Joe Warminsky

The president proposed an overall federal cybersecurity budget of $17.4 billion, including a 10 percent increase for the military's cybersecurity efforts. It's a mixed bag for civilian agencies.

"[W]e have initiated a new series of audits looking for indicators of compromise on HHS and OPDIV systems to determine whether an active threat exists on HHS networks or whether there has been a past breach by threat actors," a new report says.

Six of the 24 agencies surveyed by GAO had not "completed assigning the associated work role codes to their vacant positions, although they were required to do so by April 2018" under the Federal Cybersecurity Workforce Assessment Act of 2015.

The goal is to ensure that all government agencies are operating under the same set of security guidelines when they buy IoT devices, which have a wide range of civilian and military uses.

The request is $150 million — significantly below what the Trump administration sought in fiscal 2018 and fiscal 2019 — but it would still represent a robust addition to the fund.

The list, which the GAO publishes every two years at the start of a new Congress, puts particular attention on the process for security clearances — an issue the agency first raised separately in 2018.