Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP): History and Overview

whitePaper | November 14, 2019

Three significant anniversaries occurred in 2019. Seventy years ago, on October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong declared the founding of the People’s Republic of China and, as Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), was anointed the country’s paramount leader. Forty years ago, on January 1, 1979, the United States and the People’s Republic of China established diplomatic relations. And thirty years ago, on June 4, 1989, the leadership of the CCP, having declared martial law, sent troops to violently extinguish a peaceful protest, resulting in the Tiananmen Square massacre.

whitePaper | November 21, 2022

Cyber attacks and data breaches are at the forefront of the national agenda - and the issue isn’t going away. These types of attacks aren’t necessarily new, however the exponential increase in data combined with data ubiquity, the massive increase in Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, and the shift to remote work have expanded our attack surface, while also shifting the network load to the perimeterless internet.

whitePaper | January 16, 2020

Less than two months before California’s presidential primary, the Democratic primary remains a three-way race between Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Elizabeth Warren. Most Californians say President Trump should be removed from office and disapprove of his handling of the situation with Iran. These are among the key findings of a statewide survey released today by the Public Policy Institute of California.

whitePaper | May 26, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic has forever changed how government operates and delivers services to constituents. In the spring of 2020, government found itself with a remote workforce, closed field offices, mounting backlogs, outdated manual processes and increasingly strained legacy IT solutions. The impact of the pandemic revealed a divide between legacy and cutting-edge technology solutions, amplifying a critical need to accelerate digital transformation in government.

whitePaper | June 10, 2022

The public sector is feeling the squeeze between an increase in cyber attacks and a lack of increased resources to keep up. In a recent survey conducted on behalf of SolarWinds, public sector respondents reported increased concern over ransomware, malware and phishing the most over the previous year, but time to detection and resolution had not improved for the majority.1 To bolster application security, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a memorandum directing agencies to identify critical software and implement the latest protections outlined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Another OMB memorandum presented a federal zero trust architecture (ZTA) strategy that requires agencies to meet specific cybersecurity standards and objectives by the end of FY2024.

whitePaper | October 5, 2022

Cloud is helping to modernize government services and transform citizen interactions. But cloud security hasn’t kept up with the pace of cloud adoption. Ensuring a secure, compliant environment in the cloud is critical— particularly for public-sector organizations that collect, store and manage highly sensitive data on behalf of their citizens.