, manage increasingly complex cloud environments and turn data into better mission outcomes.
On this episode of Fed Gov Today, leaders from NASA, Deloitte and the Health Resources and Services Administration discuss modernization efforts that stretch from the lunar surface to federal health programs.
Bradley Niese, senior procurement executive at NASA, says acquisition is a “team sport” that plays a foundational role in some of the agency’s biggest missions.
NASA is celebrating progress on programs including the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and X-59 supersonic aircraft. Niese says successful procurement begins by bringing acquisition professionals into conversations with program and requirements teams as early as possible.
That early involvement allows contracting officers to understand what the mission needs, research available capabilities and build stronger acquisition strategies.
Technology is also changing that work. Niese says NASA is beginning to use artificial intelligence for routine administrative functions. The goal is to help the workforce become comfortable using AI responsibly while freeing acquisition professionals to spend more time on strategy, customers and industry partnerships.
Those lessons are becoming increasingly important as NASA prepares for future lunar missions. Niese describes a phased approach that emphasizes minimum viable requirements, learning through early operations and avoiding unnecessary “gold plating.”
He also discusses his work on the FAR Council and NASA’s effort to train acquisition professionals to use new procurement flexibilities.
Technology modernization is also creating new challenges for agencies managing multiple cloud environments.
Jason Young, principal at Deloitte, says agencies are increasingly focused on extracting greater mission value from the cloud infrastructure they already have. Multi-cloud environments can create duplicated workloads, security concerns and additional complexity when they are not rationalized consistently.
Young says AI could help agencies manage that complexity by serving as an orchestration and abstraction layer across systems that were not originally designed to communicate.
Instead of forcing users to navigate multiple applications, AI can pull information from different systems and present it through a common interface. Agencies can then modernize the underlying applications with less disruption to users.
But Young says cloud modernization cannot be separated from data modernization. Agencies need consistent definitions and standards as information moves between environments. He recommends treating modernization, multi-cloud management and data as a single portfolio rather than separate activities.
At HRSA, Acting Chief Information Officer Srinivas Panguluri describes another side of that modernization challenge.
HRSA is using the FHIR interoperability standard to collect de-identified health information that can be analyzed over time. Panguluri says the approach gives the agency more actionable information while protecting individual identities.
The agency has also built a modern data lakehouse and provides analysts with different tools for statistical analysis, dashboards and other work.
Panguluri says governance remains essential as HRSA expands its technology portfolio, particularly with artificial intelligence.
The agency is moving beyond basic AI uses toward putting AI into workflows and exploring agentic AI. That shift brings new governance questions.
Panguluri says agencies need to establish boundaries around what AI agents can do, maintain logs of their activity and create a “kill switch” in case something goes wrong. He also says agencies will increasingly need to watch AI costs as usage grows.
Across all three conversations, modernization is less about adopting a single new technology and more about connecting technology, people, data and mission requirements in ways that deliver measurable value.