Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act, 2024

Floor Speech

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Mr. SESSIONS. Mr. Chairman, this past March, the inspector general of the General Services Administration issued a report into the identity verification and validation service Login.gov.

Login.gov is managed by the Technology Transformation Service within GSA and was built by a group called 18F, which lies within TTS and describes itself as a technology design consultancy for the U.S. Government.

Login.gov was intended to provide the public with a single website through which they can access digital services with a single username and password.

For agencies, it is supposed to ensure persons trying to access services are who they claim to be so that security and convenience are met.

What could go wrong? Well, the March IG report that I will include in the Record detailed how employees at Login.gov knowingly misrepresented the level of security they provided to their clients within the government. It even billed agency clients over $10 million for services that they did not provide and for products that did not exist. Without getting too technical, Login.gov claimed that it offered a level of security that included biometric comparisons for applicants.

I realize there had been and still are concerns about the biometric comparisons returning false positives within certain ethnic groups, but if there were these concerns, the proper way to deal with the situation was not to lie and say you provided a service that you did not, in fact, provide.

When the IG report came out, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, which I was the chairman of at the time, held hearings into fraud in Federal programs. We heard how taxpayers had lost hundreds of billions of dollars to bad actors from the IRS, and a central tactic in such fraud was identity theft, which is at the very heart of what the 18F group is about.

Here we have a Federal entity marketing a service to Federal customers that is intended to assure identity, but that Federal entity is not telling the truth.

Mr. Chair, this amendment targets 18F. Why 18F and not Login.gov itself? Because since its inception in 2014, in the wake of the healthcare.gov debacle, trouble has followed 18F around. It was envisioned to be a tech-savvy group within the Federal Government that would bring a startup mentality and a high level of competence to help usher Federal agencies into the digital age. In practice, it has been more like a group run amok, a group run amok that intended to deceive people about what they were doing.

In 2016, the IG issued a report describing how 18F had run up a deficit of $31 million between 2014 and the third quarter of 2016, even though it was supposed to generate enough revenue to cover its costs.

In 2017, the IG issued another report describing how 18F routinely circumvented fundamental security policies and guidelines established by our government.

In the 2023 report on Login.gov, the IG reported that despite the concerns raised in the two previous reports, the culture of 18F and its parent group, TTS, was still a problem. One Federal tech executive is quoted as saying about 18F that they came in to solve one problem and created two different problems.

Mr. Chairman, my amendment takes care of 18F by not allowing them to be funded. 18F has been in operation for over a decade, leaving a trail of expensive problems and questionable value.

The Committee on Oversight held a hearing on this. It was a bipartisan hearing. My colleagues on both sides of the aisle had an opportunity to talk about this, and we came up with this amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

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