Ramping Up!

In this episode of GSA Does That!, FedRAMP Director Pete Waterman and Cloud Strategy Executive Director Eric Mill share how GSA is streamlining the FedRAMP process to improve cloud technology access for federal agencies. They discuss how their leadership is making FedRAMP faster and more agile, enabling agencies to adopt cutting-edge cloud technologies while maintaining top security standards.

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"GSA Does That!?" is the U.S. General Services Administration's first agency-wide podcast, offering listeners an inside look into how GSA and its partners benefit the American people. Hosted by Rob Trubia, the podcast features interviews with GSA leaders, experts, partners, and customers, covering topics such as federal real estate, acquisitions, and technology. The title reflects many's surprise at the scope of GSA's impact. At the same time, the artwork pays homage to President Harry S. Truman, who established GSA in 1949 to improve government efficiency and save taxpayer money. Whether you're a policy wonk or just curious about government operations, you can join the listener community.

For more information about the show visit, gsa.gov/podcast.

Transcript

Rob Trubia
Welcome to GSA Does That!? the podcast that brings you the stories behind the federal agency delivering effective and efficient government. And that's exactly what our episode today is all about. Hi. I'm your host, Rob Trubia and today we're talking with two industry leaders who are transforming the process of how government agencies access the latest cloud based technologies, all while keeping national security the number one priority.

Our guests are Pete Waterman, the director of FedRAMP, and Eric Mill, the executive director of Cloud Strategy. Pete's fresh off an 18,000 mile motorcycle journey around the country and has hit the ground running as FedRAMPs new director. Eric came over to GSA from the White House's Office of Management and Budget and brings a wealth of industry experience and leadership to GSA.

Both Eric and Pete are very passionate about what they do, bringing unique insights and experiences to the table. So stay tuned for a conversation that will shed light on how government is embracing technology to work smarter, faster, and more securely than ever before. Well Pete and Eric, thank you both for taking the time to be with us today. I'm really looking forward to our great discussion about FedRAMP and where you guys have it headed.

But before we get into it, I wondered if we might learn a little bit about both of you. And Pete I thought we might start with you. I looked into your background. I googled you a little bit, and you're an interesting guy. I thought you might share a little bit about who is Pete Waterman?

Pete Waterman
Now that is a loaded question there, Rob. At the end of the day, I'm just a guy trying to do his best to have fun and get through this world, right? From a government context, I grew up really weird. I grew up multicultural overseas, spent a lot of time by myself as a young adult. Moved all around the world, moved to D.C. when I was almost 30, and D.C. became the first city that I lived in continuously for more than four years.

In fact, this house standing right now that we moved into in the pandemic in my 40s, first place that I lived in my life for more than four years in a row at the same address. And my career has kind of been the same thing, too. I've just I've moved around very progressively through a lot of different things and just moved on from there through a whole bunch of things that led me into a situation where after 20 years of doing a lot of cool stuff in business, I kind of, got a little bit bored with the idea of just trying to make money.

There's only so much that you can be inspired by optimizing every click for another dollar. And I ended up just and like, sorry, I, I applied for the U.S. Digital Service which does usds.gov. Fantastic way to just bring people like me into government from the from the industry, bypassing a lot of the complicated government hiring processes. And they just dropped me right into the Department of Homeland Security, where I went to go advise a bunch of people on how to do cloud right, and just immediately ran into the giant brick wall of government policy and regulations and rules, and have spent pretty much my entire, you know, career since then, five years since then just trying to navigate that maze, agency after agency with stakeholder after stakeholder. That's what led me here to FedRAMP.

Rob Trubia
So we talk we've talked several times on this podcast about really attracting the right tech talent from all over the country and parts of the world. Honestly, to government. And it's sounding like we're starting to get some serious talent that wants to come to government for the exact reason that you just mentioned is that, you know, it's more fulfilling.

Public service is very fulfilling. Eric, how about you can you give us a little bit of background on yourself, maybe even a little bit where you grew up, maybe some hobbies, but where did you, how did you end up at your current position right now?

Eric Mill
Yeah. Absolutely. And thanks so much for having me on this show, Rob. Yeah. So I, I, grew up in upstate New York and, you know, close, close to Albany in a town called Catskill and in a very rural part of the part of the place. And, but, you know, I was fortunate enough to, you know, have a computer and internet connection, as you know, say 11-12 onwards.

And, so I ended up starting out, you really kind of in my coming of age years, spending a lot of time in those early internet days, like just long nights of chatting and figuring out how internet stuff worked and, you know, making websites on notepad and stuff, and then went to school for it so as not to be bored by everything else.

And, and then, you know, spent a few years out in the real world just kind of cutting my teeth as a software engineer and web developer. And again, still just kind of being enamored with, you know, what the possibility of the web and the internet are, especially for small organizations   and individual people. You know, for a lot of the early years in my career, I was always motivated by wanting to go to places where I could use modern technology in the cloud to do interesting things.

So when I moved to DC when I was 24, I thought I'd only be here about 2 or 3 years. That, you know, that was about 16 years ago. I started work at a nonprofit here. That doesn't exist anymore. But, it was a place called the Sunlight Foundation that did a lot of open government and transparency work.

So I was, you know, able to use, you know, my engineering skills and, and work with the cloud to do, you know, pretty good salt of the earth, public good type work. And I was able to work with our international team and do capacity building at some of these anti-corruption groups around the world and, and, you know, scrape government websites and put together apps and, data sets for them to try to help people make sense of the stuff and make use of it.

It's a very good introduction to the government from outside of the government. Really got to understand a lot more arcane stuff, than than most people in the field, I think got to do. And so then when GSA started 18F right around the time USDS was started in 2014. Yeah, that was actually enough to lure me into government.

Give me a start. So I spent about five years at GSA there. As a civil servant. I was, across, you know, the latter half of Obama and the first couple years of the Trump administration. And then just, very quickly, the circle there as I left to spend some time on the hill through a fellowship called the Tech Congress Fellowship, which was itself inspired by a GSA program called the Presidential Innovation Fellowship.

I think the technical name for that is the Congressional Innovation Fellowship. They kind of named that after that. And, so I ended up spending, a year in the Senate doing elections security, where I ended up using a whole ton of the things I've learned here at GSA and the people that I got to know to get stuff done, which kind of surprised me.

And then I ended up spending, about a year out in the private sector, at it working for, a web browser, which was, you know, the, like I said, I always been drawn to the web and making more of it, so I that was a good span of time for me. And then, an opportunity to come join this administration opened up, and I spent a few years at OMB, working on, the FedRAMP Authorization Act, the FedRAMP policy memo, and, among other things.

I didn't just do FedRAMP stuff there, but definitely, you know, was, was was involved in that stuff and, and then had the chance to join GSA here again, this year, which has been a ton of fun.

Rob Trubia
So I appreciate you sharing that. I'm curious, did you come over from OMB to FedRAMP in January?

Eric Mill
Yes, I, I transferred over here like right, like January 2nd, something like that.

Rob Trubia
Okay. And I, I'm guessing one of your very first tasks, if you want to call it that, to be, find a director.

Eric Mill
Yeah. Certainly. One of the major goals here, was, was to help lead the recruitment of, a permanent director for the program, which is a process that took some time and ultimately, popped out Pete Waterman here on the other side.

Rob Trubia
Yeah. Well, that is that is good to hear. Pete, I do have to ask you, about you, I think you took a little motorcycle ride in between some, a little hiatus from government. Maybe. Heard from you, heard from Eric, maybe on that trip. But I wondered, tell us a little bit about that you took. It was more than a little motorcycle ride.

What was that about?

Pete Waterman
So I retired from the federal government, which I was surprised to find a that was what they call it when you leave, even if you're not old enough to actually retire. The checkbox on the form says retiring from the government. And I bought a new motorcycle and I went on a big trip all the way across the US and yeah, the the FedRAMP  part of that was crazy.

So in all that time, I was not looking for jobs. I was not talking to people. I was fending people off and I tuned in to one of the recruiting pitches for the FedRAMP director. And I was like, is that something where I could potentially have a lever to make some of the changes I want to see? Or is that something where I would just be forced to check boxes and and continue on with all the things that I was frustrated with and in the pouring rain, in a traffic jam on I-95, in my motorcycle, soaking wet, I listen to Eric give a pitch for what he and GSA leadership and OMB leadership envisioned for

the future of FedRAMP. And I said, all right, that's something I'm going to pay attention to. And lucky for me, I was ready. I went ahead and I prepped a government resumé. When they announced the posting. I was just coming out of a camp site and outside of, I think, Joshua Tree in Southern California, and I thought, oh, this is this is a IT position,

remote IT position at at GSA. I better apply now. And I went ahead and applied from my phone using the Google doc that I had pre worked on my phone. And then by the time I showed up at a hotel the next day, in Arizona, that thing was closed. So I was, I was that far away from not being here today.

All because of that.

Rob Trubia
Well, let me ask Eric. I'll ask you. Can you give us a little definition for those that say, you know, these guys are really interesting to listen to, but I still don't know. I have no idea what FedRAMP is. So, Eric, what is FedRAMP? Give us a little FedRAMP 101.

Eric Mill
Yeah, you know, the but the way I the way I talk about FedRAMP and the way that I have experienced it, right, is, is FedRAMP. It it is a security certification program for the cloud providers that the government uses. But it is it is a it is a program that's here to get cool, useful, empowering tools into the hands of, not only, you know, the enterprise IT teams and the digital service folks, but all of the mission teams in the federal government that now, you know, need to be using these things to get their job done.

When I talked about, you know, in my early days as an engineer, the cloud had to me at the time a pretty firm meaning of fungible computing infrastructure that all of a sudden you could take it, treat it as if it's practically infinite and, you know, automatically provision it without going through, you know, all these manual hoops.

It's just like you you can, you know, go and, an abstraction layer has been provided to you where you can just go in and draw on all this, all this different raw and in some cases, you know, more processed computing resources and like, go nuts. But and that's, that's those are, you know, there are some very big global names associated with, with many of those providers.

But the what the cloud is now has changed a lot. And, you know, for, for people out in the world, maybe in their personal lives, they've observed this. And a lot of people working in, you know, small organizations, small enterprises have also observed this. But in larger enterprises, especially the US government, even a little not quite as fast as in which is the cloud now is like all of the websites that you use, right?

It is, you know, it is the chat software you're using to collaborate with your teams. Yeah, it is the scheduling software using. It's what you are using to like process resumes to people who apply to your company. Is it like every single function small, big, some tailored to your mission to to like the missions in a particular sector similar

commodity, everything big and small and that is now just all a part of FedRAMP as well. And so that's for people who are new to this, who haven't, haven't kind of processed like the government's relationship through FedRAMP to the cloud. It's a little hard to overstate because it really is anything that isn't literally I mean, I shouldn’t say anything. There's there's a precise answer to this that deals with policy scope and all of that.

But like, broadly speaking, a whole lot of things on the internet that the government doesn't itself own and run physically, those are things that, you know, from a security perspective go through should be going through the FedRAMP process. So, yeah, Pete ow would you talk about it?

Pete Waterman
Yeah. I mean, take a take a step back and think about just the absolute mind boggling insanity of the scale of computer systems used by the federal government, right? Millions of employees in this huge, diverse set of agencies, hundreds and hundreds of agencies. There's thousands of officials responsible for IT all across government. And they're all using computer systems.

And in the 90s, they were they were computer systems run by contractors for that. They had data centers that had armed guards where everything was in there, and it was secure. They had a place where an inspector general could walk down the row of computers and pull a hard drive out of something to access it. And so we, the government, generally knew how to protect that information.

Well, that's that's perimeter security model was pretty well established. So as cloud comes on, you started to have a massive shift where this goes out to private sector, to industry or to other government agencies or to public sector entities like all these people are now hosting somebody else's data and information. That's that's all the cloud is, right? It's just using somebody else's computer.

But to use their computer, you need to put your information in it. Government security is all about where the information is. So the scale of this over the last 15, 20 years has just gotten insane. I mean, think about somebody at the Natural Resources and Conservation Service inside of the Department of Agriculture who's out talking to a farmer about a, a funding support for building some sort of, well, you know, brush wall to support wildlife.

And they're putting information from their phone into, into a database somewhere in order to track that they made that visit or something like that. That's cloud. That's all going through the cloud. Right? This conversation, it's all going through the cloud. So the interesting thing, like from my perspective, the crazy thing about FedRAMP is that you dial this all the way back to those thousands and thousands of IT officials all across the government that are responsible for all of their systems.

And imagine if every time one of them wanted to use something on the internet, some cloud service, they had to go talk to that cloud service. They had to ask them 500 questions. They had to find out where the data is. What are they doing with the data? How do they hire people? How are they securing it? Are they following the rules?

The first 2 or 3 times that happens, that cloud service company is going to say, this is not worth my time, I am done. I just I just spent, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars having people talk to you to answer these questions. So FedRAMP just creates that, that layer in the middle where we can say, these are the questions that you need to answer for government agencies.

Here's the way you should go about doing your business in a secure way and give us that information. Work with us and we'll redistributed it to agencies. And it makes it easier for cloud service providers because theoretically, they go through this process and then they're dialed in and then they can work to very specific agency requirements from there.

Makes it easier for agencies because they can just ask a smaller subset of questions or the ones they really care about, and then think about the scale that this is happening at. Right? Like there are thousands of people today all across government and private sector are working on something to make a cloud service either more secure against a FedRAMP baseline, or they're using a federal package to assess a cloud service, like every day that's happening.

Rob Trubia
Okay. So this is helpful. We understand the structure a little bit. We understand basically what it is. I'm understanding who the two of you are, which is exciting because you're trying to change things, trying to make things better for everyone. But I want to address the elephant in the room, and that is you tell me, what is that elephant room?

And, yeah, I think I'll tell you what I think it is. When when someone wants to use a cloud solution, it's new. Maybe not. And they got. No, you do it. You got to go through FedRAMP and like, oh, geez, I got to go through FedRAMP?  forget it, I don't even want to do it. It's going to take too long.

Is that fair? Are we going to be editing this piece out or is that fair? And and and Pete, are you here to fix that?

Pete Waterman
Look Rob, you talk to anyone out in the mission areas all across anywhere in federal government, and ask them what their experience is with FedRAMP, and they'll tell you they saw something in the cloud that they were interested in using. They went and they asked their security folks, can we use it? And they were told, no, it's not FedRAMPed.

That is just I mean, I honestly believe that probably happens hundreds of times every day at the scale of government because it is just the bluntest easiest way to just set expectations. It's not FedRAMPed, and until it's FedRAMPed, we're not going to do it.

Eric Mill
And especially since, you know, if you're an agency, if there's not a FedRAMP authorization and so somebody needs to sponsor it, that means to from an agency's perspective, they're going to have to do their, their IT teams have to do some work. And a lot of agencies, you know, they have there's a cost savings mind. They've they've sponsored FedRAMP authorizations before you know about how much it costs, maybe they'll even, you know, internally like ask for some reimbursement from the mission area that's requesting it.

You know, that's it's not a trivial thing. So that that absolutely occurs.

Pete Waterman
I mean, one of the most fascinating aspects of that is that agencies have been instructed for decades to do enterprise IT. That means procure services that are available to all of their employees in like a reproducible way and a lot of cloud services. You don't need to be available to all the employees, but it's kind of the same amount of effort.

So if a small team of designers wants to use a cloud service, that will help them build a, mockup for a web page. For that agency, that's just as hard for them to go through the process of of authorizing as something like email for their entire enterprise.

Eric Mill
But that's I think that's a a very important thing to to focus on, because it's one of the impacts of the way that the cloud has changed, which I talked a little bit about earlier, but like the use cases that these tools can do has I mean, certainly there are big sprawling cloud piece of software out there, but there's a lot of niche things, right, that it may just be useful for those 50 designers in your organization and in your 15,000 person agency.

And so you know that it, government isn't inherently well optimized for serving those for, you know, yeah, for for bringing lots of resources to bear for all these little niches of things. There's just that's a trouble in every large organization. And I think, you know, the elephant in the room is that FedRAMP really brings that to a fore, especially as the cloud ecosystem has become what it is and becomes so wide.

Rob Trubia
And has it been frustrating for agencies, as it says, a slow process? What is I, I understand that there's hey, I want we want to use this for our five designers, for whoever it might be. And they're like, you got to you got to get it. FedRAMPed as you called it. It's like, well, you know, we got to find one that's already FedRAMP because we don't have time to wait.

Pete Waterman
It's it's really frustrating for agencies. I mean, I can I can tell you about personal experience. I had trying to get a very small cloud service authorized. And it got to the point where the cloud service provider said, like, this is costing me more money in just having my lawyers review your suggested changes to this Terms of service.

Not even the security of the thing, just the terms of service that I'm ever going to make off of you for your $5 a month for 50 employees. And they're like, we just can't work with you in that way. That absolutely happens. There are a lot of cloud services that aren't. It's just not there's no business case to sell to government if they have to spend millions of dollars redeveloping their systems in order to meet these requirements.

Eric Mill
Right. And that and so what you're talking about here, I mean, these these are the problems that we are trying to set out to change and trying to set out to make some progress on. And they're not, they're not as hopefully as coming across. They're not simple problems where there's just like, oh, if only we change this one line of policy.

Eric Mill
Right. Like there are some fundamental tensions of like, you know, one is obviously like, how do you how do you focus large amounts of energy on on small things and many small things. Pete also talked about the fact that, like, there just is you. There's no way to wish away or policy away the idea that, like what you need, your risk management calculus for a service that will track pencils or will track other low, you know, low sensitivity photos or whatever is different then for, you know, national security systems.

And and and and and yet right. You have the reason a program like FedRAMP comes into existence is to provide some kind of consistency to this, to centralize some aspects of this to the best degree possible. You know, if you're a company, you'd like to work through, what it means to sell on the government once or as few times as possible.

You know, you don't want to have to renegotiate with 200 different agencies, individual concepts of risk tolerance. But there will be variances of risk tolerance in the government. And so that's, you know, that's the fun problem that I have to solve. And and you know what what we've been trying to focus on are some of the things that we think are the root causes to aspects of how this problem manifests, that can be improved upon partnerships.

We can we can make, ways we can adjust some of our, some of our thinking and organizations, things we can make, you know, turn from synchronous to asynchronous. You know, the with the, the crucible that we're in always that like, you know, the government and we don't have a lot of patience to, you know, actually like, reduce our overall security expectations for these.

Like, that's not that's not what anybody wants from this. And is that what we're going to do? But you ultimately we are we are working FedRAMP has to make sense to people to go through it. And and that's the overarching thing that we have to solve here.

Pete Waterman
And I can connect that forward for you. For you too, Rob. Like we've been really talking about the past and where we got here. But the most important thing in the recent past, OMB, the Office of Management and Budget released a entirely new policy M-2415 on the modernization of FedRAMP. And in that process, they rescinded a 2011 policy that we had been following today.

So just take a moment to think about that in 2011. There are some very visionary people that saw, like how the cloud would be important to governments. But if, you know, if you paid any attention to the technology over the last 13 years, it's an entirely different world right now. And so for us, this is a super exciting time because we have like high level acknowledgment and support from the Office of Management and Budget that says the outline, this incredible vision for FedRAMP, where it's easier for cloud service providers, where it's cheaper, where things can come in faster.

All so that agencies and more importantly, from my perspective, the civil servants at agencies can get better access to these tools. If it's easier for an agency to opt to ATO the tool, then they're going to use more of them. And so as we make it easier for cloud service providers, we make it easier for agencies. We get more tools and capabilities in the hands of civil servants.

Rob Trubia
Do you have advice for some of these small players, these small cloud providers? How can they most effectively do business with the government? Anything that they could do, I mean, they're here and right from the guy.

Pete Waterman
So there's two different perspectives. We're already seeing proof that if you are a new business and you are starting from scratch, if you build modern cybersecurity information security principles, and you look at FedRAMP and the things that you need to do in order to get FedRAMPed, and make that part of your core business as you build it, it is real easy and it is real fast compared to, a small business or even a large business, which can be worse off in some situations.

You have tech debt, you've made decisions you've decided you're going to use, you know, a purple server and you love your purple server and it's great. But then when you're ready to sell a FedRAMP, you find out we don't like purple servers and it has to be green servers. Then you have this nice, beautiful purple server that you have to repaint, and it's effort and it's complicated.

I mean, like the reworking is like the number one pain point that small CSPs have is like, we made all of these decisions like bluntly engineering at small businesses are the people that riot because they say this is going to be really, really hard. I'm going to have to rebuild a lot of things. So new small, new small CSPs build it in from the beginning.

Just be ready for it. Have your engineers look it up, understand the process, understand the expectations and it will be a lot easier.

Eric Mill
And Pete, I think the thing that's important about what you're saying is that that's the same advice that you give to a company or, or any organization to if you're just going to take security seriously and do a good job, is that you you work with your security team early. You you don't wait to figure that's that you you don't focus just totally on explosive new functionality, and you'll figure out the security stuff later.

Like, you know that that the more you you actually think about that early in the architecture of your, you know, your service, the easier it's not just an easier of a time that you'll have with FedRAMP. It's an easier over time you'll have internally with your own security team. It's an easy if you're a government organization's an easier time you'll have with your CISO getting an authorization to operate.

And so the same thing holds true here.

Rob Trubia
Pete, what about the other side? What about your your agency customers from across government? What kind of advice do you have for them in dealing with FedRAMP? Give us some encouragement, encourage them. They've they've listen to the podcast this far there down I said I'm on Pete, give me something. Give me something that's going to help me get through this process.

Pete Waterman
Lean into your liaison teams. Lean into communication. That's something that we're doing and we're going to keep doing and we're going to do more. My goal is for this year, agencies are going to hear more and have more access related to FedRAMP than you ever had before. And that includes, partnerships across the FedRAMP board and includes OMB.

That includes us. We are all making ourselves more available than ever before to agencies to talk about how they can succeed in this. I think the connect from my side, the thing that I'm really trying to build and and to my agency, [inaudible] reach out, figure out how you can we can do this, but we need to talk more on a technical level.

There's a lot of executive to executive communication happening, but we need the person that is reading that information. You know, security plan, that system security plan to have a communication and a line to us to, you know, help them learn. I have all sorts of really cool ideas that are very early on in the stage of probably shouldn't talk about, but I will be trying to do everything I can to get us to a place where next year, two years from now, it looks different and the agencies have a lot more people that have been hands on with these packages in a way that they can really, really push this forward and do this faster and more efficiently because they can trust in the process.

Rob Trubia
Eric, what do you want the audience to take away from this podcast? What do you want them to know about FedRAMP today?

Eric Mill
Well, I certainly want folks to to see that folks here at GSA understand the experience. But like both the the purpose of FedRAMP as an enabling force and the problems that can come up in a big government and how you actually implement that and how and how things turn out. We didn't talk on this podcast in a ton of detail about the individual initiatives that we're doing to try to chip away at this.

And I would totally encourage folks to go look at, the last version of our FedRAMP roadmap we published earlier in the year, as well as, you know, whatever next version of that, that Pete here leads the team into doing. But, you know, we're this is, in the year since the nine months, I guess, since I joined here, to focus on this program has been the most in, you know, intense period of work and focus for FedRAMP.

You know, getting to a place that is the platform for FedRAMP to be able to more fully address some of these problems, like, I've never, again, as I said, I had been here at GSA for for quite some time, earlier as well. And I worked for really closely in and around the FedRAMP team at that time.

And the folks on the strategy team, they've been doing great work for a long time. And like I said, is is why I joined government is because of the cloud tools that were available that they that they had helped bring about. But, you know, there's a lot of a lot of work has gone into putting FedRAMP in a position where it has the, you know, space, vision, time and people to start addressing this.

And I am always the first to point out how much our, you know, putting more resources into this machine will allow it to go even further and solve even more of these problems. But we do want people to see that, like, there is a pretty substantial machine here that is is working in service of customers as as frustrating as FedRAMP could sometimes be to folks, and as interesting and high possibility as FedRAMP has seen, to folks that we see all of that and are working very hard on it.

Rob Trubia
So. Well, Pete, I'm going to give you the final word as the FedRAMP director. Two things, really. I want you to encourage the audience because I'm encouraged. I think this is exciting stuff. But I also want to ask you this because I know our administrator, Robin Carnahan, is big on recruiting the best and the brightest. We've got two of them.

We're talking to you right now. Is tell us if FedRAMP is hiring and if so, what kind of services are you looking for? What kind of experts, technologists, professionals is Pete Waterman looking to hire?

Pete Waterman
Rob I'm going to I'm going to walk you back a tiny bit, which is that I'm not necessarily looking for the best and the brightest. I think there's a lot of super amazing, incredible people out there that don't consider themselves the best and the brightest and yet would provide a ton of value to the government. But you just have to have a passion to serve, a willingness to approach your work in a different manner with slightly more constraints and a desire to solve problems in slightly different ways involving understanding policy and laws and regulations and not just, you know, sitting down and writing your code.

But you don't have to be the best and brightest. You just have to want to be a part of this big giant machine, and be dedicated to it. So when it comes to looking for gigs, USA jobs is an incredibly complex place to navigate. It's difficult for me to give advice in a pithy sound bite, so I'm just going to make it real.

Getting into government is tough. Go to tts.gsa.gov/join , and you'll get a page that will show open positions that we have at our agency in our section of our agency, as well as a lot of information about the hiring process and the onboarding process.

Rob Trubia
That's a great way to to sign off on this podcast. That's that's very encouraging. And it really goes along with what we've said on several of these episodes about, you know, finding technologists that want to do work that really matters for the greater good. And yeah, I appreciate you correcting me on that. Not necessarily. You know, the best, the brightest..

It's the people that really want to to serve, they really want to do, like I said, what matters. And and you've given some great advice. Just practical on how to navigate how to get here. Because once they get on board, you know, the gloves are off and it's time to go to work. Gentlemen, thank you both. This has been fantastic.

I really do appreciate your time, and I hope you both have a great rest of your day. And that wraps up this episode of GSA Does That!? A big thanks to Pete Waterman and Eric Mill for sharing their insights as true thought leaders in government technology. Their passion and leadership are clearly driving significant change in how agencies are adopting cloud based solutions, all while keeping national security a top priority.

If you're a technologist looking to make a real impact, consider joining Pete, Eric and the team at FedRAMP to help shape the future of secure government technology. Start your search at tts.gsa.gov/join. That's tts.gsa.gov/join. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe and share with others who are interested in how innovation is transforming the way government works. I'm your host, Rob Trubia.

Our executive producer is the one and only Mr. Max Stempora. GSA Does That!? is a production of the US General Services Administration, Office of Strategic Communication. I hope you have a great rest of your day.